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Not the grandparent, but I'll share my reasoning via an alternate universe: Imagine if e-mail was owned by HP. (In this alternate universe, someone at Digital

Not the grandparent, but I'll share my reasoning via an alternate universe: Imagine if e-mail was owned by HP. (In this alternate universe, someone at Digital invented it. Digital > Compaq > HP) All email accounts are created at hp.com, everyone's email address is janedoe@hp.com, or bobspizza4344@hp.com, etc. If you pay $240 a year for Enterprise E-mail®, then you can customize the domain name, but hp.com still handles all the sending, receiving, and storage. You don't have a say in that. Other companies have their own versions of "E-mail", variously called "MS Mail Plus for Windows Live 365™" or "iMail™", but you can't send message between them, so they're only used for niche internal communications. Everyone has an account at hp.com. You have to if you want to talk to anybody. Some people tried to make an e-mail client once, but HP revoked their API key, so it doesn't work anymore. You have to use HP's e-mail client. This is how Twitter is (and instant messaging as well, which is a shame. I thought XMPP was going to be our savior in that front, but Google saw to that). For me it's not so much a moral issue, but a practical one. E-mail is vastly better because it's open and interoperable. The WWW is way better than AOL and Prodigy and Compuserve were.

RestlessMind 11y ago
But there is no money in making an open and interoperable platform. Or to be more accurate, there is a lot more money in having a closed and proprietary platform, which you can milk for years if not decades. Ultimately, majority of people do not care whether the underlying platform is closed or open - they just want a product that works fine (eg. Facebook). So one of the rare ways open platforms can win over closed ones is if someone invests a lot in an open platform and offers a product with quality on par to those with closed platforms. But it seems money drives a lot more effort in aggregate[1] than some desire to make the world a better place. So a vast majority of times, we see better products coming out of "entities" (corporations, people) motivated by money, which will do all it can to protect it's money source. Closing the platform seems a perfectly logical thing to do in that case. [1] I define it as total man-hours spent on something.
wutbrodo 11y ago
> I thought XMPP was going to be our savior in that front, but Google saw to that Out of all the companies that had a large IM network, the _last_ one to stop s2s federation was the one that "saw to" the failure of XMPP? Never mind the fact that no other company with market power in this space (Microsoft w Skype, Facebook w Chat) allowed federation, walling off 90% of XMPP users, and by the time that Google shut off s2s, it was used by barely anyone. It's ignorance like this that incentivizes the exact behavior you're complaining about. Companies like Apple and Facebook look at Google's attempts at compromising product quality for openness[1] (which, to be clear, is a trade-off that I personally think is worth the benefits to the ecosystem) and the huge backlash they get when they finally throw in the towel long after the battle is lost (s2s federation was more or less irrelevant by the time they removed it because the vast majority of chat usage was on walled gardens). It becomes clear that the only winning move when subject to the ignorant flailings of public opinion is to aggressively avoid lack of support for things like federation and interoperability from the start, in which case the only people who lose are the users.
- function_seven 11y ago
  You're absolutely right, no good deed goes unpunished. I think I was suffering from "well, I expect FB and Apple to behave that way, but Google? Now I'm mad!" Well, that's not logical thinking. Google did try—more than anyone else—to bring openness to IM. When they did eventually throw in the towel, they became the unjustified focal point of justified anger. Meanwhile, iMessage, BBM, AIM, ICQ, MSM, Yahoo, WhatsApp, etc. all continue running walled-gardem IM systems. The closest thing to an open IM system is SMS. Thanks for the correction.
  - wutbrodo 11y ago
    In general, the sentiment is understandable and in some fora, the context is understood by everyone present. The problem in my experience is that many people hear the loud complaints (and the absence of any similar complaints for companies that are worse) and don't have the implied context. This naturally leads the tenor of the conversation to "the subject of the complaint must be worse than companies in similar situations". I've even seen this happen on fora like HN where you'd expect the context to be understood. It reminds me of a friend of mine who has decided to preemptively leave tech early in her career because of the reputation it has for sexism (despite not (yet?) experiencing any issues firsthand). The main industry she's considering switching to? _Finance_! As much as most people implicitly know that sexism in finance is WAY worse, it's rarely brought up because it's considered something of a lost cause (for now). And yet, in her ignorance[1], my friend's assumption is that the relative visibility of sexism discussion maps to the relative incidence and severity of sexism in these industries. [1] The term ignorance here is meant literally: not having experience in either field and being forced to go off of what she reads/hears about.

RestlessMind 11y ago

But there is no money in making an open and interoperable platform. Or to be more accurate, there is a lot more money in having a closed and proprietary platform, which you can milk for years if not decades. Ultimately, majority of people do not care whether the underlying platform is closed or open - they just want a product that works fine (eg. Facebook). So one of the rare ways open platforms can win over closed ones is if someone invests a lot in an open platform and offers a product with quality on par to those with closed platforms. But it seems money drives a lot more effort in aggregate[1] than some desire to make the world a better place. So a vast majority of times, we see better products coming out of "entities" (corporations, people) motivated by money, which will do all it can to protect it's money source. Closing the platform seems a perfectly logical thing to do in that case. [1] I define it as total man-hours spent on something.

wutbrodo 11y ago

> I thought XMPP was going to be our savior in that front, but Google saw to that Out of all the companies that had a large IM network, the _last_ one to stop s2s federation was the one that "saw to" the failure of XMPP? Never mind the fact that no other company with market power in this space (Microsoft w Skype, Facebook w Chat) allowed federation, walling off 90% of XMPP users, and by the time that Google shut off s2s, it was used by barely anyone. It's ignorance like this that incentivizes the exact behavior you're complaining about. Companies like Apple and Facebook look at Google's attempts at compromising product quality for openness[1] (which, to be clear, is a trade-off that I personally think is worth the benefits to the ecosystem) and the huge backlash they get when they finally throw in the towel long after the battle is lost (s2s federation was more or less irrelevant by the time they removed it because the vast majority of chat usage was on walled gardens). It becomes clear that the only winning move when subject to the ignorant flailings of public opinion is to aggressively avoid lack of support for things like federation and interoperability from the start, in which case the only people who lose are the users.

function_seven 11y ago
You're absolutely right, no good deed goes unpunished. I think I was suffering from "well, I expect FB and Apple to behave that way, but Google? Now I'm mad!" Well, that's not logical thinking. Google did try—more than anyone else—to bring openness to IM. When they did eventually throw in the towel, they became the unjustified focal point of justified anger. Meanwhile, iMessage, BBM, AIM, ICQ, MSM, Yahoo, WhatsApp, etc. all continue running walled-gardem IM systems. The closest thing to an open IM system is SMS. Thanks for the correction.
- wutbrodo 11y ago
  In general, the sentiment is understandable and in some fora, the context is understood by everyone present. The problem in my experience is that many people hear the loud complaints (and the absence of any similar complaints for companies that are worse) and don't have the implied context. This naturally leads the tenor of the conversation to "the subject of the complaint must be worse than companies in similar situations". I've even seen this happen on fora like HN where you'd expect the context to be understood. It reminds me of a friend of mine who has decided to preemptively leave tech early in her career because of the reputation it has for sexism (despite not (yet?) experiencing any issues firsthand). The main industry she's considering switching to? _Finance_! As much as most people implicitly know that sexism in finance is WAY worse, it's rarely brought up because it's considered something of a lost cause (for now). And yet, in her ignorance[1], my friend's assumption is that the relative visibility of sexism discussion maps to the relative incidence and severity of sexism in these industries. [1] The term ignorance here is meant literally: not having experience in either field and being forced to go off of what she reads/hears about.