Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

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Bingo. It's very unfortunate too, as Google were uniquely positioned to be great defenders of the Open Web. Who else has the clout to do it now, as well as the motivation? Does anybody see Marissa moving Yahoo that way? I'm guessing "no" but would love to be proven wrong. It won't be Microsoft, you can bet on that. Red Hat are a moderately powerful company, but they aren't that big and could wind up acquired by Oracle tomorrow for all we know. And they aren't that into services and web-apps. Mozilla have a lot of clout on the browser side, but arguably much less so than in years past, as their market share has slipped.

Amazon? Nope, don't see them stepping up to defend the Open Web.

Facebook? Hell no.

LinkedIn? No.

Sun? Maybe if they hadn't been acquired by Oracle.

IBM? Maybe not totally ridiculous, but history doesn't paint the best picture of IBM in this regard. And they also don't really offer services over the web, like a search engine. Maybe they could scale Watson up to webscale and make that the new Google?

Wolfram? No.

DuckDuckGo? Right spirit, but I don't think they are influential enough.

Opera? Not influential enough.

Canonical? No.

Novell? Eh, no.

HP? No.

This isn't looking too promising.... :-(

Edit: Duh, I missed a big one! The Wikimedia Foundation! They are probably one of the strongest backers of the Open Web, and definitely have a little bit of influence, thanks to WIkipedia and related projects.

I think there is a compelling case Microsoft should move in the other direction. Will they have the right leadership in the future to do this, I don't know. Microsoft is not a lost cause.

I came of age as an active Slashdot reader. At that time Microsoft was seen as an arch villain that could do nothing but evil. Curiously, today Google has a far deeper and more chilling degree of influence far beyond what Microsoft had. Microsoft had a monopoly on an open platform, Google knows everything public about you, a lot of private stuff too, possibly can run facial recognition of you against every picture on the internet, and wants to also be able to predict what you are about to do. And they have a monopoly on online advertising. Unelected regulators and elected representatives are terrified of Google. Google has gotten a blank slate pretty much to do what they want, perhaps from a national security standpoint alone.

Google today, makes the Microsoft of yesterday look like a used child's toy.

I see the attitude toward any dominant government or corporation as a pretty good thermostat toward a group's value of freedom and openness, and quite frankly the free pass Google gets here (relative to Microsoft in 1998) is disturbing.

I'd like to see it, but I have a hard time buying that this could happen. There is a lot of history and inertia at play with MS, that argues against them embracing an Open world.

I actually think Yahoo could be a bit of a dark horse here, but it's hard to guess where Marissa Mayer's head is at in this regard. Yahoo have actually done some cool stuff, in terms of Open Standards and Open Source. They were early with embracing RDFa and Microformats, for example, and some cool OSS code has come from Yahoo, including, IIRC, Hadoop. But obviously a lot has changed at Yahoo since then, so I dunno what to think about them right now.

> Google today, makes the Microsoft of yesterday look like a used child's toy.

That's a childish opinion. A grown up would see how Microsoft is constantly threatening with a nuclear patents war, sliding in that pool of companies that can't innovate any more and so they turn to litigation.

If anything I'm seeing signals that Microsoft is turning into a patents troll.

The wishful thinking on Microsoft turning into a beam of openness would be laughable, if it wouldn't highlight the tragedy of human nature (we are so stupid sometimes).

>Google today, makes the Microsoft of yesterday look like a used child's toy.

I agree with you completely with regards to privacy and all the information that Google has about users. However, the difference is that Microsoft of yesterday had a stranglehold on users' choice. It was really hard to be productive by NOT using windows operating system and the whole ecosystem that came with it.

Today you don't want Google search? Use Bing or ddg. Gmail? There are countless other free webmail providers. Google+? You have Facebook, Twitter and so on. Youtube? DailyMotion, Metacafe, etc. Android phones? You have iOS, WP8 devices.

While Google really is very powerful, one still has good alternatives.

What a terrible joke. We are talking about a company that if left unchallenged, would have destroyed everything free and open source stands for. For what? For utterly selfish domination. Microsoft is rotten to the core from the very beginning. They didn't started for making "better stuff". "That doesn't matters" to them. And they proved many times that they haven't changed at all.

Influential or not, Opera surrendered when they switched to WebKit/Chromium. In terms of defending the open web, they're irrelevant now.

However, I wouldn't dismiss Microsoft so quickly. They're a serious problem on many fronts and will probably switch sides once this battle is done, but they have plenty of reasons to oppose a WebKit monoculture, at least. When you don't have many allies, you take what you can get.

Opera didn't have much choice after their 2012 earnings were well below estimate and the market for there desktop browser, despite how awesome it is, is just too small. Their only strong point is mobile. I don't know why they haven't open-sourced the old desktop core yet, I suppose it's possible that they are holding on to hope that they can mold most of it around webkit and keep it as good as it's always been.

I know it's insane of me to suggest this, but Apple has pretty broad support for many open standards. Most iCloud services utilize open standards, they created WebKit, they broke Flash's grip on the web, they contribute to a lot of important hardware standards as well as software (mini display port and mDNS come to mind). They've been a force improving clang/llvm. Most of their file formats are XML based. Big contributors to the *DAV formats.

Apple isn't perfect and is not an exemplar of a libre philosophy. Their most strategic stuff is pretty much all closed. But they have embraced a lot more openness than people give them credit. With Google moving everything into their own APIs it might not be long before Apple is more open than Google.

Apparently Google's even made their own proprietary zigbee competitor for Android@home. Whyyyyyyyyy.

You forgot Mozilla - pretty much the only company left that supports what you mentioned.

Mozilla is mentioned. :-) End of the first paragraph:

Mozilla have a lot of clout on the browser side, but arguably much less so than in years past, as their market share has slipped.

In the past a huge majority of their revenue was from Google being their default search, and I highly doubt that has changed. If we set up a scenario where Google are the enemy, Mozilla has very little influence there.

Whoops, completely missed that!

Redhat tried being a web company. They launched their own social network about six or seven years that played nice with the others as far as possible. Mugshot closed down after a couple of years, the source was still available last I knew.

Valve? They're like the new Google in terms of being a popularly beloved company.

Perhaps, Dropbox?

They are well positioned for becoming the filesystem of the web, and may have some interest in defending open file formats and protocols.

File formats, sure, but I don't think Dropbox is that interested in open protocols (or at least open storage/sync protocols), for obvious reasons.

> This isn't looking too promising.... :-(

Well, perhaps this is a market opportunity. Many people need products that embrace the OpenWeb.

Google was a good champion. But Google is an advertising company after all, and their primary business is to spy on your datastream in order to sell your attention to advertisers.

So now that Google seems to be abandoning the OpenWeb, perhaps this will create a void that can be filled by others...

I suspect "open" and "strategic reduction of a competitors advantage" are more strongly linked

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