But there is no money in making an open and interoperable platform. Or to be more accurate, there is a lot more money in having a closed and proprietary platfor

But there is no money in making an open and interoperable platform. Or to be more accurate, there is a lot more money in having a closed and proprietary platform, which you can milk for years if not decades. Ultimately, majority of people do not care whether the underlying platform is closed or open - they just want a product that works fine (eg. Facebook). So one of the rare ways open platforms can win over closed ones is if someone invests a lot in an open platform and offers a product with quality on par to those with closed platforms. But it seems money drives a lot more effort in aggregate[1] than some desire to make the world a better place. So a vast majority of times, we see better products coming out of "entities" (corporations, people) motivated by money, which will do all it can to protect it's money source. Closing the platform seems a perfectly logical thing to do in that case. [1] I define it as total man-hours spent on something.