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HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 weeks agoClosed standards win all the time; messaging and social feeds being two major examples.
Open standards usually win only when complying with closed standards is more costly than using less developed open standards in the short run and developing the open standards over time.
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
You’ve picked relatively new things. And I cannot predict the future. You might be right. Those could be lost causes. Experience tells me they are not.
I feel an obligation to point out the past to the younger folks who think “Microsoft and Adobe always win”. I feel this obligation,l because I was one of them.
Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silver light were inevitable. They were further closing down of existing dominant closed solutions. Now both are forgotten, replaced by open standards.
Microsoft now pretends they always intended to play nice. Adobe now pretends they never even tried to build a walled garden around the Internet.
We can perhaps agree at least that closed standards do frequently win, for awhile. No disagreement from me, on that point.
We might also agree that closed standards only fail when corporations get too greedy?
But of course, I’ll share my faith: corporations always, eventually, get too greedy.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 weeks ago
Flash and Silverlight follow what I said. They were ubiquitous until the costs, being a bloated platform that couldn’t be ported to smartphones, caused the industry to shift to an open model.
And messaging is a very old use of the Internet. IRC was created in 1988; Discord shouldn’t be a thing based on what you’ve said.
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
I feel like we’re trying to find something to disagree about now…?
Discord does substantially more than IRC can do.
It’s wild to me that “people eventually move to the free thing, once it is feature complete” is a controversial take.
Yes, it can take multiple lifetimes. Yes, there’s plenty of examples where the closed thing persists long after an informed public would have switched.
But the shift to an open public standard eventually happens.
Nobody keeps a monopoly forever.
Monopolies based on restrictive agreements and secret code are unnatural, and they require constant upkeep. They eventually succumb.
In some cases, the standard even persists, but as an open one. Microsoft has figured this out, and now strategically open sources things they know they cannot keep alive, otherwise.