Laurent Eschenauer

The question we have to ask ourselves is "Why?". Answers assuming bad intentions are missing the point.

There's a deep reason why email is the only successful decentralized network. And also the worst regarding tho spam, ease of use and problems.

My point is not that they *do not* but actually are changing course, and reverting support of things they once championed. That is the scary bit.

i think it's all about GOG vs MSFT:
a) MS do not allow GTalk = Skype
b) but MS wants xmpp to talk from Outlook to GTalk to promote Office 365

Changing and admitting failure is part of Google culture and, for me, the biggest reason of their success.

We can say that they honestly tried. They tried really hard.

But it is simply not working. They are limiting themselves, they can't evolve the way they want.

I'm not saying that it is "good", I'm just saying that it is understandable and very predictable. I remember saying in one of my conference where someone told me that "XMPP was successful at taking over MSN" : "It's not XMPP, it's Google. The day Google drops XMPP, we will discover that only a tiny minority cares about XMPP."

I wish I was wrong…

(preparing a long blogpost on the subject ;-) )

"The good news is, we do not need Google to build the open web for us. "

If that's true, than I don't understand all the whining and crying is all about. Yeah it sucks when a service is closed down but that happens everyday. Why is it such a big deal when Google happens to do it - since *we* don't need them anyway.

@zaidira I think the bitterness comes from the perceived movement in google's culture. A move from their hacker origins to a corporate culture where the masses dominate. Time to move on I guess, but the effort required to replicate google's quality products is a little daunting.

Seriously, they didn't try very hard.

The XMPP community did, bending over backwards to accommodate them. A vast amount of serious effort has gone into reworking S2S authentication, for example, specifically to address Google's requests to make supporting Google Apps domains securely simpler for them.

Jingle was initially designed by Google, but yet they never implemented the latest standards as they were developed - and yet this was their area of greatest interaction.

I've even heard that some of PEP - another set of XMPP extensions they never bothered to implement - was guided by Google so they could deploy it.

Google have been known to use open standards, but they're rubbish at contributing to them.

The day Google drops XMPP, we will discover that only a tiny minority cares about XMPP.

MSN was actually XMPP without federation
Facebook uses XMPP for messaging

That picture looks a lot like Facebook email today

Don't forget http://autonomo.us/

Mike, only a tiny minority care about SMTP, too.

But federation and interop are important, just as Larry Page said, and users will be feeling that loss - and are already.

Google has always said the competition is just a click away. Time to click away, no? I think Google should not set the standards for *my* web activities, anyway. I hope others remain and evolve.

I'm curious if anyone is interested in proof of concept of federated twitter like open source project I've created some time ago: http://dotmesh.org

God, I hate Google. We should stop using them. They're terrible and evil, and are slowly ruining the Internet. Anyway, I'm off to Google News to see what's happening.

Don't forget identi.ca and joindiaspora.com

Google has never cared about the "open web"... it cares about Google being able to access all information out there. It doesn't give a damn-- and never has-- about other people being able to access information.

It's sad that a generation of people have been deluded into thinking google is somehow a force for good. They are blatent patent trolls-- suing Apple (via Motorola) for standards essential patents, which started the whole patent war (Apple sued them in defense)... which is pretty ironic given that android is a ripoff of Apple's IP... all the while Google's publically running an anti-IP campaign (Because as an IP theif they want to get away with it.)

Yet people ignore the fact that Google is the patent troll that started the whole thing and delude themselves into thinking that Google is "right" ... becuase they want to own an android phone without guilt.

At this point, I have no sympathy for people who are so deluded that they think google is anything but evil. They have been evil (and uninnovative) for a long time.

This is not surprising given they make their money by violating people's privacy.

But the deluded fools think "oh this service from google is free, they must be benevolent!"

I look at this as a golden opportunity to re-make the services they are dropping, and then sell them back to them for a nice few million bucks in a year or two. Cheers Larry!

There's not a whole lot of transparency from Goog as to why they make these decisions, so I can only imagine that as they've evolved into a purely commercial company supporting and championing interoperability has become a cost center that runs against some walled-garden vision. Who knows, but I think its sad. If anyone is interested, I'm developing an open-source+hosted API/transport pipelining system, reach out if you want to jump into the code its not released quite yet but happy to open the repo to collaborators... https://bip.io

Hey,
For email I really enjoy using fastmail.fm
Only $30 a year for having your own domain's email, else free.
Hope that's a useful tip for people.

Ian

Thanks for the post! Google is certainly making many strange decisions lately, I think looking elsewhere for the services we get from it is essential before it is too late.

I am working on a system to easily self-host all the services you might need from your own home on a Raspberry Pi. All this with a simple graphical interface, making server management available for the masses. Check it out at https://ark-os.org :)

Yeah, ßingen and Ian, *lots* of alternatives out there. (I have a website and use domain-managed mail. Doesn't cost as much as you might think.) For those of us who wear tinfoil hats and don't care about the laughter behind us, read Brad Thor's "Black List". (Just because yer paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.)

Ploum said: "There's a deep reason why email is the only successful decentralized network."

Are you nuts? Lots of our most successful networks have always been decentralized! You can't seriously be suggesting that systems like Usenet, IRC, Bittorrent, XMPP, or the internet itself (!!) aren't successful.

I am working on a Feed reader which works with the open (and open source) API provided by TinyTinyRSS http://jabs.nu/feedthemonkey and on a Twitter-like client for the Open Social Tent Protocol (https://tent.io) http://jabs.nu/bungloo

""Changing and admitting failure is part of Google culture and, for me, the biggest reason of their success. We can say that they honestly tried. They tried really hard. But it is simply not working. They are limiting themselves, they can't evolve the way they want.""

I think the problem is not that Google is abandoning these protocols. (Lots of companies never bothered to use them in the first place, and we're not complaining about those guys.) The problem is they're talking out of both sides of their mouth.

From one side: open is great, Google is open, Google is better than our competitors *because* we're more open. From the other side: we're abandoning a bunch of the most popular open protocols because they're just not working for us (you claim).

I think it would be drastically different if they had said, hypothetically, "CalDav isn't flexible enough for the needs of Google Calendars, so we're proposing a new open standard, SuperCalSync, and inviting everybody to try it out with us". That would show that the existing protocol sucks (well, it kind of does!), but that they think openness can work. But they're not doing that.

I would *love* for Google to put out a press release that said: "We tried open source and open protocols. Nobody cares, and it holds us back. We're going to do everything behind closed doors from now on. Deal with it." Then at least they'd be honest.

Great analysis. this article is good. thanks for posting this article..!

We need personal clouds http://personal-clouds.org/ to restore control to us and give us a say in the features we like to use.

Open is awesome as long as it works in my favor

It's amusing to me that Google's apologists defend the company for almost any action, even when they would be howling if a similar action was taken by Microsoft of Apple. For some reason, there's a portion of the tech crowd that's bought the insane notion that Google has everybody's best interests at heart, so we can trust them. I appreciate and use some of Google's products, but I trust the company less and less — because their actual track record is nowhere near the record of altruism that Larry Page and his supporters would have you believe. (Just to be clear, Google isn't supposed to be altruistic. I'm just sick of the hypocrisy and the dishonesty about it.)

So, when someone defends Google's actions, it may be assumed he also believes Google to have everyone's interests in mind.

I didn't see that assertion in these comments.

Fortunately, I haven't yet seen the "Google is just an advertising company" gem. There's still time, people!

Great idea. They can drop SMTP and go with X.400 instead!!!!

Here, Daniel: "Google is just an advertising company." (Hope I got that in, in time.) The Gorg isn't operating pro-bono. Employees gotta pay the rent and put bread on the table, so to speak. Guess where the bucks come from.

To believe the core of Google's business is anything but advertising simply means one is not paying attention.

"We at Google believe in freedom of speech, and that anyone who says otherwise should be locked up indefinitely"

You should see the three year ling thread of comments begging them to add caldav (and carddav) support to android. http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=7639

This is something that has been in iOS for a long time. This underscored, for me, that Google's business model is not very conducive to open protocols in the long run.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Thats why we should avoid android to and use alternatives like jolla sailfish on our smartphones.

"We at Google believe in freedom of speech, and that anyone who says otherwise should be locked up indefinitely"

"We at Google believe in freedom of speech, when you let us speak on your behalf"

Accuracy check: The Chrome RSS extension was taken down by mistake and was subsequently restored weeks ago. The status of RSS support in Chrome hasn't changed.