People opted into several of these services before they were "locked in", many of whom never noticed the switch of XMPP backplanes in Facebook Messages and GTalk. Some of them haven't even seemed to notice the loss of a few technically minded friends from their messenger windows, changes in branding, and or even really changes in apps. The ambivalence is not a preference or a "want" for a locked in experience. There isn't even a preference for a type of experience: the general human thought process is "I want to talk to my friend Jim" never "I want to use [Facebook Messenger/Google Hangouts/SMS/smoke signals] to talk to my friend Jim".
I've seen people that ritualistically open certain apps to talk to certain friends and networks of friends, but have no idea what apps they are using beyond the background navigation needs of "the one with the fuzzy green icon on my last page" and "the blue one with the annoying notifications".
Locked in platforms are a consequence of network efforts, not a "preference" for some mystical "guaranteed experience": the experience and the platform don't matter if the social interactions aren't there.
The diaspora of communications platforms hasn't hit home to the average consumer yet, and it's currently background inconvenience that people are using five to ten different apps to communicate these days in some cases, but that doesn't mean average consumers are entirely ignorant of the situation either. (To some extent that's why OS-level notification systems have become so important to the average consumer; at least when you have a half-dozen messenging apps all the notifications arrive in the same place.)
I've seen people that ritualistically open certain apps to talk to certain friends and networks of friends, but have no idea what apps they are using beyond the background navigation needs of "the one with the fuzzy green icon on my last page" and "the blue one with the annoying notifications".
Locked in platforms are a consequence of network efforts, not a "preference" for some mystical "guaranteed experience": the experience and the platform don't matter if the social interactions aren't there.
The diaspora of communications platforms hasn't hit home to the average consumer yet, and it's currently background inconvenience that people are using five to ten different apps to communicate these days in some cases, but that doesn't mean average consumers are entirely ignorant of the situation either. (To some extent that's why OS-level notification systems have become so important to the average consumer; at least when you have a half-dozen messenging apps all the notifications arrive in the same place.)