4 ms·
To be fair, Google was a champion of open standards for years and years, spending large amounts of time and money supporting them, before eventually capitulatin
by s17n 5y ago
To be fair, Google was a champion of open standards for years and years, spending large amounts of time and money supporting them, before eventually capitulating to proprietary systems. Their enthusiasm for open standards is probably a major reason that they lost in messaging!
The problem is that open standards just can't compete with closed ones when it comes to giving users what they want (for a nice discussion of this, see the classic https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)
- blunte 5y agoIndeed they were open source proponents for a long time (and are far from that now), but the failure of their messaging platforms matches the failure of many, many of their other product (projects). They just do some periodic financial analysis and decide to cull the projects they don't see a big future in. True though that open standards are slower and harder to work with because they involve too many people and too much discussion. Apple is almost exactly the opposite example of this, and clearly their approach works quite well most of the time.
- s17n 5y agoProducts don't fail because Google cancels them, Google cancels them because they failed. There are of course lots of reasons that Google's messaging products have all failed, but I'm pretty sure that the use of open standards didn't help.