Two Hungry Markets, and Why Op Cannot Look at Them

Two markets exist today that would benefit, hugely, if Op got picked up.

One is cloud portability. The story is #13. The lock as a product disappears, businesses choose clouds the way they choose CDNs, the platform business turns into a real market.

The other is AI callability. Agents need machine-readable catalogs of what services can do. MCP shipped the first version of that idea inside its niche. Op generalises the same idea past one consumer.

The temptation is to pitch Op at these markets.

That temptation is the trap.

Protocols that get sold to a market die as protocols and survive only as products. WSDL was sold to enterprise IT. It became enterprise software. OpenAPI was kept neutral. It stayed a protocol — and outlasted three full waves of fashion.

The mechanism is simple. The day Op starts performing for cloud-portability — adding fields the platforms ask for, adjusting timing for their roadmap, taking sponsored seats on a steering committee — Op stops being a form. It becomes a feature of those companies. Whatever else happens after that, the protocol is gone. What's left is a product wearing the protocol's name.

Same for AI. The day Op starts shaping itself around what agents need — what one model vendor finds easy to parse, what another lab thinks should be a standard — Op stops being neutral and becomes another vendor's instrument with extra steps.

So Op does not look at these markets. Not out of asceticism. Out of survival.

The markets get to find Op when they want to — because the form is cheaper to share than to fork. They do not get to ask Op to bend toward them. The first protocol that bends loses the bend in its own name.

This is the same discipline as #10 — the form of the shot is what matters, not the casing around it. Cloud portability is one casing. AI callability is another. Both real, both important, both downstream of a form that does not work for them by default.

Op stays still. The markets walk to it, or they don't. If they don't, Op is not less of a protocol — it is just less adopted. If they do, the work was done by the form, not by the pitch.

The pitch is the death of the form.