Said no one ever.
We don’t need to ask what brand of phone does our counterpart use. It doesn’t really matter if they are an Apple, or a Samsung, or not even if they are using a LG. We just make a call, and it goes through. Think about the simplicity. That’s the beauty of having a standard, it makes it possible for competitors to interoperate and play nice.
In contrast, in the video conferencing side, vendors continue to play this “walled garden” strategy, which they all know it is not going to persist too long. FaceTime, Google Duo, Zoom, Google Meetings, BlueJeans, Webex, none of them work together.
On the flip side, we do have to give credit to the “App economy” and recognize that as disastrous as this may seem, none of it would be possible if each and every one of these services would be attached to a purpose-built piece of hardware. Remember the VHS vs. Betamax battle? Or more recently, the HD DVD vs. Blue-Ray? If we would need a “Zoom box” and a “Webex box”, very few of us would invest on more than a couple.
The odd thing, is that THERE IS a standard that most of these solutions run on. It is Web RTC (Real Time Communications), but no one seems to get their head around. How do I know it? Because WebRTC is available on a number of cloud providers and you can embed it into any application, and you can, today, make a WebRTC call on FaceTime.