Imagine if manufacturers hadn’t somehow arrived at a standard for the shape and size of the electrical outlets in our homes, and the plugs we plug into them! People came to their senses there and found a way to cooperate across manufacturers to implement a standard — there’s no reason they can’t do it here.

Saying “that’s not how it’s done” is no reason to stop pushing for it. It’ll take time, and will start with just a couple of manufacturers joining forces, then will spread to others just a few at a time. But eventually we’ll reach critical mass, and at that point, those that don’t make the effort to provide products that accommodate the “standard” will find themselves losing sales to those that do. This is one of those times when “voting with your pocketbook” is the one pressure that each of us can bring to bear to effect a change for the better for all. And organizations (like WaSP) that call for that change get the ball rolling in the right direction.

What’s the point in that? It meant I had to have 2 cables to get pics from our 2 cameras onto the PC.

There was no need either, it was the same size port, just a different shape.

Ok, so I presume some devices may need different voltges etc, but surely we can standardise to 2/3 different power needs?

Last time my girlfriend and I went abroad I took a power cable for my old-style Nintendo DS, another for her DS Lite. One for my iPaq, 1 for our Mobile Phones (both sony, phew!) and 1 for each of our cameras.

That’s 6 different cables.

In IT, it’s the one who sells most of “his standard” that gets the money and becomes “the standard”. If no single browser would care about W3C, no one would care about W3C either. I think it’s thanks to success of Firefox that developers start getting (back) to the W3C standards. And perhaps Microsoft will too one day. They built a (Adobe)pdf export in Office 2007, didn’t they.

“So in a web industry analogy, the standards are the manufacturing processes and the websites are the products.”

The browsers are the products, that’s who WaSP lobbies. It’s the browser companies that we would like to adopt the standards.

And just because you dominate a market does not mean you automatically get to set the standards and do what you want. I guess Microsoft probably agrees with you though.

Standards are a set of guidelines as to how industry-specific processes and procedures should be handled.

For instance, the manufacturers of memory cards might all follow the same procedures when it comes to producing their cards, but what emerges at the other end are separate ‘products’ are there can be as many of those as people care to make.

So in a web industry analogy, the standards are the manufacturing processes and the websites are the products.

Sometimes, a product will come along which becomes so ubiquitous that it is known as the ‘industry standard’, like Technics 1200s for DJs or QuarkXpress/InDesign for publishing, but it is still a product, not a set of guidlines, and it only becomes known as a standard because it is so popular as to completely dominate a market segment.

I guess with the examples you’ve chosen, there just isn’t that market dominator.

I agree kinda. I think in the end, neither (HD DVD and Blu Ray) will win out. I mean, who wants to see Tobey Maguire’s fat face in 1080p on the ‘Spider-Man: The High Definition Trilogy’? Not me. :-p