[jshen]

even enough people care about it then it's a market opportunity. You should jump on that if you think enough people care about it.

My assumption, not enough people care to sustain a business.

[TeMPOraL]

It's not that. This problem is simply not viable to be solved by market alone.

I could jump in and make an integration solution, providing interop between various communication mediums. So will my competitors, and now everyone has 20 interop apps to chose from, and the problem jumps one meta-level up. Or the companies who own the services I try to make talk to one another will decide that I (or my users) break their ToS and retaliate.

Also good luck going with that when everyone's so big on encryption and sandboxing apps, making sure their interop capabilities are nil.

[jshen]

If consumers cared enough, they would switch from the closed platforms. Not enough people value it, and that's the hard fact.

[TeMPOraL]

Consumers won't care, and they never will. Sometimes the market simply exploits a coordination problem, and you can not depend on customers to care there, because they're stuck in a trap and can't collectively express their opinion in a way that would matter on market.

Other times it exploits information asymmetry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I checked, half of the good theoretical things about markets break down completely if you can't assume rational and perfectly informed customers. Well, in terms of products and services having anything to do with technology, you generally can't. General population is 100% clueless. Therefore markets following only their feedback may lead them to pretty suboptimal situations.

[jshen]

I'm not some kind of libertarian free-market solves all problems person. I think markets have many short comings. However, this is a case where I think people genuinely prefer the closed platforms for all kinds of reasons. They are better user experiences, they are easier to understand for a busy layperson, etc.