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 usbc
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 web pages
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 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 vasa 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 htcp 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 and something else you might want to try is
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