It would be nice if Google were publishing their protocol as a standard that could be adopted by others, and eventually adopted as a formal standard.
But they don't seem to show much interest in doing so. There are certainly plausible reasons for this that are not simply related to maintaining their market dominance -- it is cheaper and easier to be able to change your protocol whenever and as often as you need to for your business, rather than try to align to interoperability.
So. What options do 'we' have for trying to move things along the process you describe, where proprietary innovation leads to inter-operable standard, when some key 500 pound gorilla players show little interest in doing so (or in some cases arguably an interest in resisting this)?
There are some similarities between the situation with email and that of html and browsers, although some significant differences, but perhaps the relative recent success (relative!) in maintaining interoperable and documented standards in browsers would be useful to compare and contrast. Email does not seem to be heading in that direction at the moment.
It would be nice if Google were publishing their protocol as a standard that could be adopted by others, and eventually adopted as a formal standard.
But they don't seem to show much interest in doing so. There are certainly plausible reasons for this that are not simply related to maintaining their market dominance -- it is cheaper and easier to be able to change your protocol whenever and as often as you need to for your business, rather than try to align to interoperability.
So. What options do 'we' have for trying to move things along the process you describe, where proprietary innovation leads to inter-operable standard, when some key 500 pound gorilla players show little interest in doing so (or in some cases arguably an interest in resisting this)?
There are some similarities between the situation with email and that of html and browsers, although some significant differences, but perhaps the relative recent success (relative!) in maintaining interoperable and documented standards in browsers would be useful to compare and contrast. Email does not seem to be heading in that direction at the moment.