The only lesson from history is that all tecnologies succumb at some point. General infrastructure standards (like TCP/IP or HTTP) persist longer, but that doesn't say much for application level technologies.
>Remember that 'default' browser that had 90% of the market and now has less than 10%?
If anything that's a counter-example. Netscape, that "now has less than 10%" is the open source version. It had that 90% when it was proprietary. Besides, the current 2 big players that trump Firefox in users (Chrome and IE) are proprietary too.
>Remember that über successful smartphone company that owned the market with its propietary chat/email network?
Yeah, it got pwned by Apple and Android. Of which Apple, which is proprietary, has most of the smartphone profits, and Android has a lot of the share, mostly in lower cost phones. Not really about open vs closed. Meebo, a totally open phone never got anywhere, and neither did Mozilla's phone attempts.
>Flash for cool web effects anyone?
What about it? It dominated its niche of the market for like 15 years. If it dies its mostly because of general incompetence by Adobe. They never managed to create a mobile version that doesn't suck donkey's balls for one. They also died because a proprietary platform make a decision not to include it (iOS), which is not really about "open" winning.
Huh? I fail to see the logic behind this.
>And the fact that protocols and standards prevail is precisely because they need to be open to become protocols and standards.
Well, yes, but that doesn't say much about other levels of the stack, like applications. And besides, we've had lots of succesful proprietary but de-facto standards too, from the .doc format to .mp3 (patent encumpered), to GIF and h264.
Besides, how "I'm talking a picture while you see the whole movie"?
The case of browsers I mentioned, for example, spans 2 decades+ that closed browsers dominate. Or take desktop operating systems: closed ones are winning for 5+ decades.
That's a whole lot of pictures. I don't think there's a historical based argument you made for how the movie ends, besides your faith in a particular outcome.