[josho]

Google really gets how standardization works. They innovate and once the innovation has proven its value they offer the technology for standardization.

I previously saw companies, like Sun, completely fail at this. Eg. The many Java specifications that were created by the standards bodies. Sun tried to do it right by having a reference implementation with the spec. But the Reference implementations were rarely used for real work, so it proved only that the spec could be built, not that the spec elegantly solved real problems.

[username223]

> Google really gets how standardization works. They innovate and once the innovation has proven its value they offer the technology for standardization.

I wouldn't necessarily say "innovate" or "offer," but they do understand the process. You can make pretty much anything a "standard" with a bit of money and time (isn't Microsoft Office's XML format a "standard"?), but adoption is always an issue. However, Google controls a popular web server (Google search) and client (Google Chrome), so for web-things, they can create "widespread adoption" for whatever they standardize.

[josho]

> However, Google controls a popular web server (Google search) and client (Google Chrome), so for web-things, they can create "widespread adoption" for whatever they standardize.

Google's innovation is to make http faster over a slow unreliable network (e.g. a wireless device). They solved a real world problem, proved it using their own users and now are going to standardize. Their innovation is driving their standardization efforts.

If google didn't solve a real world problem then even with their platform they couldn't impact widespread adoption. Their innovations (SPDY and now QUIC) solve real world problems, so adoption will become widespread.

MSFT with Office XML was solving a political problem, not a real world problem. Ie. Office was taking a hit because DOC/XLS were proprietary formats, and governments were concerned about archiving documents in a proprietary format and were therefore threatening to move to open standards (ie. OSS office suites). MSFT fought back by pushing through a standard document format to offer their sales staff with a rebuttal to customers threatening to move to an open standard. Ie. The 'standard' only has traction due to MSFTs monopoly on office and serves no real benefit to anyway except for MSFTs salesforce.

[yuhong]

I have OOXML on my poorly written wishlist among with a proposal to withdraw it from standardization without breaking compatibility.

[xorcist]

That's not really the complete picture. People want to use the Google standards you mention because they solve a real problem and is proved in production. What problem does Office Open XML solve, apart from not being Open Document XML? You use it because of external factors, not because it is an elegant solution to a problem.

[pfranz]

I think Open Document XML solves a problem--it's just not an immediate problem. It won't make saving and emailing around a document easier, but it will make interoperability (I'm talking even between two versions of Word--not just between word processors) simpler. Even if it's not supported you have some recourse for extracting data. Tragedy of the commons.

Google has an advantage because there's an obvious win over the old standard and they offer a big enough buy-in. GIF, for example, is generally better served by PNG. But adoption has been slow because the benefits aren't good enough and wide support took awhile to get implemented.

[chc]

GIF this days is almost always used as a moving-picture format, which is not something standard PNG does. The number of actual GIFs being passed around these days that would be better off as PNGs is virtually zero.

[pfranz]

That's kind of my point. Animated pngs support 24bit color and transparency--which gifs do not. The carrot of transparency and more colors weren't enough to replace gif. It looked like the lzw patent scare would be enough but since that expired in 2003 nobody has been motivated to fully implement the spec or create content exclusively as pngs

[chc]

AFAIK the PNG format does not provide for animation. You'd need to use another format such as MNG or APNG. Am I mistaken?

[azernik]

Sure - what's interesting is that they use this power to eat the first-mover cost for changes that actually are beneficial to everyone to adopt. For example, they got a critical mass of HTTP2 deployed, and that has made it an immediate win for everyone else to implement it (non-Google web servers because Chrome, and non-Google browsers because Google Everything). This is similar to the effect Apple is having in making the USB-C connector happen.

The difference with Office XML is that a) there's not a clear benefit to the community as a whole to adopting the new standard, and b) they don't seem to have made any great effort to encourage their competitors to implement it.

[kefka]

Wrapping a binary blob and then saying <xml binary=start> ~~~~ <xml binary=end> doesn't make something XML. It's still MS proprietaryness wrapped in an open transport.

[scrollaway]

Honest question: Do you think Hangouts will eventually be open sourced?

It's really messed up that all our non-xmpp (a massive majority) messaging goes over nonstandard protocols. All our daily communications are behind walled gardens; one of the sorriest states in tech today.

Hangouts going open source is one of the few ways this could change in a reasonable time frame.

[StavrosK]

Why would it be? They had federation on, but shut it down. It's getting less open, not more.

[scrollaway]

Didn't say I was hopeful. But it is in line with "innovate first, then offer for standardization".

[cpeterso]

Plus Hangouts launched with an NPAPI plugin that supported Firefox and IE, but now Hangouts is a Chrome-only extension:

http://www.google.com/hangouts/

[magicalist]

> Plus Hangouts launched with an NPAPI plugin that supported Firefox and IE, but now Hangouts is a Chrome-only extension

huh? Not to further derail this thread into irrelevant topics, but open up gmail in Firefox. If you aren't still holding on to the old google chat, that's hangouts right there. It takes like 2 seconds to verify this.

[higherpurpose]

I think there's a higher chance Google would adopt end-to-end encryption for its texts, voice and video calls than making it open source.

In other words: very unlikely.