Recently there has been a trend towards more standardization, as exemplified by the SCSI-bus that allows many different devices to interconnect, such as printers, disk drives and CD-ROM players. SCSI stands for "Small Computer System Interface." In the past, vendors did not want users to be able to mix and match because they might buy components from competing vendors. Thus, locking customers into just one line of equipment was standard practice for decades and is only now vanishing as vendors see that having an open architecture allows other vendor's customers to come to their own market.

An example of using a bus standard to try to accomplish a business goal was IBM's Microchannel that was part of their PS/2 line of computers, introduced around 1987 and meant to grab back market share stolen by all the clone vendors of the immensely successful IBM PC. It did not help IBM at all and in fact many shunned the PS/2 because of its incompatibility.