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The removal of XMPP interoperability was the moment I realised "Don't Be Evil" was just another marketing puff, and not actually a statement of values. But I t

The removal of XMPP interoperability was the moment I realised "Don't Be Evil" was just another marketing puff, and not actually a statement of values. But I think the termination of Google Wave (which was also federated and built with XMPP) was the real moment Google gave up on team communications.

mike_hearn 10y ago
It amazes me how many people think that ending GChat/XMPP federation was the result of some kind of cigar smoking, moustache-twirling "evil". I worked at Google at the time. It was killed for engineering reasons, that boiled down to: 1. Nobody used federation. 2. Except spammers. They used it a lot. Trying to keep federation alive whilst fighting spammers took a lot of effort. 3. It complicated the code a lot. Features that existed in GChat but didn't map well to XMPP were harder to implement. 4. The XMPP protocol sucked on mobile and sucked in web clients, and therefore Google's own clients were not using it any more. New extensions like Jingle were more like entirely separate protocols than small upgrades. Federated chat protocols are the sort of thing that intuitively sound nice, but networks that implement them inevitably end up being killed off by closed, proprietary competitors that are simply a whole lot better. Email hangs on, kinda, but I passively await the day that the email system is killed off by a closed network. It already happened for personal correspondence (facebook) and I'm sure at some point it'll happen for work correspondence too. Moxie Marlinspike has written some thoughts on why federated protocols are yesterday's solution here: https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ Put simply, in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number, federation doesn't add much value.
- herbst 10y ago
  I may live in a nerd specific environment but gchat was our goto product for a long while. We had our notifications build in trough XMPP just like people do with slack now. Some of us used their own XMPP servers, and pretty much everyone was reachable trough it beeing google and everybody having a gmail and/or android phone at least. There were also several cool mobile and web apps that worked very well for XMPP, though not with high load thats true. When you removed XMPP and forced to hangout it died off pretty fast, no API and the Hangout thingy was not even working on Linux (not sure if it does these days, i never tried). I see your points, but i cant stop to think about this as the probably most evil step google did to my workflow. Edit:// I use hangout now to transport links from phone to desktop and the other way around. It totally lost its purpose :/
- cm3 10y ago
  > It already happened for personal correspondence (facebook) and I'm sure at some point it'll happen for work correspondence too. I don't know the numbers but I'm part of the population that never used Facebook, so I'm unconvinced you can generalize like that. > Put simply, in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number, federation doesn't add much value. I didn't really understand Moxie's arguments, but he may know more due to the projects he's involved in. But how is interoperability achieved? The beauty of HTTP, NNTP and SMTP are that you're not bound to one (or maybe two) client experiences or server implementations. I don't understand the desire to leave achievements like that on the floor just for temporary comfort. It's a slippery slope and will lead us into a long time of silo'd communication. To me the current proposals look like if I had to use 4 different post offices depending on whom I want to send a package to. There's a reason addresses are universal.
  - mike_hearn 10y ago
    Moxie's argument is that interop takes place at the level of the operating system's notification tray. If you want to make a better WhatsApp, all you have to do is ... build a better app. The traditional obstacles are largely gone in the mobile world: • You can access the same social graph just by requesting the contacts permission on your mobile phone: it's not like Facebook where the social network is locked away. • You don't have to go through some slow moving standards process which takes years to get the features into the most widely used clients like you would if trying to improve XMPP. • There's no cost to the user having multiple messaging apps installed thanks to Google/Apple's push networks: it's not like Windows/MacOS/Linux where having an app running in the background uses resources and requires permanent on-screen reminders of the resource wastage. So it's easy to get the user to set up your app. • Notifications will appear in the same place the user is looking for them no matter what. • You can (on Android) register for the right intents and whenever a friends phone number is invoked, your app will be offered as an option, so there's no lockin there either. These things together mean the traditional reasons for pursuing federated networks for chat (the avoidance of lockin) are largely irrelevant.
    - cm3 10y ago
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  > […] in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number […] To me this translates to: “Please run our proprietary software to participate and use a high-value nearly unique identifier to identify yourself — we really like to know that john.doe@gmail.com is the same person as feetfetish33 so we can better quantify you for targeted advertising.” I am willing to entertain the notion that federation is not a solution, but seeing how you now either place yourself in this panopticon or you don't and 'miss out' on things makes me feel that we should at least attempt to figure out a way to put communication back in the hands of the people. For all its warts and issues, email is still effectively federated, and will stay like that for quite a while due to the needs of many (not all, I certainly grant you that) businesses and local, regional, and national governments to control their own email infrastructure (mainly due to legislation and control).
  - tdkl 10y ago
    > we should at least attempt to figure out a way to put communication back in the hands of the people. What to do if people (majority) don't care ? Because that's the side result of bringing uneducated (regarding IT) masses online. They sell on instant gratification, cute shit (emojis, gifs galore) and hype. In return they don't hesitate to give their data and conversations. No wonder everyone want's their own silo.
  - mike_hearn 10y ago
    I have yet to encounter a chat network that uses targeted advertising, so you're well off into the realm of conspiracy theories there. Chat networks are all moving to the use of phone numbers because users mobile phonebooks are a vendor neutral, open access social network of high value contacts that almost everyone has and for which there are simple APIs available. Phone numbers have other advantages. They are difficult to register in bulk (it can be done but it costs a lot more than bulk registering web accounts protected only by a CAPTCHA). Regulations in many part of the world enforce the ability to do number porting which makes mobile numbers truly user owned - unlike email or jabber ids which are ultimately owned by the organisation after the @ symbol. There is a simple remote attestation protocol: you can prove you own the identifier by simply providing a challenge code. Everyone understands them. And it outsources identity management costs to the telcos who have large branch/shop networks to help people who e.g. lose their device/SIM. Building out and staffing account recovery infrastructures is a significant driver of costs for large web platforms. For instance if you have a contract then you can recover your identity by physically walking into a local telco shop with your passport, you will walk out with a replacement SIM (and the prior SIM remotely deactivated) a few minuets later. It's partly by shifting these costs to the telco networks that WhatsApp was able to scale to hundreds of millions of users with only 50 employees. When I look at how things work done this way vs a traditional internet federated network like email, Jabber, IRC etc, I have to agree with Moxie - it's not so bad, actually. I'm not normally a big supporter of government regulations, but making number porting obligatory is a relatively low cost rule that makes the use of phone numbers as the universal id a lot more palatable, because it's truly user owned at that point. Switching mobile networks and switching chat networks is a lot easier than switching email/xmpp providers because forwarding has always been an afterthought in such protocols, is legally optional, and at any rate is always going to be more complicated than just re-assigning ownership of a truly provider independent code.
ekianjo 10y ago
The "Don't be Evil" is so vague that it was obviously just for show right from the start.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Reflecting on it led me to use 'be nice' as our company policy. It's vague too but it has been a useful guide towards doing the right thing on occasions. Mottoes are necessarily vague.
nextos 10y ago
Yeah, it didn't make any sense. It also didn't make any sense they dropped XMPP in favour of Hangouts. XMPP has its share of problems, but it's designed as an extensible protocol. Google's Jingle addon to XMPP was actually quite nice, although it took quite some time to get polished. Once they had it right and it was gaining some traction, they drop it in favour of a proprietary solution...
- pdkl95 10y ago
  > It also didn't make any sense they dropped XMPP in favour of Hangouts. It makes perfect sense. Forcing out competitors (XMPP) with leverage from dominance in a neighboring market (gmail, which was the common interface for GTalk) is a textbook example of monopolization. If we lived in a world that actually cared about the rule of law, Google would be charged for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (and/or related antitrust acts).
  - zardeh 10y ago
    Wait are you saying that XMPP was forced out (solely) by Google, and that Google at some point monopolized the "instant messenger" market? Not to mention that XMPP is a standard, not a competitor. This is like saying that modern companies are monopolizing against SOAP or YAML.
    - pdkl95 10y ago
      > (solely) by Google I didn't say anything about other players in the "chat" market. > Google at some point monopolized the "instant messenger" No, the have dominance in the email market (I mentioned gmail). They used the position of power in the email market to limit XMPP and support their new Hangouts service. Just like Microsoft used to do, Google broke their support of the protocol. While most of the protocol still worked, they started dropping auth requests on the floor. This wasn't an error message or missing feature; their S2S protocol simply dropped auth requests so it looked from the outside that the request was delivered, but the person on the other end never responded. Outgoing (from gmail) auth requests were removed entirely. From the perspective of gmail users, XMPP popularity simply faded and Hangouts took over as a replacement. Using one market (gmail) as leverage in another market (chat) is basically the definition of monopolization. Note that this doesn't require a perfect monopoly in the first market; ability to force/manipulate the market is sufficient. Additionally, the Sherman Antitrust Act also criminalizes the attempt to monopolize. > Not to mention that XMPP is a standard Obviously. I've been following the development from the beginning (before it was called "jabber"; the name "XMPP" happened many years later). > not a competitor. An open (federated) protocol is the most dangerous kind of competitor to a big company like Google. Deals/contracts can can be made with a company, but a federated protocol by definition cannot be controlled by a single entity. > This is like saying that modern companies are monopolizing against SOAP or YAML. I think you need to re-read what I said. Or maybe read more about how antitrust law works.
cromwellian 10y ago
Larry Page spelled it out in his Google I/O q&a. Google tried for years and years to get interoperability but Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo would never do anything more than 1-way interop sucking users out of xmpp into their proprietary system. Gchat didn't have many active users, meanwhile the closed systems were getting hundreds of millions of daily actives. I think mobile chat taught Google a lesson: the cultural Dna that "open always wins" pretty much leads to losing and having to play catch up. I think at this point the biggest hope is that something like telegram can become the defacto new xmpp.
- Frompo 10y ago
  What, people started using msn instead of gchat because those chats weren't on xmpp? Why would gchat have as many users as facebook anyway? It's not like gmail was a community like facebook was. MSN meanwhile basically started as a chat client, there where ads for it on tv in Sweden...
  - kyrra 10y ago
    Skype, not MSN. http://www.androidheadlines.com/2013/05/larry-page-implies-microsoft-is-taking-advantage-of-googles-openness-while-offering-nothing-back.html http://www.androidheadlines.com/2013/05/larry-page-implies-m...
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    People on MSN could chat with people on GChat, but people on GChat couldn't chat with people on MSN. Since a critical feature of a messaging app is "my friends are on it", that gave MSN/FB/AIM a huge advantage over GChat, and had they not turned off XMPP integration, they would have bled off users until it was only used by small pockets of people, all of whom were on GChat (eg. Googlers).
    - drdaeman 10y ago
      > People on MSN could chat with people on GChat, but people on GChat couldn't chat with people on MSN. How this had worked? I mean, in XMPP both parties need a JID, so MSN users must have had theirs. Had MSN had generated random non-discoverable JIDs for their users, blocked any incoming messages unless there were prior outgoing communications, made GChat interop opt-in or what?
badsock 10y ago
When it was coined "Don't Be Evil" was a reference to Microsoft, who at the time was an especially bad actor in the industry, even for them. Dropping support for a protocol is one thing, but actively sabotaging open protocols like MS did is quite another.
- th0ma5 10y ago
  You're absolutely right except for limiting the bad actor qualities of MS to just at that time. While they have made inroads to more open systems, they continue to do heavy handed things, e.g. the misleading and intrusive Windows 10 upgrades.
marlag 10y ago
"was the real moment Google gave up on team communications" I believe so too and Wave might have failed because Google said "this is instead of email". Had they markeded Wave as a "team communications suite" like Microsoft is doing today with their team communication tools, and all the aother players too (we're getting used to hearing about communications suites especially at work, right?). But the world was probably not ready to hear about communication suites until maybe 2010, så Wave was also too early. And it definetly wasn't a email replacement. Maybe this high-lights the drawbacks of being too focused on your core business, so focused that you cut of an arm (gchat) because it wasn't in line with your philosophy of having a totally open, standardized protocol that you (Google) hoped everyone eventually would be using. The players of today do not care about these things, they care about getting traction and a massive user-base and about encryption and privacy and claim their place in the spot-light because users love them. Google knew we loved gchat. They must have know why. Google Drive + gmail + gchat, tailored towards businesses: good bye Office 356, see you never. Microsoft would be limping without Office... how could Google fail to make this happen?
partiallypro 10y ago
I knew Google was "evil" long before then, but the biggest middle finger to me as a customer was dropping ActiveSync. Seriously, try to get Outlook to work with Gmail, it's a totally nightmare. Absolutely unnecessary in its complexity to get it to work (lots of buried settings in Gmail, lots of blocking your sign-ins, Calendar syncs only work one way.) I deplore Google Apps for Business, just a complete nightmare, unfortunately I'm stuck with it.
- beagle3 10y ago
  That's not much different than dropping xmpp federation: Microsoft was charging them for the patent license on ActiveSync, AND attacking android at the same time. So Google dropped ActiveSync at the point in time when it hurt Microsoft most - WP8 release. Microsoft's response was "no no no, don't pay for ActiveSync but please keep it up" Historically, Google drops features when they don't make financial sense or when they give leverage/advantage to competitors.
  - partiallypro 10y ago
    Right, now try setting up Outlook 2016 with Gmail. It has nothing to do with financial sense, they intentionally broke the functionality. That's anti-competitive. You can search for the various people having problems with it. If Microsoft had done what Google did, they'd have made the front news of major publications for being anti-competitive. Google is a darling, so they get away with murder. This is just a minor example.
dweinus 10y ago
Personally,I had that moment when Google bought my favorite interoperable chat app so they could kill it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo
- moreira 10y ago
  YES! Meebo was the best. I used to use it on both the web and mobile, all the time. I was extremely disappointed when Google bought them and shut them down just like that.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Yeah, this was the beginning of the end of my support for things done by Google.

mike_hearn 10y ago

It amazes me how many people think that ending GChat/XMPP federation was the result of some kind of cigar smoking, moustache-twirling "evil". I worked at Google at the time. It was killed for engineering reasons, that boiled down to: 1. Nobody used federation. 2. Except spammers. They used it a lot. Trying to keep federation alive whilst fighting spammers took a lot of effort. 3. It complicated the code a lot. Features that existed in GChat but didn't map well to XMPP were harder to implement. 4. The XMPP protocol sucked on mobile and sucked in web clients, and therefore Google's own clients were not using it any more. New extensions like Jingle were more like entirely separate protocols than small upgrades. Federated chat protocols are the sort of thing that intuitively sound nice, but networks that implement them inevitably end up being killed off by closed, proprietary competitors that are simply a whole lot better. Email hangs on, kinda, but I passively await the day that the email system is killed off by a closed network. It already happened for personal correspondence (facebook) and I'm sure at some point it'll happen for work correspondence too. Moxie Marlinspike has written some thoughts on why federated protocols are yesterday's solution here: https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ Put simply, in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number, federation doesn't add much value.

herbst 10y ago
I may live in a nerd specific environment but gchat was our goto product for a long while. We had our notifications build in trough XMPP just like people do with slack now. Some of us used their own XMPP servers, and pretty much everyone was reachable trough it beeing google and everybody having a gmail and/or android phone at least. There were also several cool mobile and web apps that worked very well for XMPP, though not with high load thats true. When you removed XMPP and forced to hangout it died off pretty fast, no API and the Hangout thingy was not even working on Linux (not sure if it does these days, i never tried). I see your points, but i cant stop to think about this as the probably most evil step google did to my workflow. Edit:// I use hangout now to transport links from phone to desktop and the other way around. It totally lost its purpose :/
cm3 10y ago
> It already happened for personal correspondence (facebook) and I'm sure at some point it'll happen for work correspondence too. I don't know the numbers but I'm part of the population that never used Facebook, so I'm unconvinced you can generalize like that. > Put simply, in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number, federation doesn't add much value. I didn't really understand Moxie's arguments, but he may know more due to the projects he's involved in. But how is interoperability achieved? The beauty of HTTP, NNTP and SMTP are that you're not bound to one (or maybe two) client experiences or server implementations. I don't understand the desire to leave achievements like that on the floor just for temporary comfort. It's a slippery slope and will lead us into a long time of silo'd communication. To me the current proposals look like if I had to use 4 different post offices depending on whom I want to send a package to. There's a reason addresses are universal.
- mike_hearn 10y ago
  Moxie's argument is that interop takes place at the level of the operating system's notification tray. If you want to make a better WhatsApp, all you have to do is ... build a better app. The traditional obstacles are largely gone in the mobile world: • You can access the same social graph just by requesting the contacts permission on your mobile phone: it's not like Facebook where the social network is locked away. • You don't have to go through some slow moving standards process which takes years to get the features into the most widely used clients like you would if trying to improve XMPP. • There's no cost to the user having multiple messaging apps installed thanks to Google/Apple's push networks: it's not like Windows/MacOS/Linux where having an app running in the background uses resources and requires permanent on-screen reminders of the resource wastage. So it's easy to get the user to set up your app. • Notifications will appear in the same place the user is looking for them no matter what. • You can (on Android) register for the right intents and whenever a friends phone number is invoked, your app will be offered as an option, so there's no lockin there either. These things together mean the traditional reasons for pursuing federated networks for chat (the avoidance of lockin) are largely irrelevant.
  - cm3 10y ago
Freak_NL 10y ago
> […] in a world where clients are all free and the identifier of choice is the phone number […] To me this translates to: “Please run our proprietary software to participate and use a high-value nearly unique identifier to identify yourself — we really like to know that john.doe@gmail.com is the same person as feetfetish33 so we can better quantify you for targeted advertising.” I am willing to entertain the notion that federation is not a solution, but seeing how you now either place yourself in this panopticon or you don't and 'miss out' on things makes me feel that we should at least attempt to figure out a way to put communication back in the hands of the people. For all its warts and issues, email is still effectively federated, and will stay like that for quite a while due to the needs of many (not all, I certainly grant you that) businesses and local, regional, and national governments to control their own email infrastructure (mainly due to legislation and control).
- tdkl 10y ago
  > we should at least attempt to figure out a way to put communication back in the hands of the people. What to do if people (majority) don't care ? Because that's the side result of bringing uneducated (regarding IT) masses online. They sell on instant gratification, cute shit (emojis, gifs galore) and hype. In return they don't hesitate to give their data and conversations. No wonder everyone want's their own silo.
- mike_hearn 10y ago
  I have yet to encounter a chat network that uses targeted advertising, so you're well off into the realm of conspiracy theories there. Chat networks are all moving to the use of phone numbers because users mobile phonebooks are a vendor neutral, open access social network of high value contacts that almost everyone has and for which there are simple APIs available. Phone numbers have other advantages. They are difficult to register in bulk (it can be done but it costs a lot more than bulk registering web accounts protected only by a CAPTCHA). Regulations in many part of the world enforce the ability to do number porting which makes mobile numbers truly user owned - unlike email or jabber ids which are ultimately owned by the organisation after the @ symbol. There is a simple remote attestation protocol: you can prove you own the identifier by simply providing a challenge code. Everyone understands them. And it outsources identity management costs to the telcos who have large branch/shop networks to help people who e.g. lose their device/SIM. Building out and staffing account recovery infrastructures is a significant driver of costs for large web platforms. For instance if you have a contract then you can recover your identity by physically walking into a local telco shop with your passport, you will walk out with a replacement SIM (and the prior SIM remotely deactivated) a few minuets later. It's partly by shifting these costs to the telco networks that WhatsApp was able to scale to hundreds of millions of users with only 50 employees. When I look at how things work done this way vs a traditional internet federated network like email, Jabber, IRC etc, I have to agree with Moxie - it's not so bad, actually. I'm not normally a big supporter of government regulations, but making number porting obligatory is a relatively low cost rule that makes the use of phone numbers as the universal id a lot more palatable, because it's truly user owned at that point. Switching mobile networks and switching chat networks is a lot easier than switching email/xmpp providers because forwarding has always been an afterthought in such protocols, is legally optional, and at any rate is always going to be more complicated than just re-assigning ownership of a truly provider independent code.

ekianjo 10y ago

The "Don't be Evil" is so vague that it was obviously just for show right from the start.

pbhjpbhj 10y ago
Reflecting on it led me to use 'be nice' as our company policy. It's vague too but it has been a useful guide towards doing the right thing on occasions. Mottoes are necessarily vague.

nextos 10y ago

Yeah, it didn't make any sense. It also didn't make any sense they dropped XMPP in favour of Hangouts. XMPP has its share of problems, but it's designed as an extensible protocol. Google's Jingle addon to XMPP was actually quite nice, although it took quite some time to get polished. Once they had it right and it was gaining some traction, they drop it in favour of a proprietary solution...

pdkl95 10y ago
> It also didn't make any sense they dropped XMPP in favour of Hangouts. It makes perfect sense. Forcing out competitors (XMPP) with leverage from dominance in a neighboring market (gmail, which was the common interface for GTalk) is a textbook example of monopolization. If we lived in a world that actually cared about the rule of law, Google would be charged for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (and/or related antitrust acts).
- zardeh 10y ago
  Wait are you saying that XMPP was forced out (solely) by Google, and that Google at some point monopolized the "instant messenger" market? Not to mention that XMPP is a standard, not a competitor. This is like saying that modern companies are monopolizing against SOAP or YAML.
  - pdkl95 10y ago
    > (solely) by Google I didn't say anything about other players in the "chat" market. > Google at some point monopolized the "instant messenger" No, the have dominance in the email market (I mentioned gmail). They used the position of power in the email market to limit XMPP and support their new Hangouts service. Just like Microsoft used to do, Google broke their support of the protocol. While most of the protocol still worked, they started dropping auth requests on the floor. This wasn't an error message or missing feature; their S2S protocol simply dropped auth requests so it looked from the outside that the request was delivered, but the person on the other end never responded. Outgoing (from gmail) auth requests were removed entirely. From the perspective of gmail users, XMPP popularity simply faded and Hangouts took over as a replacement. Using one market (gmail) as leverage in another market (chat) is basically the definition of monopolization. Note that this doesn't require a perfect monopoly in the first market; ability to force/manipulate the market is sufficient. Additionally, the Sherman Antitrust Act also criminalizes the attempt to monopolize. > Not to mention that XMPP is a standard Obviously. I've been following the development from the beginning (before it was called "jabber"; the name "XMPP" happened many years later). > not a competitor. An open (federated) protocol is the most dangerous kind of competitor to a big company like Google. Deals/contracts can can be made with a company, but a federated protocol by definition cannot be controlled by a single entity. > This is like saying that modern companies are monopolizing against SOAP or YAML. I think you need to re-read what I said. Or maybe read more about how antitrust law works.

cromwellian 10y ago

Larry Page spelled it out in his Google I/O q&a. Google tried for years and years to get interoperability but Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo would never do anything more than 1-way interop sucking users out of xmpp into their proprietary system. Gchat didn't have many active users, meanwhile the closed systems were getting hundreds of millions of daily actives. I think mobile chat taught Google a lesson: the cultural Dna that "open always wins" pretty much leads to losing and having to play catch up. I think at this point the biggest hope is that something like telegram can become the defacto new xmpp.

Frompo 10y ago
What, people started using msn instead of gchat because those chats weren't on xmpp? Why would gchat have as many users as facebook anyway? It's not like gmail was a community like facebook was. MSN meanwhile basically started as a chat client, there where ads for it on tv in Sweden...
- kyrra 10y ago
  Skype, not MSN. http://www.androidheadlines.com/2013/05/larry-page-implies-microsoft-is-taking-advantage-of-googles-openness-while-offering-nothing-back.html http://www.androidheadlines.com/2013/05/larry-page-implies-m...
- nostrademons 10y ago
  People on MSN could chat with people on GChat, but people on GChat couldn't chat with people on MSN. Since a critical feature of a messaging app is "my friends are on it", that gave MSN/FB/AIM a huge advantage over GChat, and had they not turned off XMPP integration, they would have bled off users until it was only used by small pockets of people, all of whom were on GChat (eg. Googlers).
  - drdaeman 10y ago
    > People on MSN could chat with people on GChat, but people on GChat couldn't chat with people on MSN. How this had worked? I mean, in XMPP both parties need a JID, so MSN users must have had theirs. Had MSN had generated random non-discoverable JIDs for their users, blocked any incoming messages unless there were prior outgoing communications, made GChat interop opt-in or what?

badsock 10y ago

When it was coined "Don't Be Evil" was a reference to Microsoft, who at the time was an especially bad actor in the industry, even for them. Dropping support for a protocol is one thing, but actively sabotaging open protocols like MS did is quite another.

th0ma5 10y ago
You're absolutely right except for limiting the bad actor qualities of MS to just at that time. While they have made inroads to more open systems, they continue to do heavy handed things, e.g. the misleading and intrusive Windows 10 upgrades.

marlag 10y ago

"was the real moment Google gave up on team communications" I believe so too and Wave might have failed because Google said "this is instead of email". Had they markeded Wave as a "team communications suite" like Microsoft is doing today with their team communication tools, and all the aother players too (we're getting used to hearing about communications suites especially at work, right?). But the world was probably not ready to hear about communication suites until maybe 2010, så Wave was also too early. And it definetly wasn't a email replacement. Maybe this high-lights the drawbacks of being too focused on your core business, so focused that you cut of an arm (gchat) because it wasn't in line with your philosophy of having a totally open, standardized protocol that you (Google) hoped everyone eventually would be using. The players of today do not care about these things, they care about getting traction and a massive user-base and about encryption and privacy and claim their place in the spot-light because users love them. Google knew we loved gchat. They must have know why. Google Drive + gmail + gchat, tailored towards businesses: good bye Office 356, see you never. Microsoft would be limping without Office... how could Google fail to make this happen?

partiallypro 10y ago

I knew Google was "evil" long before then, but the biggest middle finger to me as a customer was dropping ActiveSync. Seriously, try to get Outlook to work with Gmail, it's a totally nightmare. Absolutely unnecessary in its complexity to get it to work (lots of buried settings in Gmail, lots of blocking your sign-ins, Calendar syncs only work one way.) I deplore Google Apps for Business, just a complete nightmare, unfortunately I'm stuck with it.

beagle3 10y ago
That's not much different than dropping xmpp federation: Microsoft was charging them for the patent license on ActiveSync, AND attacking android at the same time. So Google dropped ActiveSync at the point in time when it hurt Microsoft most - WP8 release. Microsoft's response was "no no no, don't pay for ActiveSync but please keep it up" Historically, Google drops features when they don't make financial sense or when they give leverage/advantage to competitors.
- partiallypro 10y ago
  Right, now try setting up Outlook 2016 with Gmail. It has nothing to do with financial sense, they intentionally broke the functionality. That's anti-competitive. You can search for the various people having problems with it. If Microsoft had done what Google did, they'd have made the front news of major publications for being anti-competitive. Google is a darling, so they get away with murder. This is just a minor example.

dweinus 10y ago

Personally,I had that moment when Google bought my favorite interoperable chat app so they could kill it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo

moreira 10y ago
YES! Meebo was the best. I used to use it on both the web and mobile, all the time. I was extremely disappointed when Google bought them and shut them down just like that.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Yeah, this was the beginning of the end of my support for things done by Google.