SMB

Cory Doctorow explains adversarial interoperability: building tools that connect to a dominant product without its owner’s permission, so people can move between services without abandoning their existing communities. He traces how projects such as Samba, Apple’s iWork, and cable TV challenged incumbents, and argues that laws and contracts have made this kind of competition riskier. He connects market concentration to weak competition, regulatory capture, and declining trust in how public claims are checked. For founders, he sees opportunities in tools that help people leave or work around platforms while retaining access to their networks, and in products that support resilience and recovery.