Dropping XMPP is not the issue, using a proprietary protocol is. Had Google opened this protocol it would not be a problem.
Keep in mind that this decision was not technical but political. The Hangouts team is a group of very talented software engineers, unfortunately lead by a very incompetent person: Kate Cushing. Really sad when you think about it.
Not sure if you're trolling. Google+ has never been mandatory within Google. There's plenty of people at Google who despise Vic Gundotra and don't want to have anything to do with G+.
On the other hand, there are very active and vibrant communities in Google+, perhaps you should try looking them some time.
You're not missing anything. Most if not all of your concerns were voiced during the internal dogfooding phase and, as usual for G+ and Vic Gundotra, duly noted and ignored.
And still is really sad that Google employees still waste time creating memes about Michael in their stupid internal memegen site many months after his departure.
Personally I'd love to see a community driven extension to XMPP, with its corresponding RFC, which would allow feature parity with Google's proprietary crap while keeping interoperability and federation, so people could give Google the finger on this one.
Yep, I already warned about this a few days ago. I would like to encourage everyone to avoid using this walled garden service and make sure you tell both your friends and Google why. Say NO to proprietary network protocols!
The Netflix competitor is paid Youtube channels, except it only works in a few countries and it's not as good as Netflix.
Google has bet everything on social and are creating these satellite services to fuel G+ usage and adoption. You won't see anything revolutionary coming out of GOOG for a while.
I currently use Spotify and there is no way I'll be switching to a Google product. In fact I'm trying to reduce my dependence on Google products.
There is no successor to Reader, it's gone. Forever. Babel (Hangouts) is not theoretical, is very real and has been leaked already. It's just a walled garden (they threw XMPP away and went with their own proprietary protocol) so I personally would steer clear from it.
No they didn't. This is actually run by a third party as Google does not own these offices. FWIW Google has a pretty decent security team, although for some reason most of them are arrogant assholes (e.g. Tavis Ormandy)
I never understand this blind hated for Sony. The OtherOS thing was a reaction to the Geocrap clown. The people who design the phones have nothing to do with that anyway. The Xperia phones are awesome and Sony is actually one of the few well behaved manufacturers in the Android ecosystem.
I just found out about this comment. There is a bunch of arrogant and condescending Googlers that continue mocking you in both the internal mailing lists and the memegen site. Thought you'd like to know that they're still obsessed with you.
How could like the G1? The capacitive screen was awful and the performance terrible, although the latter was due to lack of optimizations and JIT in the Android VM.
Now that Sundar Pichai is in charge of Android I've been looking at alternatives and Firefox OS looks very promising. I don't use that many apps on my phone anyway and would like to steer clear of some Google products.
Keep in mind that this decision was not technical but political. The Hangouts team is a group of very talented software engineers, unfortunately lead by a very incompetent person: Kate Cushing. Really sad when you think about it.