I agree, except for the part about this being physical hardware rather than a cloud thing. I find it very difficult to imagine even 10% of America buying something like this; a likelier model is, imagine that your typical $50/mo wireless plan included a $5/mo virtual server, and an app to manage it that looks like an easier version of cpanel.
If even 10% of america bought something like this the product is a wild success, and it would be enough pressure to ensure silos are unable to totally wall themselves off. I'm sure apple would love to drop support for SMS, but they can't, because some large percentage of Americans don't use apple devices, and so those that do wouldn't tolerate being unable to message their friends without apple devices.
I know people that aren't tech savvy at all that would buy a box they just plug in, boot up, that for example synced their contacts, pictures, ran a social media server just for them (mastodon maybe) and an email server and IM server and all they had to do was run an app on their phone and enter a password. You could build something like that and offer it to people for under 100 bucks. People don't run those though, because it's not as simple as that. Most people would rather have a product than a service. But the product is less profitable than the service, so companies build services, and so people use services.
