Thanks.

(Talking about web and native APIs)

> And I think that we've really invested a lot in the open standards behind all that

> I've been personally quite sad at the industry's behavior around all these things

> If you just take something as simple as instant messaging

> We've kind of had an offer forever that we'll interoperate on instant messagoing

> I think just this week Microsoft took advantage of that by interoperating with us but not doing the reverse

> Which is really sad, right?

> And that's not the way to make progress

Larry Page says there he would like to see more open standards used, and he is sad the industry isn't moving in that direction. So why isn't any of their new IM technology an open standard?

Because being constrained by existing standards, rather than being free to make the changes to the protocol that you think will make the product better, is a huge trade-off. The benefit is that your users get that interoperability with e.g. MSN Messenger or Skype or whatever.

However, if no one else is doing that, if no one else is playing fair (like Microsoft accepting things like typing or presence notifications but not sending them in return), then it turns out you're being constrained, and possibly doing additional work to add features, and the person benefitting the most is someone else's users and not your own.

I really doubt that Google were constrained for technical reasons. XMPP is completely extensible. I've worked with it for over a decade and there's absolutely no technical reason why Google couldn't have extended the XMPP specification and put out their own XEPs (XMPP Extension Protocol) which would have given them all the functionality and features they needed.

XMPP's only major downside at the time was mobile battery life due to XMPPs limitations over cellular. This could easily have been resolved by using a non-XMPP accepted handshake (as WhatsApp did) or by using a completely different protocol for mobile as Facebook did for mobile (MQTT).

Google decided to go for a walled garden approach as a competitive advantage. There's no technical reason for it.

Then I assume their standards and implementations are completely open, and they allow third parties to federate?

Someone has to start doing it, otherwise you'll get the catch 22. So "others aren't doing it" is not an excuse.

But they did start doing it with XMPP and kept it that way for a while.

So. They had to persist, and address deficiencies too. That's the only way to break the cycle.

Because their old one was an open standard, and they were effectively the only one open one (and the last open one standing). So I find it totally reasonable that they stopped caring about it (and probably would again if another major player did).

I find it a very lame excuse. If they care about it, it shouldn't depend on others. In the end, it shows they didn't care enough.

Probably costs a bunch for not that much convenience though. Tragedy of the commons in action.

I disagree. I can understand why you think so, but an analysis of the situation will point out something different.

Google got talk working almost by accident. And it was the most feature-complete chat app for years, at least. And then, they abandoned it for years. This isn't to say it had many features, it had few. But it worked well, was integrated with gmail, was compatible with XMPP and geek's IMs, ...

After that, they killed all the compatibility before making an app that was yet again a lot more feature complete : hangouts. And hangouts got the best features for quite a while.

And then Hangouts started wildly bashing it's weight around. Forcibly taking SMS was one thing. Refusing federation. Forcing Google+ account and lots of extra info. And so on, and so forth. Hangouts was a good app, but created a lot of ill will in the process.

And then it was seemingly abandoned. Feature frozen, with the excuse that all these features had resulted in an extremely difficult to maintain app that they couldn't add features to. Chatting without having a gmail being a big one (whatsapp allowing you to chat with "everyone in your phonebook"), status, reliability (and showing clearly and timely when it isn't/cannot be reliable because disconnected, not 3h after connectivity gets restored), video call quality, adding non-gmail users or just screens to video chats, not allowing bot interaction, apps in the video chat, ...). And this lasted for years.

Inside of China, some chat apps demonstrate how chat apps can be monetized in a way that users appreciate : allow chatting with companies and give those companies the ability to show interfaces for transactions. E.g. buy a coffee. Line at starbucks ? Open up whatsapp, because you're in starbucks it shows starbucks as a contact (you can add it permanently) and there's a button "order coffee". Select what kind of buvaranicpoppafrappadongieccino you want, you pay through the app, and you've just skipped the queue. Next time you do it 5 minutes before arriving. App takes cut of transaction value (just like credit card payment does).

Next, other apps turn up. Whatsapp, Lyne, ... and so forth. And they caught up with Hangouts. Surpassing it in some ways, behind in others. Mostly they're superior in letting you find the people you can chat with. And then they passed it by. And then they left it far, far behind. It's not (yet) the case that they truly dominate hangouts in features, but it's getting close.

And lo and behold : people switched to the (sorry) better apps. I'm not entirely sure why anybody is either surprised or complaining. These changes look a lot like they're making it worse, not better, but we should give them the benefit of the doubt.

That's the case with most of interoperability / standardization efforts. But without it, the whole situation ends up being the current mess.

Microsoft does support full federation. As long as you federate Skype servers. I know that's a bit lame, but since they bundle most of their products with most of their other products in licensing, no one in business seems to care.

Google doesn't do even that, as they don't offer anything on-site (anymore). They have seriously failed on business markets. I don't know about consumer market, because I mostly just send dick pics for the giggles to random people I don't know.

That's the big thing about SaaS, mobile and Cloud.

I don't get that people complain about Microsoft software being closed, and anti-competitive ... well any cloud software is more closed and anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was on it's worst days : it's not that you can't get good documentation that the application you're using uses ... you can't even get at the data at all, in most cases.

Google is the best at this out of all the cloud players, but it's still abysmal. And yes, you can download exports. And there's Google takeout. Is the data there all the data Google apps use to work ? No. Quite simply, no, it isn't. There's plenty more they won't ever give to you. And that's ignoring the fact that there's 1000s of developers making apps for Google and about 5 working on takeout. Why should Google be forced ? Well, that's the standard we're applying to microsoft, isn't it ?

And this is by far the most flexible cloud provider exporting data. They're not being jerks. I don't even think they're trying to be anticompetitive. Nevertheless, they're far more anticompetitive than Microsoft.

And of course, conveniently, the DRM-breaking is now a crime on things like iTunes and Hulu and ... because it involves actually creating access into someone else's computer system or at least changing their code (even though you're paying for it to do things and only getting it to let you exercise rights granted to you by law, like copying a movie). And the result is the same. iTunes, Hulu, even Play are ridiculously expensive, idiotically restrictive (buy movie on iTunes for a trip, go to Europe, log in to hotel wifi ... no movies. But no worries ! I copied that movie onto my device first. Nope, it won't play. WTF).

Same thing goes for app stores. There Apple is the big instigator of forced-incompatibility (or otherwise: your app won't run without Apple's permission hardware). Remember the flood of articles scaring people that microsoft might do this ? They're still at it, with the BIOSes that supposedly won't run anything but windows.

The dreaded "the right to read" scenario ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html ) is far, far closer on the cloud and mobile than it is on your own machines.