Need some examples?

Question

To explain why commonality is important, pcmag.com reminds us how the 2000 Presidential election was affected by apparently confusing punch cards in Florida. In that scenario, the interaction of humans with technology failed to prove consistent and resulted in a recount that cost time, effort, and money. A common user interface regarding ballots in all US polls might have been less stressful. Please describe other real-life situations where a lack of computer commonality can be detrimental or situations in which commonality could provide improvements.

Besides the ballot thing, what are some other examples of this type of situation>

Answer 1

Before giving you examples, let me say that the reason it is very difficult to arrive at commonality is because solutions to anything is money driven. That means, if there is money to be made, somebody will get busy and solve it. Having said that, if two different people strike out to solve a problem, you end up with two different solutions and neither looks like the other. So the end user wants them to look alike, but who is going to pay for it. You already have patents and copyrights and thousands of hours arriving at the solution you have. Unless somebody is willing to put up big bucks to make the changes, it will not get done.

So in the voting thing, there are several companies that compete in that market and each has a different solution. The way to avoid that in large issues like voting, is for the government to call for bids from all the people that want to compete, and then for the winner of the bid to supply plans for the product. All future products would have to be according to that spec.

But the problem is, there is no system on a national level like that. Each state is responsible for its own system. And so different states call for different bids and arrive at different solutions, and then school teachers use the RESULT as a reason for commonality, when in fact the result is a natural result of the PROCESS.

Having said all that, here are some examples of products that provide soutions but in different ways.

BETA vs VHS tapes (VHS won and Sony lost)
MAC vs PC computers (business software chose PC, graphics software chose MAC.
MP3 vs WMA music players (if you don't have the right format, you cannot play the music)
CD vs DVD (each one has different playing speed and different formats and you need the current and correct software)
Lots of software will not backdate past a certain point, and all software cannot use predated sofware. In other words, if you have version 4.0 and somebody sends you a version 5.0 file, you cannot read it.