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That's a good point, although when you maliciously box out competitors from being easily compatible with your product once your audience is locked in...

Well, it starts to smell like antitrust behavior, honestly. These changes WOULD make peoples' lives better and easier, if they were allowed to be compatible with the products those people were previously using. To prevent that, incumbents do everything possible to stop any new/different systems from interacting with the ones that they sell.

And the whole point is that that would not be an issue if people were willing to hold their noses for a damned second and migrate to systems that ARE accessible and open and easy to use with various products from a plethora of different vendors. That way, the barrier of 'pointlessly changing things' will be vastly reduced in the future.

You say the managers are short-sighted and lazy, but so are the workers. It's only human.




Of course. We are familiar with the concept that, in general, people will act in their own short term self interest. An open, compatible computing world sounds great to you and me because we are computer people with heavy investment in the future of computing. This is not the case for most workers or their managers and executives.


Yeah, but what I'm saying is that a major reason why it doesn't wind up working for most people is because large incumbent players abuse their market position to a staggering degree, in order to lock all of those people into their platform.

They rely on the fact that most workers will resist changing from their systems, no matter what the executives want. That's how you get hooks into a client's flesh and roughly drag them out of any semblance of a free market. It just seems like gobsmackingly reprehensible behavior.




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