The inherent tension between the speed and efficiency of closed platforms and the decentralized power of open standards based platforms seems insurmountable. Except that's sort of what I find so great and so fascinating about Google, because it represents the one singular, powerful, centralized, commercial force whose incentives align almost exactly with the Web at large.[0] And I think it's really great to have such a power innovating on basically every layer of the Web stack, from protocols, to codecs, to browsers, to operating systems.
The problem with Google is that Google is pro-web as long as the web is pro-Google.
Take Google+ for instance - they could have at least attempted a decentralized social network, but they didn't. Instead they are requiring real names, because apparently pseudonyms are bad for Google ... and yet being anonymous is something which the web (in general) not only allows, but also encourages.
Yes, you can choose not to use Google+ or Facebook, but for how long will this freedom last when absolutely everybody will be on one of these social networks? How long will it last until email will not be the primary means of communicating at work with your customers or colleagues?
It's a pity that the millions of users with accounts on Facebook haven't discovered the advantages of opening up an account on Wordpress.com or similar services, with their own domain name ; or the advantages of using Google Reader to follow your acquaintances.
I agree with you that G+ would be better decentralized, and based on open standards. But I think they tried that with Buzz and Wave, both catastrophic failures. And I think the strategy this time is to try to nail down the user experience first. I think the real names policy is a part of that, too (though I agree, too, that this is a bad policy).[0]
Actually, Google+ is based on open standards, here is what Evan Prodromou (the creator of http://status.net, one of the biggest decentralized open source social network) has to say about the API:
> Activity Streams, PoCo, OAuth 2. I feel like the girl in Jurassic Park. "I know this!"
I think what many of us really want is federation or some level of interoperability such that we can run our own services that work transparently with G+ as a peer. More like the way email works.
(As a bonus, this would neatly sidestep the ano/pseudonymity issue.)
So, when I can run byjoemoon+ on my own server and interoperate with G+ users with complete feature parity, I'll be really happy.
Meanwhile, I think the API stuff is great, but only a half-measure.
> The inherent tension between the speed and efficiency of closed platforms and the decentralized power of open standards based platforms seems insurmountable.
Isn't this where open source platforms like Linux come in? Linux has been fighting for desktop adoption for decades, but the surrounding projects (Cairo, Pango, etc) that support that effort have evolved a tremendously powerful platform. An open source project could easily build and popularize an alternative to HTML and the like.
The problem I see is the entrenched HTML output (both static and from dynamic generation) of billions of websites. The longer HTML is entrenched, the bigger the leverage it has. And that entrenchment isn't wholly without merit either. Resolution and viewport independent UIs, especially over such a broad range, are incredibly difficult.
That said, I fully expect things like onmouseover scripts to disappear as we try to learn new UI ideas for multitouch devices.
[0]: I wrote a bit more about that here: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/166900257/why-i-trust-google
And a bit about the problems around the particular relationship Google has with the web here: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/7590977101/googles-existentia...