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The problem with chat is that every big tech company is only interested in "winning" vs driving usage. Google would be better off fighting for open standards to
by tims33 4y ago
The problem with chat is that every big tech company is only interested in "winning" vs driving usage. Google would be better off fighting for open standards to improve their position in this market. Open standards in the 70s, 80s, and 90s did such great things for technology.
- brian_cunnie 4y agoGood point! I think the EU is gonna force Apple to open up Messages, in which case Apple Messages will become the _de facto_ standard.
- ghaff 4y agoI don't want iMessage to be a _de facto_ standard. I want my work stuff to be mostly on my work channels. Very little work stuff gets onto my cell phone number which includes iMessage.
- petre 4y agoIn France they have a law that the employer is not allowed to call you off work hours. I think it should also apply to instant messaging. They also have another good law which prohibits eating in the office, so they all have to take the lunch break off and eat at a restaurant or bistro or canteen. Which is great because food delivery also generates single use food container waste and also food waste. https://www.npr.org/2022/06/10/1103463809/why-eating-at-your-desk-is-banned-in-france-lunch-law https://www.npr.org/2022/06/10/1103463809/why-eating-at-your...
- ghaff 4y agoI mostly don't even want IMs on my personal phone though--and I don't want to carry two phones. I personally have no issue with doing some quick work off and on after hours--so long as you have no trouble with me taking care of some errands during the day. Seems a pretty good tradeoff. When I went into an office, I would sometimes grab lunch at my desk if I just wanted some calories and wrap up my day as quickly as possible. Otherwise I'd eat with people in the cafeteria or go out (options for both of which varied a lot by job).
- majewsky 4y agoAgreed on the food container waste, but why would eating at the desk vs. in a restaurant cause more food waste? I'm just eating the same portion in a different place. Also, when no one else is in the office, I sometimes like eating at my desk because I can eat by myself instead of having to deal with noisy people at the other tables.
- petre 4y agoBecause something always comes up and the food goes cold and stale? Plus the office reeks of food, ketchup on your keyboard, unhygenic. You can eat wherewer you want, just not in the office. You can eat in the park. The thing is, one also gets to disconnect from work, walk away from the desk and maintain a proper work life balance. Some French individuals also use the lunch break to exercise. I don't live in France but we use the meeting room to eat, instead of eating at our desks. We properly vent it afterwards, of course.
- tomjen3 4y agoThats terrible, because it you can't bring your own food? What the hell do with people limit/weird diets do?
- petre 4y agoYes you can, just not eat it in the office. They also bring their own food. I guess there are places where you can eat you own food confortably.
- SoftTalker 4y agoIs someone actually going to call the police if I'm eating a sandwich at my desk? And are they going to respond?
- MomoXenosaga 4y agoNo you will just be ostracized. There is this line in Europe, the North-South divide. And they dont do "sandwich" for lunch it is full on dining with wine. Degenerates!
- benhurmarcel 4y agoI work in France and nobody will complain if you eat at your desk, but it's not something people do usually. If you do it often people will comment that you should take your break. French people like to take the time to eat in some other place, even if done quickly. Most employers have at least a dedicated room for eat your own food, with some basic equipment. In practice the law is more about what employers must provide in terms of amenities and time off to eat.
- tomjen3 4y agoOkay, that is a lot different than not being allowed to eat in the office. All the two places I have worked had a separate eating area as well, though I often snack at my desk.
- scarface74 4y agoSo you think that it’s good that the government tells you where you can eat?
- usrn 4y agoHopefully they'll just force everyone to federate with XMPP again. That was pretty great and now we have OMEMO so it's even E2EE.
- WheatM 4y agoYou're overstating the importance of Apple outside of the USA. No one I know uses Apple Messages.
- Dma54rhs 4y agoBut not many people use iMessages in EU to begin with. Its more of an American thing because of history of texting and the iMessage color phenomenon.
- ghaff 4y agoSome of it is probably history in US. Texting used to be very expensive. Admittedly, I couldn't even tell you what I pay--if anything--in non-iMessage texts these days on a bog-standard AT&T plan but it's not something enough to take note of and I don't take the color into any account when texting.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoI feel like texting was unlimited by the time iMessage became prominent. At least I do not recall text costs being a concern for domestic texts anytime in the 2010s. I do remember international texting costs driving adoption of WhatsApp though. It was a killer app that everyone knew how to instantly use, not have spam, and the contacts/pics/video/group sharing just worked across all phone OSs. Edit: In fact, the exact opposite is what I think happened. Texting was unlimited in the US, or effectively unlimited because it was so cheap, that people in the US did not bother to look into a non default SMS/MMS apps to message others, since Americans are mostly contacting other Americans. All the people I knew who had international contacts jumped on WhatsApp, but a huge portion of Americans never contact anyone outside America, so they never cared about international messaging costs, and never bothered with WhatsApp/Viber/Tango/Skype/whatever other chat app was out there to bypass text costs. This gave Apple an advantage because they can implement their own iMessage in the default SMS/MMS app, and ramp people up onto iMessage without people even choosing it.
- ghaff 4y agoYeah, I'll use WhatsApp or something like Facebook Messenger for the maybe handful of international folks I sometimes text with. But I don't care if Americans are texting green or blue--and that's 99% of the people I text with. I communicate with Europeans in particular all the time. But those are via Gmail/Gchat or Twitter mostly.
- scarface74 4y agoRight, they may make Apple Messages interoperable with SMS… Oh wait.
- mistrial9 4y agoaren't all the Big Tech companies you are thinking of, actually American Big Tech companies spreading out into other places? If I were not an American, I can definitely sympathize with the point of view that having American companies run vital communications for other populations.. is not OK. Open Standards are the concerted effort of thinking people to make something where the motivations can vary, but the tech is reliable. I think it is no accident that things like weather apps, chat, and trading photos have become ... not only that ..
- mavhc 4y agoIn the 70s/80s/90s your software didn't change every day. Google started with xmpp with Talk, but it didn't evolve fast enough to add new features. In Talk days I had to dismiss notifications from every device, even though I'd read it on one. And file sharing, video calls, audio calls, group messages didn't work well. The internet enabled software to update every day, that made standards way less relevant, sadly. The HTML5 model of standards is probably best for the modern world
- ChrisArchitect 4y agoyes, in theory XMPP should have won everything (with clients built on top) -- but there's this other thing of users being so dumb/wool over the eyes about new flashy apps and not understanding "texting" as SMS vs internet based messaging and international differences meant stupid closed things like WhatsApp took off and none are the wiser. Ridiculous to this day that WhatsApp conned so many people into thinking they were getting 'free texting' by basically making the accounts phone numbers, even tho there's no connection to cell networks/SMS. Arrgh. Not to mention a similar sort of confusion with iMessage. But its so hard to counter momentum and social circle movement with these things and ppl's willingness/unwillingness to jump apps or run ten messaging apps crazily.
- cuteboy19 4y agoConsumers don't care if the text goes through cell networks or the internet. They don't even care if the message appears in WhatsApp or their messages app. All they care about is sending a message or an image to a phone number and they want the cheapest and fastest way to do that. So they aren't as stupid as they appear
- SnowHill9902 4y agoThey are not stupid they are shallow.
- hansel_der 4y agoand we the ppl have a right to it. i.e. i don't want to be an electrical engineer to be able to operate a light switch. i don't care about the certifications of the cabling or the switch or in which way the electrons were produced - i want the lights on.
- XorNot 4y agoXMPP wasn't a great protocol for mobile. The dependence on supporting extensions to get features like push messaging from servers to work efficiently was a problem.
- 4y ago
- tootie 4y agoIt's unbelievable how frothy the chat market is when there hasn't been a substantive innovation since the 80s.