Take electric tools. If I have a Milwaukee setup (lawn mower,leaf blower etc) and I buy a new drill. If I want to use the batteries I currently have I’ll have to get a Milwaukee drill.
Yes this is good business, but not all industries do this. Why?
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Consider the use case. How many people will be carrying their cordless Milwaukee drill in a bus or train, stuff it in their bags and use it at all times of day in various locations?
Then there is the network effect. The industry got together a long time ago because they understood that interoperability was necessary to reduce development time and cost and to enhance communications between devices.
No third party was going to develop specialized keyboards, mice, accessories etc if every single accessory had to be designed with a specific PC manufacturer. Remember that USB standard originated in the PC world not the phone world and likely predates smart phones by a decade.
Once the hardware and software protocols were developed, it was simply easier for the earlier phone manufacturers to piggy back the existing standards and extend it for use in phones. Remember that the original USB power lines were mostly meant to deliver power to accessories and not designed to charge batteries.
Bottom line is that most of the cordless tool manufacturers never had much incentive to collaborate with each other to make a universal standard.
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