Two or three years ago, I’d have agreed with you. However, the world has changed pretty fundamentally in the past few years. In this case, I don’t think the “big three” will have much choice but to keep their APIs open. If history is any indication, the leader at any given time will be the one with the greatest incentive to solidify and extend its leadership position with a traditional platform lock in play. However, the minute it moves in this direction, one or both of the other two will see open APIs as a competitive weapon. The fact that the distribution channels are wide open this time around is the big change. There can be no monopoly in the web world based on tightly controlling distribution. Furthermore, after finally freeing itself from the grip of the last monopoly, my sense is that the market is greatly attuned to the importance of open standards. Obviously, the big three will want to promote “stickiness”, but they’ll have to do it by actually competing on *value* and *continued innovation*. The big winners will be us, the users. That’s not to say there aren’t threats. The real threats are decommoditization at the lower levels of the software stack and data getting locked up in vendor specific silos. We have to keep our eyes on these things. But proprietary APIs at the top layer of the stack as a means to lock in users are a thing of the past, at least in my view.

-ian

All three companies sole purpose is to generate profits. For now, they keep the tools to access their avenues open and can generate sufficient profits this way.

Later, when cosumers get used to having some free service and can’t live without it, they start charging for that service. When the company’s profits aren’t sufficient, they will charge for the tools that generate those profits. Rinse, Repeat.

There is zero incentive for the avenues to keep their developer tools free for long. In fact, there’s a DISincentive. There’s no profit in free.

Now, you may say, yeah but these are open standards. They may be, but just as Microsoft has done repeatedly, simply extend and extinguish.

There’s no assurance that profits will continue to come to the avenue owners with little-guy innovators in the market. So, using various legal methods to ensure a steady profit stream eliminating innovators will be another thing that the avenue owners actively pursue.

This is dark stuff, but ultimately will come true. History has shown us time and again, there is no such thing as a free market. Most tiny markets start out “free-ish” they don’t stay that way for long.