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Wait, so Google is dropping XMPP support because Outlook.com is supporting it to allow Gtalk users to chat on Outlook.com, so in order to perpetuate the GMail/G

Wait, so Google is dropping XMPP support because Outlook.com is supporting it to allow Gtalk users to chat on Outlook.com, so in order to perpetuate the GMail/GTalk lock-in by caging the Gtalk chat users to GMail, they're dropping standards support and killing access to all XMPP clients in existence including non-Microsoft ones? And they announce this right when Microsoft spent all the time and effort to allow Outlook.com users to chat with Gtalk friends and is rolling out that feature? Am I right? Someone tell me I am wrong! That sounds unbelievable, coming from the supposedly open company even though it's coming on the heels of them trying lock out millions of Windows Phone users from Youtube by sending a C&D takedown on the app. I guess open standards don't work when you're the guy trying to lock in users. If Google had a lock-in on Office products, looks like they will ditch "open data" and "open standards" in a heartbeat. They should change their policy to "open when it's convenient for us to flog it for PR purposes, else closed, oh and please store all your office documents on our cloud, we make it really convenient.". This is not Open vs. Closed anymore, this is Corporations vs. Individuals, except for Mozilla which is becoming less powerful because Google uses its ad dollars to bundle Chrome with Flash, Acrobat and Java updates by default thereby reducing Firefox's share and has the nice side effect of reducing Google's payments to Mozilla for searches. And Web DRM? Of course it's coming because IE, Chrome and Safari are going to be supporting it fully with 80% marketshare and people will blame Firefox if Netflix doesn't work in it and recommend you switch to Chrome to see movies! iOS, Android and Windows Phone, BBOS will add support for 100% tablet and phone support for the DRM. Firefox and Opera are powerless to stop it. We have already seen this play out with th h.264 HTML5 video support in Chrome fiasco when Google said it would drop H.264 from Chrome but did not and Mozilla was left holding the short end of the stick and had to recently had to eat crow and add support for H264. The web is owned by the corporates, not individuals anymore, there was some hope when Firefox was at 40%, not anymore. And we all willingly gave them the power by believing in "open" and "do no evil" and switching in droves. I can picture Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix etc executives sitting at a bar and giving toast to each other and laughing while we whine and debate fruitlessly with vitriol on these forums. All their stock valuations are up recently!

VikingCoder 13y ago
So, to be clear, Google is supposed to make video chat with groups of people, recording to YouTube, desktop sharing, and Google Docs live editing work with XMPP? Or else they're evil?
- cooldeal 13y ago
  The company with half the top Phds and best engineers in the world and billions in profit every quarter is unable to create an open extension to XMPP to accomplish those and fallback gracefully if it's not supported? You really believe that? You could assemble a team of 30 random HN posters and they would be able to do that. So, I think they could do it, if and only if they wanted to. But they didn't and they themselves said it was because they didn't want to be open.
  - MostAwesomeDude 13y ago
    I think that you should assemble your team of thirty random people on HN and get them to do that thing that you want them to do. Good luck!
    - jessaustin 13y ago
      The hypothesized "video chat" protocol extension to XMPP already exists and it's called Jingle. FOSS client support isn't great, but it is progressing. So if this service isn't open to FOSS clients, that's more an issue of strategy than resources. (And indeed, the decision might change in future and be attributed to improved FOSS client performance.) If the service is indeed closed, however, they probably ought to update this page: https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications
- adrinavarro 13y ago
  I don't care too much about video chat, YouTube, etc, etc… Just about the plain old XMPP/Jabber user-to-user that was the base for Google Talk and that has been around for many years. The ability to talk with users from different providers. That is being open. Without XMPP federation, we're effectively locked into Google. And it's just a matter of time that they drop XMPP altogether and we have to use their own protocol for chatting.

VikingCoder 13y ago

So, to be clear, Google is supposed to make video chat with groups of people, recording to YouTube, desktop sharing, and Google Docs live editing work with XMPP? Or else they're evil?

cooldeal 13y ago
The company with half the top Phds and best engineers in the world and billions in profit every quarter is unable to create an open extension to XMPP to accomplish those and fallback gracefully if it's not supported? You really believe that? You could assemble a team of 30 random HN posters and they would be able to do that. So, I think they could do it, if and only if they wanted to. But they didn't and they themselves said it was because they didn't want to be open.
- MostAwesomeDude 13y ago
  I think that you should assemble your team of thirty random people on HN and get them to do that thing that you want them to do. Good luck!
  - jessaustin 13y ago
    The hypothesized "video chat" protocol extension to XMPP already exists and it's called Jingle. FOSS client support isn't great, but it is progressing. So if this service isn't open to FOSS clients, that's more an issue of strategy than resources. (And indeed, the decision might change in future and be attributed to improved FOSS client performance.) If the service is indeed closed, however, they probably ought to update this page: https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications
adrinavarro 13y ago
I don't care too much about video chat, YouTube, etc, etc… Just about the plain old XMPP/Jabber user-to-user that was the base for Google Talk and that has been around for many years. The ability to talk with users from different providers. That is being open. Without XMPP federation, we're effectively locked into Google. And it's just a matter of time that they drop XMPP altogether and we have to use their own protocol for chatting.