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Google-embraces-extends-extinguishes.md (4397B)

    

  1. ---
  2. date: 2018-05-03
  3. layout: post
  4. title: Google embraces, extends, and extinguishes
  5. tags: [philosophy, google]
  6. ---
  8. Microsoft infamously coined the euphemism "[embrace, extend,
  9. extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)" to
  10. describe their strategy for disrupting markets dominated by open standards.
  11. These days, Microsoft seems to have turned the other leaf, contributing to a
  12. huge amount of open source and supporting open standards, and is becoming a good
  13. citizen of the technology community. It's time to turn our concerns to Google.
  15. Google famously "embraced" email on April Fool's day, 2004, which is of course
  16. based on an open standard and federates with the rest of the world. If you've
  17. read the news lately, you might have seen that Google is shipping a big update
  18. to GMail soon, which adds "self-destructing" emails that vanish from the
  19. recipient's inbox after a time. Leaving aside that this promise is impossible to
  20. deliver, look at the implementation - Google emails a link to a webpage with the
  21. actual email content, and does magic in their client to make it look seamless.
  22. Thus, they "extend" email. The "extinguish" with GMail is also well underway -
  23. it's infamous for having an extremely strict spam filter for incoming emails
  24. from people who run personal or niche mail servers.
  26. Then there's AMP. It's an understatement to say Google embraced the web - but
  27. AMP is how they enter the "extend" phase. AMP is a "standard", but they don't
  28. listen to any external feedback on it and it serves as a vehicle for keeping
  29. users on their platform even when reading content from other websites. This is
  30. thought to be the main intention of the service, as there are plenty of other
  31. (and more effective) ways of rewarding lightweight pages in their search
  32. results. The "extinguish" phase comes as sites that don't play ball get pushed
  33. out of Google search results and into obscurity. AMP is perhaps the most blatant
  34. of Google's strategies, serving only to further Google's agenda at the expense
  35. of everyone else.
  37. The list of grievances continues. Consider Google's dizzying collection of chat
  38. applications. In its initial form, gtalk supported XMPP, an open and federated
  39. standard for chat applications. Google dropped support for XMPP in 2014 and
  40. continued the development of their proprietary platform up thru today's Hangouts
  41. and Google Chat platforms - neither of which support any open standards. Slack
  42. is also evidently taking cues from Google here, recently shutting down their own
  43. IRC and XMPP bridges.
  45. Google Reader's discontinuation fits too. RSS's decline was evident before
  46. Google axed it, but killing Reader dealt a huge blow to any of RSS's remaining
  47. momentum. Google said themselves they wanted to consolidate users onto the rest
  48. of their services - none of which, I should add, support any open syndication
  49. standards.
  51. What of Google's role as a participant in open source? Sure, they make a lot of
  52. software open source, but they don't collaborate with anyone.  They forked from
  53. WebKit to get Apple out of the picture, and contributing to Chromium as a
  54. non-Googler is notoriously difficult. Android is the same story - open source in
  55. principle, but non-Googler AOSP contributors bemoan their awful approach to
  56. external patches. It took Google over a decade to start making headway on
  57. upstreaming their Linux patches for Android, too. Google writes papers about AI,
  58. presumably to incentivize their academics with recognition for their work. This
  59. is great until you notice that the crucial piece, the trained models, is always
  60. absent.
  62. For many people, the alluring convenience of Google's services is overwhelming.
  63. It's hard to hear these things. But we must face facts: embrace, extend,
  64. extinguish is a core part of Google's playbook today. It's important that we
  65. work to diversify the internet and fight the monoculture they're fostering.
  67. ---
  69. **2018-05-04 18:12 UTC**: I retract my criticism of Google's open source portfolio
  70. as a whole, and acknowledge their positive impact on many projects. However, of
  71. the projects explicitly mentioned I maintain that my criticism is valid.
  73. **2018-05-05 11:17 UTC**: Apparently the previous retraction caused some
  74. confusion. I am *only* retracting the insinuation that Google isn't a good actor
  75. in open source, namely the first sentence of paragraph 6. The rest of the
  76. article has not been retracted.