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Comment by hayksaakian | Hacker News Reader

It was ultimately a business decision - the same kind that leads to product shutdowns and all the other "evil" things that new Google does.

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Oh, a _business_ decision. I guess we can just let them continue to embrace, extend, and extinguish the commons we've built over the last decades, then. No complaints necessary.

(I'm not a GOOG shareholder, so their business needs don't matter to me. I _am_ now going to be cut off from my contacts, though. Part of markets is the feedback that comes with mis-steps, and saying "it's just business" does a dis-service to those of us who feel that Google has been over-stepping their bounds.)

  The [EEE] strategy's three phases are:

    Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product,
             or implementing a public standard.
    Extend:  Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product
             or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers
             who try to use the 'simple' standard.
    Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant
             market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support
             the new extensions.

How does this fit in with what Google is doing? Where are their non-standard extensions to XMPP (or RSS, etc) that weren't supported by the competition?

XMPP was essentially a non-player before Google used it, and it'll return to being a non-player after they leave. There's no big strategy needed to accomplish this.

This is not to say I support Google's recent decisions, but then again, I had already moved off their applications (Reader and Gmail) way before the shutdowns started, mostly due to the methods used to push Chrome.

They embraced standards via XMPP. They then extended them in proprietary ways, with Hangouts rather than gtalk. They then are deprecating gtalk in favor of Hangouts, and will finally extinguish it.

Hangouts is not an extension of XMPP, it is a replacement.

Google's extensions to XMPP took place via the XEP process, and were published so other vendors could implement them.

That's exactly the same thing. Once you own most of the implementations running "the standard" you modify it and close it so that nobody can follow your path.

It does not matter if the said modifications are called "G-XMPP" or 'Hangouts'. The result and logic are the same.

The rest is a useless fight on semantics.

The Hangouts protocol is not a modified or closed version of XMPP. They have nothing in common except that they're both used to implement IM clients.

SSH is not an extended version of Telnet.

And then again.. you didn't get the point. SSH and Telnet do the same thing, but nobody killed off telnet by getting everyone to use their implementation of it, then kill it and propose SSH as alternative.

Thats what Hangout does. Name 5 of your friends without a google account who use internet & mobile phones. See what I mean? They were using XMPP. Everyone could talk to them using XMPP. Not anymore. Wanna talk to them? Gotta use hangout, no way around it.

It does not matter if its based on the same _code_ what matter is that it offers the same functionality AND kills off the previous product by using their market share.

That's the freaking concept.

In the extinguish part, what got extinguished were the competitors', not Microsoft own products.

That is perfectly valid, to me. However, there is no reason to spread misinformation to cover such a decision and to bluntly cut off existing communications between people outside and inside of the Google Hangout domains. Without any warning to the former, even.

A lot of the shutdowns have been due to low (for google) user bases, or just no engineering staff to support it. A lot of their shutdowns I see as a way for google to become more focused as a company, which I feel like was needed. They had too many half-baked services.

As for XMPP, it was their business decision. I'm betting engineering had a good reason for it, it just may not be shared with us.

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