Small companies loves protocols, but as they become big and dominant they start pivoting to platforms to exert control and extract more profits from the ecosystem.

We need regulations around platforms, protocols are inherently more powerful and from the perspective of humanity almost always preferable over platforms, so the incentives of companies should reflect that, but it isn't right now.

Stuff like email, http etc is what makes computers great. I doubt anything like that could get invented today, companies would just create their own proprietary protocols and there would be no web browsers. Imagine if we just continued along that route and made protocols for everything instead of having big companies lock down computing habits via platforms.

There are tradeoffs beyond just the company making more money, as Moxie's recent web3 assessment covered. Protocols take much longer to evolve, platforms are quick to evolve.

Allowing platforms to innovate but somehow incentivizingnor requiring opening up what they've built seems like it would be the best of both worlds, but I'm not sure how that could be done well.

If people actually paid for usage, that would be one thing, because then it would be all about getting people to use your platform so you made more money, and having others innovate on too of it that you could fold into it would be cost effective. In the world of free APIs and services, it's all about keeping control of every bit.

Maybe all it needs is a nudge to make the decision to hoard all data no longer worth while. Make companies liable for PII that's lost and make someone's PII their own property only to be used with their agreement and maybe the rest will start to fall out of it.

The UK open banking regulations are a good model to follow.

The problem is the intersection of extreme profits at stake and the public's lack of understanding of the underlying causes. That's not a recipe for good political outcomes.

In the case of the UK open banking regulations I suspect tech lobbying (powerful) might have trumped high street bank lobbying (not as powerful).

> Stuff like email, http etc is what makes computers great.

I concur with this. I've gotten into IRC recently, and have started reading RFC's/specs for various protocols instead of ducking "How to do X", and it's both greatly increased my enjoyment of computing, and my knowledge.

The last thing I want is gov regulations by even more out-of-touch regulators than the people they’re regulating.

Standards are good. IETF is the reason for some sanity in IT.

Even Spotify don't make it easy. The librespot library is a rewrite of libspot, which Spotify deprecated.

Crazy idea that I'm sure isn't an original thought: instead of adapting the languages to deal with abstracting the idiosyncrasies of each OS, change the OSes to expose a universal API to make everything else lighter.

I guess that's also kinda Docker or QEMU or V8, but also https://github.com/solo-io/unik if you think about it differently.

In other words: hey, Lisp Machines were an excellent idea back then, but they still are. Maybe someday we'll have a V8 co-processor. More fun reading: https://lobste.rs/s/2poahh/what_i_could_not_undiscover_about

Cross platform 'windowing toolkit' APIs are what's missing. At this point I'd be happy even if Microsoft, Apple, and UNIX likes (who would probably just implement any free open standard anyway) could agree on even ONE such interface.

Postscript as a UI language? Fine as long as they all do it.

HTML5+ as a UI language? (E.G. like the failed HP Fire or Firefox) Fine as long as they all do it.

Some new thing that isn't a complete dumpster-fire but is included everywhere and a free for anyone to implement interface? Fine as long as they all do it.

We have NO shortage of programming languages that can be cross compiled to different operating systems. Filesystem differences can be annoying but you can work around those. Entirely different user interaction paths? That's the sticking point.

That would be ideal, but there are huge differences between the window implementations on different platforms.

One really obvious example (maybe no longer current - it's been a while since I spent any time on Windows) is that OS X windows are responsive even without focus. So you can scroll around background windows just by hovering without having to click first. Windows doesn't support this.

The bigger problem is that the data structures for menus, chrome, and the rest are completely different. An OS X menu is nothing like a Windows menu is nothing like a Linux menu.

There are systems like Tcl/Tk and Qt which act as middleware between GUI descriptions and specific OS bindings, and they kind of work. But they force devs to learn a separate intermediate language and (IMO) they look crude compared to real native apps.

Of course there are also business reasons why GUI convergence won't happen.

Just an FYI your scrolling example is indeed no longer current (or least not with Windows 10).

Scrolling non-focused windows works just fine (ex. can type text into notepad while simultaneously scrolling a browser window).

If those don't go altogether stagnant then usually what happens is there are a bunch of features that only work in the "official" implementation so it's a degraded experience anyway.