I'm sure you've printed things from color printer and noticed the colors didn't look the same as on screen, or from one printer to the next, or held to computer monitors side by side and noticed color differences. As I type this, I'm sitting in front of two identical Dell monitors of the exact same revision and the color temperatures are completely off. They look fine on their own but side by side the colors look off.

For businesses, accurate color reproduction is essential for brand recognition, brand perception, and reputation. IBM's blue and T-Mobile magenta are pretty iconic. It would look pretty silly if you had a meeting with IBM and the business cards you got handed all had a different shade of blue and none of them match the letterhead on the meeting agenda the provided. Or you walked into a T-Mobile store and the magenta on the walls didn't match the placards, the floor, the employee uniforms, nametags, or the sign hanging in the window.

There are color calibration devices, like the color scanner in the paint section at Home Depot, that are used to calibrate monitors, printers, and everything else but they're useless without a reference point to calibrate to. That's where Pantone comes in. Pantone produces a standard catalog of colors that people can reference. Additionally they license the catalog to software and hardware manufacturers for color matching purposes.

When you take a Pantone color swatch and pull out a color, open Photoshop and paint a swatch of that color and print on an Epson Pantone printer and an HP Pantone printer, those prints are going to match the swatch from Pantone.

Pantone sells consistency.

So far, so good, but it seems to me like many others would be able to manufacture such calibration devices. I mean, the CIE colour space is known to everybody.

The problem with CIE is that there are no constraints to the colorspace at all. It's gamut range is every color imaginable by a person.

All devices have different ranges of color they can reproduce and nothing can produce the full CIE colorspace. Even if we possessed a device with that capability, we lack the ability to describe all possible colors to that device. AdobeRGB and sRGB are subsets of CIE and computer monitor makers struggle to make professional grade monitors that can cover 90%-100% of those gamut ranges.

The Pantone system is constrained further by just being a subset of colors exist within a limited gamut range. Pantone colors are only ones that can be produced by the mixing of, I think, 14 base colors. Their system sets clear limits on the scope of the problem and provides clear and consistent reference points.

The other problem is that thanks to metamerism, you can only use CIE for colour matching under a single fixed choice of illuminant - samples that appear to be the same CIE colour under (say) tungsten lighting may not be under florescent lighting or daylight.

And through the rabbit hole of color management we climb...

What you are paying for is what you usually pay for: convenience and consistency. When you send a print job off to the printer, you tell the printer what you expect to see. For many years, the easiest way, for solid spot colors, was specify the Pantone color. You knew what you were looking at in your office was what the press operator was seeing. But it does seem like in these days when reliable digital color calibration tools are available at affordable prices, that it would be easier to not rely on the Pantone color books, at least for anything that could be spec'd in standard CMYK.

They sell these color fans which almost every designer uses.

http://www.pantone.com/graphics/pantone-matching-system?from...

They sell color books. You have to (according to them lol) buy a new one every few years because the samples fade and change over time.

Color fading is a real concern in many industries. I have an old munsell book (the standard for coloring dirt) from a retired geologist and it's no where near the color in new copies.

TIL there's a standard for dirt color matching.

This is not surprising. The chemical compounds used for the colours will degrade over time, either from direct illumination, or degradation by oxidation, or some other process. This will lead to subtle change in the colours, and if you care about accuracy, you'll need to replace them.

if you're a designer, a painter, anything to do with printed media at all you use pantone, and thus you pay for it

I was under the impression that they also sold ink, but turns out that's not the case. Their parent company, X-Rite, sells electronic equipment for measuring and calibrating colour, but that seems like a smaller, more specialty business than Pantone brand. Licensing the brand for products must be lucrative enough on its own.

They sell color "standards". And this applies not just to printed matter, but also to colored objects.

You have different books for "Matte" and "Glossy" and also one for "Fabrics".