Microsoft may have popularized the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish modus operandi, but Google loves that play too.

Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can trust them.

It really only seems like a matter of time until they have stabbed every single one of their customers in the back.

I wonder if that strategy is an unavoidable modus operandi, if so much of your management / work force motivation is derived from increasing the stock price.

...and at least consumers in that are not the customers, but the product...

The same strategy was pursued with Android. It was open-source, but Google set up the Open Handset Alliance with OEMs in 2007 and one of the membership stipulations were that OEMs could not create competing OSes based on forks of the open source code.

Over time, more and more functionality became linked to Google Play Services, which was not open source. The logical result of this was that OEMs simply went with the Google-approved proprietary flavour of Android.

How Samsung stay on while selling Tizen OS?

Tizen is a Linux foundation project, it's not an Android fork. In any case, Samsung can always arrange for preferential treatment as they are the flagship OEM.

I don't think any for-profit entity can be trusted with a monopoly over an important piece of infrastructure. It's healthy to have competing options.

It remains to be seen whether a non-profit entity can be trusted with such a position.

> Google Reader drove out most of the rest of the rss ecosystem

but how come it's not reviving now that the biggest gorilla is gone?

There's some inherent commercial unfeasibility to RSS i think, which google uncovered by having a free client.

There were a lot more rss readers popping up and/or getting more attention immediately after Reader shut down. Feedly was one of the earlier winners for example.

Inoreader is good Google Reader replacement (at least for me).

Even if Google revived Reeder, I'd still use NewsBlur over it. Once burned, twice shy.