yanw

Sigh. It's the same anti-Google post on HN again.

That comment reads like reflex than anything with much though put behind it: "Google is closing a service", "Google is new the Microsoft" the same tired cliche.

First of all it's far form an unexpected announcement seeing as they have been developing another payment service in paralleled, and second "monopoly" is a specific legal term, it shouldn't thrown around lightly, it's not just another synonym for "big".

As for your points:

1) Great things could come out from experimentation so it's a new positive and by definition most of those experiments will fail, you can't really be any sort of a self respected tech company if you shun experimentation.

2) This is anecdotal, they have a selection of core products and when a preferential one gets deprecated it's done through a reasonable process as spelled out in that post.

3) That's subjictive.

Wasn't this a profile piece about the so called "whistleblower" whose "evidence" Google already was confronted with by PM this week?

Hyperbole aside (they won’t drop SMTP) that is a very narrow and unfair view on the situation, they at least tried for years to make it work with these standards and failed.

They were obviously the last ones doing so, and this new approach is mainly about modernising their infrastructure.

Is there anyone else of any consequence out there who is building these sorts of messaging apps on top of XMPP?

Google was the last one standing, and it just didn't work out.

And why cherry pick “standards”? how about web standard? Chromium is a very big commitment to them.

Edit: I should be more specific as I meant a federated implementation of XMPP.