It's nothing new either, it has been going on for years. They've even dropped their support for net neutrality years ago.
In the mean time Google has been heavily pushing the Google+ walled garden, their anti-privacy and anti-anonymity agendas, and has been pro-active in filtering their services on behalf of the copyright-exploitation industry.
This is not a conspiracy theory, it's just a matter of connecting the fairly obvious dots that barely need connecting because there are so many of them by now all that's missing is an official "fuck the open web" press statement.
3 if I count correctly: Reader closedown (which, in my opinion, not a hit to open web at all), XMPP Federation issue (It's fixed now) and CalDAV whitelist (Not closedown, whitelist).
[Edit: originally typed "calendars" instead of "contacts".]
For free customers. It's still there for us paying customers. Google pays Microsoft a licensing fee for use of the EAS specs.
From hearsay, I understand it's reasonably easy to get on the whitelist if you're a moderately-known app developer or a legit institution. This would lead me to believe Google's reasons are less nefarious in this case.
Success like this does not breed innovation. Aside from some novel extra-Internet projects like Glass and autonomous cars, Google does not innovate much, and many of these services have stagnated, and Google does not seem to care much about Internet standards or about being ethical.
I really don't understand your angle with the second paragraph though. It's just the kind of stuff that's going to make this all devolve into a battle of words about who the best/worst/most evil/most creative/most underdog/most overvalued/undervalued/deserving/undeserving companies are. Frankly a generalization like that without any specifics or context is a fanboy thing to say. If you're trying to tell me that Google is a stagnating company doing more net harm than good, all I think it's worth to say is that I think you're terribly wrong, and I disagree.
Reducing your dependency on Google's support for open standards then becomes prudent.
Personally I'm sticking with a number of Google services, but I'm also taking precautions (backing up my data; my primary address is on my own domain so I can move away from Gmail easily if I want to (don't think they'd close it down, but they certainly can - and have - made changes that I find detrimental; I only stick with Gmail now because of a number of tweaks using Minimalist, for example)
It's not so much that Google has become horrible, but that they've taken a number of steps to be "less good" than what a lot of people have come to expect and depend on. They're on their way to being "just another company" instead of anything special.
If you are referring to the original article, the article makes it fairly obvious that the GReader event was the proverbial last straw, not the main motivator.
As for the second paragraph: My point is that once you have a certain amount of dominance, and a certain amount of traction in the market (of the kind that it's hard to switch from, such as Gmail or Reader or Docs/Drive), it's no longer important prioritize openness or sharing or standards compliance. Those things don't matter in the short run to your user base, many of whom are loyal by necessity (switching is hard) or inertia (don't really care, it's the default choice), or who just don't know or care. It doesn't really matter to your bottom line if you piss of a minor percentage (eg., Reader, or the recent post about Google not providing any kind of support), and the competition is so small that they don't matter much either.
Not really:
- Video: Till Oct '12, youtube's market share peaked at ~52%. [1]
- Email: Gmail surpassed Outlook in market share only in Oct '12. [2]
- Search: Google Search 67.5% as of March 15, 2013. [3]
And when they attempt to get out of markets so that other new companies can perform better, we get Reader like response.
> Google does not seem to care much about Internet standards
And how are you sure that FastMail and Vimeo (Alternatives suggested in the OP) are any better?
[1] http://videonuze.com/article/youtube-s-market-share-nudges-u...
[2] http://gigaom.com/2012/10/31/gmail-finally-beats-hotmail-acc...
[3] http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2255183/Google-Grabs-Mo...
> And when they attempt to get out of markets so that other new companies can perform better
I really doubt that they canceled Reader for such altruistic reasons.
> And how are you sure that FastMail and Vimeo (Alternatives suggested in the OP) are any better?
I don't know what their market share is, but I bet it's very small compared to Google's. In other words, they have to care about standards because they are nowhere near in control.
They are not monopolistic, like you said.
> they canceled Reader for such altruistic reasons
There is no evidence that it was done to bring more users to Reader (like the article suggested) either. They did allow you to takeout your reader content. So yes I do evidence that they hope that users find services that fit their needs.
Also, porn.
Sorry, you can't say "Outlook" when it's actually "Hotmail". Just because Hotmail had 400 million accounts, doesn't mean Outlook will have, too. Outlook only had 10 million accounts last I checked.
It's true that the visible feature changes have slowed significantly, but I'd attribute that more to the size and completeness of the existing products than anything else. It's also true that they aren't entering many new product lines, though for one thing I'm not sure that's something you'd lament and for another, I hear they've declared they won't be entering any new business that they expect to be below $1bn.
I just don't see much happening with other products. Chrome? Just getting slower and more bloated. App Engine? Does nothing for me that Heroku doesn't. Docs, while impressive, came out years ago, and Drive is basically a Dropbox/iCloud clone.
Google actually made a huge reverse-innovation with Google+, which is essentially just Facebook rewritten for the Google ecosystem. It's pretty much as invasive as Facebook in how it attempts to smear the contents of your private life across an impersonal surface, and it seems to belong to another era of walled-garden services that don't integrate with anything other than itself (posts doesn't even support formatting other than bold and italic, how's that for retrograde?).
Chrome: A hell lot of features that are pushing web forward, arguably the best development tools, significant contribution to Webkit (now to Blink), becoming platform for Chrome OS, v8 engine that serves as basis for NodeJs.
App Engine/Drive: So when Heroku/Dropbox does it, it can be called innovation but when GAE/Drive does it, it is just iteration? That's an insane standard to work against.
> doesn't even support formatting other than bold and italic, how's that for retrograde.
There is no way you could argue that supporting lists and headings will suddenly make Google+ an innovative product out of nowhere. What I find awesome are Hangouts and circles. They work very nicely for me, YMMV. You can set the entire profile to be hidden and no one will be smearing contents of your private life anywhere. I am not sure exactly is this complaint coming from.
There are technical innovations, but I thought we were talking about product innovations. Users don't care about WebGL or canvas or CSS3. Those things are not innovations to them.
The only significant user-facing innovation in Chrome is arguably the extension/app store. Maybe incognito browsing, although I believe Safari had that first.
> App Engine/Drive: So when Heroku/Dropbox does it, it can be called innovation
The word "innovate" derives from the Latin name for new. You don't innovate by copying. Heroku (as far as I know) launched a year before Google, and is clearly prior art. Dropbox launched years before.
> There is no way you could argue that supporting lists and headings will suddenly make Google+ an innovative product out of nowhere
I didn't say that. I said that the lack of support for formatting is old-fashioned (the opposite of innovative, really).
Btw, here are some Google products that it continues to iterate:
Google Maps YouTube Android Wallet Google+ Go AngularJS Shopping
However, if you don't want to count these ones, I guess you're right that most of Google's services have stagnated.
#sarcasm
Search, Maps,YouTube have not evolved much the last few years; the last true innovation was Street View, and the last truly useful addition to Search was the fact database integration. Android is basically just following in Apple's footsteps. Wallet I don't know anything about, so I can't comment, Shopping looks to me like it's still the terrible old shopping search that isn't useful for anything. Google+ is basically a reimplementation of Facebook.
Go may have been created at Google, but it's really the work of Pike and Thompson; according to insiders, the internal language at Google is still mainly Java and C++; and I wouldn't call it innovation, exactly, since there is nothing innovative about neither the parts or the whole; rather, it's a very incremental evolution of the general-purpose computer language tradition of C plus Oberon/Modula.
In other words, your sarcasm is wildly misplaced, sir.
Android, in its core, is so entirely different then iOS that saying "following in Apple's footsteps" is just wrong. What has changed in recent major (!!) iOS updates? Twitter & Facebook integration.. Seriously? While Android 4 revamped the entire user interface, streamlined ui & ux and allowed for buttonless phones (apart from power).
Also, Google Maps recently added vector based maps, a great addition to the previous bitmap based maps. Search has added countless quick results like instant currency conversion, quick answers to questions and instant results. Gmail has litteraly changed web based mail and still continues to do so. I do agree on youtube & go. Go isn't a revolution, it is one of the most boring languages ever. Which is one of it major plusses over "exciting" languages like ruby & python. Also, it isn't an offcial Google product, so stomping Go to the ground really shows how you are just bashing away.
Please don't say innovation has stopped when it clearly hasn't.
Of course Android is following in Apple's footsteps; Apple came first, after all, and established everything that Android has since also implemented. Whatever Google is doing, it's an incremental improvement on that revolutionary approach to smartphones. Google Glass is innovative, possibly even revolutionary; but Android isn't.
> Google Maps recently added vector based maps
I doubt users notice that. (I'm a developer and I haven't noticed.) (Also, didn't Apple do this first, with the Maps app?) I'm sure there is lots of technical, low-visibility innovation happening at Google, but that's not what we are talking about here.
> Search has added countless quick results
Again, miniscule, evolutionary improvements.
> Gmail has litteraly changed web based mail and still continues to do so.
Gmail launched in 2004 and has hardly changed since then. Sure, it got priority inbox (a minor feature, hardly the revolutionary feature they claimed), GTalk and themes. Not really innovations in any meaningful sense. Gmail is possibly the worst example of all, since everything after 2004 has essentially been polish.
> Also, [Go] isn't an offcial Google product, so stomping Go to the ground really shows how you are just bashing away.
The parent was the one who mentioned Go, I merely responded.
Google Now IS innovative.
Google's method for voice recognition is certainly innovative, as are the myriad ways in which they have implemented that core technology.
Google voice (grandcentral) was certainly innovative; the calling system and the text transcription in most specific.
My main problem with your exchange is my perception of you constantly moving the goalposts. I don't see how you can categorically reject 'technical, low-visibility innovation' unless your argument is presupposed.
Furthermore, most of these achievements are acquire/hires, and we have seen the big G push these purchased assets into new features or products. I would argue that this capability IS the basic facility to innovate the marketplace.
(gmail has indeed revolutionized webmail, both in size of free storage and in the mailbox organizational methods)
I am not moving the goalposts. The original article was about Google web products such as Chrome and Reader. The only non-productized item mentioned was OpenID, which concerns integration with the rest of the web and could be considered a feature of their user-facing products. These things are the things that matter to people when they view Google as a company. Not whether Maps has vector graphics.
So, yeah, for the purposes of this discussion, I do discount technical, low-visibility innovation. If we are talking purely about technology, then sure, Google is probably an innovation leader.
As an original GrandCentral user, I take this as a complete insult. Google bought GrandCentral and removed features. So chalk this one up to negative innovation.
Pretty much every product you said have not evolved is continually improving.
You know I say that? Because I USE them.
I'm 100% sure you have not spent time using these products.
Ok, so products created within Google by Google employees don't count?
What other restrictions do you have?
Can you please give a few examples of innovative companies these days? (And I am totally serious, no snark/sarcasm intended)
The YC portfolio has a lot of interesting, innovative startups. No products that I use myself at this point, though.
Right now, personally, the new idea I find the most exciting is crowd-funding computer games. Last year I spent a ton of money on Kickstarter to fund small indie developers such as Double Fine.
One of the more amusing typos I have written while sleep-deprived. Sorry.
What's clear is that:
- Google is seeking to increase the monetary value of its users
- the way to do that is with social media (see Facebook, who are winning this battle hands down)
- they will push open standards under the bus where necessary, in order to drive users to Google+
As the former PM for Reader puts it (https://www.quora.com/Google-Reader-Shut-Down-March-2013/Why...):
"Let's be clear that this has nothing to do with revenue vs operating costs. Reader never made money directly (though you could maybe attribute some of Feedburner and AdSense for Feeds usage to it), and it wasn't the goal of the product.
Reader has been fighting for approval/survival at Google since long before I was a PM for the product. I'm pretty sure Reader was threatened with de-staffing at least three times before it actually happened. It was often for some reason related to social:
2008 - let's pull the team off to build OpenSocial
2009 - let's pull the team off to build Buzz
2010 - let's pull the team off to build Google+"Whether they're "working against the potential of the open Internet" is another question altogether. They like head counts, but like certain fickle people in all of our lives, the idea of actually having a real enduring relationship never crosses their Aspergian heads. It's just business. We've already got enough of that ruining the world. Some of us actually yearn for a better future ... not just enduring life on the way to Alpha Centauri or whatever.
I've never met anybody at Google how was happy with the way G+ is being handled or liked Vic Gundotra. A lot of us rather he'd go back to Microsoft.
You can argue that they're against certain open standards if you want, but the canceling of Reader isn't actually evidence of that. Simultaneously putting effort into G+ is also not evidence of that. It's not even symbolic of that. It is only evidence of shifting product priorities, not outright opposition to open standards.
The singular data point that I can think of as being anti-standard is the pending drop of CalDAV for Calendar, which I personally think sucks. But nobody ever cites that. Everybody's pissed that Google canceled a product that they liked, and that's what's driving this never-ending criticism.