Blogs Are manufacturer ecosystems growing too large?

Yes, they are growing too large:
As mentioned for consumers there is the threat that cross brand compatibility could go away, for the brands themselves it also creates practical problems (keeping more products up to date, convincing shops to stock the lot, providing support for everything rather than s specific type of product etc)

No, they aren't growing too large:
Capitalism demands growth but you can only sell so many of product x which means branching out into product y is a requirement imposed on brands by capitalism.

 

Most of them aren't really that different though, most products are manufactured by one or two companies with some minor tweaks and some branding slapped on it.

I blame PSUs as i think it started with them.

I agree though that it's natural progression, market forces reduce manufacturing to a few players because of costs of scale and those same market forces mean you end up with superficial changes being made to give a sense of choice.

/Grumpy old man rant...is it the weekend yet?

 

Luckily I missed out on that due to not being allowed to use electronic devices as a kid (yeah, my mom is a bit loopy)

 

And later in the DOS era with non-universal video and sound interfaces. Or the early Window era, with multiple proprietary 3D accelerator APIs. It probably wasn't until Windows 98 where DirectX managed total ubiquity and finally killed off the majority of vendor-specific device APIs (for GPU and sound devices).