Comment by arter45

I understand, but in this specific arena, because of the network effect, interoperability is important so you can hope to make a competitive product.

More in general,standard protocols are important but they don't necessarily avoid lock-in.

For example, imagine a Dropbox equivalent with a public API specification.

At some point you want to leave. You are ready to use Postman or even curl and download everything to upload it somewhere else... but download is capped at 10 files/day per user. And you uploaded 100,000 files over years.

The API is public but good luck leaving with all your files!

In other words, standard protocols help avoiding client lock-in, but when the value is on the server side (data,...), they are not enough.