[nonlogical]

This is something very spiritually close to a concept I recently learned about from Cory Doctorow’s talk at DEFCON called Adversarial Interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

As many have noted the reason this functionality is not available is because it invariably leads to commodification of services. Competitors will quickly jump in and use those APIs to interoperate to bootstrap themselves up.

Most likely for consumers that is a huge win, but for companies that is a dangerous filter that filers out companies that stagnate.

This used to be common back in the day and was keeping companies from stagnation, that was until per Cory’s arguments there have been an explosion of laws that basically outlawed Adversarial Interoperability. Which in turn led to too big to fail software giants we have today.

[ekanes]

> As many have noted the reason this functionality is not available is because it invariably leads to commodification of services.

Exactly right, and that's why when AI-based voice assistants become wildly capable someday, some of the more brand-based companies will lose a lot of value. I'll be asking Alexa/Siri/Google Assistant for that ride/groceries/etc and as long as it's good, I won't care where it comes from. The (perceived) value will be with the voice assistant, not the fulfilling service.

[jkestner]

Yeah, Doctorow's discussion of that is what got me thinking about the snow job of ecosystems, and specifically how Apple scared/seduced many industries into this: https://blog.supermechanical.com/2023/10/31/the-latest-and-g...

There's probably a subtle business case for interoperability that you can make from within a company, but I only offer that because it's all we have the power to do ourselves, while we're waiting for regulation to change the economic motivations.