You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators
who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem?
My observation is that, regardless the myriad solutions based on
strongly enforced interoperability standards, no government has ever
had the courage to directly go up against US technopoly. I can see
that changing at last. And my goodness, what a long, long, dark time
it's been coming.
It may be the problem, but it's also become the standard. If you want Microsoft, you know where to go. If you want Apple, you know where to go. If you want Linux or open standards, there's hundreds of companies that will help you, but which are good? Which are bad? Nobody knows.
That feeling (you invoke "seems" and thus the realm of appearances)
is now common in all walks of life. It has rather little to do with
the reality of change. Mostly it means when change comes it's as a
surprise. One of the ways to unblocking is to challenge assumptions.
I think as entrenched tech people we get even more stuck in a set of
assumptions that the world is moving beyond.
Like the idea of "an OS that becomes popular" Does anybody (except us
tech sorts) want that? If API interoperability exists then popularity
is actually undesirable and is the root of many failure modes. Why
care about popularity? People want and need at least adequate
functional utility.
In many ways tech never got off the starting blocks.
50 years of commercial IT and has significantly failed to achieve many
of the basics. If being able to copy a simple text file from one
computer to another in 2025 is still a struggle, that's failure by any
reasonable standards, and BigTech companies are right at the heart of
that failure.
I've got decent challenges to many of the other seemingly "no
alternative" stuckness I see in this thread, but no need to labour the
point - which is to clear ones mind of unexamined assumptions.
You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem?
My observation is that, regardless the myriad solutions based on strongly enforced interoperability standards, no government has ever had the courage to directly go up against US technopoly. I can see that changing at last. And my goodness, what a long, long, dark time it's been coming.