I believe that calling USB ‘the only successful computer standard’ is a little harsh. What about Bluetooth? It has done well both on PCs and mobile devices.

There’s only been one standard in the PC industry that has survived and thrived over the past decade– Universal Serial Bus, good old USB.

Compare USB’s evolution to the headaches over DVD standards, HD-DVD standards, and the whole wireless crowd.

One day books will be written on the Machiavellian posturing that continues to take place on trying to establish a “standard” for 802.11n while Airgo Systems rolls out second-generation chipsets that will more than double the proposed 108 Mbps “standard” speed this fall.

The first USB hardware implementations started shipping in 1996 and ended up fully blessed by Microsoft by 1998/Win98. Early implementations were slow at 12 Mbps and the device involved – not bad if you were plugging in keyboards and low-speed devices, but not speedy, either. [Read the rest]