Simon Phipps, SunMink

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Monday July 09, 2007

Choice and Customers

For those of you who were on vacation last week, welcome back! I ran a series of stories last week looking at places around the house where there are multiple "standard" formats for things and what the impact of them is. To recap, I looked at:

Choice and Light Bulbs, in which I noted that choice that serves the customer involves having as few different connectors as possible and lots of choice of light bulbs in that format.
Choice and Flash Memory, in which I observed that I wish I didn't have to keep buying memory cards for my different gadgets just because the format in use varied, and how some formats seem designed to actually reduce customer choice.
Choice and Power Supplies, in which I looked at the power supplies all my gadgets come with and observed there were so many different, vendor-serving choices in play there that I am swamped with power adaptors, but how a solution from an unexpected direction - USB - may be the answer.

Lessons Learned

Spending this time looking round the house for examples of multiple standards has been useful for me. It got me to tidy a load of stuff that had been sprawling across the study, yes. But it also led me to some conclusions about the value of having a choice of standards.

There are plenty of examples of a choice of "standards" in our lives (usually validated in some way by a vendor body), but I have yet to find one that actually leads to a benefit to the customer. In the cases I have found, it arises from:

Vendors trying to create customer lock-in, like Sony and the Memory Stick;
Subsequent versions of a prior format being developed, like the Memory Stick Pro;
Vendors trying to reduce their costs, like those choosing to only offer 110v wall wart power supplies;
Vendors trying to create an after-market, like those selecting custom power plugs in their gadgets so you have to buy their in-vehicle adaptor;
Vendors operating in a market that is fundamentally divided, like those choosing between SBC and SES sockets for their bulbs.

When standards do occur that help the customer, it may be that the fastest path is to avoid involving the vendors directly. Using USB as a power connector standard was not part of the intent of the consortium that defined USB (who were competing with Firewire, leading to an undesirable, vendor-focused choice of standards).
No vendor will willingly surrender the ability to create customer lock-in or a taxed after-market. Even in the case of USB as a 5v power standard, it is still taking legislation in Asia to stop vendors being anti-social.

In other words, I have yet to see a case where a choice of standards in a single area delivers benefit to the customer. I can see all the benefits it's bringing to the vendors in the cases above, but it's also causing them unnecessary costs. But customers? No. I remain unconvinced that a choice of standards for a given application does anything for them.