01/14/2020

Maximize Impact by Limiting Jargon

The USB Implementers Forum learned this lesson recently

I got a really big monitor for the holidays, and it made me truly appreciate how complicated technical standards can be.

I asked for the monitor with all the extra ports because I anticipate using it for a lot of stuff—old computers, new computers, game consoles, you name it. I’m a computer nerd, and this is what I do with my free time. But standards are complicated things, and what worked a few years ago might not work today. Plug a 4K monitor into a computer with an out-of-date cable—or choose HDMI over Thunderbolt—and you might be terribly disappointed with the result.

The Universal Serial Bus, or USB, has been dealing with problems just like this over the past few years. As I wrote in 2014, the USB Implementers Forum had managed to pull off an improbable feat over the prior two decades or so, with the technology becoming the de facto standard for plugging in just about everything. At that time, the forum was on the way to releasing its successor USB-C, which appeared in a big way on Apple laptops starting in 2015.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.