> I received an email from Google telling me that my extension violated Facebook’s trademark What did you expect? Any service, not just Google, will shut down apps and extensions for similar reasons. This has nothing to do with > I just don’t think it is worth it to put any amount of effort to build something on a platform that turned out to be so unreliable.
I do agree that any service might honor the takedown request for the registered trademark infringement. But what the author refers to is completely another issue: the complete lack of support from Google. The extension author complied with the request. Tried to contact several times an only got canned responses. I guess Google doesn't care much about people that develop for their platform. At least that's what I got…
This seems to happen to every company reaching a certain size and in need of some belt tightening (either pressured via investors or internally realized). Microsoft, for instance, has consistently flushed new frameworks away over the last decade, driving tons of Microsoft-centric developers away from the idea of building on any novel platforms and frameworks they put out. Google seems to be going down the same route by torpedoing APIs, torpedoing entire services, killing Chrome apps next year, hampering support requests, etc.
If there's good harmony between the broader dev community and a given platform, it stays. There's no point in supporting a framework that doesn't catch on fast enough (why invest the time?) and also no point in supporting outliers who have a hard time implementing a service unless -- as the author hopes -- it becomes a press headache for them.
...since I upvoted the link, I suppose I'm on the author's side here.