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[1] coherently about the value to the whole system 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.
Even the dear old European Union — remember when the UK was in the EU? Fun times — was un-idiotic enough to regulate a public common standard for phone chargers in 2009[2] So was born the USB standard: amazing: up to a given wattage, you can plug any device in anywhere, and it works.
The JC humbly submits, with the same unmediated gut instinct that propels many of his strongest convictions, that those who try to build proprietary interfaces out of touchpoints that should 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 in a stockade where they can be pelted with cabbage.
To be sure, trying to impose a toll gate, can be like putting yourself in a stockade anyway (remember Betamax?) — but enough such proprietary formats survive, even those which wilfully interpose friction (DVD region encoding!) to make us ask how it ever come to that? Shouldn’t the unmediated forces of competition 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[3] and Jimmy Wales[4] 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
References
- ↑ The Essential Deming, ed. Joyce Orsini, Ch. 7.
- ↑ press release here.
- ↑ The World Wide Internet.
- ↑ WikiMedia.