Gizmo pelmanism

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“The little dongly things I am concerned with (and they are by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the micro-electronics world is infested) are the external power adaptors which laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the mains AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type that has negative tips and positive sleeves. By the time you multiply all these different variables together you end up with a fairly major industry which exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things none of which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body.

Now why is this? Well, there’s one possible theory, which is that just as Xerox is really in the business of selling toner cartridges, Sony is really in the little dongly power-supply business.

Another possible reason is that it is sheer blinding idiocy. It couldn’t possibly be that could it?”

— Douglas Adams

In the same vein as Douglas Adams, W. Edwards Deming writes coherently about the value of commoditised public standards: railway gauges; fork-lift pallets, containers — which between them just make the world’s life easier. No single solution is perfect — undoubtedly some advantages accrue to having wide gauges, and some to having narrow gauges, but neither confers as much net benefit as having everyone on the same gauge.

The dear old European Union was un-idiotic enough to regulate a public common standard for phone chargers in 2009

We humbly submit, operating on the same unmediated gut instinct that propels many of the JC’s strongest convictions, that those who try to make proprietary interfaces that should really be common — nodes; intersection points on a distributed network; utility crossings where everyone, bar a gate-keeping rent-seeker, would benefit from transit without friction — deserve a special place in hell.

To be sure, many of them, by trying to impose a toll gate, are building themselves infernal penthouses anyway, so good luck to them — but enough of them survive (Apple, for the longest time) to wonder, should it really come to that? Shouldn’t the unmediated forces of competition and commerce work so that common standards emerge by themselves? If not, why not? What incentives are at play that prevent it?

Where commerce has worked this way, through the enlightened altruism of people like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales staggering things have come about. Where it has not — and we are bound to note legal practice as being such a place — we remain mired in complication, chaos, cost, delay and, above all, tedium. A contract is a transfer: it is a connection point between two nodes on a network. Why are we so far from the [][end-to-end principle]]?

It seems to me that anticompetitive forces: instincts to corner markets, claim false propriety in what should be standards, and —ironically enough — the disincentives for competitors to collaborate that are created by antitrust regulation. Each of these forces merchants and specialists to retreat into their corners; to rent-seek; to claim secret sauce in something that is really nothing of the kind.

See also

• Secret sauce
• Antitrust
• End-to-end principle