Grousing About Standards

Once, computing had companies like IBM that provided true leadership, by bullying vendors into following its wishes. We need a bully again.

There is no leadership in the desktop computer business anymore.

Once upon a time IBM would provide a kind of leadership through bullying. Curiously, bullying is exactly what we need in the computer market nowadays. Without that leadership, we have agreement on how systems work in some areas, but in other areas complete, customer-gouging chaos.

For example, here's an actual standard: when you buy a large flat panel you might notice that various mounting screws for hanging on the wall will be identical from monitor to monitor. That's because these dimensions are establish by VESA, a standards committee for such things.

When you buy a Seagate hard drive then swap it out for a Western Digital or even an SSD you'll see that it mounts the same way with the same screws. This is thanks to the Small Form Factor Committee.

Wi-Fi would never go anywhere if it wasn't standardized by the IEEE 802.11 Working Group.

Standards are great—but these committees are never going to be as efficient as some large domineering company saying that you will do it my way or no way! Those days are over. Now we have far too many things hanging in limbo. The biggest culprits are power supplies, batteries, and USB cables.

Every time you turn around, some new version of the USB cable appears. There are square ones and round ones, and wiggly ones and that thin one now used by most phone makers as the universal charger cable. With that last one, you have to fidget with the thing to get it plugged in the right way. It's a crap shoot every time and a joke.

This sort of non-standard product is also reflected in batteries, battery chargers and power supplies. Cameras and cell phones are the worst offenders. It's a miracle when you can find two cameras with the same battery type. Making the batteries non-standard, of course, is so the maker of the product can gouge its customers if the customer needs a replacement.

Apple is number one for this sort of thing with all sorts of non-standard connectors and chargers (hello, Lightning). The former king of the gougers was Sony which went so far as to eschew compact flash memory and SD card in favors of its own "memory stick," a storage format which only Sony used. With this approach, however, the customers eventually wise up to the gouging and abandon the company.

I don't even want to get into the myriad of "brick" type power supplies. There are 12V supplies, 6V, 5V, 9V all with various amperages. It's ridiculous. What is worse is that they don't necessarily have the same device connector even if they share identical specs. I've blown up a device or two with those power supplies that had the exact same connector and a low-output device. Everyone I know has boxes of these things. They accumulate, but people are afraid to throw one out then find it's needed. All to avoid getting gouged.

Source: PCmag

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