Comment by tpmoney

Open protocols are great but they are also absolutely a hindrance on change. If you’ve ever worked on a public API you know how painful making a breaking change to that API can be. Inevitably something you want to change becomes some one else’s “hold space bar to heat room” feature. And sure you can have “private” Or reserved spaces in APIs, but that can often lead to messes like needed 5 different vendor specific CSS tags to accomplish the same thing in all browsers, which in turn really leads to consolidation around one “winner” (see also IE6 and Chrome). They might very well still be able to make unified systems on open APIs and platforms, but it’s not clear whether they would be able to make them as well as they do when they control and own the whole stack and can change it without having to worry about anyone else.