Imagine a car mechanic remotely helping you to do what's needed to be done. This use case is showcased in one of the videos and it is probably not as complicated as building an AI engine to help a user repair his car.
The furor is not about dropping XMPP; it is about dropping the philosophy of open communication they championed: "Client Choice, Service Choice and Platform Choice" (https://developers.google.com/talk/open_communications). If Google chose to drop XMPP in favor of some other protocol that allowed others to adopt and interoperate, the discussion would have been about the effort required to migrate. But this move by Google is a huge blow to those who hoped for a world of ip based open communication solution.
Google is in a position to define the course of internet and has used that power in several ways in the past. This move from an open communication network to a closed network, to me, is as defining as WebGL and WebRTC are, but in a very unhealthy way. Google's move therefore is clearly 'evil' (as per their own definition of evil) as it is a clear choice they made to safeguard their vested interests, stating that other corporations are unduly benefiting from their openness as a reason.(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfK8h73bb-o [2:40])
They stated that major networks did not interoperate with them. But in 2007 AIM started interoperating with Google Talk. http://gmailblog.blogspot.in/2007/12/gmail-chat-aim-crazy-de.... Doesn't that count? What did Google do to promote federation, other than asking people to contact them to federate? It appears that when Google was small, they tried to be open to benefit from other big players. Now that they are the biggies, they don't see any value in being open.
I believe more than any other company you mentioned, Google benefited significantly by projecting themselves as the messiahs of internet, purportedly promoting openness and standardization. They captured the imagination of people like us by promising to be only doers of good, placing the objectives of internet and humanity ahead of the corporation's benefits. They did so, as long as it worked in their favor. Those initial adopters who stood with them for these objectives are either absorbed into Google to work as if Google's interests are internet's interests or they are too few and left with fewer alternatives to significantly influence Google and its corporate objectives. With many of the influential personalities deeply affiliated with Google, we have fewer voices calling a spade as a spade.
Let us say each message exchanged in XMPP is about 200-300 bytes. If in a session (time between app foreground and background on a mobile device), user exchanges 10 messages, we are talking about net data transfer of less than 3K bytes. Each of those characters might be compared to 10 tokens while parsing (thee is scope for significant optimization). I think, the battery cost of 30K comparison on CPU isn't comparable to the cost of rendering one of those messages on the screen and it might be sub 1% of the cost of keeping the screen lit for that user session.
Optimizing parsing cost, at the expense of breaking foundational philosophy of their communication services, is hardly justifiable. XMPP has several overheads, XML will not top that list.
What if Mircorsoft had called Windows 8 as some Neo OS v1 (or beta)? What if they had said that this OS is:
1. Optimized for low power chips and is very power efficient
2. Cloud centric and integrates all the modern breed of sensors like accelerometer, GPS, proximity, ...
3. Supports touch and pen inputs as natively as Windows supports keyboard and mice.
4. Super fast
5. Runs your legacy Windows applications
6. Supports most of the devices like cameras, scanners, printers meant to work with Windows
7. Runs in several form factors
8. Gives a familiar .NET and HTML environments to develop applications
I think, calling it Windows has set an expectation for start button and desktop as the landing screen and led to this widespread disappointment. Microsoft failed to get users to approach it with a desire to explore. By making their new OS the mainstream OS shipped with every PC sold (with or without necessary hardware support), they neither chose the initial seed users right nor gave the OS a good chance with right devices.
Doesn't whitelisting amount to closing of interface? They may very well use the CalDav protocol which is open, but how good is it if the consumption interface is not open?
I made a chrome extension that shows a github repository's commits, issues and status updates against the repo's contributors in one view.
My team uses github issues and we have daily standups, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to get a cohesive view of the progress each developer was making and the problems he was running into. I tried to bring these 3 things together (commits, standup updates, github issues) to give that view.
This thing is really crazy!!