I want to talk about microwave ovens, but first some historical perspective.
Have you ever read about the control system of early automobiles? And I don't mean just vehicles from the era when every car was a custom build. Even Ford's Model T has controls that differ significantly from the system we take for granted today. There is a hand throttle instead of the floor mounted accelerator pedal, some of the pedals had function we don't expect these days, and the pedal layout was different. And other manufactured cars from the same era had their own control layouts.
By the Model A we see the three pedals that a modern driver would expect to find on a standard transmission vehicle and in the expected order. However, there are more controls than you need on a modern engine (and not just the choke that lasted past WWII, there are spark advance controls and similar exotica). It took time for automation to be engineered to take over those aspects of regulating an engine.
Even today various details of things like headlight controls are not completely standard, though I can sit down in a unfamiliar rental car and find the things I need with only a couple of minutes of puzzling over the controls. And that's before we talk about the changes that Tesla has imposed on the throttle control to support their regenerative braking behavior.
Now back to microwaves. How long does it typically take you to puzzle out the panel on the microwave at a acquaintances' house? Can you just enter a time for default cooking or do you need to push a function button first. Is there a "quick-cook" system and if so how does it work? What about a time? Can you run the timer while you cook? If you can how will you know which one just finished? Etc.
Microwave ovens have been around for my entire life, yet the behavior of their control systems are in no way standardized.
I suspect this is partly because embedded control system used to be a significant expense, but these days you can get microcontrollers with more than enough horsepower and memory for less than a US dollar in bulk.1
Anyway, I propose that the standardization of microwave controls will represent a step toward utopia, unless a multi-touch gesture interface is chosen in which case it is a step toward dystopia.
1 Heck, you can get systems-on-a-chip that support stock linux for less than USD10. Remember when Andrew Tanenbaum criticized Linux for having too-heavy system requirements?
