> Il 26/11/2020 21:33 Michael Thomas <mike@xxxxxxxx> ha scritto: > > I know there are a whole lot of things that Google is doing for > configuration, casting of urls (cf chromecast), etc which use > proprietary protocols. Lots of other vendors are inventing the same or > similar wheels. Can anybody tell me why these haven't been standardized? Well, whether an open standard exists is often not the driving factor in choosing between using a standard or a custom protocol - or, the open standard is taken and used in non-interoperable ways, through incompatible extensions or simply by refusing connections from third party clients. Instant messaging is a trove of examples of this. Social single sign-on is another example. It does not make a lot of sense to put effort into standardizing something, if the market leaders do not want to interoperate. > Is it politics? It sure is a PITA to not be able to send a URL to Apple > Device or cast from Firefox onto my chromecast. I assume that this > tangle applies for every other ecosystem like Apple and Amazon. > > Does anybody know the history and/or why we suffer this mess? I suspect that the reason is that we now have a generation of Internet CEOs that noticed that you can make a lot more money if you conquer the entire market and then lock your users into a walled garden and refuse to interoperate, so that others cannot take the market away from you just by being better. -- Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange vittorio.bertola@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy
