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Wednesday, June 18, 2003
17:47 - Overnight Ubiquity
http://www.bangkokpost.com/Database/18Jun2003_datacol61.html

(top) link
This is a riot. It reads like a parody, but from the look of what's on the cited USB.org website, it's not.

At the end of last year the USB Implementation Forum met _ Microsoft is on the board of directors while the chairman/president is Jason Ziller of Intel _ and decided that the matter was perhaps too clear, too transparent to the customer. Rotten customers were asking what version USB was installed on a machine and if it was USB 1.1 they thought it inferior to USB 2.

The Forum came up with a clever way of dealing with this.

In December it announced that henceforth USB 1.1 would be called USB 2 and USB 2 would continue to be called USB 2.

To help the public grasp this subtle distinction USB 2, which was the old USB 1.1, would have ``Full Speed'' added to its title and USB 2, which was USB 2, would have ``Hi-Speed'' added.

Not only did the consumers not get the subtle beauty and usefulness of this change. Neither did the retailers.

They, unstudied clods that they are, thought that if a device said USB 2 they could sell it as being to the old USB 2 standard. In their ignorance they did not realise that USB 2 could be USB 1.1 or USB 2 depending.

No kidding. So, as Kris says, all Macs back through the original 1998 iMac actually have USB 2.0 now! Excellent! That's got to be the easiest adoption curve ever in the history of computing. (Except for all the documentation that will have to be retroactively corrected.)

It's been a mantra of mine for some months now that business decisions tend to get made for very good reasons; if something looks absolutely retarded to the end user, a little bit of research will usually reveal that at the implementation level, or at the finance level, or at the executive level, somewhere along the line the decision made perfect sense-- and with that in mind, the whole rest of the decision's ramifications make sense as well.

But this one... whoo. I'd love to hear the explanation for this.

Wait, I bet I know. I remember when "letterbox" video releases were new, and some dimwitted malcontents got all up in arms about how it was "censorship"-- because it put those black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Even when it was explained to them that the original image was wide, and so those black bars had to be there because of the different shapes of the image and the TV, they still said it was censorship-- because it was shrinking the image to less than what their screens could show. They demanded that movies be released in pan-and-scan format, so it would use the shape of their screens to their full advantage. They even tried to organize boycotts of HDTV because it was inherently widescreen and "promoted" the evil letterboxing method.

So video companies started calling pan-n-scan "Fullscreen" or "Full-frame" so as to appease these people. Wonderful solution, don't you think? There's no longer any such thing as "inferior technology". Everybody wins! Everybody gets a gold star!

Now those same visionaries are apparently in charge of the USB consortium.



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© Brian Tiemann