Wait, so Google is dropping XMPP support because Outlook.com is supporting it to allow Gtalk users to chat on Outlook.com, so in order to perpetuate the GMail/GTalk lock-in by caging the Gtalk chat users to GMail, they're dropping standards support and killing access to all XMPP clients in existence including non-Microsoft ones? And they announce this right when Microsoft spent all the time and effort to allow Outlook.com users to chat with Gtalk friends and is rolling out that feature? Am I right? Someone tell me I am wrong!
That sounds unbelievable, coming from the supposedly open company even though it's coming on the heels of them trying lock out millions of Windows Phone users from Youtube by sending a C&D takedown on the app.
I guess open standards don't work when you're the guy trying to lock in users. If Google had a lock-in on Office products, looks like they will ditch "open data" and "open standards" in a heartbeat. They should change their policy to "open when it's convenient for us to flog it for PR purposes, else closed, oh and please store all your office documents on our cloud, we make it really convenient.".
This is not Open vs. Closed anymore, this is Corporations vs. Individuals, except for Mozilla which is becoming less powerful because Google uses its ad dollars to bundle Chrome with Flash, Acrobat and Java updates by default thereby reducing Firefox's share and has the nice side effect of reducing Google's payments to Mozilla for searches.
And Web DRM? Of course it's coming because IE, Chrome and Safari are going to be supporting it fully with 80% marketshare and people will blame Firefox if Netflix doesn't work in it and recommend you switch to Chrome to see movies! iOS, Android and Windows Phone, BBOS will add support for 100% tablet and phone support for the DRM. Firefox and Opera are powerless to stop it. We have already seen this play out with th h.264 HTML5 video support in Chrome fiasco when Google said it would drop H.264 from Chrome but did not and Mozilla was left holding the short end of the stick and had to recently had to eat crow and add support for H264. The web is owned by the corporates, not individuals anymore, there was some hope when Firefox was at 40%, not anymore. And we all willingly gave them the power by believing in "open" and "do no evil" and switching in droves.
I can picture Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix etc executives sitting at a bar and giving toast to each other and laughing while we whine and debate fruitlessly with vitriol on these forums. All their stock valuations are up recently!