Standards Wars: A brief history of Japan's losses and pyric victories - Updated

It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes. - misattributed to Mark Twain, more likely Theodor Reik

What Twain did say was, "History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends." Much less quotable.

Whomever coined this bon mot, this week featured another example of it. Japanese companies have a reputation for lining up behind the wrong standard. In the 1980s, when most of the rest of the world was standardizing on the TCP/IP networking protocol, Japan was backing the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model. Japan didn't like TCP/IP because it had been developed by the US Department of Defense. Of course, TCP/IP won out, and no one remembers OSI anymore. Also in the 1980s, Japan's Sony famously backed the Betamax standard for home video cassettes. Betamax tapes were higher resolution, physically smaller, more durable, and had higher capacity and better audio quality than VHS. But VHS was cheaper to mass produce, and so Betamax lost. Of course, in that case, VHS was developed by Japan Victor Corporation, so Japan was backing both sides.

In the 1990s, as the PC revolution started to pick up speed, the West was standardizing around Microsoft Windows 3.1, Japan was building its PC ecosystem around DOS/V, the operating system of the dominant NEC PC-98. In fairness, this wasn't completely without merit. Windows 3.1 was terrible at dealing with double-byte characters, which are required by the more complicated symbols used by the Japanese language. DOS/V was quite nimble with them. At the time, those who needed to go back and forth between the languages almost exclusively used Apple devices, as Mac OS was equally at home with single byte ASCII code as it was with double byte encoding schemes like Shift-JIS. During the 90s, Sony also backed the MiniDisc magneto optical audio storage system which was intended to replace Compact Discs. Being recordable and contained in a protective hard plastic shell to prevent scratches and damage to the disk surface, MiniDisc offered many improvements. However consumers had acclimated to pre-recorded CDs, and while big names like Michael Jackson, Oasis, Radiohead, and Big Audio Dynamite released albums on MiniDisc, they were never exclusive MD releases, and music stores were forced to prioritize shelf space to CDs which had a wider user base. Also in America, the RIAA actively campaigned to keep MD out, fearing its recordability, which had been one of the bigger reasons they championed the transition from cassette to CD. The wide scale introduction of MD was sufficiently delayed that by the time it did become available, MP3s were already plentiful on peer-to-peer sharing sites.

In the 2000s, Sony finally won a pitched battle over standards, with Blu-ray winning out over HD DVD. High definition video was finally a reality and the two formats battled over industry dominance. Of course, just like Betamax vs. VHS, the other side of that format war was Toshiba, another Japanese firm, so no matter which won out, Japan would win. But the win was a hollow one, as streaming services like Netflix quickly made physical media moot.

This week another format war of sorts had a major development. Hyundai Motor Company announced that it was switching from the CCS charging system to NACS, the standard promulgated by Tesla, and opened for use by other manufacturers in 2022. With this announcement, it means that by 2025 electric vehicles from Tesla, Fisker, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar-Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Polestar, Rivian, and Volvo will all be able to use the same charging stations in North America. The only remaining holdouts - Toyota and BMW. It seems inevitable that those manufacturers will have to change as well, or lose market share. Toyota and BMW are Betamax to Tesla's VHS.

This doesn't mean there won't be further consolidation. There are other standards in other countries. Japan favors the CHAdeMO standard. China uses the quixotically named GB/T 20234-2015. Type 2 and Combo 2 are common in Europe, India, Australia, South America, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. Given the movement patterns of gasoline-powered cars in the world, it seems likely that at some point there will be only a few global standards. Manufacturers can continue to push their niche connectors, but as Charles de Gaulle supposedly said;

Genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop.

Update - On October 21, 2023, Toyota announced it would transition to Tesla chargers in the North American market from 2025 - LINK BMW had announced it was joining the Tesla charging platform the previous week: LINK