Comment by jfoster
4 days ago
The market for operating systems naturally falls into oligopolies.
It's usually not financially feasible for third-party applications to support more than a few of them.
Users tend to have strong preferences toward operating systems that have lots of applications built for them.
But here we're talking about developers. They will have other platforms they can use.
And I don't believe for a moment that Google will have any success with this new project. They simply aren't capable anymore of making projects such as these work. MacOS, Windows and Linux will stick around long after this project is abandoned.
Here's to hoping that's the case. But the GGGP was arguing about that other case, where in fact Google manages to lock down the desktop to the point that you have to ask their permission in order to be able to ship a piece of software.
And since we've already seen two other players take that exact stance thinking that the third (who is already doing similar stuff on their mobile platform) is going to do the same thing is not just a theoretical risk.
Standards fill this gap, allowing for interoperation. When was the last time you had to write custom logic for your browser to access 99% of the domains you access?
I've certainly run into websites that were doing something nonstandard and my browser of choice didn't work as intended. Sometimes when I've complained to the site operator, they've told me that browser isn't supported.
I can (and have) told them they should build to web standards rather than specific browsers, but they're only motivated to care if it impacts a large enough percentage of users.
So markets determine the outcome even when standards exist.
Working as intended is the functionality on the site, and I didn't claim everyone followed all standards. But given you had the correct address for the site, your browser captured the DNS resolution and pushed a content request to that particular site's server.
Yes, the web is fairly good these days. That's only adjacent to the topic under discussion though, isn't it?
In terms of downloadable apps & games, there hasn't historically been anything that solved the operating system level oligopoly issue.