>They're definitely on the "extend" phase of embrace, extend, extinguish.
When you provide even a little evidence that this is their plan, this may be taken seriously. As it stands, they are still a huge champion of open standards (hardly a "phase"), and have raised the price on two of their more expensive services (app engine and maps) - both of which only affect developers, not end users.
As it stands, your fears are FUD and nothing more.
As it stands, they are still a huge champion of open standards
As long as it doesn't encroach on their business. For example, given the enormous popularity and similarity of feature set among web ads, why hasn't there been a successful ad campaign standard that would make transfer and interchange of ad campaigns seemless?
This is a space that is in dire need of an open standard and Google is the company in the best position to make it so. This is something I've seen multiple companies struggle with -- it's a real problem. But of course, this is Google's bread and butter. When it comes to being open about things they make no money from, that's one thing. When you instill those same "values" against your bottomline then I think you're being serious.
Just look at Chrome. On one hand, Google claims undying support for web standards, and on the other they're adding a bunch of non-standard features to their browser trying to get people tied in. This is very similar to MS and IE6 + ActiveX
Gears seems like a perfect example. It predated the HTML5 local storage when Google found such a tool useful. Now the standard's caught up and Gears has been yanked in favor of the standard. Dart and NaCl could conceivably lead to evil, but I like the history shown with Gears/HTML5.
There's no reason that you can't both support standards and also offer non-standard technologies. The problem comes when you _don't_ support the standard but offer your own, non-standard implementation.
When you provide even a little evidence that this is their plan, this may be taken seriously. As it stands, they are still a huge champion of open standards (hardly a "phase"), and have raised the price on two of their more expensive services (app engine and maps) - both of which only affect developers, not end users.
As it stands, your fears are FUD and nothing more.