I agree with your criticism overall. In defense of interoperability though, I think everything you mentioned is a great example of interoperability working as i

I agree with your criticism overall. In defense of interoperability though, I think everything you mentioned is a great example of interoperability working as it should. Everyone started with the same serial capabilities, and tried their own solutions to various degrees of success. Eventually, the industry settles on a particularly attractive and agreeable implementation and standardizes it for everyone. This happened with sound cards, video cards, keyboards and pretty much everything else. As the Bleem! lawsuits proved, even interoperability between game consoles was a legal concept. The incentive to engineer solutions for it just didn't really exist until we standardized computer architectures.