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Comment by codereflection | Hacker News Reader

And Google continues killing off niche application vendors... WalMart of the Internet.

Screen sharing is a Skype feature. If having a broadly available free tool with deep-pocketed corporate support was going to kill off that "niche", then it's surely been dead for years already. This is just Google achieving feature parity with the existing players.

I mean, I'm as much a cynic as anyone, but I swear that these days it seems like Google can't catch a break on this site.

Skype has screen share but the quality pales in comparison to RDP/Teamviewer

I thought Skype offers only screen sharing, but doesn't allow to control other person's desktop. I might be wrong though.

I doubt this analogy is perfect. Location/upkeep/convenience are different in the software world, and one of the big problems with Walmart is that they underpay their workers. And whereas mass produced X and artisan X might be different, I don't see any advantage of artisan desktop sharing.

Maybe there is something to soaking up a market (RSS) then dropping it (though it seems the ball is being somewhat picked up there), But, maybe unlike walmart?, there is little reason to believe that was malicious. People (Kevin Rose, for example) were making fun of RSS being super dead in 2011. I am no expert, but I doubt it is a google plus play as much as a twitter defeat. Note: I personally love RSS, but if I was not a tech news junkie, it might be of little use to me.

If you want to carry on the analogy, Google has a debit card that only works at Google and unlike Walmart it won't accept competitors coupons and all the stuff sold in store isn't sold anywhere else. You also can't take it apart, and only people with Google debit cards can see any of it when it leaves the store.

Hangouts is becoming a nightmare of a proprietary locked in mess that is destroying decades of progress in FOSS space towards open standards for communication. They are killing Jingle and XMPP by depreciating Talk, and they are now killing VNC. They may not have played nice together, and they may be painfully outdated, but it isn't an excuse to take your toys from the community sandbox, go home, and build yourself a space rocket in your back yard and fence it off, because very few people will pay to get in your back yard and will stay in the sandbox with Tonka Trucks.

> and they are now killing VNC

Um, no. This feature substitutes for one small VNC use case -- a use case already largely controlled by commercial products like TeamViewer and Copilot anyway.

VNC has much broader uses than this.

Good points.. however I don't thing they're killing off VNC. VNC, I believe, has a pretty narrow user base. Google's addition of remote desktop control will be doing more harm to small companies and their apps like FogCreek's Copilot.

"They are killing Jingle and XMPP by depreciating Talk..."

As of two or three weeks ago, the Hangouts videoconferencing code used WebRTC, Jingle, and a variety of video and audio codecs (among which one could find Opus.).

If you run the software on a *nix system, you can verify my claims by checking the contents of /tmp/gtalkplugin.log while you're in a video call with someone. Note that that file seems to be flushed to disk at irregular intervals, and that it is removed after the call is terminated.

My point is more even if they continue to use Jingle on the backend they defeat the point of Jabber by putting the auth servers in a proprietary backend. The whole point of XMPP was to stop making messaging / communication formats that don't play in the same sandbox and can't interopt. I can't contact someone in a hangout (via chat or voice) with anything but a hangout.

I wasn't looking for a perfect analogy. Simply put that like WalMart killing off mom & pop shops, Google / Microsoft / Amazon are doing the same thing to niche application vendors who do one thing well to make a simple living.

Do you expect them to stop innovating just to avoid stepping on someone else? This development actually makes a lot of sense for Hangouts, and I'm glad they did it.

There is still room for others, especially in the spheres where using Google products is not an option.

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