Interoperability Quotes

“To make tech better, we have to make it smaller—small enough that the bad ideas, carelessness and blind spots of individual tech leaders are their problems, not everyone else’s.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

“The development of an open format for a whole model is hardly relevant anymore, as long as you are able to move data around.”
― Chiara C. Rizzarda, BIM Notebooks - 2016

“The lower the switching costs are, the better a company has to treat you if they want to keep your business.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

“Today’s tech giants have not invented an interop-proof computer. They’ve invented laws that make interoperability illegal unless they give permission for it. A new, complex thicket of copyright, patent, trade secret, noncompete and other IP rights has conjured up a new offense we can think of as “felony contempt of business model”—the right of large firms to dictate how their customers, competitors and even their critics must use their products.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

“We need lots of tech, run by lots of different kinds of people and organizations, and we need to make it as close to costless as possible to switch from one to the other.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

“The hard problems of reforming social media are the laws that block interoperability and the management of tech giants’ unwillingness to provide interoperability in the absence of these laws. Because Big Tech can lock people into its silos, it can impose high switching costs on users who have the temerity to leave those silos: they can make you surrender your apps, or your data, or your relationships, or your media, or your customer list.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation