[msl]

That's not really what happened. The European Commission made gave the manufacturers a choice: they could sit down and come up with standard that they voluntarily accepted to follow or the EC could write the standard and force the manufacturers to follow it [1].

I imagine they would have eventually converged on USB anyway, but when the upcoming rules (or "rules") were announced, you definitely could not count on being able to charge your phone using anyone else's charger (or one of the many that had come with your previous phones).

Counterfactuals are tricky, and we'll never know for sure what might have been, but seeing laptop manufacturers dragging their feet, I really can't see how you could feel so certain that the market would have fixed the mess that existed just as quickly.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1... (search for "ultimatum"