Ok but that still shows how much Google cares about open standards.
And did you just say "few tens of millions" of users is insignificant? How many users are we here on Hacker News again?
And did you just say "few tens of millions" of users is insignificant? How many users are we here on Hacker News again?
Yes.
>How many users are we here on Hacker News again?
I'd say well under a million (or around that at most). What does that have to do with anything? Did anybody say that HN has a significant amount of users web-wise?
Slashdot and then Digg, which were both something like 100 times HN in size fell off the side and nobody much cared.
I remember reading posts by several people which said they weren't going to build a RSS reader because they didn't want to compete with Google Reader.. and then they went ahead and killed it.
RSS didn't really "take off" with mainstream users (I guess today's equivalent is Twitter), but it filled an interesting niche.
RSS -> Twitter
Usenet -> many proprietary platforms
IRC -> Slack
XMPP never took off
Many open, interoperable services died off or never took off, but companies built similar services and are enjoying success.
/s
Also, it's a lot easier to make good protocol decisions if you don't have to get them published into a standard and deal with the beauracracy etc. If you look at the level of polish in slack vs one of the many previous open source irc clients, the difference is clear. It helps to have money.