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Imposing interoperability has other costs than switching costs: mainly the opportunity cost of stifled innovation. All costs must be taken into account. Cost

Imposing interoperability has other costs than switching costs: mainly the opportunity cost of stifled innovation. All costs must be taken into account. Cost of opportunity is immeasurable. This is not an easy task.

capableweb 5y ago
Wouldn't imposing interoperability be the opposite of stifling innovation? It's forcing companies to allow others to innovate as well, as they'll actually have a chance of breaking into the market of the dominant player. If Twitter can (and will) act without interoperability, they can shutdown anyone who tries to interop, stifling innovation in the space at large, while if they are forced to allow interoperability, other players can also enter the market.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  It depends! For example, IPv4 did inhibit some innovation (think CNLP, OSI, IPv6, etc.), and TCP did too (probably), each at their respective layers, but TCP/IP produced a great deal of innovation at layers above, and that's easily worth the opportunity cost of missed innovation at the the network and transport layers. But now suppose we standardized on Java or Ada or something for app dev. That would not be good, and the opportunity cost of inhibited language development would be awful. Standardization in APIs is worse even, if you disallow extensions, but is less nasty if you do allow extensions. So, yeah, "it depends" is the best I can do for an answer. Sometimes it's possible to reduce the opportunity cost of innovation inhibition by standardizing in mature technology spaces, but sometimes a sector that appears mature is ripe for disruption, so it can be really hard to predict. And we cannot know what we've lost for quite some time after the standard is imposed. So on the whole I'm disinclined to have standardization forced on the market.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Well, it may stifle innovation in the protocol, while encouraging innovation in the implementation and/or use. In my book, that's a net win. Why? There's less room for innovation in the protocol. Take TCP, for instance. Could it be improved? Probably. But how much gain are you going to get by innovating there? On the other hand, how much was enabled, on both ends of the wire, by everything standardizing on TCP? Far, far more than we could ever get by a "better TCP".
- jatone 5y ago
  TCP is a bad example; since its actively being supplanted by quic simply because TCP is such a inefficient protocol.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    TCP dates from 1974, QUIC from 2012. I don't think a new transport protocol after 38 years invalidates my point - that there is less room (not none) for innovation in the protocol than there is for innovation in the things that use the protocol.
    - cryptonector 5y ago
      TCP is a bad example because it has become so hard to replace. SCTP failed to replace TCP for various reasons, such as too many middleboxes filtering ULPs that aren't TCP or UDP, or SCTP being far to rich and complex, or just inertia. But TCP has had a ton of problems, and while there has been a ton of research into those problems and the solution spaces for them, adopting even hacky solutions into TCP has been difficult. As a result, TCP has gotten complex and bloated over the years without at the same time solving all the problems that a new protocol could solve. On the plus side, in spite of inhibiting innovation at the transport layer, TCP enabled innovation at the application layer by making the application layer possible at all.
    - jatone 5y ago
      didn't say it invalidated your point just that it was a bad example. just because something has inertia doesn't mean its good or even okay. it just means it timed the market correctly. you could have used UDP for example which being as old as TCP has spawned many new protocols on top of it (including quic) and in its own right has been the backbone of many applications.
Gollapalli 5y ago
Perhaps. But all the core protocols of the web were done using government money and standardized as a public good. I don't see why social media protocols should not have some base level standard of interoperability, given their importance in society. I don't begrudge FB and Twitter their success. But I think that, as with the previous generations of captains of industry, it is time that the winners take into account the public good. Something like the living web standard for social media would be nice.

capableweb 5y ago

Wouldn't imposing interoperability be the opposite of stifling innovation? It's forcing companies to allow others to innovate as well, as they'll actually have a chance of breaking into the market of the dominant player. If Twitter can (and will) act without interoperability, they can shutdown anyone who tries to interop, stifling innovation in the space at large, while if they are forced to allow interoperability, other players can also enter the market.

cryptonector 5y ago
It depends! For example, IPv4 did inhibit some innovation (think CNLP, OSI, IPv6, etc.), and TCP did too (probably), each at their respective layers, but TCP/IP produced a great deal of innovation at layers above, and that's easily worth the opportunity cost of missed innovation at the the network and transport layers. But now suppose we standardized on Java or Ada or something for app dev. That would not be good, and the opportunity cost of inhibited language development would be awful. Standardization in APIs is worse even, if you disallow extensions, but is less nasty if you do allow extensions. So, yeah, "it depends" is the best I can do for an answer. Sometimes it's possible to reduce the opportunity cost of innovation inhibition by standardizing in mature technology spaces, but sometimes a sector that appears mature is ripe for disruption, so it can be really hard to predict. And we cannot know what we've lost for quite some time after the standard is imposed. So on the whole I'm disinclined to have standardization forced on the market.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

Well, it may stifle innovation in the protocol, while encouraging innovation in the implementation and/or use. In my book, that's a net win. Why? There's less room for innovation in the protocol. Take TCP, for instance. Could it be improved? Probably. But how much gain are you going to get by innovating there? On the other hand, how much was enabled, on both ends of the wire, by everything standardizing on TCP? Far, far more than we could ever get by a "better TCP".

jatone 5y ago
TCP is a bad example; since its actively being supplanted by quic simply because TCP is such a inefficient protocol.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  TCP dates from 1974, QUIC from 2012. I don't think a new transport protocol after 38 years invalidates my point - that there is less room (not none) for innovation in the protocol than there is for innovation in the things that use the protocol.
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    TCP is a bad example because it has become so hard to replace. SCTP failed to replace TCP for various reasons, such as too many middleboxes filtering ULPs that aren't TCP or UDP, or SCTP being far to rich and complex, or just inertia. But TCP has had a ton of problems, and while there has been a ton of research into those problems and the solution spaces for them, adopting even hacky solutions into TCP has been difficult. As a result, TCP has gotten complex and bloated over the years without at the same time solving all the problems that a new protocol could solve. On the plus side, in spite of inhibiting innovation at the transport layer, TCP enabled innovation at the application layer by making the application layer possible at all.
  - jatone 5y ago
    didn't say it invalidated your point just that it was a bad example. just because something has inertia doesn't mean its good or even okay. it just means it timed the market correctly. you could have used UDP for example which being as old as TCP has spawned many new protocols on top of it (including quic) and in its own right has been the backbone of many applications.

Gollapalli 5y ago

Perhaps. But all the core protocols of the web were done using government money and standardized as a public good. I don't see why social media protocols should not have some base level standard of interoperability, given their importance in society. I don't begrudge FB and Twitter their success. But I think that, as with the previous generations of captains of industry, it is time that the winners take into account the public good. Something like the living web standard for social media would be nice.