Lets look at technologies Google has captured then adversely affected either the adoption or implementation thereof.
* Google Reader and RSS
* Google Talk and Jabber
* Gmail and self-hosted mail (not exclusively Google, but one of the big mail senders)
The post's point was not that this is malicious, it's about what happens in big corporations with big ideas, big roadmaps and big reorgs. The fact that this has happened quite a few times is unsurprising.
I disagree on the third point. It was spam and scams that ruined self-hosted email. Gmail (and other large providers) became the solution to that because the network effects of centralized spam filtering made for an increasingly valuable service to users.
Oh, and, perhaps a bit ironically with respect to recent conversation and concerns around Google and its acquisitions:
In September 2011, Google announced it would discontinue a number of its products, including Google Web Security, which was acquired by Google as part of Postini.[7] On August 21, 2012, Google announced it would be shutting down all of Postini's web services and folding the service's users into Google Apps.
I recall that, but it was no longer in my conscious memory.
They implemented Google Talk, which was fantastic and opened it up to the world with XMPP support, again, fantastic. Implemented Jabber federation which again was great. One of Google's stated goals was interoperability[1]. Because of this a lot of people moved from running their own Jabber servers to Gtalk. Google then started to add non-standard extensions[2] and in 2014 dropped all interoperability in favour of Google Hangouts integration, meaning that with a Gtalk account you could no longer talk to Jabber accounts.
If this was Microsoft, the term that would be used would be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but it's probably more along th lines of team reorgs and changes in strategy. Google claimed trouble with spam XMPP federation, but this[3] article sums up some of the feelings at the time, and it's more likely that with a bunch of different products Google needed to consolidate efforts and the new team had different prioritie (like hangouts and wave at the time).
* Google Reader and RSS
* Google Talk and Jabber
* Gmail and self-hosted mail (not exclusively Google, but one of the big mail senders)
The post's point was not that this is malicious, it's about what happens in big corporations with big ideas, big roadmaps and big reorgs. The fact that this has happened quite a few times is unsurprising.