And theoretically, that CAN happen. But… looking at the examples, the only time it ever actually happened was instant messaging which very clearly died because the vast majority of people don’t consider a desktop client to be the primary interface to a chat system these days. But most of that is just based on Microsoft of the 90s and… a lot of that was early internet propaganda coupled with courts ruling on concepts they barely understood.
Going through their examples (and then one of my own)
Browser Incompatibilities: Ask any web developer. All browsers suck. The only reason life has gotten somewhat decent is that just about everyone is built on chromium these days… and EVERYONE hates chromium. Safari is still batshit insane.
Office Documents: As someone who has used star/open/libre office for over twenty years now (ugh…). It may have been true that not being specifically doc or xls would screw you over. And it did, but that was more because of licensed fonts that all documents were based around. But these days? Libre has no issue opening the vast majority of docx/xlsx files, google docs works great, etc. It may not have been a good path to a standard, but we actually have standards now… that those of us who like latex/beamer still get grumpy about
Java: Java is dead outside of legacy systems for very good reasons. But almost all of that boils down to companies wanting to use the new hotness and standards committees generally not having the resources or the know-how to optimize per platform. And they shouldn’t. No matter what language you are using, you eventually get to the point of “I can use an open platform agnostic library and get 75% of performance or I can use this platform specific one that will give the vast majority of my customers 100% of performance”. Which is software engineering
Instant Messaging: I am not even sure what the argument here is. MS didn’t maintain compatibility with AIM? They’re all dead in favor of imessage and whatsapp and google’s thin layer of paint over jabber. And pretty much every major gaming related IM is built on top of IRC at this point?
E-Mail: I will fully admit to hating office 365. But corporate IT tend to lock down everything regardless of what provider/software they use. And if it isn’t locked down? Odds are that is just because the IT guy uses it and their boss doesn’t know that exists.
WSL: I genuinely have no idea what the complaint is here
iMessage: This is my favorite example and probably the closest to actually succeeding at this in the software space. It sort of started as a meme but has waves of being increasingly real. Apple, for Reasons, use this to basically make Not Apple (so Android) a plague upon society because it ruins all the wonderful benefits of imessage and blah blah blah. Which largely has killed SMS for anyone I interact with for more than a few dates. But it isn’t like I am selling my android to get an iphone. We just both choose to use a third party app instead. Gotta love that third or fourth date “So… that was fun and I really liked what you did with your mouth. By the way, what are your thoughts on Signal versus Whatsapp?”
Do I think facebook et al will kill “The Fediverse”: Maybe. But that will be because we’ll finally stress test things and find all those issues and determine what is a fundamental flaw versus something updatable. But I would rather use a good product/software than get cranky that one specific protocol/implementation which is demonstrably inferior got pushed out. Because it isn’t like all open source office suites died the moment people realized how dogshit of an experience openoffice was. Iterations and forks were made and libre office is now REALLY good. And so is google drive and online MS office and so forth.
Because, again, look at Microsoft. Yes, there was a time where it looked like internet explorer was going to take over the planet. And, in some ways, it did. But it was a piece of shit and even at the time we knew netscape sort of existed (and eventually became Firefox?). And as more and more people ran into issues, more and more alternatives gained a foothold. And we are seeing this happen again as chromium’s well known performance issues coupled with google’s bias against ad blocking have led to a resurgence of Firefox and massive pushes by Opera (which is still chromium but…) to market themselves as the alternative that Michael Reeves uses.