Swappability, compatibility & fixability

When I was 15, I got my first motorcycle, a BSA. Cantankerous even on good days, one day it wouldn’t start at all. A friend found the coil was faulty, he removed the coil from an old immobile AJS in his shed, hooked it up to the BSA which then promptly roared into life. Boom, boom, boom. A component from one motorcycle could be swapped with that of a different maker. Oh joy! I was mobile again until my weekly gallon of petrol ran out and I had to mow a lawn to buy some more.

Try swapping components between vehicles nowadays. Or cameras. Or rice cookers. Each bit is tailor-made for that specific product.

There are exceptions. Like SD flash memory cards. I can put an SD card into a Panasonic digicamera, or into a Canon videocamera, or a Nokia phone or an O2 PDA. (Maybe not the rice cooker.) But I like that sort of cross platform compatibility.

Yet some companies try to force consumers into buying only their products. Sony and Apple are two of the most cunning players in this game. For example, Sony equip their cameras only with Memory Stick slots and by and large you are locked into buying Sony to use the Memory Sticks.

I like this swappability, that a bit of this machine can be used in that machine. It recalls the DIY (do it yourself) shed culture that I grew up in. Because of this quirk in my background I am shying away from buying Sony and favor products from manufacturers who support more open standards.

My father had a heart valve replaced ten years ago. The doctors put in a pig’s heart valve but it finally started to give trouble so he had it replaced a few weeks ago. On the day of the operation, just before going into theater, the operating surgeon asked my father, “About this valve, today they have both cow valves and pig valves. What’ll it be, pork or beef?”

He took pig again. But he had a choice. If that sort of swappability is possible in heart surgery, why can’t mere camera makers offer the same sort of swappability?