> Google (and to a lesser extent) Apple, Facebook and Twitter, have little interest in allowing their products to inter-operate in a meaningful way. Having had

> Google (and to a lesser extent) Apple, Facebook and Twitter, have little interest in allowing their products to inter-operate in a meaningful way. Having had to deal with Google's somewhat non-compliant implementation of IMAP recently, I'm not going to say that they're big on having their products interoperate. However, I would be hard-pressed to make a case that Google is less interested than Apple, Facebook, and Twitter in having their products inter-operate, either with their own or with other companies'. Google's entire business model requires a far more open web than the other three properties, in order to function. They still don't favor a truly open web, but they're far less siloed than Apple, Facebook, and Twitter, whose business models all require[0] siloes in order to function (though for completely different reasons, hence why Apple and Facebook aren't competitive the way Google/Apple or Google/Facebook are). [0] Twitter is arguably the only exception here.