As much as they may pretend to hate each other, rival tech companies often do have incentives
to work together. This tends to happen when both companies stand
to benefit from it, and while that sounds obvious,
this kind of collaboration has also benefited you.
The poor consumer doesn't want to deal with 40 kinds of connectors for your laptop.
Ever heard of USB-C? That's right, I'm talking about standards.
Technologies that remain consistent across platforms
so you can have a smooth experience no matter what you're using.
We're talking HDMI, USB, HTML.
These standards have made it possible to connect gadgets
or view webpages anywhere in the world, no matter who manufactured them or what browser you're using.
But how do companies that often exist as fierce rivals
band together to create and maintain these standards?
Like survivors in a zombie apocalypse. Sometimes, the problem that they're all trying to deal with
is the fact that there's no standardization.
This is exactly what happened with USB. It was pretty clear in the early 90s that there were going
to be large numbers of new computer users in the near future,
but one of the major hurdles to widespread adoption
and consumers viewing the PC as a platform that was friendly to novices was that
everything required a separate connector
and some kind of software configuration, usually meaning you had to install drivers
from a floppy disk for every little thing. So an engineer from Intel came up with the idea for USB,
but it required multiple companies to get off the ground.
Intel helped build chips that would power USB while IBM and Compact designed actual systems around it,
and Microsoft collaborated with making the standard electrically suitable for peripherals
like the mice they were trying to sell. USB's subsequent explosion in popularity did indeed
make the PC more accessible to average users as a result,
and today, over a thousand companies are members
of the USB Implementers Forum, which is helpful in ensuring USB continues to work well
across a huge range of devices.
The USB logo on a product also helps consumers
understand the product will simply work a certain way.
Kind of like how Vesa Display HDR tries to let you know
the screen will get up to a certain brightness, even if it might not be real HDR.
Those are for the elites. But sometimes, standards come about as a result
of a smaller number of companies trying to get a leg up
on their competition. This is how Bluetooth originated,
as it was a collaboration between IBM and Ericsson.
Both companies were struggling in the mobile market as IBM's laptops and Ericsson's phones
weren't the hottest sellers. These two companies wanted to work together
to build a cell phone inside of a laptop,
but because this would have been a power hog at the time,
Bluetooth was created to link a phone and a laptop
over short distances. By making Bluetooth an open standard,
they could position their new products as some of the first to incorporate a technology
they hoped would become popular. And that it did.
IBM introduced a ThinkPad in 2001 that became the first Bluetooth-enabled laptop,
while Motorola took advantage of the open standard and introduced Bluetooth to a large portion
of the American cell phone market. Of course, sometimes standards come about as a way
to be anti-consumer as well. HDMI is a good example of this,
which might sound a little strange, as it's pretty convenient.
Before HDMI, you might have needed nine different cables
for an HD picture and surround sound, and now you only need one.
But the goal of HDMI wasn't just to untangle your AV setup.
It was to help content providers prevent copyright infringement
through a baked-in technology called HDCP.
Several competing movie studios were reluctant to release high-def content,
which they viewed as ripe for piracy, without some kind of protection scheme.
Obviously, the company's manufacturing HDMI-enabled hardware
wanted their customers to actually be able to watch
HD content, so companies like Panasonic, Phillips,
and Sony, all of whom competed against each other
in the home theater realm, formed the HDMI Forum,
which today consists of several dozen companies
that help develop the standard to ensure it keeps up with the growing bandwidth needs of ever-higher-res audio
and video, though the HDCP handshake is still far
from a perfect process. I guess we might as well make Try Turning It Off
and Back On Again, an official part of the standard.
That's right, everybody. That was a tech-quickie.
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