can people stop bringing up this thought terminating cliche every five minutes, it's like the HN version of that quip about Rudy Guliani, "everything he says is a verb a noun and 9/11."

Any open protocol will always be subject to competition, that's the point of it being open. If someone adopts that protocol and supercedes it because they add stuff that people want, that's how it goes. If people don't want that to happen, they need to stay on their toes and extend protocols quickly driven by user demand. That's really why a lot of protocol based ecosystems get absorbed, they stagnate.