The Korean government ("Ariadna - how Korea stopped the adaptor mess," el Mundo) issued a standard that mobile phone adaptors should share a universal connector. No matter what brand the phone, providers will have to comply with a universal connector. This seems a very wise decision of the Korea government. "Japan and China are said to follow this example soon."
The availability of an overdoses of connectors can be a real nuisance. Especially in the innovative mobile phone market where you ought to buy a new one every six months. And every new device will not connect to the previous car set, adaptor, etc. because the (non) standard is for each device slightly (non) adapted.
"The family Park uses eight mobile phones from three different suppliers," but all use the same universal adaptor. How much adaptors do you use yourself, questions the newspaper next. Too many to count in my case.
A standard rule is quite efficient. There will be an absolute lower amount of adaptors which is a win for nearly everybody. It will increase the overall productivity of a country because of the increased efficiency and less waste, even though the old adaptors could be recycled. The quality of life also increases; just replace the mobile adaptor for the remote control and think how nice it would be if you could use only one (for TV,VCR, DVD, Stereo, etc) instead of four or five.
But it requires a central coordination principle. In order to benefit from a standardized output the stakeholders in the production and supplying process should comply to more rules and this will lead (automatically) to less freedom.
Any central government (read office) could be wrong. What if this new standard turns out to increase the time-to-market or to diminish the opportunities to develop new features or delays production?
(Therefore) whether western countries will follow this strategy remains uncertain. Perhaps they can import the new standard, but the more western approach is to let the markets go; out there some innovative company could just invent "the" connector that will outperform all others designed previously. From such a success will follow an new standard automatically without government interference. It is possible, but whether it will happen...
© 2007 Hans Bool
Hans Bool writes articles about management, culture and change. If you are interested to read or experience more about these topics have a look at: Astor White or sign-up for our newsletter.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Hans_Bool
No comments:
Post a Comment