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You are correct. The greatest threat to someone providing a service based on an open protocol is that users might pick up and leave. Consequently, a service pr
by neilk 4y ago
You are correct. The greatest threat to someone providing a service based on an open protocol is that users might pick up and leave.
Consequently, a service provider will plow enormous resources into differentiating their service, and generating other lock-in effects, so the users find it hard to leave.
A popular open source protocol is actually the perfect playing field for a would-be monopolist.
The monopolist can make their service better and better with cash and execution, but meanwhile the protocol is stuck at a baseline since a varied ecosystem doesn't upgrade itself as quickly. So it is less and less attractive.
- the_other 4y ago> A popular open source protocol is actually the perfect playing field for a would-be monopolist. At first I thought "email seems a good example of this: most people don't want to leave Google, I don't want to leave FastMail"... but then I remembered that I could just leave FastMail and take my email to Google. Which proves the upthread point about the open protocol being a safety net for users. Can you talk about some examples of monopolised open protocols?
- neilk 4y agoEmail is the paradigmatic example. You can export your mailbox and use `pine` if that's your jam. But in the real world, most users of Gmail will depend on at least one feature of Gmail that isn't easily replicable elsewhere.
- the_other 4y ago> Email is the paradigmatic example But there's no monopoly. There's feature-based lock-in built around the open protocols, and it's very effective, but it's not a monopoly.
- giobox 4y agoI wonder what gmail's churn rate even is? It is surely staggeringly close to zero.
- sokoloff 4y agoI wouldn’t be surprised if they have more churn via death (people, companies, abandoned projects) than any other single source.
- mkmk3 4y ago> A popular open source protocol is actually the perfect playing field for a would-be monopolist. Whereas when there's no popular open source protocol, the OSS ecosystem upgrades itself fast, like a cheetah? :P Whatever mental model you're using here might just be going over my head and I'd appreciate you being more explicit about it
- thrown_22 4y agoMicrosoft: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
- andsoitis 4y agoWhat's an example of an open protocol (what this thread is about) where MSFT successfully followed this strategy?
- thrown_22 4y agoHTML before IE6. At one point Microsoft owned the web browser market to the same degree that Google owns it today.
- bogantech 4y agoAnything from this century?
- thrown_22 4y agoIE6 was the most popular web browser until 2008. It wasn't until 2010 that we finally could somewhat ignore it when it dropped below 20% market share. It was a happy day when I could completely ignore it in corporate in 2018 when it was uninstalled from all computers.
- mkmk3 4y agoRiiigght, that makes some sense, thank you! Need to consider to understand if open source is really advantageous, but you've pointed out how it might be