Yeah, I don't think "that's not phillips, that's pozidrive" is a good excuse. If they're that close, then pozidrive is just a non-standardard-complying phillips bit. It's the IE6 of screw heads, and the confusion is all their own fault.

The Phillips is the IE6 of screw heads. Pozidriv is an improved version which has long since replaced Phillips in Europe. I was unaware that Phillips screw heads were still common in the US until reading this thread.

It seems Phillips is just an outdated but standards-complying head. No one wants to use it because there are better tools for the job these days, but it did serve its purpose once. Whereas Pozidrive just duct-taped a few updates to the old standard and decided to call it good rather than fixing the actual problems.

There's no reason to have kept the same form-factor for the two varieties, it just leads to unnecessary confusion. The fact that you can plug an incorrect driver into it is, by definition, broken. Like how USB and Ethernet jacks are the same size, so you can plug your USB stick into Ethernet (which luckily does nothing harmful) but you can't plug Ethernet into USB.

If you're going to update an old standard and that requires an incompatibility with the old standard, you should come up with an entirely new form factor to ensure people won't mistakenly use the old connector with the new technology.

Though to be honest here in the US I've never seen Pozidrive and I just checked, I have zero drivers for a Pozidrive screw. Phillips really is just that awful all by itself.

It's not like pozidriv screws are unmarked. And in any case these days if you buy 200 screws you get a bit thrown in for free at most places. 100% correct fit all of the time.