

WebRTC is going to break the whole game open anyway - julien
http://blog.andyet.com/2013/09/27/webrtc-is-going-to-break-the-whole-game-open

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n00b101
WebRTC is to messaging/socket communication APIs as WebGL is to 3D graphics
APIs? So big game changer is that web browsers will implement functionality
that native applications have had for decades? I don't understand this
obsession of running everything inside a web browser with HTML and JavaScript
and then declaring it as some kind of revolutionary step forward. What we want
to do as developers is make it easy and secure to run applications on end-user
desktops. Web browsers are the dominant delivery platform right now (for
consumer applications anyway) but that does not mean that it will always be
this way or that it is the optimal solution. There are a lot of W3C standards
... are they all really so great? Does anyone remember VRML?

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tedsanders
A central idea of this article is that

>Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are truly the new telecoms—each within
the last few years has built or bought a communication platform of their own.

Some aspects of this analogy are true, but it's weak overall. Telecom is an
extremely capital intensive business. Online messaging is not.* As a result,
if telecom companies screw you over, it's hard for a startup to replace them.
With online messaging, if a service screws you over, it's relatively easy to
switch to a new standard/provider. That feedback mechanism should hopefully
keep the messaging platforms better than the telecom platforms.

*and yes, online messaging runs on lots capital, but the capital - fiber lines and whatnot - is already pretty open

