I'm trying to explain to a non technical person, why certain websites (generally ones whose user base exist solely in countries where Microsoft owns more than 99% of the market share) fail to load in Safari or even Firefox (specially on Macs). Such users generally wonder why anyone would even think of buying a Mac, when it doesn't even load websites that PCs can. These websites happen to be ones that they frequently visit and the fact that it does not load, is directly considered to be a fault of the system in question (the Mac). They are generally unaware of the notion of multiple web browsers and are obviously totally unaware of browser standards, etc.
Does anyone have a good analogy to explain why things are the way they are today. And why they might change in future? Maybe some other real world example where not sticking to a existing well defined standard became the norm for society, until they finally realized the loss and that ended up generating industry wide compliance. This need not be technology specific example.