We’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking to folks about the incentive structures around this, and think they stand on their own - although your skepticism was an initial worry we had, too. As it stands the Block Protocol enables embedding applications to make their products more useful to consumers. And block developers reach a wider audience with their tools than they would otherwise. There’s a lot more to this that we’ll write up nicely later.
I can see how, if you get to critical mass, the network effect will drive adoption. For example, building a Blocks-based project management system becomes much, much easier if it can tie into one of many (hypothetical) Blocks-based HR information systems, so that you can pre-populate a list of employees at the company. As much as big companies love lock-in, there's tremendous potential value in enabling small companies to build open value-add tools that focus on solving a narrow problem extremely well.
