Problems with Walled Gardens

A resposne to Jakob Nielsen:

"In 1999, I wrote an article "Metcalfe's Law in Reverse" about the problems of so-called walled gardens, where a service cuts itself off from the Internet and tries to add value by being closed."

On NPR yesterday, there was a segment on Bit Torrent and how it worked by grabbing only bits of content from disparate sources. A side note to the story was the certain ISPs (Comcast, actually) were attempting to block the traffic on their network for file sharing programs such as Bit Torrent.

Jakob Nielsen brought this same argument up back in 1999 and concluded that it will fail.

"Facebook and the current generation of social networks are trying to replicate the walled garden strategy that failed ten years ago. It'll fail again."
The idea is that by closing off the network, it will promote value, but as Metcalfe has shown, the larger network will prevail. Will it prevail in large corporations? When will we stop purchasing external systems that won't talk to each other and start integrating them into a cohesive user experience?

I think we need to be working towards integration, not exclusion.