The software competitive scene is fairly good at the moment, and the open web remains an escape hatch, but the risk of too tight integration is that startups become impossible.
Let's aim for integration on equal footing, then. No special APIs for vendor only, and no ToC clauses prohibiting third-party clients/integrations.
I don't know how to work around the "COM problem", though - IIRC, your product can have just as deep integrations with Outlook & Office as Teams has, if you're willing to throw man-hours at dealing with the clumsiness of COM. This understandably advantages a company with lots of money to spend and direct access to people who develop the platform. Some non-MS products still manage to ship with deep integrations, but in my experience, they tend to be fragile.
That said, I feel it would be a tremendous help for both competition and integration, if some form of "can't restrict access to a service to vendor-owned clients" clause entered the law.
It's kind of my problem with products being turned into services - service providers currently have way too much power over their customers/users.
> The software competitive scene is fairly good at the moment, and the open web remains an escape hatch
Can't agree really. On the operating system front, it's Linux-only at this point. And the "Linux community" has completed its long way to the dark side, with RedHat paying devs to subvert the portability Unix/POSIX has always stood for, with systemd and the rush to containers. For a perspective, consider Docker was originally a way to equalize distro-specific libs and quirks; RedHat and Kubernetes essentially deprecating Docker (and adding unbelievable amounts of code to replace it as infrastructure) just means a central entity calls the shots now. When the problem of non-uniform libs is entirely created by RedHat and too many distros themselves. In reality, starved core F/OSS packages haven't changed in a decade or more. But enterprise cloud deals are just too sweet, so change for change's sake it is. In that context, it makes sense that RedHat has shutdown CentOS now.
On the web, it's even worse. There are no "browser vendors" except Google and Apple left, and Google is gatekeeping so-called web standards. Recently, HTTP and DNS is up for grabs as well. Hail monopolies.
> RedHat and Kubernetes essentially deprecating Docker (and adding unbelievable amounts of code to replace it as infrastructure) just means a central entity calls the shots now.
Err, the concept of containers aren't being deprecated. At first, Kubernetes only supported Docker. This was considered a negative monopoly, so they defined the CRI (Container Runtime Interface) and started shifting towards that. Now they're just taking the sensible step of deprecating the old specific support for Docker. Docker is still free to implement CRI (and IIRC there have been motions towards this). Containerd (Docker's underlying runtime) already supports it today.
Your Docker images will also keep working. Even if Docker doesn't end up implementing CRI, both containerd and CRI-O use the same container format, and are compatible with your existing images.
> On the operating system front, it's Linux-only at this point
A GPL'd system available entirely for free is hardly a "monopoly", though. And this only applies to servers, Linux desktops are rare and phones are split between the free-ish Android (with critical non-free Google Play Services) and the entirely locked down iOS.
Arguably if it's an open interface it's not "integrated". You certainly lose the product improvement and co-design benefits of tight integration when you have to run it past a standard committee.
Or you end up with "open standard with proprietary extension" (bane of everything from HTML to opengl)
I don't know how to work around the "COM problem", though - IIRC, your product can have just as deep integrations with Outlook & Office as Teams has, if you're willing to throw man-hours at dealing with the clumsiness of COM. This understandably advantages a company with lots of money to spend and direct access to people who develop the platform. Some non-MS products still manage to ship with deep integrations, but in my experience, they tend to be fragile.
That said, I feel it would be a tremendous help for both competition and integration, if some form of "can't restrict access to a service to vendor-owned clients" clause entered the law.
It's kind of my problem with products being turned into services - service providers currently have way too much power over their customers/users.