One of the costliest, most hard-fought battles between incompatible product formats ended more than a decade ago with victory in the marketplace for the VHS video recorder system over its Betamax rival. Millions of consumers were left angry and confused, while several electronics companies licked their wounds.
For years such battles have been a fact of life in consumer electronics and information technology, as more recent squabbles over Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) formats have shown. It may never be possible to eliminate them, but now these industries and the standards organisations which work with them are having a go.
Format battles occur partly because technological change and product development have far outpaced the creation of widely-agreed global product standards. Over the past year, the world's big standards organisations have responded with "fast-track" or informal ways to help industry agree product specifications. One aim is to agree basic specifications before product launches to avoid battles in the marketplace.
Reaching a global consensus on a product standard can take five to seven years because of the range of interests - industries, consumers, governments and others - and the plethora of national and international committees involved. Standards organisations agree that something needs to be done if they are to remain relevant to large sections of the electronics industry. "The penny has dropped over the last year," says David Lazenby, director of standards at the British Standards Institution.
"The IT and electronics industries were getting more and more restive." Tony Raeburn, general secretary of the Geneva-based International Electrotechnical Commission, which develops and publishes electrical and electronics standards.
At the end of 1997, the IEC launched its Industry Technical Agreements (ITA), a high-speed process aimed at delivering industry specifications in months. Last month, the IEC announced that its first ITA was under way. The process is being used by the Open Platform Initiative for Multimedia Access (Opima), a consortium of more than 40 companies and organisations which was started by Chiariglione, head of television technologies research at CSELT, Telecom Italia's corporate research centre.
This aims to have defined by next September specifications that would allow a consumer to access a range of multimedia services - such as TVs, decoders, radios and personal computers - from one terminal. Chiariglione says multiple terminals with different interfaces are expensive and confusing, and are slowing down the adoption of digital services. He hopes products will be available in 2000.
The new process has other advantages, says Raeburn. "Multinationals such as Philips and Sony have their own networks for talking to each other, but this gives an opportunity for smaller companies to get involved."
But if industry is happy, what about other interests? Couldn't these fast-track processes produce an industry stitch-up that leaves consumer organisations and governments under-represented.
"There is always going to be a trade-off between openness and transparency on the one hand, and time," says Lazenby. "For industrial purposes, a fast-track approach is fine, but I don't think it is appropriate when there is a public or society issue involved."