Competing platforms/ecosystems slow down innovation? I would say we need at least a couple of strong JS contenders to get the most benefit. The Central Bureaucracies such as W3C make change (granted positive or negative) slower.
>Competing platforms/ecosystems slow down innovation?
Yes. That's what killed the vision for massive adoption of desktop Linux for one thing.
That's what hampered a good Java web story (tons of competing frameworks).
It's why there are several slow scripting languages (Python, Ruby, Perl, etc), whereas Javascript got crazy fast as the only game in town when it comes to the web.
The reverse of that (Rails as the "one true framework" instead of tons of competing stuff) is what helped Ruby make waves.
Especially when the "competing platforms/ecosystems" are needlessly competing. It's a waste of effort, people duplicating features and stuff.
>The Central Bureaucracies such as W3C make change (granted positive or negative) slower.
The central bureaucracies are actually "competing platforms/ecosystems" too, only they are competing for inclusion in the one same standard. MS, Apple, Google, Oracle, IBM etc each wanting their own APIs and changes to the final spec (which is slow).
Most progress has been made by ONE SINGLE company going at it and inventing something new on their own that others adopt more or less wholesale (e.g Apple with Canvas, MS with AJAX, Mozilla with asm, etc).
Constrast that to each of those companies having its own competing technology for the same thing (e.g different canvas drawing APIs) instead of adopting one and being done with it.
You are describing competition within a platform, which is happening in JS as well: EmberJS vs AngularJS vs KnockoutJS etc. Do you really think this kind of competition is bad?
I am talking about competition on a higher level: e.g. Ruby on Rails vs ASP.NET vs JSP. RoR was not the first one. Do you really think this kind of competition is bad? Was inventing Linux a bad thing because we already had other OS's?
"company going at it and inventing something new on their own" - the very definition of competition: generating something new to get a competitive advantage (new platform, new technology, new framework).