The article doesn't mention that MSX computers had little to differentiate themselves from each other. Er, so a Panasonic MSX was very similar to a Sony MSX. This is great if you like standards but makes it hard to chose one machine over another. I beleive some people were paralysed by that choice and took a different computer instead. Also, individual makers within MSX had profits diluted by all the other MSX builders.
That was the whole idea. Microsoft would license BASIC and MSX-DOS for whatever they felt like while computer makers, unable to differentiate on features, would compete on price alone and grow the market for Microsoft.
I'm quite surprised clever execs bought that...
Also, the fact MSX was obsolete when compared to similarly priced Commodore and Atari machines of the time didn't really help. Also, MSX2 and 2+ were still 8-bit designs, Trbu-R being the first and only major overhaul, far too late to really matter.
But why wouldn't the clever execs buy it? They are consumer electronics companies. The TVs they manufactured followed standards (PAL/NTSC), their videocassetes were all VHS... why should it be different for home computers?
tv/vcr/radios/etc are all for content consumption - it's generally a read-only experience. "computers" have a (imo) somewhat "hard to define" level of interactivity that wasn't taken in to account. For execs that hadn't worked with personal computers before, this would be an unknown.
Hindsight is always 20/20. If I were a Panasonic/Sony executive in the 80's seeing the success of Atari with no means to compete, and had some company showing up with a standard that would allow me to just do my core business (manufacture at scale), of course I would get into it.
The only problem is that the MSX standard failed to gain adoption, not with the strategy itself. If you think about it, it is no different than what Google did with Samsung/LG/HTC/any other mobile manufacturer. And these executives are not seen as stupid for adopting Android and growing the market for Google, are they?
I think because of the 70s/80s, you now have at least one generation of execs that at least have a more basic understanding of tech, and I suspect Samsung/LG/etc have a better idea of what they're getting in to.
Additionally, these players got in early enough in to a market (smartphones) which wasn't already saturated with competing standards. Indeed, many of these players were already in the phone market, and this was a more natural evolution for them. Contrast this with the MSX trying to get in to the market with Commodore, Atari, Apple, IBM, Acorn, Sinclair and others all vying for the same (albeit growing) pool of dollars. At that point it's about as 'me too' a play as you can execute.
Of course hindsight is 20/20, but even in 1985 I could somewhat explain why computers were different than VCRs - I'd spend every waking hour working with my ZX81 then later my C128. We used a VCR a few hours a week to watch a movie - passively. Fundamentally different use cases and interaction modes.
I think we are using different points of reference here. if you take the iPhone as the ground zero of smartphones, then Android was still new. But I'm looking at the Palm OS/Windows CE/Blackberry/Symbian days. This makes the parallel between MSX/Android and Panasonic/HTC even more clear.
And to go back to the point: OP implied that it was a stupid strategy of the manufacturers to embrace some standard. I see no fault at the strategy. It didn't pan out, that's all.
