That or a consortium of companies agree on some sort of standard. (See the work on pc buses in the early pc days)
But you are right. When companies run under trying to get as many users locked in as possible during a paid for investors period. This model is precisely the opposite outcome expected as the whole point is to build a moat around the sales model.
Email is only useful because each server can send and receive with other servers.
But we all know this, so what the point here?
I would say that my point is that if interoperability becomes more useful than the walled garden approach, then we will see something like this posts call for BYO client. Email is an example. We have interoperable email because it is was more useful than service specific inboxes.
Until interoperability is necessary for Word, we won’t see an opening for other Word “clients”.
Aside: you could argue that Google built Gmail to make a dent in the ubiquity that was Exchange for corporate messaging. It exploited the openness/interoperability of email in order to do this. If you accept that argument, then maybe they should take a page from that playbook and work to make Google Docs as open as possible. Allow for more interaction with external clients. Let a more open ecosystem develop. That might have the potential to diminish the position of Office for document creation.
Or maybe email is just so old, the owners got established before it could be commercialized... it might happen again, but I’m not hopeful. For example, I don’t expect Twitter to care about federating their system with other messaging applications. There is too much to be gained (selling ads) by keeping people on their site.
When one person controls the whole system, it's easy to pivot rapidly. I guess that's another argument against having widely used protocols (even though I disagree with it.)
Regardless,
* Blender
* Godot
* Krita
* GitLab
* Olive
* Firefox
* Thunderbird
* NextCloud
* Amarok
* Vital
* and more
The problem isn't an "economic model". The problem is that most open-source projects simply don't attract UI designers, UX researchers, and users because contribution flows are more technical or geared toward developers.
UX research isn't "expensive" when referring to open-source projects because it predominantly requires people: designers, researchers, and users. The whole foundation of open-source is volunteerism.
Most developers I've worked with don't exactly love going back and forth with designers on UI stuff.
And volunteerism was much more popular in the 1990s when it was easy to write software by hard to sell it. App stores suffocated open source by offering a path to revenue.
It got beaten by FB Marketplace because Facebook has almost three billion captive users, and a marketplace bundled in the service they use many times a month takes less effort to visit than a completely separate site.
From this, and many other cases - like e.g. everyone hating the IM/videoconference system they use and yet using them anyway, I conclude two rules of thumb:
- UI that's good for users has very little to do with what UI/UX specialists peddle today;
- Network effects trump UIs - a sticky service with bad UI will beat a competitor that offers much better UI, but doesn't hold the user captive.
Had they not fiercely destroyed all the various "Search all Craiglist" mechanisms, they might have had a chance at fighting FB Marketplace.
Just the other day I had someone, an old person, complain about how a "revamp" of an internet banking site. They rewrote their functional, working UI, with a site that was designed by "UX designers", and you know how he phrased his opinion of the new site? "They made the site for stupid people".