That sounds like a way to not get any progress. The way I'm used to this sort of thing happening is some company brings in a new proprietary standard, makes bank, then all the competition bands together to form an open standard to try and stop them. There is a bit of a tick-tock feeling as consortiums use more open and accessible standards to slowly lever power away from incumbents.

It is interesting to just glance at the history of USB [0] through that lens was originally developed, and it is interesting to see that as I would have predicted the group of companies that developed USB (MS, IBM, Compaq, etc) seem to be disjoint from the companies listed as precursor technologies (looks like that was especially an Apple-led consortium of hardware manufacturers organised around firewire [1]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#History

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#Patent_consideration...

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adrian_b 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As your link shows, even if the IEEE 1394 promoted by Apple was technically superior to USB (mainly because IEEE 1394 had been derived from SCSI), it was killed by patents.

Many superior technologies have been killed by patents and the greediness of the patent owners has been futile and they gained very little from their patents, because people have always preferred something cheaper, even if less good, so the inferior USB has easily won against IEEE 1394.

The patent owners that hope to gain too much from their patents always forget that instead of paying a too big royalty it is always possible to circumvent the patent by using an alternative solution, even if that is inferior.

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sofixa 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The way I'm used to this sort of thing happening is some company brings in a new proprietary standard, makes bank, then all the competition bands together to form an open standard to try and stop them. There is a bit of a tick-tock feeling as consortiums use more open and accessible standards to slowly lever power away from incumbents.

And that leaves you with two standards (at least), non interoperable between them. In the case of hardware this can be really annoying, constraining and inefficient both for consumers and at large.

	▲	roenxi 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		How likely is it that that can be avoided if, as in this context, the starting point is the current standard not being that great? It pretty much has to end in 2 different competing standards. Or there can be 2 different flavours of the existing standard which are quite likely to break interoperability and make reusing the name an annoyance rather than a help. A downside of existing standards is it means it is quite hard to innovate on them.

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kotaKat 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It really is a damn shame that my Lightning connectors are all dead and useless despite being the empirically better connector because of Vestager's whinging and stupidity across the entire EU mobile ecosystem.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Lightning is not a better connector. It maxed out at USB 2 speeds and I needed separate bespoke adapters and chargers. I can now use standard USB C cords with everything, standard USB C headphones, connect my iPhone to my portable external monitor with the same USB C cable I use for my computer… https://imgur.com/a/fIwsjIQ And the iPhone supports all of the USB C standards that computers support - audio, video, mass storage, network, keyboard, mice etc