The saddest part is that both the Alexa and Apple walled gardens spent years constraining users from integrating with other ecosystems, but now they are all racing to give data to 3rd-party LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini, which can ... integrate with other ecosystems via APIs, MCP servers.

Users can now escape walled gardens, at the cost of multiple middlemen. If Alexa and Apple had allowed users to access other ecosystems, there would now be thriving customer communities with proven open workflows that could be sherlocked into commercial success by the platform owners. Instead, that value will accrue to foundation model companies.