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Deployment of USB was happening anyway. I don't understand this belief that the Commission has anything to do with USB adoption. It predates the Commissions's i
by thu2111 7y ago
Deployment of USB was happening anyway. I don't understand this belief that the Commission has anything to do with USB adoption. It predates the Commissions's involvement by a long way, USB was developed completely independently and the vast majority of consumer electronics firms see no competitive advantage in making their own chargers/cables so standardisation was the direction of travel anyway. Only Apple bother developing their own proprietary charging and cable standards, and as they proved, the regulation is toothless: they simply shipped a cheap adapter nobody cared about or used and that was the regulation solved.
I think there's a lot of backwards reasoning here. Lots of people want to believe the EU is good, therefore, if it does something, it must be good. This kind of nitpicky regulation is worthless: if there had been genuine, fierce competition over cable systems the EU would never have dared to regulate in the first place. It was only because the industry was standardising anyway that they were able to pass such a rule, and take credit for other people's engineering work.
As for open vs closed communication standards, that's a red herring. Lots of firms have had unusual ideas about how to advance consumer communications, which is why we mostly use their products (with the obvious and major exceptions of the web and email). But in charging standards and many other areas people realised their efforts were best pooled. Government had no impact on these decisions but can certainly now impede innovations if someone does come up with some revolutionary new cable idea.
Look at it this way. If this regulation had applied to computers pre-Steve Jobs we might never have seen MagSafe cables. They'd have been literally illegal which is insane. The EU is way out of bounds here. It's the sort of thing that supported the case of Brexit - celebrated last night.
- dijit 7y agoYou’re inferring something that isn’t true. The EU is not “good” or “bad” it just “is”. They do good things and bad things, however there’s a very clear delineation between pre-2004 and post-2004. It is very clear that even if it is not a direct cause then it is at least a large push. USB as a a standard existed for sure, but rarely if ever used on phones. (The only phone I can think of is the RAZR and that was actually a huge selling point) I remember hearing about the directive when I had a new Sony w300i (which is a phone that came out in 2006!) I’ll let you tell me what charger it uses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_W300i?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_W300i?wprov=sfti...
- thu2111 7y agoI'm not sure what event in 2004 you're referring to. The EU Common Charging Standard dates from 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply#H... USB has been used in phones for a very long time indeed.
- tripzilch 7y agoThe EU already told the industry to come up with a common standard, before that. This is the result of that call to action.
- thu2111 7y agoWhen? The MoU was signed in 2009. USB has been delivering power for much longer than that. This claim the EU politely requested the whole tech industry to develop a standardised power cable and they leapt into action because such a brilliant idea had never occurred to anyone before doesn't match the timelines of the actual tech development. USB was around a long time, was happening anyway and the non-binding MoU the EU demanded firms sign had no impact on the only firm that still wanted to do their own cable, as Apple's actions proved quite directly. To re-emphasise the point, if the EU had passed binding regulations like this at an earlier stage in its life we might have never had MagSafe. Or we might have ended up standardising on barrel connectors.