
Google Abandons Open Standards for Instant Messaging - thisisparker
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-standards-instant-messaging
======
cromwellian
As a Googler (who does not work on Hangsout) my own personal opinion is that I
fully agree with the EFF here:

"In public explanations of its dropping XMPP support, Google has said that it
was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if
this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn't
prevent the company from making it public and interoperable. Releasing the
specifications for Google Hangouts would be a good first step. Releasing
free/open source clients and servers should follow. It's clear that some of
Hangouts' video features have been implemented in some very Google-specific
ways. But that's no excuse for leading us toward a world where the only
practical choices are proprietary chat clients and protocols."

I hope the specs at some point are opened. The Hangouts team probably has good
reason at the moment to strictly focus on a core set of functionality and get
it working with good UX on all the platforms. People are complaining that
stuff like voice calling, and some Talk features are missing, but it's
probably due to focus on shipping something that works good first. It's
inevitable people will reverse engineer the client, as was done with MSN, Y!
Messenger, and AOL. In the late 90s, early 2000s, I remember using reverse
engineered Java libraries that could talk to these services.

Google Wave was done in the opposite way, as was Open Social. They came with
specs, but they did not focus on core user experience in the beginning. It's
hard to win with open specs without getting consumer traction.

~~~
spankalee
As another Googler, I mostly agree with you, but I also sympathize with the
product and engineering teams.

They keep seeing very popular apps and messaging products that are completely
proprietary and locked in, and that are able to move and innovate fast because
they either don't have to conform to an existing standard, or worry about
publishing and support whatever internal protocol they do use.

Sure Hangouts could publish their protocol like Wave did, but Wave was a
complex mess of different protocol formats and transports and publishing that
as a "standard" was way premature. Who knows how good the current Hangout
protocols are, or how well they might play with real standards like WebRTC.
It's probably too early for them

I remain optimistic that these things can be standardized in the future.

~~~
rjzzleep
i'm sorry i fail to see the argument. it's perfectly fine to have your own
proprietary format, but publish the specs so others can interact with it. who
said anything about ietf having to sign it off.

~~~
btilly
The problem is simple.

Once you've published it, you're under pressure to remain backwards
compatible. But until you've got experience with it working in the real world,
you don't know what really works. And then before publishing it, you need to
go through a lot of work to make the published spec clear enough that someone
else can reimplement from scratch and it will actually work.

For all of those reasons, there is pressure to not publish a spec until after
the technology has matured.

~~~
DannyBee
This is mostly crap, to be honest. It's all about messaging.

I wrote most of the first version of the wave federation spec (I cannot
remember how this happened, but im pretty sure it involved being in Sydney
temporarily, alcohol, and Soren being Soren. I'm fairly sure I got the short
end of the stick on this one).

It was absolute and complete crap. But it kinda worked. We were clear it was a
first draft, and folks understood it would completely and utterly change.

Within an hour of publishing it, the wonderful XMPP folks emailed me and asked
me to fix a few things (like accidentally using some reserved namespaces/etc),
and asked how they could help, pointing out the XEP process, and pointing out
we were doing some things others were working as well.

With their help, it ended up as a "mostly sane" spec.

Realistically, pressure comes from improper messaging. If you tell people
"here's our current thoughts, in spec form, this is all gonna change", you can
do a lot of work in the open without too much customer pressure.

Now, will this slow adoption? Maybe, it depends on what kind of product it is.

But the argument that you get this pressure out of thin air is wrong. Pressure
is mostly caused by self-inflicted wounds where people are not being clear
about the state of the world as they see it.

~~~
btilly
That is an excellent point, and I'm glad it worked out for you. What I'd be
more curious about is how well it would have aged had it not been
discontinued. Comments below suggest that if you had longer to do it you would
have done it differently. Which suggests to me that developers 5-10 years
later would likely have wanted something quite different.

The reason that I'm cautious is that I've suffered through code that has to
jump through hoops to remain compatible with something someone thought was a
good idea 10 years ago. Things that seem like a good idea now don't always a
few years later. When you control both ends, you have a potential upgrade path
to fix it. When you don't, you're stuck.

~~~
DannyBee
But for most of the API's and protocols we are talking about here, 5-10 years
later, developers _always_ want something different, regardless of whether you
designed it right or wrong. That's just the nature of the speed of our
industry.

I'm, of course, not suggesting that you should never try to design something
that will last 5-10 years, but in most cases, you can only standardize what
people want to use _now_ , and hopefully design a way of extending the
protocol to be able to standardize what people want to do in the future as
well.

As you say, otherwise you have to try to remain compatible with something
someone _thought_ was a good idea 10 years ago. That usually means it _wasn't_
a good idea 10 years ago, it was something that 10 years ago, they thought
would be good in the future, and they predicted wrong.

Past that, sometimes you have to just accept that the useful design life span
of some protocols is not going to be as long as some customers would like.

------
josteink
Google abandoning open standards is nothing new.

It seems they'll use open standards only as long as it serves them, but when
they've grown big enough to dominate the competition, they'll turn around in a
heartbeat and exploit that.

Just look at what they did to the open web with Chrome.

First they said "Web standards are important, so here is a good, fast and web-
standards compliant browser. Feel free to try it". After a while that was not
enough, and on every single web-page they had they had a _big_ "Use Chrome!"
ad for every visitor not using it already.

Once they had gained enough dominance, suddenly Google started using non-W3C
HTML in their _production_ web-sites. HTML which had not been fully drafted or
ratified and which was only available as they saw fit in web-kit.

And then all the other non-Google browsers were suddenly "slow" on "adopting
new HTML standards". Basically through its internet dominance, and now its
browser, Google pushed through its own implementation of proprietary HTML
features as standards other browsers had to implement, without any discussion,
feedback or other input.

Google just decided that they alone should dictate how the HTML-standard is
from now on.

After seeing that happen, I lost all belief in Google as a company which I
will rely on for anything more than I strictly need to.

~~~
munificent
> It seems they'll use open standards only as long as it serves them, but when
> they've grown big enough to dominate the competition, they'll turn around in
> a heartbeat and exploit that.

I don't see how Google is dominating the competition. Gchat _used_ to be a
dominant player, I believe, but that was before mobile existed. I think the
dominant players now are:

iMessage. Propriety, only runs on Apple devices, can only communicate with
other iMessage users.

Facebook Messenger. Proprietary, only runs in Facebook site and app, can only
communicate with other Facebook users.

WhatsApp. I think based on XMPP? Only runs in WhatsApp application, can only
communicate with other WhatsApp users.

Notice that every single one of those is a walled garden.

~~~
jadyoyster
Unlike WhatsApp, Facebook chat is accessible via standard non-federated XMPP,
so you can use it with any XMPP client.

------
mindcrime
_Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new
technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different
technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it
public and interoperable._

Indeed. If basic XMPP wasn't good enough for whatever reason, (or SIP or
whatever other protocol already exists) then the "right thing to do" would
have been to work with the respective standards body to extent / modify an
existing standard to overcome whatever the restriction was. OR, as a secondary
option, Google should at least release detailed specs for their new protocol,
along with an open source reference implementation.

Creating more new walled-gardens is not a positive step forward here.

~~~
cromwellian
To be fair, releasing an open source reference implementation takes a separate
engineering effort. You can't just take Google services engineered for
Borg/Spanner/et al, and drop them in OSS. It took Google Wave team a lot of
resources to open source a non-Google-datacenterized version. Hangouts is also
intertwined with lots of other Google services, so it's not a matter of just
code dumping.

Imagine that you have a small team trying to hit 3 platforms (Web, Android,
iOS), in time for Google I/O launch, packaging up an OSS release along with
spec document is probably the least priority.

~~~
RyanZAG
If the reason they can't document is because they have a small team, then this
is an easy solution for Google - hire some people to document the system. They
don't even have to be in direct contact with the actual development team, just
access to the source code and developer design documents should be enough. For
a company the size of Google with the amount of profits they make, 'small
team' is just not an excuse for anything.

The move is definitely deliberate, they can't have Skype come in and allow
people with Skype to make calls to hangout when the hangout client can't make
calls into Skype. It would make them look bad.

~~~
cromwellian
I think you've got it backwards. If Google was really concerned with making
Hangouts a competitive moat by blocking interoperability, why would they be
plowing so much effort into WebRTC, a technology which pretty much commodifies
Hangouts and makes it possible for anyone to implement peer to peer video or
audio group chat? Skype is actually trying to block WebRTC, as is Cisco WebEx,
and Nokia.

I don't really see that Google would have anything to gain by blocking
interoperability with Skype, Skype is the market leader, it is usually those
who are not market leaders in a particular area to push for interop, and
usually those who have a hold on the market to resist.

~~~
sinkasapa
I think that the reason that these aren't contradictions is because Google
isn't a person. So if they do one thing that is open and a second that is
closed, we aren't using it as evidence to search out a human being's soul or
true intentions. An organization of this size can do both things at the same
time. If there was a master plan, you could say that the openness is great PR
that allows them to do closed stuff without getting as much of a backlash. But
again, that is just anthropomorphic BS. In one case people within a
personalityless organization are doing one thing. In another case different
people in the same organization are doing another. The two cases should be
treated separately.

~~~
cromwellian
I work at Google, openness is not PR, it is part of the culture. People here
believe in it, which is why I was the first person to bitch about this, and
I'm not alone.

Often if someone is doing something that cries for an interop spec, but they
aren't doing it, chances are they have some good reasons that don't involve a
corporate master plan to "talk about openness to make people like us, but
secretly silo-the-world" Often, it revolves around having a task list of a
gazillion things to work on and prioritize, and often open-spec is 'nice to
have, but not critical for launch' kind of thing.

Really, when you look at the market, 99% of the folks are shipping closed
apps, where more time is spent on cute emoticons than on infrastructure.
Google risks becoming "open, but irrelevent" in a market of
iMessage/WhatsApp/FaceBook messenger, where a niche audience is supremely
happy they can build third party clients, but which becomes a service unused
by the great unwashed masses.

The network effect requires other users to increase value, so they've got to
double down on things which delight and wow end users first, and developers
second.

~~~
dalke
"Openness ... is part of the culture"

It seems that there are any of a number of non-open parts to the Google
culture. How many server machines do you all have? How are dirty SEO methods
detected and thwarted? What are the details on the influence made by the $18M
spent in lobbying D.C. in 2012?

That's not to say they shouldn't be private. It's me asking you what it means
to be "open" as part of the culture.

~~~
tomkarlo
Openness being part of the culture doesn't mean that everything Google does is
disclosed publicly. Openness to the public, and openness within a company are
two entirely separate issues, and there are obvious practical limits to both
(at different levels) if you want to be competitive.

~~~
dalke
I believe the previous poster was only talking about openness to the public.
(Is Google distinctively more "open" internally than, say, Microsoft or SAP? I
think that's a different topic, and one that I'm not so interested in.)

As I wrote, I agree with the view that parts of Google are not disclosed
publicly.

My question is, we all know that Google has some closely held secrets. In that
case, how do I tell if (public) openness is part of the culture? Can I use
that to estimation method if the level of openness has increased or decreased
at Google over the last decade?

------
peterwaller
Larry inspired me with his talk the other week, in which he lamented that
Microsoft (and others) were playing silly zero-sum games in their own closed
ecosystems.

I've immediately stopped using as many Google products as I can in response to
this after trying out the new hangouts a few days ago and finding I couldn't
connect with my friends that weren't on Google.

I'm sad - this directly removes choice and is a sort of lockin. I now can't
use Google to communicate with people who choose not to participate in
Google's ecosystem for whatever reason.

By leaving, I also make it harder to communicate with many friends who are on
Google.

Google, you've alienated me.

------
orangethirty
The bigger issue here is that Google is integrating everything into G+. They
are moving away from being a search engine, towards being a social network
with better search capabilities than Facebook. The problem is that the average
Google users (read, non hacker, and generally not computer smart) does not
understand the changes. They just go to Google to learn about a new chicken
recipe, or what side-effects does Singulair has. They don't go there to
socialize. And Google is forcing this into everybody. Which is a significant
deal, because for a lot of people out there ( a lot) Google _is_ the internet.
Just like AOL was in the 90's, Google is now. They are diluting their brand,
and going in every direction. Before you say anything else, I use google
products. I like Google. I remember their old nerdy logo. I loved how they
took on the old search engines of yore, and beat them at their own game. But
it has reached a point where Google is now a faceless corporation simply
driven to profit. All of their actions point to that. They seem to no longer
really care about the users. Just like IBM, MS, and all the old tech giants.
Management has taken over. The true hacker spirit seems to not be found
anymore.

~~~
aniket_ray
Disclaimer: As a Google Engineer, this is my understanding of Google+.

I think Google+ could be understood better once you realize that Google+ is
not a social network in the traditional terms. Google+ is truly a social layer
across all Google services.

The average users who are just looking for a chicken recipe (as you mention)
would always love to find the particular chicken recipe that their friends
have recommended. Even more relevant to me (since I don't cook) is that if a
friend finds a todo app useful, I'd definitely want to know.

If Google has this social layer, it'll really unleash more expressive search
results that would help the vast majority of users. This is what Google+ is.

Google+ is literally Google Plus More.

Of course, to get these benefits you really have to start using Google+ on
different Google services. I guess this is the reason that Google employees
who actually use Google+ services continue using it and prefer if their
friends do it too.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Those are all things that nobody wants. Not only do we not want them, we abhor
the thought. That's what Google isn't getting.

We just want to search. Or keep using email like we have been for a decade.
People switched to Gmail because it was like hotmail with a nicer interface
and a large mailbox limit.

Maybe some people do want those other things. That's fine, give them their own
corner, let them play with the toy social network or social layer or however
you want to pitch it. Stop force-feeding it to the rest of us. I don't want to
know what my friends are searching for or what recipes they like. It's just
unwanted noise.

And let's call a spade a spade - "sharing" has very little to do with friends
and everything to do with advertisers. It's very disingenuous and insulting of
Google to pretend that the _primary_ purpose of +1 buttons is to "share with
friends".

~~~
moultano
> And let's call a spade a spade - "sharing" has very little to do with
> friends and everything to do with advertisers. It's very disingenuous and
> insulting of Google to pretend that the primary purpose of +1 buttons is to
> "share with friends".

This is calling a spade a turkey. How did you possibly come to that
conclusion?

> I don't want to know what my friends are searching for or what recipes they
> like. It's just unwanted noise.

On the right-hand side of your search page, there's a button for turning off
personalisation.

~~~
cageface
_On the right-hand side of your search page, there's a button for turning off
personalisation._

For now. Maybe not tomorrow. Google has already demonstrated its willing to
run roughshod over some of its users in order to advance its agenda for
Google+, which clearly is much more in Google's interest than the interest of
Google's users.

The information I store with Google is actually quite a bit more valuable than
anything I might post on Facebook so their recent willingness to stuff all
their other services into a shitty social network with a creepy "real name"
policy has me eying alternatives.

~~~
sangnoir
So you are blaming Google not for what it has done, but what it __could __do?

~~~
cageface
If they want me to trust them with that much information then what they seem
likely to do with it is extremely relevant to my decisions about how much I
rely on them today.

Even a few years ago I had no second thoughts about depending on Google for
critical web services but their tactics with G+ have me seriously second
guessing them.

------
hcarvalhoalves
That's one reason to dislike Google. They push free (as in beer) services and
standards until they kill all competitors, then let it rot. To me what they do
is even worse than going with proprietary solutions from the start and
charging for it, at least that's honest and fosters competition. Just look at
what they did with Google Apps.

Nowadays I only trust services where they profit (aka. anything that includes
advertising), and none of the open standards they push forward.

~~~
magicalist
Except this is just generic Google comment #4 and has nothing to do with the
current situation. AFAIK Google Talk is nowhere near the most popular chat
service, there are a ton of competitors, and the problem here is the exact
opposite of letting it rot: it's changing the communication format so
completely that it's breaking the former adherence to XMPP.

Google Apps doesn't seem especially relevant, but it _also_ has lots of
competitors (including, just like chat, very active open source projects),
hasn't been left to rot, and they've actually moved to _only_ charging for it,
instead of having an ad-supported version.

...so, are you really just talking about Reader?

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
> AFAIK Google Talk is nowhere near the most popular chat service, there are a
> ton of competitors, and the problem here is the exact opposite of letting it
> rot: it's changing the communication format so completely that it's breaking
> the former adherence to XMPP.

That's not how I see it at all.

You make it look like they are improving the service and that requires
breaking compatibility with XMPP, but it's yet another strategy to force users
into Google+ by consolidating Google Talk under the "Hangouts" feature.
Commitment to open standards is only skin deep.

~~~
magicalist
That's, again, something totally different from what you described in your
original post.

Letting a service rot generally means abandonment. I'm certainly _not_ saying
that the opposite of letting something rot means improvement, I'm saying that
making a major change like this is not at all an example of letting that
service rot.

------
tptacek
I am not clear why EFF is lobbying on behalf of the XMPP standards foundation
here. The entire computing industry is cluttered with opportunities for
interoperable standards, some of which haven't been tried, some of which
worked out, and some of which were attempted but (often correctly) jettisoned
in favor of progress.

Standardization is a good thing, but not the only good thing, and it always
worries me when people make arguments that effectively demand that new
offerings justify themselves (either with time or money) to existing standards
groups.

~~~
bad_user
Why do you have a problem with EFF lobbying for a standard? They lobby
whenever they feel like it's necessary and this isn't the first time they
lobby for privacy or for open standards, after all, their motto is "defending
your rights in the digital world" and I think that dropping support for
_federation_ or for disabling the _archiving_ of chats is within their goals.

At this point, standardization for video chat is one of the most important
steps forward. We already have proprietary video chat services. We already
have the likes of Yahoo, Skype and Facebook.

Why do we need another proprietary protocol to throw in the mix? What could
possibly be more important than an open standard at this point? And yeah,
Hangouts has some cool stuff in it, but not enough to justify the breaking of
a promise, but then again, it's not the first time where I feel like Google is
disappointing.

~~~
tptacek
Every time software progress threatens the status quo, partians of the
standard argue that the new functionality proposed doesn't justify degrading
standardization. Who are those partisans to say?

~~~
bad_user
True, but at the very least they should keep the support for XMPP they had
until now and make an effort to publish specs (not as standards, but as public
documents), such that at the very least we can have third-party clients and
not leave it up to third-parties to reverse-engineer the protocol badly,
violating some TOS in the process.

Or at least commit to doing it in the future at some point. Nobody's rushing
them into doing it right now, but changes such as these create anxiety. I
mean, what next? Are they going to drop POP3/SMTP support from GMail or
something?

~~~
tptacek
If it costs $X dollars to retain XMPP support and $Y dollars to build their
new offering out and their budget can't accomodate both $X and $Y, then the
choice is indeed between progress and placating standards advocates.

I can't imagine a standards issue I would care less about (among standards I
routinely use) than Google Mail dropping POP3 support, unlikely as that may
be. Most mail users are better served by web interfaces. POP3 and IMAP are
archaic. People that want those interfaces have plenty of options for
maintaining them.

You have never had more freedom in how you can avail yourself of technology
than you do in 2013, no matter how many restrictive app stores and giant email
providers you choose to concern yourself with. (I don't mean that to sound
snide.)

~~~
bad_user
These standards, archaic as they may be, also allow you to export your emails
should you want to. I pay for my wife's Yahoo email account, such that GMail
can use POP3 to connect to it and retrieve the emails that she gets on that
account. Not to mention that email clients work best if native. iOS users
didn't have to wait for Google to release a half-baked client for them.

As an alternative, of course, we can do better than POP3 or IMAP. Sure, lets
burn them, but name an alternative first and it has to be a standard supported
by Google, no?

I can't believe that you think this. You're basically arguing for the sake of
arguing.

Btw, you're mentioning " _web interfaces_ ". How would you have liked it if
everybody had their own browser-like app, communicating through their own
http-like protocol, speaking their own language for hyper-linked documents?

~~~
tptacek
If you think I'm just arguing for the sake of arguing, let's you and I just
stop arguing.

------
shmerl
_Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new
technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different
technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it
public and interoperable._

Well said. Google made a bad move with breaking things before enabling
interoperability by publishing their protocol. It's not the proper way of
doing things. Firstly, they could extend XMPP, Jingle etc. instead of creating
something from scratch.

If they can't (though they didn't explain why), they need first to develop a
protocol, publish it, and then start deploying it. Not other way around! Right
now they are moving towards cutting the connection between Google users and
users of other XMPP servers. Connection which works already now. I can
understand that they might envision new communication patterns, but it doesn't
mean one has to break what already works _before_ enabling others to
interoperate. It's completely immature on Google's part. Going the right way
might take more time - but it will not increase the horrible mess that the IM
scene is today. What Google does now is creating only more mess.

------
mtgx
I'm a lot more interested in them adding OTR encryption than having
interoperability. However, if they never intend to add OTR (which being
Google, seems very likely), then I'd want Hangouts to at least work with other
IM's that _do_ offer OTR, like Gtalk has worked so far.

~~~
cbr
Is this out of date: <https://support.google.com/talk/answer/29291>

~~~
magicalist
That's just turning off chat history, which is confusingly also referred to as
"off the record". Usually when people talk about OTR for chat, they mean
client-to-client encryption, so not even the chat provider knows what the
content of the chats were, analogous to using something like PGP for email.

------
mosqutip
This is quite sad, and what seems to be a growing trend at Google.

~~~
godgod
I've noticed this trend as well. Privacy is dead at Google. Sleep with dogs(US
govt), don't get upset when you wake up with fleas.

------
jspark
Does facebook follow an open standard for their messaging system?

~~~
dannyr
Also add WhatsApp, Line, KakaoTalk, Viber, Kik.

Google is getting clobbered in the messaging space by these apps. If Google
thinks they can move faster by dropping XMPP support, I'm fine with it.

Imagine if Google sticks with XMPP and continue to lose market share in
messaging. They might have to shut down Talk. We know what happens when Google
sunsets a product, lots of angry people.

Lose-lose situation for Google here.

------
djloche
Google isn't abandoning open standards for instant messaging. They're
abandoning instant messaging. They've moved from a real time communications
tool to a messaging tool. This is incredibly frustrating for those who used
previously used Google Talk for instant messaging purposes, but now have to
look for other options outside the Google ecosystem.

------
farinasa
Google has dropped support for XMPP (chat) and calDAV (calendar syncing).
What's next? cardDAV? IMAP?? Honestly I can see that Google is no longer
interested in open protocols. They are afraid that it's too easy for their
users to simply migrate everything away. Their response is to build a wall
around their users. Enough red flags have been raised for me to,
unfortunately, say goodbye.

Perhaps I may still buy their hardware, but they want to isolate my data from
every company but them. They are no longer reliable.

------
plywoodtrees
I would also like an open standard but I had to laugh at the final sentence of
the EFF statement:

> To be clear, even the earlier [off-the-record] setting was far from perfect
> from a privacy perspective: disabling chat history only kept the logged
> messages out of your Gmail account, and didn't prevent other users, or
> Google itself, from keeping a record of the conversation.

How on earth would you expect an open protocol to prevent the other keeping a
record of a conversation? It's like asking for perfect DRM with open clients.

~~~
claudius
They _could_ [0] implement some client side actual OTR[1], at least blocking
Google from keeping the clear-text message. No idea how they would want to
force the intended recipient of the message not to store it, though.

[0] In theory with infinite resources and time. Maybe.

[1] Or any other sort of encryption.

------
ausjke
'dont be evil'

~~~
ausjke
by down-voting this is getting even more evil, I don't mind what google does,
just please don't wear a 'dont be evil' outfit while doing it, you can't have
it both ways, why bother.

~~~
runjake
I'm pretty sure you're being downvoted because your comment didn't add any
value to the conversation.

Beyond that, we see a "don't be evil" comment every time a Google-related post
comes along.

~~~
ausjke
I hope we can have a google competitor on the horizon, it does not matter what
google claims, once it starts to monopoly, it starts to get evil, i.e. forget
about the interoperability, forget the open source, my way is the best,etc.
google is becoming microsoft quickly under the new CEO, like many others, I'm
finding alternatives for all related google services, I'm ok with that
actually, just find its 'dont be evil' slogan becomes even more so ridiculous.

~~~
greiskul
Google doesn't have a monopoly in instant messaging. Far from it, they are
lagging behind Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. What good is Google doing for the
world having an open product that almost nobody uses?

------
zachgersh
It's a defensive posture in response to what Apple has been doing with
iMessage.

------
RivieraKid
It's often not in the best interest of private companies to use open
standards. If using an open standard is a net financial loss, why should the
company do that? It's simply the result of how the system works. I've been
thinking whether the rules (=laws) can be changed somehow to provide incentive
for using open standards, but it's quite a complicated problem.

~~~
icebraining
Instead of adding more rules with their inevitable unintended consequences,
I'd rather we'd kill the rules that promote closed protocols, like the anti-
reverse-engineering clauses and overreaching "anti-hacking" laws.

------
MrQuincle
It's just a matter of time before something like Vidyo [1] is replaced by
WebRTC. There is too much at stake for Google to be the kitchen sink for all
kind of technologies. They want you to connect to them.

[1] <http://blog.vidyo.com/technology/the-new-google-hangouts/>

------
guest
Internet abandons Google, heads back to the glory days of Prodigy and
Compuserv.

Sales of animated gif skyrocket, solving financial crisis.

------
eunice
IMAP in gmail next

~~~
rnicholson
got a source? Or just wildly speculating?

~~~
farinasa
They killed calDAV. IMAP is a bit of a jump, but mark my words, cardDAV will
be next.

------
tn13
Actually makes total sense. Companies like Google should always remain ahead
of the curve. They should innovate much faster than any of the open standards
could grow.

~~~
claudius
They can use XMPP as a base and build extensions for everything they need atop
of that, then use these extensions immediately while they go through the XSF
and eventually become a standard.

XMPP has sort of been designed with extensibility and innovation in mind.

------
acd
The Google mantra "Don't be evil" - not! Decision to drop XMPP is bad/evil.
Seems more like the strategy of customer lock in.

------
nwmcsween
Thank god XMPP is disgusting.

------
yeleti
We abandoned xmpp for node.js and websockets at www.tesla.im

------
swiil
I switched back.

------
godgod
Does anyone else see the radical changes going on over at Google? They are in
bed with the US government. It's now less about serving up search results and
more about retaining all information on you. Google is evil.

~~~
pjscott
What, concretely, does Google gain from spying on you? In contrast, they have
a very clear profit motive for search: they get paid a lot of money to put ads
next to the search results.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
The same motive. This isn't even a secret conspiracy, their ToS says they do
it and says that is why they do it. The more data they have on you, the more
ad money they make.

Why do you think the ads you see in a search just happen to contain items you
were just emailing your mother about a day prior?

------
drivebyacct2
The sad thing is, no one has noticed that Hangouts is invoking a WebRTC plugin
in my PulseAudio container, leading me to believe that they're already
experimenting with WebRTC.

With WebRTC, a proper signaling protocol (they're probably using Jingle
anyway, give the RTC history and the fact that RTC relies and builds on
Jingle), and a relay server, there's not much to need to do to interoperate if
they wanted to enable it.

This whole notion that they "can't" make it interoperable or that it will
"slow them down", is complete and utter shit. Slow them down on what? All I've
seen so far is more merging of GoogleTalk+GooglePlus and a rebranding effort.
Basically no new feature, no integration with Google Voice, no seamless
integration with SMS.

------
fakeer
Time for email, im, calendar, tasks, notes, docs and other services start-ups
(for individual users).

Better if they are decentralized. You wouldn't have to move everything at
once. But this will also increase costs.

