Google embraces, extends, and extinguishes

https://drewdevault.com/2018/05/03/Google-embraces-extends-extinguishes.html

by Sir_Cmpwn • 8 years ago

313 185 8 years ago

GoToRO• 8 years ago

Any company that grows this big will behave the same. The only solution for consumers is to not create companies this big. Always also buy from competitors.

ribchinski• 8 years ago

Any company this big needs to have some outside control. They are clearly monopolizing. I thought the US had a law against monopolies, or does it only apply to the railroads?

TulliusCicero• 8 years ago

I thought the US had a law against monopolies,

It's more complicated than that. US law tries to only target "bad monopolies" that engage in anti-competitive practices or hurt consumers: https://www.investopedia.com/insights/history-of-us-monopoli...

lallysingh5• 8 years ago

Monopoly on what? google.com? Android?

Google's power comes from its (a) technical prowess and (b) popularity of some of its products. Many of their products get a large advantage just from being on their own internal platform.

But I can't think of a product of theirs that doesn't have a strong competitor. Search is the strongest they have, and the underlying problem's getting a bit simpler (I believe it's substantially cheaper now to pay for the infrastructure for a good-enough web crawler than it used to be), and competitors give pretty good results as well. I'm a bit surprised Apple hasn't tried going after this beachhead yet.

Android can be avoided by using an iPhone.

I can get an email account for free nearly anywhere. Every ISP I've had in the last 20 yrs has given me one (that I don't use).

Google's got a lot of influence, and I think AMP is quite the overreach, but they don't fit in the monopoly bucket. If you want, it's pretty easy and reasonable to avoid using them. At least as consumer -- I can't speak as an advertiser. But I don't have a lot of sympathy for advertisers.

emodendroket3• 8 years ago

The conception of antitrust regulation has gradually evolved into the idea that if it doesn't directly lead to higher prices for consumers it's harmless, which is a much stricter standard than was applied in periods of vigorous trustbusting.

emodendroket3• 8 years ago

i.e., not really a solution, because a consumer doesn't have that much influence. Without a government devoted to pursuing antitrust cases it just won't happen.

majani• 8 years ago

Unfortunately Google and Microsoft tend to make their money from solving hard tech problems, which results in natural monopolies or duopolies.

ocdtrekkie6• 8 years ago

I would argue Google and Microsoft make their money out of making tech problems seem hard. As noted: In the 90s your Pentium III could do speech recognition, but now nobody believes you can do speech recognition without the cloud.

And plastering ads over everything also is not super hard.

ashleyn• 8 years ago

Google's approach to open source does feel very much like virtue signaling rather than constructive adherence to the ideology. The build system for any Google project is notoriously terrible. I recently attempted to build Skia; even after rereading the scant instructions, I could not get it to do anything better than a compilation error.

Boulth2• 8 years ago

I think this stems from their internal monorepo culture, e.g. they care about building everything in one go, not in isolation. This can also explain the issues with golang dependencies, it's hard for them to see problems of most regular developers as they use a unique toolchain (custom SCM, custom build tools etc.)

ethbro• 8 years ago

Not Invented Here (tm) seems like a large part of the cultural problem with being better open source contributors.

It's great they open source a lot of their stuff, but just because you're big enough as a company to rewrite {component of build chain} for yourselves... doesn't mean you should.

Caveat: I know parts of Google are awesome with contributions and using standards.

pjmlp7• 8 years ago

Many devs use the C# version just to avoid going through that experience themselves.

golergka2• 8 years ago

even after rereading the scant instructions, I could not get it to do anything better than a compilation error

To be honest, that's my usual experience with any open source project, especially with something based on C/C++ (modern languages usually have much better and stable tooling).

jjhbw• 8 years ago

I wonder if their attempt to force HTTPS everywhere (by shaming HTTP-only sites as insecure in Chrome) fits into this strategy.

It would put net neutrality violators like US ISPs out of the mass surveilla- ..eeeh advertising business, so I guess that is a good thing.

Cursuviam• 8 years ago

I feel this one is highly positive enough to give them leeway. There are many types of browsing data, my porn habits as an egregious example, that I would prefer be constrained to a minimum number of entities.

jacksmith2100622• 8 years ago

Think driven to keep people safer and the same with Project Zero. A safer digital world and people will use more and Google then makes more money.

My gripe with the broader industry is that Google is finding a lot more of the big vulnerabilities than their competitors.

Should be a lot more balanced. I can not even think of one major one found by Apple. Yet Google has found so many of the really big ones. Today see an article they found additional.

crummy3• 8 years ago

What exactly should Google do differently here, when they find bugs in other companies products?

superflyguy• 8 years ago

Am I missing something here? Just seems like moaning. And the irony of the link on the side of the page to a Minecraft clone that's been embraced, extended and then abandoned because the author just can't be bothered any more (but you can send him money and maybe he'll change his mind) isn't lost on me.

titzer• 8 years ago

link on the side of the page to a Minecraft clone that's been embraced, extended and then abandoned

I'm not sure how a person doing a clone of something owned by a billion dollar corporation (Microsoft)...and then giving up on it...is the same thing. At all.

bigtones• 8 years ago

Agreed, this seems like moaning and does not contribute anything.

Quarrelsome• 8 years ago

slander. Attack the content, not the author.

Sir_Cmpwn• 8 years ago

I don't think TrueCraft's history is at all comparible to embrace/extend/extinguish, nor does it make Google's behavior excusable if it were.

jahvo4• 8 years ago

The “extinguish” with GMail is also well underway - it’s infamous for having an extremely strict spam filter for incoming emails from people who run personal or niche mail servers

And thank God for that. That's why their antispam is sooo good.

akerl_2• 8 years ago

Yup. Between the spam filtering and their Inbox mobile app, I now actually have an email experience that doesn't make me dread incoming messages.

sdoering• 8 years ago

Exactly. Because enforcing monopolies like that is a good thing? Isn't it?

jahvo4• 8 years ago

Gmail won because it fixed the biggest pain points with HTML email and spam. And so many years later nobody has come even close. That's not their fault.

SquareWheel8• 8 years ago

Letting people spoof emails by ignoring SPF records isn't ideal either.

megous• 8 years ago

You will never know or be able to judge until you get on the other side of it. The worst are companies who use gmail to accept unsolicited email from job applicants.

It's not a great first impression if you are asked to write something up (on a Careers page) and send it to some address and then are 5xx rejected and your email is blackholed and not even delivered to a SPAM folder.

Funny thing is that the 5xx message tells you to contact their gsuite admin to change some settings. :D I guess to get blackholed again.

jcranmer2• 8 years ago

Google didn't invent the reputation-based antispam, or the DNS blacklisting, or all the annoying antispam features that make running your own email server difficult. The only thing Google added to the mix was applying its famous quality of customer service (or rather, lack thereof) to the problem.

crummy3• 8 years ago

At the time I signed up for Gmail they had by far the best antispam filter I'd seen (online or local). I would regularly have ~1000 spam emails per month in my spam box and false positives or negatives were extremely rare (~1/year?)

jahvo4• 8 years ago

They invented using those things right, so I don't get spam.

amelius• 8 years ago

I sure hope mail will not end up like chat, e.g. in a number of isolated services.

Having federated e-mail is more important to me than the feature of spam filtering.

nova22033• 8 years ago

and contributing to Chromium as a non-Googler is notoriously difficult.

so fork?

takluyver3• 8 years ago

Forking a big, fast moving, security critical piece of software like a browser is totally impractical unless you have a sizable company behind you to maintain it.

lallysingh5• 8 years ago

It's probably easier to just keep a set of diffs.

icebraining• 8 years ago

So what? Lots of things are impractical for individuals.

scrollaway2• 8 years ago

[edit: Moved here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16994356]

SquareWheel8• 8 years ago

To my memory Gmail has always had a very strict spam filter. At what point did it turn into "extinguish"?

lallysingh5• 8 years ago

The complaint is that they're extending the email standard by sending single-URL bodies instead of the messages inline. I can see the point, but sending URLs is still fine in my book, and this is a useful feature that's trying to get parity with Outlook.

pjmlp7• 8 years ago

Including not being able to read them when using a 3rd party client?

Lionsion• 8 years ago

The complaint is that they're extending the email standard by sending single-URL bodies instead of the messages inline.

Someone needs to write a client to recognize the gmail, single-URL, bodies and archive the content with the messages.

akerl_2• 8 years ago

They're extinguishing all the parts of the web that I didn't like: email spam, slow web page loads on mobile devices, etc.

Hope they keep up the good work.

gcp3• 8 years ago

slow web page loads on mobile devices

Mostly slow because they need to display a lot of...Google Ads?

jacksmith2100622• 8 years ago

This is a very goofy article. Google has open source so many things that it is a bit crazy they give away. But who else open sources their OSs? Both Android and ChromeOS.

But the craziest one is giving away Borg. Probably the most incredible technology Google has created and just opens sources it.

For me personally the biggest contribution from Google is

https://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

Kind of the opposite of what this article suggests.

I get some of the alt right has a problem with Google firing Damore but this article is ridiculous, IMO.

pjmlp7• 8 years ago

Both Android and ChromeOS.

Which are only kind of open sourced.

Google only makes the lower levels available and both are designed in such a way that using Linux as kernel is largely irrelevant for anyone using the OS SDKs.

ChromeOS is mostly a Web browser juggler and as such the only way to develop for it is with the standard Web platform APIs.

Android is all about Google's version of Java, with plain ANSI C, C++ and a couple of native APIs on the NDK, everything else is not white listed as official NDK API and as of Android 7 trying to link to them will cause an application termination.

MikusR• 8 years ago

Neither Android nor ChromeOS are open source. Only parts of them are.

virgilp2• 8 years ago

You could've skipped the last paragraph as it adds nothing to the discussion.

nukeop3• 8 years ago

It reveals the poster's affiliation, which is pretty important in assessing the usefulness of his post

batty_alex• 8 years ago

First, How does this have anything to do with the alt-right?

That's just a distraction from your argument that we shouldn't criticize the actions of Google because they give away some research. Google, and others, have turned open source into a free marketing campaign. Most of it is only open source in the "source available" sense.

You could fork it, but the sheer size and magnitude of insider contributions makes it as useful as packaged software that came with source code.

jacksmith2100622• 8 years ago

It appears a lot of the negative Google stuff I read is driven by emotions upset with the alt right thinking they are against them. Seems to have started with firing Damore.

I have ZERO problem criticizing anyone. But if we look at all the tech companies there has never been any tech company that give away more IP than Google. Nobody even close.

So my post is a lot more about removing the social politics emotions and look at actual data.

It is crazy giving away Borg and the K8S trademark. But Google has open sourced so much stuff. We have five OSs today. iOS, OS X, Windows, Android and ChromeOS.

Two are open source. Yes I realize there was a OSS of Apple OSs but that is NOT what is used today.

But then Chrome and well so many other things. But look at giving away Map/Reduce and GFS and so many other things in papers.

I tire a bit of the bitching on HN and really worry Google will end giving away stuff. It is hard to see why they continue. There is little in it for them.

kuschku• 8 years ago

"Android is open source".

So let’s take a look at it.

If I buy an Android device from Google today, can I use it just with the open source version of the OS? No, I can’t. Is there any device I can use just with the open source version? No.

So, what is in the proprietary version that isn’t in the open source version?

The Dialer is proprietary (since somewhere between 4.4 and 5.0), the Calendar is proprietary (since 4.4), the Contacts app is proprietary (since 4.4). The on-device search is proprietary (since 3.0), the homescreen app is proprietary (since 4.4).

The drivers are proprietary, the firmware is proprietary, the libraries to use recent openssl on older versions are proprietary, the only way to do wifi geolocation is proprietary, the only way to run in background is proprietary.

Android is as much open source as macOS is: Darwin is open source, and webkit is open source, but everything inbetween is proprietary.

I suggest you read https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on... to learn about why your statements about Android are deeply misleading

scarface7413• 8 years ago

Sure parts of Android are open source, but what makes Android what it is to most users is the open source part + a bunch of closed source Google parts. Google has been closing more of Android over the years....

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on...

dep_b• 8 years ago

Android is becoming more closed source every year up til the point that they basically forked it without officially forking it. Apple has open sourced Darwin but the real goodies are in the closed source part of macOS.

kmfrk2• 8 years ago

I think Google are just terrible at product, plain and simple.

I just looked at the new YouTube Creator Studio interface, and it's literally the biggest UI and UX abomination I've seen from a major tech company in recent memory. It's worse than the iOS 7 redesign.

jacksmith2100622• 8 years ago

Depends on the product. We just got YouTube TV and just love it and same with Google Photos. But then there are other Google products that are poor and been for years.

They are now a pretty big company with a lot of different teams so not surprising some good and some bad.

kmfrk2• 8 years ago

It’s weird, because Google clearly have great designers and do some great work, but YouTube (as an uploader) is just the worst.

It’s great that YouTube for PS4 sorta works now, though.

I do wonder why there’s this crazy variance in quality.

monetus• 8 years ago

I recently saw a relative yell at their computer, as the chromecast popup menu grabbed the mouse focus and they couldn't pause the youtube video. I'm not impressed with their decisions in regards to UX.

chatmasta• 8 years ago

Hey, I was just talking about this in a comment the other day! I totally agree with the author here. I was surprised not to see any mention of cloud facing open source products. Kubernetes seems like a prime example. Google lost its containerization first mover advantage to Docker (remember google was famous early for its internal use of containers). So they targeted the next level up the stack of container orchestration. Kubernetes is a great project, but its clear priority is compatibility with the cloud computing business model. It didn’t take long for google to offer GKE on top of kubernetes. At least for now, there is feature parity between open source and hosted versions. But I don’t expect that to last long. I would be wary of the kubernetes project introducing features that only work well in google’s cloud.

The main externality of this open source EEE strategy is developer opportunity cost. When google swept into the chat market, they used their size and first mover advantage to push an open standard, XMPP. So developers who might have worked on other projects/standards naturally gravitated toward XMPP and contributed their time there. If those developers had known the future of XMPP, they likely would not have worked on it. They could have invested time in a competing, more open project instead.

This to me is the real danger. It’s bad enough that google gets to benefit from thousands of free contributors to its “open source” code. It’s even worse that they are taking those developers away from other projects, so that when google moves to the third phase of EEE, there are no viable alternatives.

jacksmith2100622• 8 years ago

Google completely gave away K8s including even the brand. So not sure what you think Google will do?

They are giving away everything they learned with Borg and you somehow take it as a negative? Really?

Do think from a business standpoint not sure why Google would give up the K8s brand but it is good for everyone.

I really worry that Google will stop opens sourcing and more important sharing so much through papers when people b*tch so much.

Starting to be hard to see why they even do it any longer. Who else have a huge competitive advantage with something like Borg and just gives it away to the industry?

But I am someone super curious and just probably spend more time on

https://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

Read most of the paper. But then what they presented at NIPS. My favorite paper right now is

https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01208

Bigger example is how much they give away in terms of AI/ML.

hellepardo3• 8 years ago

Bigger example is how much they give away in terms of AI/ML.

You think they are publishing all these papers and open-sourcing TensorFlow for the good of the community solely?

No... if the entire ML community publishes papers with TensorFlow as code, then now Google can sell that many more TPUs and that much more access to their cloud systems to run the models...

LamaOfRuin• 8 years ago

Do think from a business standpoint not sure why Google would give up the K8s brand but it is good for everyone.

Because with Borg they only had an advantage with their own products' operations. That's nice, in that they are able to maintain a decent amount of technical superiority and have their product reliability be leading or tied for first, but it's not a clear line between this and them generating more revenue. They want their cloud offering to compete with AWS and Azure, which is why they want K8s to gain mindshare. GCE has huge potential for growth and significant switching costs; meaning they need to get new products on it sooner rather than later, and developer mindshare is the way to do that.

hellepardo3• 8 years ago

I have always felt that, in a "typical" open-source project, I could approach the community, join it, build some rapport, and eventually help with the decision-making process (assuming I was any good and people in the community liked me).

But with Google-run (or other company-run) open-source projects, it's a completely different story. Want to be a TensorFlow maintainer? Great, sure, you can contribute, but you'll never get to make any decisions about the direction of the project itself unless you're inside Google.

To me it's a disappointing semi-abuse of the term "open source"... it doesn't mean what I think it should...

FLUX-YOU2• 8 years ago

If you are good enough to contribute to Tensorflow and be able to come up with new directions, why not just get a job at Google so you can do that?

This isn't unlike any other open source project ran by people who don't want to consider all input from others. Not all suggestions are worth serious consideration, after all. Open source doesn't mean I'm beholden to your every whim just because you've contributed. That's what forks are for.

golergka2• 8 years ago

assuming I was any good and people in the community liked me

...you could always find other people who think the same way and create a fork.

cromwellian2• 8 years ago

This is true of any large project. Do you think you’ll be able join Linux and make decisions about Linux kernel architecture?

The larger and more important a project, the more bureaucratic it will be, and the more people you’ll be competitive with for attention.

kogir• 8 years ago

I don’t understand your XMPP example. Google didn’t and doesn’t decide the fate of XMPP. Most developers who targeted it only cared about where the users were, and features supported by the most popular servers and clients.

Would you have preferred that those developers reverse engineer something closed source Google developed instead? Libpurple has advanced messaging not at all, only been great for interoperability.

dontchooseanick2• 8 years ago

I've worked on XMPP.

Google talk / now hangouts once was an XMPP pusher. XMPP is decentralized. As with mail servers you can advertise your own XMPP servers, see https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/SRV_Records , you can even publish a per-user DNS record with an OTR key.

I shut down my XMPP endpoint a few monthes ago because Google had stopped supporting XMPP bridging to hangouts. Now that everybody uses hangouts (coders) or slack (teams/corporates) or whatsapp/messenger/skype (everyone else) there is no incentive to support it anymore (I speak now only IRC with coders)

They gave their support and a lot of traction to the protocol, and removed it on a second step (once advocates of XMPP, _yes, like me_ said to everyone, "yes you should prefer gmail+talk, they are supporting open standards")

Looks like an approaching-with-good-intentions and then disrupting strategy to me. Even if you disagree on the responsibility of XMPP rise and fall, they are the bull in a china shop : don't drink the kool aid, you'll end up broken.

jononor• 8 years ago

Gmail/Google was one of the biggest platforms that supported XMPP. Then they removed it completely, with of course made supporting XMPP less meaningful/attractive for others.

jchw3• 8 years ago

Call me naive but I disagree with the points about Kubernetes. While they did make Kubernetes specifically for their GKE offering, it was before Docker Swarm even existed, so it didn't directly compete with Docker. I doubt Swarm was doomed to failure; more, it felt like the priorities were off (it was simpler than Kubernetes at the cost of being less useful.)

Further, Google has been taking the Google bits out of Kubernetes. They declined to call their own offering "Google Kubernetes Engine" officially until the playing field was level and they had a certification program. Amazon, Azure, DigitalOcean and others are implementing their own managed Kubernetes solutions.

Google doesn't have to cheat here. Speaking as someone dealing with Google Cloud directly, they are mainly hitting on the point that Google Cloud offers better network and disk performance, in a more flexible manner, for significantly less money. And honest to God they're right. The CPU performance is worse in some cases, but we're saving money on workloads so far.

On the flip side, as long time AWS users, the Kubernetes experience has been pretty good since Kubernetes 1.3. New features typically support AWS pretty early in, with the main exception being Ingress controllers (for good reason: ALBs weren't even released when that became a thing.)

Google is one of those companies big enough to make it easy to feel like they have evil ulterior motives, but I'll be honest: in my dealings with them, I've felt that the opposite is true and generally the intentions are good.

scarface7413• 8 years ago

I wouldn't trust my business to Google Cloud Platform because they have a habit of abandoning services that aren't related to their core business - search and ads.

I have more confidence in Amazon and Microsoft.

bryanlarsen4• 8 years ago

IMO Kubernetes is safe. It has way too many outside contributors for Google to pull it back in. And it's going in the opposite direction as you describe: networking, storage and ingress used to be considerably more clunky on non-GKE based installations, but now we're at the stage where people are starting to use third-party ingress and storage plugins on GKE because those have features that the Google implementation doesn't have.

And Google is probably ecstatic. It's disrupting the AWS monopoly that was developing, tons of outside developers are improving GKE for them, and it's running a textbook "commoditize your complements" play.

Compare that with Android, which Google is successfully doing the EEE strategy on. Despite widespread usage, it has few outside contributors, so Google is bearing all of the costs of it being open source without reaping few of the benefits.

But that's Google's fault. It's hard to build and contribute to Android. Development is done privately and thrown over the wall.

OTOH, it's easy to contribute to Kubernetes, and it's done in the open.

scrollaway2• 8 years ago

Posted further down, but I'll move it here since it's more relevant to android's development:

So a few years ago I created an open source community in gaming (which coincidentally, the author of this blog post was a part of early on). We had a Github organization, an IRC channel, etc. It was fun.

At some point I grew part of the community into a company, which today is growing and thriving. We're rooted in open source. I'm rooted in open source (Nearly all my work has been public and on Github for the past decade).

Today we still have nearly all our work up and public on Github but get next to zero external contributions. Because contributing as someone external to the company is hard.

Unless your actual goal as the company is to produce free & open source software, it's going to be really, really hard to make it possible for external actors to contribute to the core products as smoothly as for the company's employees. There's loads of things that pile up, like reusing internal CI systems for testing, requiring API keys and passwords for access to resources that are required or highly useful for development (eg. testing a redshift environment), and so on. All those things are fixable, but take a huge amount of time to fix, and why would you fix it if nearly nobody external to the company is contributing anyway? It's not like making the experience easy is a guaranteed win either.

Things like product design, project management, etc... it's not obvious how to make those open processes. It's not like you can do part time project management contributions to any random open source project out there. And when the processes aren't open, the barrier of entry to contribution is that much higher.

And quite frankly, certain people (who will recognize themselves) make it extremely unappealing to spend a lot of efforts on keeping the entire project open. The kind of people who will complain about every little detail of how you're trying to open up the project, until its name is prefixed with GNU/. "All or nothing" is an atrocious approach to open source and actively harms the ecosystem.

Point is, don't blame Google for making Android and Chromium hard to contribute to. It's not like it's on purpose, it just takes a huge investment for it to be possible. I mean fuck, Firefox isn't exactly easy to contribute to, and Mozilla is one of the most open companies out there, and in many ways a role model of how an open source company should be run.

seba_dos1• 8 years ago

Uhm... Google wasn't the first to use XMPP. XMPP is also as open as a project can be. It's still going strong, providing a modern, mobile friendly IM protocol - it just happens without Google now. XMPP never was a Google project of any kind. They just played EEE by having the biggest server and making it incompatible with the rest of the network. That's a completely different story that what it seems from your post - no external development happened to progress Google's service in any way.

Google backstabbed XMPP, sure, but it's healing pretty well. I don't see how any time spend by developers on XMPP is wasted just because Google backed off. They took their userbase with them, sure, but if you want modern, open, federated IM network, XMPP is a sane choice. The only proper alternative these days is Matrix, but that's more of an IRC replacement.

shmerl2• 8 years ago

These days, Microsoft seems to have turned the other leaf, contributing to a huge amount of open source and supporting open standards, and is becoming a good citizen of the technology community.

In some cases, but not in others. MS never joined the Vulkan working group, instead insisting on its DirectX lock-in. MS's Outlook / ActiveSync is still not an open standard which makes it a major pain to use. exFAT isn't an open standard despite MS pushing it on SD cards storage. And so on and so forth.

And XMPP story isn't any better either. Google should be blamed of course for deserting, but so is MS who never joined the effort to begin with.

Mediterraneo10• 8 years ago

it’s infamous for having an extremely strict spam filter for incoming emails from people who run personal or niche mail servers.

I run my own mail server and I have zero problems with reaching Google Mail users. Google – like other big mail providers – just expects you to set up DMARC and DKIM authentication for your server, which is not hard to do. Linode already provides a convenient guide to setting this up for any Ubuntu or Debian installation.

aceon48• 8 years ago

AMP's point isn't to "reward" faster pages. The mobile web is garbage and 80% of pages are hot dumpster UX fires that take several second to load.

AMP's point is to help standardize the excellence of the few pages that actually are performant. Any rankings boost was a carrot for early adopters. In july, page speed will have greater importantance ranking for pages generally.

tehabe2• 8 years ago

There are also a view counterexamples, for example that Google abandoned its native client in favour of webassembly when the standard took form. The same with progressive web apps which will replace the "web apps" in Chrome.

I was also sad when Google Talk was shutdown for Hangouts but to be honest, XMPP was going nowhere. The quality of available clients was very different. You had awful clients like Apple iChat (which is still awful), complete client like Psi which stopped at some point, clients which wanted to be everything like Adium/Pidgin, etc. pp.

Google Reader was indeed sad and really weird, they could have build on top of their social networks they already had but they wanted something new and shiny. I still look for a good replacement.

jacksmith2100622• 8 years ago

The Google Reader one is so baffling and love to hear the real story at some point.

ebikelaw• 8 years ago

Boring story. Vic Gundotra, the clueless jackass from Microsoft that Google made SVP for Social did not think RSS fit into his idiotic vision so he shut it off.

Eridrus• 8 years ago

Google Reader was a product in decline with low usage numbers and revenue, and it really wasn't aligned with the way the world/web was headed, this made it hard to retain engineers on the project since it was a career dead end.

We all have a soft spot in our hearts for Reader, but the world has largely moved on to algorithmic feeds, because that's what most users want. Most users are intimidated by the fact that you have to find people to follow on Twitter, let alone find RSS feeds.

Boulth2• 8 years ago

W.r.t. XMPP have you seen https://Conversations.im or https://dino.im? I'm using the former daily and the experience is very good, it's a modern messanger. Hangouts is stuck in the past.

tehabe2• 8 years ago

I know Conversations, I like it but I lost all my Jabber contacts over the years (also due to the fact that the server I was using shut down). So, my list is empty. I have not tried Dino (I don't use Linux at the moment).

gmenegatti• 8 years ago

This is true, not just for technical side, but also on business side.

Google just did it again on the Ads business:

https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/googles-gdpr-cons...

minikites• 8 years ago

Does Gmail still cause trouble with vanilla IMAP clients? I remember something about how "tags" in Gmail showed up as folders in the client, but since emails could have multiple tags it caused lots of problems.

(I use Fastmail, an email service that's much better and standards compliant.)

ocdtrekkie6• 8 years ago

It does. Deleting things in an IMAP client usually means "removing the tag corresponding with that folder" in Gmail. There's a hilarious tendency for things you delete in IMAP to just be in "All Mail" with no labels in Gmail, for instance. I used to use Gmail on a Windows phone for a while, and the issues were painful.

Note that FastMail is developing JMAP, a replacement standard for IMAP. And even though FastMail itself doesn't support labels, they've made sure their new standard can support Gmail's currently proprietary way of handling mail correctly. Hopefully JMAP will take off and we'll see better email clients in the future.

shmerl2• 8 years ago

You need to configure your client to do expunge in addition to delete.

nukeop3• 8 years ago

Google gets 97% of its income from selling ads and analytics, everything else they do or produce exists only to serve this goal and to strengthen their monopoly and entrench their position even further. A browser to dictate internet standards so they can push towards more surveillance, a mobile operating system so they can control most of the world's mobile devices with an iron fist, email service and cloud storage platform so they can get better profiling data and so on.

Any code that is shared for free under the guise of "open sourcing" is most of the time either a byproduct of their internal research that will not lose any value by sharing it (or will actually make non-employees extend it and work on it for free for Google's benefit), or something so specific to the company that nobody stands to gain anything from adopting it.

Google is first and foremost an advertising and user profiling company, it is useful to think about them from this perspective as it explains most of their actions with perfect clarity.

jacksmith2100622• 8 years ago

Actually 88% but close.

nukeop3• 8 years ago

At their size it's hard to estimate but it's definitely in the 90% range. I've seen estimates of 85-99% of revenue coming from advertising.

crispyporkbites• 8 years ago

This does feel like a familiar turning point for google- how long until they are the slow moving incumbent in the market and ripe for disruption?

If you’re thinking about taking on google in a specific product area, now is probably a good time to start.

scarface7413• 8 years ago

An ad blocker + reader view could very well take care of most slow loading web pages. What are the chances that Google will build an infrastructure that allows third party ad blockers to work with Chrome on Android? Yes I know that you can download other browsers,but embedded web views still use Chrome.

romanovcode2• 8 years ago

Google is experimenting with putting ad content seamless together with regular search results so an ad-blocker will not help you at all.

yoz-y• 8 years ago

One thing I would add is constantly pushing the web standards forward with little regard to other players. They are adding features so fast that only the biggest structures can keep up. Many of these seem to exist just so ChromeOS can actually be considered a real OS.

Writing a secure and up to date HTML rendering engine from ground up is now almost impossible (kudos to Mozilla to actually doing that).

zzzcpan• 8 years ago

Yeah, web standards and the whole Chrome browser is a prime example of embrace, extend, extinguish strategy from Google.

oscargrouch• 8 years ago

In the case of browser it would become: embrace, extend til no one else can keep up without expending a lot on it, kill competitors that do not have the pockets to follow up and monopolize

gcp3• 8 years ago

The problem is that they push "standards" but the implementation of the standards often does not function as written.

Typically standard bodies avoid this by requiring two independent implementations, but the market situation really means that the standard is what Chrome implements, and nothing else.

romanovcode2• 8 years ago

They also ignore many things they push.

dontchooseanick2• 8 years ago

Have you noticed how <custom-elements />, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Components, have become google web fundamentals, see https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/web-component....

Nobody discusses v1 vs v2, x-tags vs webcomponents polyfills even though mozilla had it right (all-in-one js vs typed sub-sections like shadow DOM)

Having worked on both XMPP and CustomElements I couldn't agree more.

Gosh, I've even already written on the quasi-impossibility to use Android as a non-google open-source system, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14516538&p=2#14526788

So kudos to Mozilla once again, they're the one pushing real FOSS

hapnin• 8 years ago

In 1998, Brin and Page admitted that the future Google would biased and poor quality:

“The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.”

“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”

“Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.”

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

quantumwoke• 8 years ago

This article reminded me of an old quote from J Allard, a former exec from Microsoft. Replace Microsoft/Windows with Google, and the result is scarily accurate.

"In order to build the necessary respect and win the mindshare of the Internet community, I recommend a recipe not unlike the one we've used with our TCP/IP efforts: embrace, extend, then innovate. Phase 1 (Embrace): all participants need to establish a solid understanding of the infostructure and the community — determine the needs and the trends of the user base. Only then can we effectively enable Microsoft system products to be great Internet systems. Phase 2 (Extend): establish relationships with the appropriate organizations and corporations with goals similar to ours. Offer well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards that have been developed in the Internet community. Phase 3 (Innovate): move into a leadership role with new Internet standards as appropriate, enable standard off-the-shelf titles with Internet awareness. Change the rules: Windows become the next-generation Internet tool of the future."

davdc• 8 years ago

Google's approach to open source may be about as transparent as North Korea, but I do appreciate their contributions. VP8 and VP9 never really had any competition in their category, and their collaboration with the AOM to ship AV1 appears to have been fruitful.

willnorris2• 8 years ago

Could you expand on this a bit? We've tried to be very transparent with how we approach and think about open source by publishing all of our internal documentation at https://opensource.google.com/docs/. Is there something that's missing from that? Or are you thinking about certain specific projects being opaque in terms of how their managed?

forgottenpass2• 8 years ago

The default google approach to open source is unidirectional source dumps after all the work is done. On some products you do a bit better, but still keep your cards incredibly close to the vest, and maintain very tight control. Even when you're trying not to, you can't break from that mold.

I've got this comment saved on my reddit account because it was so funny:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/53gb56/why_lea...

gcp3• 8 years ago

Microsoft...is becoming a good citizen of the technology community

By displaying deceptive ads about competitors in their flagship product?

Get out.

neilparikh• 8 years ago

To be fair, Google did the same thing. When chrome was new, they had banners on google.com suggesting you “upgrade” to Chrome for a better experience. And the banners weren’t only shown on outdated/old browsers (say, IE); they were shown on Firefox too.

ocdtrekkie6• 8 years ago

They also show for Edge, of course. And don't go away no matter how many times you dismiss them. Firefox is currently my main browser, and there are only two things left on the Internet which truly annoy me.

- "Upgrade to Chrome?"

- "Subscribe to YouTube TV?"

No matter how many times you say "No", they'll both come back. And you know that's not bad code, because YouTube literally said it was part of business plan to annoy people until they pay up.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147800/youtube-streamin...

shouldbew0rking• 8 years ago

Write more AGPL licensed code ;)

mankash666• 8 years ago

On open source and standards Google has been a leader. Contributions:

1. VP8, VP9 and 90% of av1

2. WebRTC

3. Nacl/Pnacl that was killed by W3C for no technical reason, in favor of an inferior wasm

4. SpyDy inspiring http2

5. V8 js runtime

6. Angular js

7. ProtoBuf and grpc

8. Android

9. Huge contributions to the looking kernel, and many many open source libraries, like boring ssl

10. Brotli compression and other related tech

11. Go language

12. Tensorflow

13. ...

It's a bit sensationalist to label Google an "extinguisher". If anything, they're a huge enabler in software.

Now, all the above doesn't make itself. A company pays competent software engineers to work on this full time. I'm in complete support of Google's attempts to monetise Gmail, one of their largest services. After all someone needs to pay for those engineers, and most of all, Google is a for profit enterprise

You're free to transition to any of the other million standards compliant providers, there's no data lock-in. You can download your email via imap, another standard that was pushed by Google when the competition was only offering web-email

craftyguy• 8 years ago

8. Android

Have you tried to build pure AOSP lately? Hint: you pretty much can't, it's broken. Google plays super dirty with manufacturers that want to use Android.

Google embraces, extends, and extinguishes

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