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Comment by davorak | Hacker News Reader

> All that talk about Client Choice, Service Choice and Platform Choice has been replaced with "if the other big players don't play, why should we?".

It seems like the impact of the other big players not playing is down played here. Did it not allow facebook users to start conversations with google talk users but not vice versa?

Playing the cooperation card first is what google did, but in the iterated prisoners dilemma you often need to play the non-cooperative card if that is what your peers are doing.

That really seemed to be the core of the issue. Now 5-25 years from now maybe google will have an entrenched culture of playing the non-cooperative card and will not reach for the cooperative card first but I do not judge this to be the case yet.

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I believe I get to downplay that because the federation they joined helped grow their own network, and allowed them to do Google Talk for other domains. I know many companies that have moved their XMPP stuff to Google for that.

Now those outside contacts are cut off, without any warning. Worse, they see their inside contacts online, can send them messages that never show up in Hangouts!

Those big players are hardly affected, though. Also, Google could simply block those entities that don't fully federate (only).

I believe I get to downplay that because the federation they joined helped grow their own network

Do you have any evidence that federation helped Google grow the network in a significant way?

allowed them to do Google Talk for other domains

Are you referring to Google Talk integration with Google Apps For Your Domain? Outside evidence suggests that federation is not used between these domains. For example XMPP SRV records are not required and ignored if present.

There are a few examples though where Google has opted not to support or develop standards. For example WebM, SPDY and XMPP and not to mention their continued support for Motorola's despicable FRAND abuses.

those are all examples of standards that Google has supported and developed, two of them originating at Google (well, sort of for WebM/VP8...the standardization, at least, originated at Google). I'm not sure what you're on the right track here...just because you come up with a new format does not mean that you're undermining old ones.

That's exactly what the EFF has suggested, in fact: if they don't want to use XMPP, publish the new format for others to be able to use.

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