On an Enterprise Connect panel a few years ago, one of the panelists responded to a question about multi-vendor interoperability by coining a phrase: “Ease of use is the new interoperability.” What he meant was that if it’s easy enough to access and switch between applications, those apps don’t need to talk to each other because everyone can just have every application and use whichever one the parties decide on.
His model was the smartphone running messaging apps. Maybe, you communicate with a group of friends over WhatsApp, while you might use Skype for family and SMS for general purposes. The main thing was the effort of switching between apps and groups was trivial, a problem not worth solving.
