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Comment by bkurtz13 | Hacker News Reader

So we should never create anything new, then?

No. You just must build your new things in such ways that your competitors can easily repeat them and your customers can easily migrate to your competitors.

Your competitors are going to "repeat" you and take your Customers anyway. If lock-in is your value proposition then you have no value proposition. Using open protocols allows your Customers to do interesting things with your service that you never envisioned.

I think the author is trying to say that we should build products on top of established, open standards. Or, where applicable and within reason, we should integrate them into our product. Allows our users to more easily integrate our products into their existing workflows.

AFAIK canvas is an open standard. the OP is like someone criticizing a website that chose to use canvas over svg to display graphs,because canvas isn't accessible. It has nothing to do with using Open standards or not.

It's not about graphs, it's about the entire app. That includes lists and paragraphs of text.

That's clearly not what the author is saying.

You can easily create something new while embracing standards. You can open your app up to existing standard means of consumption like RSS, email, SMS, etc.

The problem is that you can't make (as much) money using standard means of consumption. Why would a company charge for access via a standard protocol when there is much more money to be made by walling up the garden and blasting advertisements at the inhabitants.

And sadly making money is the purpose of 99% of the companies out there.

So how do standards come about? Someone does something new. Which means it isn't a standard yet. Otherwise we would still be using 1980's technology "standards".

There are very discrete routes to standardization through the IETF, ISO, ANSI, etc - you submit proposals, get them vetted, etc.

Two examples would be HLS and DASH. HLS is a draft standard of the IETF proposed by Apple, but Apple has never pursued standardization beyond that. This effectively means Apple maintains complete control of HLS and can change it however they want while still passing it off as a pseudo-standard. DASH was made by MPEG-LA, mainly to continue forcing their patent ridden nightmare video codec down everyones throats, but they got through full ISO standardization.

The third wheel there would be Flash - not a standard at all, a proprietary streaming protocol that is only usable by Adobe. They have no intent to standardize, and no intent to open the tech up ever. That is the kind of vendor lock in the OP talks about. All three were "something new", but each one did something different. And when you are making a product, you could take explicit steps to document your protocols and architecture, or you could keep it all proprietary and user hostile and try to maintain maximal control of everything.

Another good example is messaging. XMPP is another IETF standard, Telegram is a proprietary server with an open protocol, while Skype, iChat, Hangouts, and Whatsapp are wholly proprietary. You can implement XMPP servers or clients, and clients and servers can interoperate (assuming the server lets you, Facebook uses XMPP but their server isn't a full implementation, so you cannot add non-facebook friends in the service, for example). Telegram lets you implement clients however you want, but the protocol is designed to only work with their messaging servers, so you would have to fork the protocol to have server independence from Telegram. The others are all black box protocols nobody else can interoperate with and have no documentation.

No, just don't be greedy and don't try to capture all the value you're creating. Using open protocols, you can let your users build stuff that you could have never imagined yourself, and guess what - that only means more users for you.

You realize any CEO that didn't capture all value that the company created would probably be sued into the ground by the shareholders for not maximizing the return on their investment ?

In other words, you'd be fired by idiots who don't give a damn about anything than their wallets. That's the problem with shareholders. As someone explained on HN recently, "share holding" periods are often stupidly low. Shareholders are in no way interested in long-term good of the company. So if as a CEO you end up in a situation where shareholders are forcing you to do things that are bad long-term, there were likely some stupid decisions made that gave them so much power over you.

But anyway, you can't have cake and eat it too. If you care only about maximizing shareholder value, then don't lie to customers that you care about providing them value.

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