In an ideal world, the wireless things in our life would all work in harmony, and the underlying platforms they use would be the most technically advanced around. You wouldn’t have to worry about if your smart lights can connect to your smart speaker. Everyone — developers and consumers — would all be on the same page.
If only. The thing about tech companies is they want to make money. That makes getting them to agree on a broadly compatible set of wireless standards a cumbersome process.
Take Bluetooth, for instance. It has a centralized body, the Bluetooth SIG, that counts thousands of Bluetooth-using companies as members, and oversees the development of the tech as a whole. Almost anyone can use it, and almost everyone does.
However, the fact Bluetooth accounts for so many companies’ needs makes pushing out new and improved versions of the tech very slow. It has to make sure the tech actually works with all sorts of devices, for one. It also has to deal with internal politicking, since many of its members want to get whatever intellectual property they’ve developed toward the standard to be included in the final spec, and thus ensure they get a cut whenever it’s deployed.
That’s just one example. The new 5G network, which will be much more capable than the 4G LTE we use on our mobile devices today, doesn’t even have a base set of standards yet; it looks like it’ll be relatively open, but right now, it’s more of a concept than a concrete piece of tech. While things usually work themselves out, the point is that openness usually comes at a cost, both in terms of time and general quality.