[malandrew]

At the end of the day it's all about interfaces and we should, as much as possible, decouple the interfaces from the house and from the appliances.

What I would love to see insofar as wall outlets is an adjustment of the current standard wall box and outlet+plate so that you could quickly replace the entire wall place in one go very quickly. With that innovation I would love to see the same on the appliance end where it is trivial to replace the entire code on an appliance. This already exists with IEC320, but if would be nice if everything used IEC320.

Then every 5-10 years the industry innovates to dramatically improve one end and then 5-10 years later works to dramatically improve the other end. This would give a very reasonabe 10-20 years between completely replacing all the appliances (or using adapters or switching neither), and 10-20 years between replacing all the wall plates. You wouldn't even necessarily have to upgrade every 10-20. If an appliance is working fine on an old appliance to cord standard or a cord to wall standard, you can leave things alone.

It was this interface approach that allowed Apple to have one dock connector for the longest time but many different shaped devices, since all that had to be done is replace the plastic dock insert [0].

This approach wouldn't work for cellphones and laptops, but should work swimmingly for 120v mains since space isn't at a premium except in the appliance.

[0] http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/...