Agent Memory Has a Lock-In Problem. Open Formats Are How We Fix It.
The bug in the ecosystem
Run this thought experiment. Your agent has been in production for a year. It has accumulated thousands of memories: user preferences, resolved decisions, corrections, domain facts. Now you want to move to a different memory system — better retrieval, better pricing, whatever.
What's your migration path?
For most of the ecosystem: there isn't one. Hosted memory services keep your data in their cloud with no portability to other systems. Graph-based systems store memories in proprietary structures that can't be exported to anything else. Runtime-based systems own your whole agent loop, so leaving means rewriting the agent, not just the storage. The switching cost isn't an accident — for some of these products, it is the retention strategy.
We've all debugged this class of problem before. It's the pre-SMTP email problem. The pre-USB peripheral problem. A collection of good products that can't interoperate isn't an ecosystem...
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