[nickbp]

The result is a dramatically increased page load performance that only works between Chrome (as it includes SPDY support) and Google’s servers (which supports the features for Google sites.)

Reminds me a lot of MS's strategy of adding incompatible features to existing standards.

[nl]

No.

Embrace & Extend is a well known, very destructive mechanism for subverting standards.

Enhancing existing standards with experimental extensions is a well known very useful mechanism for improving widely used standards.

As with anything to do with technology you need to look at the details to determine exactly what is happening on a case-by-case basis.

Just saying "that sounds like MS" isn't useful without examining the details. For example, many of Microsoft's extensions to HTML were very useful (eg, XMLHTTPRequest), whereas others weren't. It's a case-by-case thing, and asserting this is always bad is a very shallow interpretation.

TL;DR: Details matter. Experimenting by extending standards isn't always bad.

[yuhong]

Yea, I have to come to think that embrace and extend is not the worst thing MS did. For example, extending ODF would be far less bad than creating OOXML.

[tzs]

Extending ODF was not possible because Sun would not allow it. Sun's IP licenses for ODF effectively gave them veto power over attempts to add things to ODF that they did not approve, so that was the end of that. Sun's position was that ODF would support exactly the feature set needed by StarOffice.

If you ignore IBM's and Sun's massive FUD campaigns against OOXML, and actually compare the specs, you'll find that OOXML is not anywhere near as bad as they claimed, and in many ways is better than ODF. ODF does have nicer markup--I'd much rather read or write by hand an ODF file. On the other hand, ODF is incomplete in major areas, and other areas are imprecise. (Sun and IBM actually tried to use this as a point in their FUD campaign, slamming OOXML for having too much detail).

[ZeroGravitas]

It's seems likely that Sun's IP licence was specifically written to stop Microsoft from doing its well documented embrace, extend, extinguish routine on ODF like they did to Sun's Java. Instead they just emrbraced, extended and extinguished the entire idea of a standard XML office format. Nice work.

Weirdly, Microsoft seem to have incompatibly forked their own OOXML format and are in no rush to fix that now that they've seen off the competitive threat posed by ISO standardisation of a competing format.

[tzs]

StarOffice and Microsoft started work on XML formats at around the same time, and most of the subsequent histories are largely parallel. There was no EEE here.

[corin_]

I'm a long way from being an expert in the area so I won't comment on this exact situation, but an overall thought: the difference between MS and Google is that MS wanted a monopoly and were generally quite sloppy, whereas it's in Google's interest to have a faster internet for everyone, not just their users, plus they have the ability to push for adoption of features developed for their browser/servers, which could lead to other browsers, and servers (would it be Apache/etc. that would have to implement it?) adding SPDY support.

[jamaicahest]

How is that different? MS wants marketshare, Google wants marketshare, faster internet for everyone is just a means to an end: more people using Google services. I'm sorry for not buying into the Google-hype, but keep in mind they're a business like everyone else and they are in it to make money. If you ever need proof that Google is doing this for money like everyone else, just take a look at the history of their advertising services.

[corin_]

I'm not saying that Google isn't doing this for business reasons - it just happens that in Google's case, they benefit more from all browsers being better than trying to make Chrome kill off other browsers.

[roc]

This is similar to Microsoft happily pushing and supporting new bus/interface/port standards to allow many various hardware companies to bring newer, better, faster hardware to the consumer.

It wasn't because they were nice or had the consumer's best interest at heart. They just wanted PCs to be faster, because they had a monopoly that sat atop PCs. So they benefit when PCs get faster, get replaced and stay ahead of would-be competitors.

[shin_lao]

FYI Ajax was a "feature" of IE5.

And I truly hope I can be as sloppy as Microsoft and build a software that reaches only 95% market share.

You need to remember that before you were born "stuff happened".

[ericd]

One of those incompatible features that they added ended up becoming Ajax.

[pilif]

they were actually adding it over a well-defined extension point (ActiveX instantiation). Not by extending the existing spec (JS/DOM).

That happened later once the usefulness of XmlHttpRequest was noted and other browsers added it directly to their JS support before it was formally specified.

So this is exactly the way to extend (by using clean extension points) that Google was using with SPDY. This is different than, say, implementing a <marquee>-Tag directly into the HTML renderer which doesn't provide a nice extension point.

[VMG]

Except that the SPDY protocol is open in the sense that Firefox and other browsers can implement it if they want

[phamilton]

Google's bottom line is a result of the volume of internet content consumed. Their presence means that no matter where you go, you encounter Adsense ads.

Google wants the whole web experience to be faster. They don't benefit in locking you in. I imagine Apache/Nginx/etc will all have SPDY support in due time (while still defaulting to HTTP or a hybrid setup) and it will be yet another nice enhancement to the web experience.

[yuhong]

BTW, if you think what the IE monopoly did to web standards was bad enough, look at what the Netscape monopoly did to web standards. Saying that Netscape had a bad track record of following them would be underestimating the impact.

[lallysingh]

In a word, javascript. Imagine if we had a good language instead!