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Standardization - Not In Our Lifetime
calendarToday is 1.2.13 - at least it is here. In the rest of the world it is 2.1.13 - which doesn’t have the same level of resonance. Then again, you might choose to write it out as 13 - 2/1 and / or countless other inversions.
Being English - I still naturally drift towards 2/1/13 - the date, followed by the broader category of month, followed by the broader category again of year. I STILL don’t get after all these years why the American standard of month - date - year even started - much less holds sway. (I do really - but not going there - maybe in a later post).
Back in the day when I cared about file structures, I used dates in file names so I could find docs quickly. For this I reversed the order from ‘date - month - year’, to ‘year - month - date’ - then everything sorted in chronological order - regardless of the ’last
You would be amazed how quickly things could be found when you called a document ‘filename-year-month-date’
So what?
Well it just makes you realize that changing even a date format - which costs nothing - could make the world - at a stroke - understand when they look back to today that it is the 2nd January - not the 1st February, communications would be simplified, things more easily found, less confusion.
Electricity is hardly standard. How much crap do we carry around with us to overcome the inadequacies of decisions made forever ago.
And then. Holding that thought. Ask yourself …..
What say you to the chance of getting google and apple and amazon and samsung and ….. to play nice.
I say no - It isn’t in there interests. And we know that we aren’t important.
When the people rule this decision - THEN we will know that the people - the crowd - have decided.