In fact interoperability is what enables innovation, vs walled gardens.
It'd take a pretty strong argument to convince me that this is so much more productive and allows for more innovation than the old days when the spec for things like Email, HTTP, IRC, XMPP allowed for a plethora of different tools unrelated to the company sponsoring the tech and people figured out how to make money USING the interoperable tech instead of OWNING the tech.
WhatsApp is basically an unfederated XMPP provider.
Sure it would take a few months of serious dedication for these chat vendors to write specifications for the protocol spaghetti they came up with, but the benefits would be tremendous.
So why is "nobody" using XMPP protocol? The problem is not exactly with the specifications (although there's still a little margin for interpretation here and there, they keep evolving for the better) but rather with the implementations. Since a protocol is not tied to a single implementation, it requires additional resources to develop user-friendly clients. This fact is used by an argument by some people (see also: m0xie's The Ecosystem is moving) to justify centralizing all communications and protocol development. This argument was amply debunked by Daniel Gultsche (who maintains an Android XMPP client) and Drew Devault (who maintains an (unfederated-so-far) forge):
https://gultsch.de/objection.html
https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html
There's also a lot to say about the Matrix/Element approach, which has some good and bad sides. I'm happy to elaborate if that's of interest to someone.
Why do you think WhatsApp reached a billion dollar evaluation? Not because users have the freedom to move to a different provider and still be able to talk to all their friends...
The only other possibility is that users start rejecting providers who do not comply with internet standards (and I don't see that happening, even here on Hacker News).
Instead maybe the government should start eating its own dog food and use an open standard for both internal and external use.
Let's please go back to ntalk!
The free matrix.org server is also overloaded. The paid server is much faster.
For example bridges break important features like end-to-end encryption.
Having 5 IM apps installed is much preferable to me than 1 worse app. Not sure the situation for XMPP but I have been told its highly fragmented with extensions that not all clients support. If I'm talking with someone, I want a high level of assurance that their client is pretty much the same as mine and that all features work and look roughly the same on both sides.
Internet standards do not innovate. People that adopt standards and built interesting things with them do.
For example, Google originally wrote the Jingle XMPP extension. Sadly, it seems like there are no real economic incentives for interoperabilty in the IM space (quite the opposite if you already have a lot of users on your platform), so we don't see a lot of investment going into the adoption of internet standards from big players anymore.
The Internet won on the free market, through its own merits. No politician intervention necessary. Even if plenty tried to capture the glory (information superhighway…)
Of course it doesn't have to be mandated, and in the past usually wasn’t, but hell, it’s hard to see many good reasons to not standardize on USB-C. It’s got plenty of pins, it’s already mass-manufactured, and outside of only a single product Apple sells, there’s not much competition aside from legacy stuff that can’t handle a lot of today’s data, form factor and power delivery needs.
Most of it, including most of the history of computers.
Competition almost always breeds innovation. It's basic economics, and why people get upset by monopolies and such.
Different conditions beget different types of innovation. Interoperable systems evolved things (paradigms, models, languages…) that competing ones couldn't, and the opposite is also true. The world needs both, and probably everything in-between.
This same kind of madness, of course, totally already exists elsewhere. I’m sorry but, out of the hundreds of thousands of different power connectors, most of them aren’t even very well thought out to begin with, less “innovative.” It turns out that delivering power to a device isn’t that interesting, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get it horribly wrong. For every MagSafe that has at least some redeeming qualities, there’s about 500 DELL power bricks out there. And for something that is effectively delivering small amounts of low voltage DC power, in fact often one of about 2 or 3 different voltages, it’s sad that you have to scour the earth for chargers that match the pinout of your device.
But wait a minute. We’re not even talking about laptops, but essentially just mobile phones and cameras. So where’s the innovative competitor to USB-C that we’re all so worried about getting stomped on by the EU? Even Apple has adopted USB-C for almost everything except iPhone. micro USB hardly exists on new phones, even the budget phones are switching to USB-C.
The market doesn’t just automatically do the right thing. Apple is simply too powerful for market forces alone to compel them to use a “standard” charger, and actually, the friction of changing something that works probably makes it resistant against that, but just because that’s the case does not mean it is the right way to go for consumers or the world in general, in the long term. And once enough people are tired of that non-sense, they turn to regulation. And I’m sure regulation like this is annoying—what does the EU know about connectivity and mobile phone design—but it’s probably relieving to Apple, because it roughly solves the problem of having to reconcile it: they either do it, or they are in violation of the law. Problem solved!
And no innovation was harmed, because plugging phones in is not that interesting.
P.S.: Interoperability absolutely breeds innovation, and it does not mean no competition, it builds a framework for competition. Standards do obviously limit what you can do, but in exchange they open many doors that would otherwise be closed. Please tell me you don’t think the “innovation” from having 30 competing hypertext formats would’ve been the ideal path to “innovation” for the world wide web.
Would Raspberry Pi have happened without Linux?
What about the evolution of data centres?
I am sure that there are examples from closed systems, but it is not clear that keeping secrets and strict intellectual property spur innovation
Were it not for standards and regulations you would have to buy different locks, lightbulbs, and charger adapters depending on the company which built your apartment. It's already annoying enough that these specifications change from one country to another, but it would be a complete nightmare if there were no interoperability regulations at all.
Also, more specifically about computing: the Internet being an open standard brought many advantages for innovation, compared to centralized networks such as MSN or AOL. As for hardware, i don't know about you but i'm pretty happy i can change my CPU/RAM/HDD with any socket-compatible product and i'm not tied to a single vendor... in fact i'm pretty angry when i find a machine where some parts are non-standard and cannot be easily replaced.
To be clear, i'm not saying there's no value in deviating from the standards for innovation. I'm just saying 99% of usecases are better addressed with standard solutions than with halfbaked proprietary "solutions".
Your statement might hold for software but definitely doesn’t hold for hardware.
Having used a few different models of MacBook over the last decade for work, and owning a few different models of Thinkpads over the same timeframe, I'd take the Thinkpad any day of the week. From the annoyingly either hot or cold all-metal case to the floating ground problem triggering shocks when using the fold-out wall connector, MacBooks are inferior in my book. But that is also only my opinion.