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.
They've always archived non-"off the record" chats, difference is that controlling archiving behavior is no longer done by client rather via a new web interface at: https://mail.google.com/mail/#chats
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.
Why is it not utilized more widely then? foregoing for a minute that everyone is cultivating their own gardens - what are the weaknesses of XMPP that would make it so easily avoidable for most of these apps?
I think the Chrome app is an excellent cross platform solution (written once, easily maintainable). As for the protocol I don't think it is practical or even possible to built this sort of all encompassing communications platform on top of XMPP (see the competition).
Serious question: how practical is it to build something like Hangouts that is meant to compete with iMessage, WhatsApp, Viber etc on top of XMPP? is it even possible?
I try to avoid these sorts of submissions, mainly because of their non-content and the subsequent familiar discussion, but somehow they keep reaching the front page.
It’s certainly your prerogative to use whatever you like but the incorrect assertions bother me, especially the prevalent one: “It's because I think that Google is now working against the potential of the open web”.
Here’s a rebuttal in the form of a partial list of links to Google initiatives that exist primarily to advance the “open web”:
I don't think the closure of Google Reader was any indication to the contrary, and all of these are certainly much more important to the web than yet another centralized RSS reader.
Other errors in that post: Chrome never ‘dropped decent RSS support’ as it never supported it to begin with, it was actually Firefox that dropped their support. Also there is no evidence that Reader was closed to “drive users to Google+”, there is no proof nor common sense explanation to support that assertion.
They do not "scrape" content on your local machine. They do incorporate stuff on their services including emails, as you mention (OpenTable, Amazon packages, etc).
If you've Googled these stocks/companies then they will show up on a Google Now card. Chrome has nothing to do with it, except maybe that you are more likely to be signed in when using Chrome.