Not necessarily.  Microsoft kept trying to make a walled garden around the web.  They might have had a lot of users, but the web fought back and luckily today we have &#x27;world wide web&#x27;, not a totally isolated Microsoft Web, Google Web, Apple Web, Firefox Web etc.<p>I <i>hated</i> the days when you constantly had to switch web browsers to get pages to render. I&#x27;m glad it&#x27;s rare now, because we didn&#x27;t give up on the hope of open systems.<p>Mark might have lost the battle to have HTTP&#x2F;2 encrypted by default, but at least when Let&#x27;s Encrypt came out, it still worked in all browsers.<p>Would we have been better to just give up and have lots of walled gardens instead? I don&#x27;t think so. I&#x27;m glad we have WWW.<p>Personally I don&#x27;t think XMPP failed because being open made it slow to adapt. I think we&#x27;re mostly stuck because ICQ, AOL &amp; MSN just got there first.<p>I don&#x27;t envy being in Moxie &amp; OWS&#x27;s position of figuring out how to make this work.  I&#x27;ll add opinion and some of it harsh, though I&#x27;ll reserve criticism until I&#x27;ve built something as awesomely globally deployed as Signal.