From Reconsider:
Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe. No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.
This. Fucking nailed it. One of the most frustrating things lately in technology is that nobody wants to play nice together. Everyone wants to have a platform, instead of providing a great service and while getting along with others. One simple example, look at the landscape of chat services, currently. There was a time, where there were different services, and different clients. Each service had a protocol that a client could conform to, and many clients supported those protocols. I used to chat to my AIM friends and my ICQ friends and my Google friends all within the same program.
Now, everything is a walled garden. Hangouts doesn’t have any third party clients, so I have to run a shitty chrome app to talk to use that. iMessage is its own deal. Facebook has its own thing.
But that’s just one example. Amazon provides great services. Apple makes great products. Apple and Amazon are both have competing products now, the Amazon Fire TV, and the Apple TV. Amazon won’t sell the Apple TV in its stores, and Apple doesn’t have an Amazon Instant Video app available with its services.
Did either of these moves increase loyalty? Improve consumer happiness? Speaking as a consumer: no. It’s only been an inconvenience.