zlacker

This is the kind of intractable bureaucratic inertia people were worried about regarding the EU’s USB-C mandate. It remains to be seen how that plays out (partly given that the current state of USB-C implies it could Frankenstein forward for quite some time), but this is definitely a useful cautionary tale. The floppy mandate was probably a really progressive take at the time it was introduced.

>>merryw+(OP)
Is there no way to have the best of both via some specified revisitation of the spec, or sunsetting of the original provision? It seems like a sunset period of 5 years would enforce the global switch without a permanent lock-in. Potential downside is that it might hamper development of alternatives, but that’s also the point.

>>merryw+(OP)
Perhaps in a really broad sense of "bureaucracies can be slow which make narrowly focused laws inherently risky because they might become outdated." But the actual constraint is quite different: "the government needs data in this format" vs. "your consumer device must provide this specific power delivery format".

The damage of the former is entirely contained to the act of producing the floppy disk. It sucks for each business when they have to make the 1 floppy disk but then the damage is done. With the USB mandate, the party producing the millions of devices is constrained going back to the design of their core product and then every person using it is constrained.

>>merryw+(OP)
Bureaucracy has absolutely nothing to do with this. Japan likes its traditions to the point where it does not know when to stop and re-evaluate. The "bureaucracy" just follows the culture. After all, the bureaucracy is the people.

No one is enforcing the use of old-school fax machines, for example - businesses just have been reluctant to give it up.

>>etraut+j1
That all sounds well and good until you're the department head of the 1000 person floppy processing division and it comes time to cut the entire division.

>>merryw+(OP)
> EU’s USB-C mandate

This is fake news /s

The law of the land is manufacturers all have to agree on a standard.

If Apple wants to bribe everyone to use lightning, or micro-usb, they are free to do so.

If tomorrow everyone wakes up and decides to use thunderbolt, they are free to do so.

>>merryw+(OP)
EU had a similar structure with micro-USB, and yet it managed to transition to USC-C without issue.

>>Clumsy+n4
I'm a bit confused. The directive specifically says USB-C [1].

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv%...