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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you don’t buy a new set of power tools every 2 years, but you do but a new phone every few years
Milwaukee didn’t always have standards, either. There was a time 10-15 yrs ago when the batteries weren’t all interchangeable, like today.
It’s easier with other plug ins. When electronics and electricity were first being created they realized they needed a way of connecting these things to the grid. So various makers created various outlets and inlet connectors with various levels of efficiency. It came to a point where when you bought an electronic with a different connector type you would have to buy the proper ports for it to make sure it would work. And this wasn’t sustainable because you also needed different types of electricity to power different electronics. Even today there’s still 19 different voltage ratings on grids around the world that will require converters.
So they created a standardized voltage for electronics and a standardized connector for those electronics. And countries picked the perceived most efficient one. Britain was the last to standardized and standardized the one that was the most energy efficient…. whereas the Americans were last to standardize so they were the least energy efficient (an electric kettle takes about 1.5 minutes to boil in the US vs 4 seconds in Britain).
USB-C rose as an industry standard because of its ease of use and its ability to charge very quickly. Europe standardized it because they had similar worries to early electronics adopters. But it won’t remain standard in the rest of the world for very long. But the world will find itself in a very similar situation soon as different countries begin to standardize different standards based on use. The USB-C was chosen for the EU because of how common Android phones are.
Alternatively all phones might just embrace wireless charging and be done with cords. Europe will remain the only country with a port that only exists as a legislative requirement.
It’s reversible and supports high bandwidth, allowing for a wide range of uses. The reason its now being introduced into Apple products that used to have Lightning is because the EU is forcing it.
In theory other industries HAVE done this. Which is why you see AA batteries, toilet paper on a cardboard roll, the battle between vhs and betamax/ bluray vs HD DVD. Lightening vs usb-c was just the latest iteration of two competing technologies.
It only occurs due to government intervention.
Companies dont like adhering to universal standards because they are good for the consumer and encourage healthy competition.
The company doesn’t want competition they want to sell you their proprietary charger for 400x what it’s worth and leave you with no choice but to pay that (the entire apple business model)
The thing to take away is that believing companies do things or make money based on providing the best service to customers is a gross oversimplification at best and an outright lie at worst.
Sorry I’ve worded this in a bit of a salty way but it’s the truth.
As far as batteries for power tools, you can buy an adapter to use Milwaukee to Dewalt or Milwaukee to Ryobi or Mikita to Dewalt. Etc.
Don’t get the “battery” mixed up with “charging cable”. It is FAR easier to standardize a simple plug than it is to standardize the whole power system.
Universal means everyone can do it. Most companies want you in their ecosystem to they can fleece the most money out of you. Apple being the perfect example.
The reason why companies often don’t rally around one common standard is because creating a universal standard is often extremely difficult.
The “B” in USB stands for “bus”. So let’s draw an analogy to an actual road-driving bus.
You’re plotting out a bus route for a city. So, obvious question: where is the bus going to stop?
There will probably be a bunch of obvious answers. The big mall at the center of town? Good idea. Grocery store? Sure. Center of a big housing development? Definitely. Hospital? Absolutely.
But what about, say, a laundromat? Is that important enough to stop at? Not everyone who is going to ride the bus needs to use the laundromat. And mind, every stop you add that people on your bus don’t want wastes their time with stops they don’t need. But obviously *some* people would seriously benefit from the laundromat. What is worth including?
Generally, every company under capitalism is selfish. Why wouldn’t you be? Resources spent on things that aren’t the betterment of yourself are ultimately resources wasted. Whether they help anyone else along the way are simply incidental. Or worse, actively assist competition. So, ideally, if your company needed a bus route built, you’d want it to stop only at the places that benefited your company, and only your company. If the currently existing bus route stops at a bunch of places that don’t help your company at all (or provide too much help to companies that compete with you), it may just be worth it to you to start your *own* bus route, that only stops at the places you care about. So the natural consequence of this is the creation of a bunch of independent bus routes catered to slightly different purposes.
Plus, if you happen to create something that other people also like, you can charge money for that. So even if a standard out there does everything you need it to do, it may just be worth it to make your own, and sell that to others. Why use the free thing when you can make money selling a thing you own, right?
True standards really only come about in two ways: either 1) they truly have everything every user could possibly want with very little compromise, and coming up with your own better solution is more expensive than dealing with the compromise, or 2) a government steps in and forces everyone by law to use it.
USB was always intended to be option 1, [but getting to option 1 is very hard](https://xkcd.com/927/), and for a long time USB was not there yet in the eyes of many companies. Arguably, with USB 3.0 (the way the wires talk) and USB-C (the shape of the plug), it has finally achieved option 1, but by this point, some companies (Apple…) were still locked into their own plug types. So ultimately it took option 2 in the EU to force the standard.
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