Regarding 3, I think part of the problem of ecosystem fragmentation has to do with large tech companies finding their favorite niche and being reluctant to compete with each other.
I have a theory that this has something to do with incentives: competition can be good for the company that is able to grab another's territory, but on average it's usually a loss. That's especially true from the perspective of shareholders, most of whom don't just hold one stock but many. Some competition is necessary, but too much is inefficient. If you own stock in both Apple and Google, you're happy with them each having their own group of loyal phone buyers. Spending more money than necessary to try to attract the other company's customers to switch is almost a pure loss from the point of view of the shareholder. Companies might not explicitly collude to divide markets (which would be against anti-trust law), but they're still subject to the disapproval of their shareholders if they rock the boat too much. Sometimes I think it makes more sense to think of all publicly-traded companies as being a sort of loosely-structured single corporation rather than truly separate competing entities.
So we have all these different software ecosystems that all these different businesses have built their respective walled gardens around, but software developers suffer because they can't just write to one platform and have their application be portable. Instead, they need a totally different application if they want to be accessible to desktop PC users, Android, iPhone, the web, tablets, servers, enterprise customers, HPC, cloud, game consoles and so on. Sure those users all have different needs, but surely they could have quite a bit more cross-platform consistency and common tools and standards than what we have now.
I have a theory that this has something to do with incentives: competition can be good for the company that is able to grab another's territory, but on average it's usually a loss. That's especially true from the perspective of shareholders, most of whom don't just hold one stock but many. Some competition is necessary, but too much is inefficient. If you own stock in both Apple and Google, you're happy with them each having their own group of loyal phone buyers. Spending more money than necessary to try to attract the other company's customers to switch is almost a pure loss from the point of view of the shareholder. Companies might not explicitly collude to divide markets (which would be against anti-trust law), but they're still subject to the disapproval of their shareholders if they rock the boat too much. Sometimes I think it makes more sense to think of all publicly-traded companies as being a sort of loosely-structured single corporation rather than truly separate competing entities.
So we have all these different software ecosystems that all these different businesses have built their respective walled gardens around, but software developers suffer because they can't just write to one platform and have their application be portable. Instead, they need a totally different application if they want to be accessible to desktop PC users, Android, iPhone, the web, tablets, servers, enterprise customers, HPC, cloud, game consoles and so on. Sure those users all have different needs, but surely they could have quite a bit more cross-platform consistency and common tools and standards than what we have now.