Yes, as I read the article I thought about interoperability between applications as a related problem. There has been lots of effort put into this over the deca

Yes, as I read the article I thought about interoperability between applications as a related problem. There has been lots of effort put into this over the decades with things like OLE and in some sense, object-oriented programming in general. They've achieved some success but it feels like they've always fallen far short of the level of reuse and interoperability envisioned, and for basically the same reasons alluded to in the article - even if you can solve the easier technical problem of defining protocols, there remain the harder technical and design problems of mapping semantics and user interfaces between application environments, and the social problem of divergent interests and priorities between the developers of those environments.