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"Our best option is to avoid supporting and using proprietary monocultures." Like the App Store?

• roc 14y ago
  And this is really where I have an issue with people posing the proprietary nature of Facebook, Google+, Twitter, et al as "A Problem". People throw their content into these services, time and again. Often doing so as they're suffering whatever pain we hypothesize is implicit in leaving a prior service. (However much pain it did or did not cause, to have everyone's stuff locked up in a MySpace silo, it did not stop anyone from putting all their stuff right back into Facebook's silo.) And they do this in other contexts: no-one much frets about proprietary saved-game file formats. Or the release of new console platforms that end support for entire libraries of games. So clearly there's a line. And it seems a reasonable one to draw. Because who really cares about their old saved games, or a game they hadn't played, or mobile app they hadn't so much as launched, in months? It's certainly nice as things approach the open/internet ideal. But there's clearly an entire class of computing where people do cost/benefit considerations with an emphasis on immediate entertainment value, rather than long-term computing value. And people have repeatedly demonstrated a desire to treat social networks more like consoles than even mobile platforms, let alone PC computing platforms. So why do geeks persist in seeing "A Problem" here? Let alone a problem that, if solved, would garner any attention for having presented a solution?