[gjvc]

It feels like the slow, laborious and fundamentally equitable nature of standards ratification in the open has been seen to be at odds with the OKRs of tech businesses.

At the risk of sounding like I'm trivialising this comment (with which I completely agree), this difference in behaviours has as its root the difference between a long- vs short-term mindset.

[rocqua]

I think the issue might be the huge amount of VC cash invested, and the need for such a player to have explosive growth to a huge valuation.

Open standards of federated systems could lead to slow sustainable growth with a spot for the original designers and pushers of the protocol. But open standards won't let you fully dominate the market, they don't allow you to leverage all the VC cash, and so they don't pay back on massive investment. Because quite a lot of the benefits are shared.

Moreover, slow growth can't compete with VC cash investment. The VC backed competition will have a better UX, more features, aggressive marketing, and in general be more developed. All because they can develop their product a lot faster because they have more money behind them.