[southerntofu]

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".