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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

Maps? Gmail? Youtube? All these are screwed up? Compared to whom? Driverless cars? Android? Streetview?

Damn I am tired of people unhappy with one product line using it to damn the entire company.

I dislike how they are playing fast and loose with my personal information and seem to be building their own "walled garden" on the internet by sabotaging open standards like RSS. But if they get everyone to ride in self-driving cars I will forgive them forever. I cannot exaggerate how excited I am about that, it will completely reshape American society.

How, in any way, did they "sabotage open standards like RSS"? That's a pretty broad statement to throw out there - that Google is somehow undermining the open standards process. I'd argue it's done better than other companies, including Apple and Microsoft, in supporting open standards.

One example would be Calendar. First they announce that they retire EAS for CalDav. A few month later they announce that CalDAV will be deprecated and only available for selected developers and other services should use the proprietary Google calendar API.

Which is kinda sad as Google could have really improved CalDAV with their move. Now it is back to "walled garden".

While I think that pattern sucks, I'm not sure that "not supporting" a standard constitutes "sabotaging" it. There's a big gap between "promoting" and "destroying/undermining", it's not either-or. Saying Google "sabotaged" a standard implies that they somehow made it unusable for everyone.

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