IDK man, when I think of standard connectors I think of clunky junk: CCS which was all engineering and no focus on human centered design with its clunky connector that also wiggles in ports.
all of the USB connectors including USB-C, with it mandate to support so many different edge cases that cause cables to not always be compatible with each other defeating the purpose.
Bluetooth again with so many edge cases that made it terrible until Apple came along and cut a lot of that out in their solution finally made it tolerable.
Hell even a lot of electrical connectors (such as the US outlet) suck: developed in that way due to historical interests, it looks terrible, is not entirely safe (ie. ground does not go in first) and now has stuff bolted on to make up for its shortfalls. (GFCI, in line fuses etc.)
Now there are probably loads of terrible proprietary connectors but it seems like the free market eventually takes care of disposing of the chaff. That itself is a forcing function to get to a better design that users will like. Whereas you have no choice of a standardized connector because some "standards body" made up of opposing interests artificially keeps lousy designs around and forces it upon the population.
Im not arguing for one or the other but its just annoying that standards bodies always seem to get a pass when in my experience they produce a lot of mediocre stuff.
The points of standards is that they solve one or more problems for many constituents well enough so that all adopters gain in things like supply chain, design ease, and interoperability. They are rarely going to be optimal for every specific use case. They also often derive from specific designs by a specific company
Adding a standards body into the mix is going to add complexity to the process by definition, but shouldn't be taken as a default "bad", since there are tangible benefits to non-corporation-managed standards. Otherwise they wouldn't exist.
Name the “wildly successful” standards you are thinking of and then look into the history of them. You’ll find one or maybe two major players that pushed it initially.
Yeah, there are advantages to the "just do it" approach to standardization vs design by committee. A lot of web technologies started out that way (arguably most of them actually). Both approaches are valid.
They are doing what they need done for their business and then inviting others to join. And way earlier than they did with NACS: https://www.tesla.com/blog/opening-north-american-charging-s...