> No, interoperability isn't perfect now, but it's a heck of a lot better than it was in the 80's.
It was much worse, but, surprisingly, the desire to improve it was much more widespread. Lots of hard work got done to make it, in your words, "a heck of a lot better". As a consequence, the design philosophy held by the people that had done that work then was that an open standard was a good thing (e.g. RSS).
Nowadays, though, it seems like the dominant philosophy is that creating walled gardens is better, and while interop is much better than it used to be in some aspects, the direction we're taking for new infrastructure isn't so good (e.g. messaging and the way the mainstream messaging apps disregard open standards).
It was much worse, but, surprisingly, the desire to improve it was much more widespread. Lots of hard work got done to make it, in your words, "a heck of a lot better". As a consequence, the design philosophy held by the people that had done that work then was that an open standard was a good thing (e.g. RSS).
Nowadays, though, it seems like the dominant philosophy is that creating walled gardens is better, and while interop is much better than it used to be in some aspects, the direction we're taking for new infrastructure isn't so good (e.g. messaging and the way the mainstream messaging apps disregard open standards).