Larry Page commenting about it at I/O 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pmPa_KxsAM&t=2h54m20s
Strategist commenting about it: http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-strategie...
Microsoft's one-way integration was them not exposing presence and typing notifications to services they federated with (but they were "taking" that data from others).
(Talking about web and native APIs)
> And I think that we've really invested a lot in the open standards behind all that
> I've been personally quite sad at the industry's behavior around all these things
> If you just take something as simple as instant messaging
> We've kind of had an offer forever that we'll interoperate on instant messagoing
> I think just this week Microsoft took advantage of that by interoperating with us but not doing the reverse
> Which is really sad, right?
> And that's not the way to make progress
However, if no one else is doing that, if no one else is playing fair (like Microsoft accepting things like typing or presence notifications but not sending them in return), then it turns out you're being constrained, and possibly doing additional work to add features, and the person benefitting the most is someone else's users and not your own.
XMPP's only major downside at the time was mobile battery life due to XMPPs limitations over cellular. This could easily have been resolved by using a non-XMPP accepted handshake (as WhatsApp did) or by using a completely different protocol for mobile as Facebook did for mobile (MQTT).
Google decided to go for a walled garden approach as a competitive advantage. There's no technical reason for it.
Google doesn't do even that, as they don't offer anything on-site (anymore). They have seriously failed on business markets. I don't know about consumer market, because I mostly just send dick pics for the giggles to random people I don't know.
I don't get that people complain about Microsoft software being closed, and anti-competitive ... well any cloud software is more closed and anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was on it's worst days : it's not that you can't get good documentation that the application you're using uses ... you can't even get at the data at all, in most cases.
Google is the best at this out of all the cloud players, but it's still abysmal. And yes, you can download exports. And there's Google takeout. Is the data there all the data Google apps use to work ? No. Quite simply, no, it isn't. There's plenty more they won't ever give to you. And that's ignoring the fact that there's 1000s of developers making apps for Google and about 5 working on takeout. Why should Google be forced ? Well, that's the standard we're applying to microsoft, isn't it ?
And this is by far the most flexible cloud provider exporting data. They're not being jerks. I don't even think they're trying to be anticompetitive. Nevertheless, they're far more anticompetitive than Microsoft.
And of course, conveniently, the DRM-breaking is now a crime on things like iTunes and Hulu and ... because it involves actually creating access into someone else's computer system or at least changing their code (even though you're paying for it to do things and only getting it to let you exercise rights granted to you by law, like copying a movie). And the result is the same. iTunes, Hulu, even Play are ridiculously expensive, idiotically restrictive (buy movie on iTunes for a trip, go to Europe, log in to hotel wifi ... no movies. But no worries ! I copied that movie onto my device first. Nope, it won't play. WTF).
Same thing goes for app stores. There Apple is the big instigator of forced-incompatibility (or otherwise: your app won't run without Apple's permission hardware). Remember the flood of articles scaring people that microsoft might do this ? They're still at it, with the BIOSes that supposedly won't run anything but windows.
The dreaded "the right to read" scenario ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html ) is far, far closer on the cloud and mobile than it is on your own machines.
