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.
All costs must be taken into account.
Cost of opportunity is immeasurable.
This is not an easy task.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.