In order to talk to my friends, family, and coworkers I need to have the following apps installed and running: Slack, Teams, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, Google Chat/Hangouts/Allo/Whatever, FB Messenger, Discord, Twitter, etc.
It'd take a pretty strong argument to convince me that this is so much more productive and allows for more innovation than the old days when the spec for things like Email, HTTP, IRC, XMPP allowed for a plethora of different tools unrelated to the company sponsoring the tech and people figured out how to make money USING the interoperable tech instead of OWNING the tech.
I actually love the choice and the separation. And when an innovation good enough appears on a platform, it is quickly copied on the others (reactions…)
I'm willing to bet that your friends and family wouldn't be happy if the European Union would mandate using IRC everywhere. Heck, why not go further and stick to the good old ntalk [1].
I used XMPP around 2003 when it was still called Jabber. I can't say there's something major wrong with it (only XML verbosity comes to my head), it's just the idea of making it mandatory. By the way how come some EU officials use Zoom? [1] Where are those good open standards?
Funny you should mention Zoom, which just like Whatsapp is pretty much a half-baked proprietary XMPP implementation. Now if we had proper interop regulations mandating interoperability between commercial entities (no need to apply that to hobby/research projects), we could talk between all these networks.
Sure it would take a few months of serious dedication for these chat vendors to write specifications for the protocol spaghetti they came up with, but the benefits would be tremendous.
So why is "nobody" using XMPP protocol? The problem is not exactly with the specifications (although there's still a little margin for interpretation here and there, they keep evolving for the better) but rather with the implementations. Since a protocol is not tied to a single implementation, it requires additional resources to develop user-friendly clients. This fact is used by an argument by some people (see also: m0xie's The Ecosystem is moving) to justify centralizing all communications and protocol development. This argument was amply debunked by Daniel Gultsche (who maintains an Android XMPP client) and Drew Devault (who maintains an (unfederated-so-far) forge):
There's also a lot to say about the Matrix/Element approach, which has some good and bad sides. I'm happy to elaborate if that's of interest to someone.
If you want to have provider choice for customers and interoperability between messaging apps, I don't think there is another way than making standards mandatory.
Why do you think WhatsApp reached a billion dollar evaluation? Not because users have the freedom to move to a different provider and still be able to talk to all their friends...
The only other possibility is that users start rejecting providers who do not comply with internet standards (and I don't see that happening, even here on Hacker News).
Making something mandatory will definitely push things forward because what else are the providers going to do? Though I still have doubts about real progress being made. EU can't can even add VP9 and AV1 to the list of codecs used for Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB).
Instead maybe the government should start eating its own dog food and use an open standard for both internal and external use.
The bridges are not horrible. But they aren’t super reliable. I have seen them go down for a few days once, generally be a bit slow, forward messages out of order, etc.
The free matrix.org server is also overloaded. The paid server is much faster.
Internet standards have consistently failed to innovate. Email and IRC have failed to progress along with proprietary platforms. Features like end to end encryption require user effort and plugins which never took off.
Having 5 IM apps installed is much preferable to me than 1 worse app. Not sure the situation for XMPP but I have been told its highly fragmented with extensions that not all clients support. If I'm talking with someone, I want a high level of assurance that their client is pretty much the same as mine and that all features work and look roughly the same on both sides.
PC and x86 took us pretty far... And that was mostly carried on interoperability... I doubt we would have gotten to technology being as ubiquitous as it is without it.
Funny enough, France's failed internet, the Minitel would probably be the solution pushed today by the EU.
The Internet won on the free market, through its own merits. No politician intervention necessary. Even if plenty tried to capture the glory (information superhighway…)
Do you have any credible sources to base that claim on, other than "let's paint the government as idiots"? Did you know that TCP/IP was based on that other "failed" french network, Cyclades?
I'm all in favour the EU doing what it's doing, but x86 is actually a good example to not enforce this standard. Imagine that the EU enforced x86 as well, what would've happened to ARM ?
When in history has interoperability not been a catalyst for innovation? Look at everything people do in browsers now. Or if that's not to your taste, perhaps the era of BASIC is a better example. Not all standards are good, but a decent standard is better, or at least much more practically useful, than a lot of better but incompatible proprietary equivalents.
Of course it doesn't have to be mandated, and in the past usually wasn’t, but hell, it’s hard to see many good reasons to not standardize on USB-C. It’s got plenty of pins, it’s already mass-manufactured, and outside of only a single product Apple sells, there’s not much competition aside from legacy stuff that can’t handle a lot of today’s data, form factor and power delivery needs.
Different conditions beget different types of innovation. Interoperable systems evolved things (paradigms, models, languages…) that competing ones couldn't, and the opposite is also true. The world needs both, and probably everything in-between.
OK. We like competition. But the “almost” part is a little bit underplayed here. It doesn’t “almost always” breed innovation. Sometimes it breeds 50 different horribly positioned walled gardens. The consumer loses, the lack of interoperability becomes a tragedy of the commons, and our landfills are full of garbage nobody needs. Case in point: Home automation. I challenge you to scroll through the full list of things you can integrate with Google Home and try to justify why there needs to be this many different proprietary ways to interconnect devices. Home automation is not a new market, either: the X10 standard has been around since 1975.
This same kind of madness, of course, totally already exists elsewhere. I’m sorry but, out of the hundreds of thousands of different power connectors, most of them aren’t even very well thought out to begin with, less “innovative.” It turns out that delivering power to a device isn’t that interesting, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get it horribly wrong. For every MagSafe that has at least some redeeming qualities, there’s about 500 DELL power bricks out there. And for something that is effectively delivering small amounts of low voltage DC power, in fact often one of about 2 or 3 different voltages, it’s sad that you have to scour the earth for chargers that match the pinout of your device.
But wait a minute. We’re not even talking about laptops, but essentially just mobile phones and cameras. So where’s the innovative competitor to USB-C that we’re all so worried about getting stomped on by the EU? Even Apple has adopted USB-C for almost everything except iPhone. micro USB hardly exists on new phones, even the budget phones are switching to USB-C.
The market doesn’t just automatically do the right thing. Apple is simply too powerful for market forces alone to compel them to use a “standard” charger, and actually, the friction of changing something that works probably makes it resistant against that, but just because that’s the case does not mean it is the right way to go for consumers or the world in general, in the long term. And once enough people are tired of that non-sense, they turn to regulation. And I’m sure regulation like this is annoying—what does the EU know about connectivity and mobile phone design—but it’s probably relieving to Apple, because it roughly solves the problem of having to reconcile it: they either do it, or they are in violation of the law. Problem solved!
And no innovation was harmed, because plugging phones in is not that interesting.
P.S.: Interoperability absolutely breeds innovation, and it does not mean no competition, it builds a framework for competition. Standards do obviously limit what you can do, but in exchange they open many doors that would otherwise be closed. Please tell me you don’t think the “innovation” from having 30 competing hypertext formats would’ve been the ideal path to “innovation” for the world wide web.
Hardware innovation relies on competition. Interoperability can be useful for iteration but true hardware innovation would seem to require being different from the status quo, no?
Commodification spurs innovation at a level above the commodity. I love Linux but its ubiquity is partly to blame for why I am not using a capability based OS on my personal devices.
The whole history of sciences builds a case for interoperability, not against. See also the railway sizes problem (eg. in Australia), the electric/lighting socket standardization, doorlocks...
Were it not for standards and regulations you would have to buy different locks, lightbulbs, and charger adapters depending on the company which built your apartment. It's already annoying enough that these specifications change from one country to another, but it would be a complete nightmare if there were no interoperability regulations at all.
Also, more specifically about computing: the Internet being an open standard brought many advantages for innovation, compared to centralized networks such as MSN or AOL. As for hardware, i don't know about you but i'm pretty happy i can change my CPU/RAM/HDD with any socket-compatible product and i'm not tied to a single vendor... in fact i'm pretty angry when i find a machine where some parts are non-standard and cannot be easily replaced.
To be clear, i'm not saying there's no value in deviating from the standards for innovation. I'm just saying 99% of usecases are better addressed with standard solutions than with halfbaked proprietary "solutions".
AOL used SMTP and NFS and TCP/IP and many many other open protocol interop things. It wasn't great at sharing back, I am afraid, but it wouldn't have been able to be what it was without the internet protocols and many other open things (network socket programming, DLPI, heck sendmail, SSL, HTTP compression). AOL is a prime example of how a solid infrastructure enables new businesses (but those businesses might not stick with the partner that brought them).
It'd take a pretty strong argument to convince me that this is so much more productive and allows for more innovation than the old days when the spec for things like Email, HTTP, IRC, XMPP allowed for a plethora of different tools unrelated to the company sponsoring the tech and people figured out how to make money USING the interoperable tech instead of OWNING the tech.