Hey! I might have already said most of what I need to in my other comment, but I'd like to get into your idea of how these big companies might be incentivized to cooperate and drop their garden walls. e.g. Facebook (/Instagram) - what do you think could possibly be done to positively incentivize them to open their data up to other platforms? They make so much from selling people's usage data every day to advertisers, and their relevance seems to be dependent on cumulative network effects (people sticking with them because all their friends are on it) rather than actual unreplicable innovation (their tech could be easily copied) or reputation (people kinda hate them now!). Why would Facebook loosen their stranglehold on user data, open their API, or allow people to easily leave en-masse willingly? It seems to me that the incentives for these big companies to lock people into their platforms far outweigh their potential benefits from sharing with other platforms. Utility/usefulness/beauty are cheap and worthless - anyone can create or copy something useful or pretty. It's network effects that are valuable - and sharing with other platforms (especially open source) means diluting your ownership of them.
I'd argue even that an eternally-growing "pie" is itself a bit of a dated concept. This kinda assumes value is created by greater and greater utility of an economy - whereas with Moore's Law winding down (and the arguments in my other comment) it's possible that value is really just aggregating in scarcity rather than innovation or uplifting of the general population - and so strengthening your ownership is the better play, rather than fostering open communication. (Though ideally you should secretly do the former while publicly appearing to do the latter) Sure, attracting networks of people is still valuable, and you have some minimum quality requirements to do that, but if you can make it as hard as possible for those people to leave without totally breaking those quality requirements - even better.
As I said in the previous thread: way I see it, I think to overcome these walled gardens we need to considerably mature the consumer incentive structures - making masse movement between platforms easier, and with real concrete payoff, to individual users. Only once such threats are actually viable will the big companies cave and aim to improve their user retention through good reputation rather than dirty tech practices forcing retention. The economics do seem to incentivize consumers eventually doing this, though, but they might just be a bit too dumb right now - and companies are taking advantage.
I'd argue even that an eternally-growing "pie" is itself a bit of a dated concept. This kinda assumes value is created by greater and greater utility of an economy - whereas with Moore's Law winding down (and the arguments in my other comment) it's possible that value is really just aggregating in scarcity rather than innovation or uplifting of the general population - and so strengthening your ownership is the better play, rather than fostering open communication. (Though ideally you should secretly do the former while publicly appearing to do the latter) Sure, attracting networks of people is still valuable, and you have some minimum quality requirements to do that, but if you can make it as hard as possible for those people to leave without totally breaking those quality requirements - even better.
As I said in the previous thread: way I see it, I think to overcome these walled gardens we need to considerably mature the consumer incentive structures - making masse movement between platforms easier, and with real concrete payoff, to individual users. Only once such threats are actually viable will the big companies cave and aim to improve their user retention through good reputation rather than dirty tech practices forcing retention. The economics do seem to incentivize consumers eventually doing this, though, but they might just be a bit too dumb right now - and companies are taking advantage.