It’s funny because they squashed open standards when they were the big player and then push for open standards when they’ve lost market share. I wish companies believed in open standards for the value they bring to society, rather than selectively supporting them based on competitive interests.

I think there is a pattern with Google:

Social network: Orkut was their one and only working social network. Google - it is not great, so we raze it to the ground and make a better product... and they were trying to do so for last 12 years.

Messenger: Talk was their one and only working messenger. Google - it is not great, so we raze it to the ground and make a better product... and they were trying to do so for last 12 years.

Photo blog: Picasa was their one and only working photo blog. Google - it is not great, so we raze it to the ground and make a better product... and they were trying to do so for last 12 years.

New site: Reader was their one and only working news portal. Google - it is not great, so we raze it to the ground and make a better product... and they were trying to do so for last 12 years.

Casual blog: Blogger was their one and only working casual blogging site. Google - it is not great, so we raze it to the ground and make a better product... and they were trying to do so for last 12 years.

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Google Photos is such a faceless product to the extend you get surprised time after time again to the fact of its existence when you see it popping up under different names after firmware updates.

Picasa was a photoblog, something with essence, community, and vaguely stated purpose. Photos, on the other hand... well, just a file dumpster with UI.

Orkut was great ... but not exploitable in terms of commerce. It lost almost all its market share in the industrially developed West, but was huge in BRIC countries. Not the target demographic Google was looking to exploit at the time. And thus it got killed.

Google is primarily a marketing company. They need to make money off of their products. In that context, all the products you reference, which I agree were pretty great, were not useful to Google. So they got killed, or allowed to languish, in the hope that they would at least drive new users into the Google ecosystem.

I do have to disagree with part of your assessment of Google Photos. You are 100% accurate ... it's a file dumpster with a UI that I routinely forget about. And that's perfect. I do not need to have a relationship with my software. But it quietly functions in the background, and periodically rewards me with an animation or AI-generated image? Hey, that's pretty cool. I'll share that with my family and friends. And that's what Google wants to see.

Well, to be precise, orkut was big in the B of BRIC...

Some of your examples aren't as convincing as others. Picasa was mostly renamed and migrated to Google Photos - which is a fairly good product. (The desktop app was a casualty in the process however)

sometimes question are ask is web code old, insecurity? does it scale? power profile, can we support it?

look at flash was massive but it was insecure and had to be replaced.

from my understanding talk had to be change due to mobile network usage and battery drain.

sometime it isn't black and white what kills a app and most of these products are free so it isn't like google owes you anything.

i think they could communicate this better with people be more open on why a product is put to rest or replaced

That's the old MS playstyle, which I expect MS themselves got from even older companies.

It's almost as if they don't understand that much of the value of iOS as a platform comes from Apple's consistent willingness to tell carriers to go pound sand.

I would guess that they do know that, but they think for whatever reason that they can't get away with doing the same thing. (Or maybe they'd have to sacrifice something else that they care about - if they started setting higher standards and got 90% of carriers on board, but the other 10% stopped selling Android devices, would that be worth it for them?)

I'm not sure if they're right, but I am pretty confident there are tradeoffs here.

>We don’t believe in taking the approach that Apple does.

I bet the person who wrote that is naive enough to believe it due to lack of historical knowledge. Probably 95% of the current Google employees were hired after XMPP support was dead.

Probably the person who wrote it is in marketing, gets handed down a list of talking points, and has no idea about the technical background of the decision.

These are all weasel words: "open ecosystem", "partners", "great experience"

They are signals that mean "closed" and "invasive"

Because people want party parrots. And there isn't a standard to send party parrots through XMPP. /s

Okay, a little snarky, but it makes a point. Chat programs have a lot of proprietary features that won't translate through XMPP.

Most of the features these programs have translate fine; you won't have a good experience unless you're using their client or another client with a similar feature set (though things to tend to degrade gracefully), but that's fine for the most part. It still gives you a nice realtime API for developing other stuff on top of it, most people will use your clients anyways, and if you're on a feature phone or something and can't use the first-party clients, you can still connect. It's a win-win.

> Chat programs have a lot of proprietary features that won't translate through XMPP.

Most chat networks are still built around xmpp - they’re just not federated and likely using private extensions.

Pretty sure XMPP included extensions for sending arbitrary HTML and binary attachments. Now, support for janky mobile connections, that's another matter.

XMPPs actually been really good at this for quite some time; despite XML being a bit verbose, it compresses very well and it's had TCP like stream management at the application protocol layer for ages, among other things. It was pretty bad at low-bandwidth connections in the early 2000s, but now there are people running it over extremely low bandwidth high frequency radio, so a janky phone connection is no problem.

XMPP had extensions just for that crap. The trick was getting clients that all supported them.

That's exactly my point. Thank you for making it for me.

> How do they expect people to trust this statement

Because they're using an open, industry-created standard. It certainly isn't in their interests to do so (unless Apple also adopts it, which... we'll see)

Right. Embracing the open standards - like they did previously (e.g. with GTalk), and then suddenly..."oh look, we've improved the standard, and we're not publishing our extended version. It's so much greater, but only works with this one client, made by us - what a coincidence."

Gee, I wonder where I saw this pattern before...nope, it's not like they're going to exterminate their Official Blessed Client once they tire of it, 18 months from now.

Surely with that attitude they're damned if they do and damned if they don't? If they make their own standard it's bad, but if they adopt an industry standard they're probably going to ruin it, so that's also bad?

If they've embraced an industry standard previously, extended it and exterminated, multiple times before, surely it will be different this time.