I sympathize with this fellow’s wish. I’d love to have a single really fast connector for everything, including video. I don’t know that it will ever catch on though, outside of Apple computers.
I lived through the time of serial ports, parallel ports, AT connectors, PS/2 connectors, and the like. USB caught on, not because it was infinitely better (which it was), but because it united three things that none of those other things did: generality, speed, and power.
You have to have lived through that period to really understand how tortuous it was getting near the end. Keyboards connected through the system’s only AT connector, or later the dedicated keyboard PS/2 connector. The mouse used the dedicated mouse PS/2 connector, or the serial port. Printers connected via the parallel port, or (again, though rarely) the serial port. Everything else had to use the serial port. There were no other connectors, unless you bought and installed a special adapter card, and with the exception of the ridiculously expensive SCSI interface (primarily for hard drives), everyone had their own proprietary version.
I had an external hard drive at the time, which used the parallel port and a wall-wart power adapter. It worked on nearly every DOS system, once you loaded the drivers, but on most systems it read ridiculously slowly because parallel ports were designed to be one-way only. There were only maybe four or five signals from the device back to the computer, and some of those weren’t available or reliable on all systems either. To add insult to injury, the cable was painfully thick and hard to work with, and parallel ports were inevitably on the back of the computer, where you couldn’t see them without pulling it out. And let’s not even mention bent pins making the ports useless.
I also had one of the really early webcams (though the term “webcam” hadn’t been invented at the time). I believe it used the parallel port for data too, but you had to plug it into either a PS/2 port or a power adapter as well because the parallel port didn’t have power and the PS/2 port (where it was even available) was designed explicitly for keyboard and mouse and couldn’t be used for anything else. The parallel port was also ridiculously slow; even at the pitiful resolution it offered (320×240? I don’t recall), you could see the picture slowly update. If I recall correctly, you might get three or four frames a second.
Serial ports were used for every general-purpose device that didn’t absolutely require the speed of parallel ports, but it was far slower. I had a very early digital camera too, and you had to transfer pictures via the serial port. If you had more than a couple pictures to transfer, you started it and went to get a coffee, because it would take a while.
The USB standard fixed all that. It was still slow by today’s standard, but it was general, bidirectional, and provided power, and everything moved to it very quickly (except keyboards, they’ve only really moved to it in the last few years, because PS/2 ports were getting rare). It allowed things that simply weren’t possible before too, such as laser mice, and the connectors and wires were small enough and reliable enough to be convenient.
What similar killer advantage does the Thunderbolt connector offer? It’s faster, and it can handle video as well. We’ve had faster before, in the form of IEEE 1394 (a.k.a. FireWire), and it was adopted by a few people who needed the speed but never caught on generally. Video? We’ve got video, at least eight major standards for it (“standards are great, there are so many to choose from”). Is that enough to drive people to adopt it? I doubt it, though I might be wrong.
Will anything take over from USB? Maybe. An adapter that provided speed, video, and bidirectional power as well — so that you could charge your laptop simply by connecting it to your monitor — that might provide enough impetus to drive people to it. If two or three of the big manufacturers made it the only way you could charge laptops from them, it would really take off. Short of that, I don’t think so.