A video by Android: Apple Is Starting to GetTheMessage

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3 pointsfrays2 comments

What I find most amazing is we actually figured out how important interoperability is back when Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word were proprietary formats. Decades ago everyone realized how messed up it was that these files were hostage and subject to the whims of their parent companies, that access to them was contingent on many factors outside our control, that long-term access to them was a massive risk.

Fast-forward to today and we are stuck in "walled gardens" all over again with more restrictions than Microsoft and Adobe ever dreamed of, our devices are hostage, our usage is heavily taxed, our perception of pricing is skewed, our payment options all feed back to a single beneficiary, and regulators seem almost powerless to end it.

Heh, not only that, back in the day even the IM clients started to interop, what with Jabber and Trillian and Pidgin and such. There was a nice few years where you could talk to most people on most major IM networks with whatever client you liked. But then the ecosystem providers realized how much more money there was in walled gardens / blue bubbles and started closing it all off.

RCS was Google's desperate countermeasure to iMessage, which worked superbly for years while Android still had to use SMS. That's why most of the rest of the world moved to Whatsapp, Wechat, Line, etc.

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