About the only two successful federated communication systems I know of are phone network and e-mail. It doesn't matter who you pay your phone bill to, nor where your e-mail address is hosted, you are globally reachable. There might be something insightful in how those two systems started and what keeps them being relevant.

> Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.

Indeed. And you can't fund a good marketing department if you don't resort to m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶e̶x̶t̶o̶r̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶a̶c̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ vendor lock-in and similar strategies. It's something that, by the way, I see as a direct cause of why so much products are utter shit nowadays - because marketing has much, much better ROI than actually making something useful.