Building new services which require users to collaborate using a single, official client can foster tribalism among users who wish to use their own preferred services, and lead to what the author terms “collaborocapitalism” whereby to be able to collaborate with others you are obliged to use the same single service as them.
Using local-first software promotes BYOC, allowing the freedom to choose a preferred application to interact with data, but with the ability to collaborate across services, such as with version control.
The author provides examples of successful existing ecosystems of client software built around open standards, but highlights that cloud apps exacerbate the problem of the need for a single official client, unless the service actively exposes an API and doesn’t shut it down.
The author ponders whether it is possible to go further with BYOC by picking individual interface elements, enabling the creation of a favourite email client for example, out of an inbox, a compose window and a spam filter, and also code distribution.