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My company's dev team is on Slack, so I log in there whenever I need to talk to them--unless we're doing a video conference, at which point we switch to Google
by legutierr 11y ago
My company's dev team is on Slack, so I log in there whenever I need to talk to them--unless we're doing a video conference, at which point we switch to Google Hangouts. Most of our clients prefer the phone, email or SMS/iMessage, but the ones that don't use Skype. If I'm chatting with friends it's probably on Facebook, unless it's on Hangouts. Any video chat my family does is over Facetime.
These services are never going to inter-operate, and I hate it. Imagine if we had to maintain different telephone numbers or different email accounts just to communicate with different groups of people. It's almost unimaginable, but that's what we have now with text and video chat.
This is core communications infrastructure. These segregated private networks have begun to displace the public telephone network in terms of popularity and importance. These are also the platforms over which video communication is being rolled out--not the public telephone network, as most people would have thought twenty-five years ago.
The FCC needs to step in and set some inter-operability rules for the major players here. I have mixed emotions suggesting this, considering that I'm generally opposed to regulation of the Internet. But unless the government steps in, can the situation ever change? Doesn't it need to?
- Atheros 11y agoPerhaps we should just wait for one to become a solid monopoly and then our anti-trust laws can take care of it. That seems to be the good middle-ground between freedom from regulation and freedom from monopolies. And it worked out pretty well for our phones.
- troydavis 11y ago> Doesn't it need to? No. That's applying a personal preference - one that I also have - to the rest of the population. Most, and quite possibly almost all, users have chosen features above interoperability. Yes, the situation could change, but no, it doesn't need to. Contrast with, say, mobile phone number portability in the US. While one can still argue for or against requiring it, users obviously actually cared and used it. Even when XMPP was popular, very few users left Google.