No, what I'd like is if there was a published specification for storing a music library. Then, any device could implement it. You could store your music on your Xbox and push it to your iPhone - or in iTunes and push it to your Windows Phone.
Imagine if your BlackBerry could only send emails to other BlackBerry devices. We wouldn't accept that (although BBM is trying to push us that way) - so why should we accept it with other services?
>> No, what I'd like is if there was a published specification for storing a music library. Then, any device could implement it.
If there were one published specification for storing a music library, before you know it some people will demand features that are not supported by it, and some software vendor will create and sell some piece of software that extends the format to provide it. It's just supply and demand.
I really can't wrap my head around this, are you really asking for generic, one-size-fits-all file formats, applications and hardware for everything, or are you just being naive?
Look at email as a standard - a few people have tried to extend that and it hasn't worked.
Or, look at HTML as a standard. People want to extend that so they fight in a committee and collaborate until there's something which is mutually beneficial.
Or, look at USB. Literally a one-size-fits-all plug on both ends and a common transport layer - but you can stick whatever device you want on either end.
>> Look at email as a standard - a few people have tried to extend that and it hasn't worked.
Bad example. E-mail is basically just formatted text with binary attachments to be interpreted by the e-mail client. Still, almost every e-mail client uses some internal database-like format to store your inbox and augment it with metadata to make it easily searchable and whatever. E-mail clients are to e-mail what music players like iTunes are to music files. You can't just pick up your Thunderbird e-mail database and drop it somewhere for Outlook to use, just like you can't pick up your iTunes library and drop it into Windows Media Player or whatever other music player. With some effort you can often import/export e-mail databases between clients, but that's no different from importing/exporting an iTunes library.
>> Or, look at HTML as a standard. People want to extend that so they fight in a committee and collaborate until there's something which is mutually beneficial.
One of the most-heard complaints about the HTML standard is that it moves so freaking slow, and is still full of cruft and inconveniences from 20 years ago. HTML isn't actually that great at all, it's just the least worst option we have if you want cross-platform markup with all the features HTML offers today. That's not to say I propose a proprietary alternative to HTML by the way, just that HTML is hardly the prime example of a model you'd want to apply to every other piece of software.
>> Or, look at USB. Literally a one-size-fits-all plug on both ends and a common transport layer - but you can stick whatever device you want on either end.
First of all that's not entirely true, because USB only defines a transport layer, not how the data going over the wire should be interpreted. It isn't all that different from something like RS-232 serial communication, just a lot more advanced. In itself there's nothing you can do with USB alone, you still need a protocol, which is usually implemented by a driver. Apart from generic hardware such as mass storage devices, almost any USB device that implements any kind of specialized hardware functions needs a hardware-specific driver, and more often than not, thesre are proprietary. Don't confuse 'open' with 'generic' by the way, because even if some piece of hardware uses an 'open' protocol, it's still not 'generic' as you can't do anything with it without a (very specific) driver. Second, USB is not really the epitome of 'openness' either, as you have to pay royalties to sell hardware that uses the USB standard and carries the USB logo.
Your Thunderbird email store is just a bunch of mbox files, which is a standardized (RFC 4155) and rather well supported file format. Outlook can't read it, of course, but that's because Outlook is shitty. You can certainly pick up your Thunderbird email store and drop it on (Al)pine, Mutt, Kmail, Atmail, Claws, Cone, Gnus, Opera Mail and others.
Outlook can pick up mbox, but how about moving your filters around? Or Apple Mail VIP contacts? Virtual folders, fancy tags and indexed search databases?
You can just move around the mails themselves, just like you can move around your music, and as a small bonus, the static playlists.
>before you know it some people will demand features that are not supported by it
Eh, what? Features don't matter. It's just the data that should be portable.
If one platform supports "dynamic playlists" (which is just the equivalent of a view in SQL) and another platform doesn't, that might be a bit inconvenient, but it really doesn't matter. At least your data can be converted.
Imagine if your BlackBerry could only send emails to other BlackBerry devices. We wouldn't accept that (although BBM is trying to push us that way) - so why should we accept it with other services?