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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

i was there, i was developing on those systems.

i think you're romanticising things.

the whole situation with interoperability was not sustainable, as evidenced by the fact that it was dropped by every player as soon as possible.

one of the reasons why it was not sustainable was that the standards at that time were conceived for a different era, and everyone wanted special features not available in the standards.

it does seem like we're having much better success with interoperability nowadays, but only because the standards are much better today.

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Players always drop it to trap their users to their service.

See how google closed hangouts to being able to communicate with other XMPP servers, or how slack dropped IRC and XMPP when they felt they had enough adoption to be able to do that.

So in the beginning you want interoperability so it's "just the same", then you drop it so the users are stuck.

> Players always drop it to trap their users to their service.

i understand what you're writing and i agree. but in my case all our enterprise clients were demanding features that had us circumventing interoperability since the features they were asking for would never make it into the standards.

> i think you're romanticising things.

I don't think I am. As a user, I could use Pidgin or Gaim and talk to my friends across every service I used. This only stopped when companies started consciously working against these efforts. Discord explicitly and openly banned third party clients. They didn't have to do so. It has nothing to do with standards and everything to do with companies becoming aggressively and openly hostile towards anything that isn't directly under their control.

> They didn't have to do so. It has nothing to do with standards and everything to do with companies becoming aggressively and openly hostile towards anything that isn't directly under their control.

we tried to do it differently. it was impossible. every company had it’s own extensions on top of the standards because the standards were poor. those extensions only worked when chatting with someone on the same network using the same software. this was not sustainable. when we removed those standards we not only provided an incredible experience for the user but we also removed huge amounts of code that made everything much faster.

the casualty was interoperability.

No, people left because a large enough percentage of their friends and coworkers did. That's how walled gardens work: exclusivity demands participation.

you're describing the "network effect". but it only happens once people actually move away from certain platforms. why did they move away? features that couldn't be implemented using a shared standard.

"move away" is a tenuous assertion. If someone puts the majority of new content on another platform, is that "moving away"? What if they only use the old platform once a week? What if they only use the new platform once a week, but that's when an important discussion happens?

No one moved away from email.

> If someone puts the majority of new content on another platform, is that "moving away"?

yes.

> What if they only use the old platform once a week? What if they only use the new platform once a week, but that's when an important discussion happens?

you’re describing low usage.

My point is that it's still the network effect, even when the old platform still has active users.

Nobody left email, yet the network effect is still very present in that space.

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