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Throwing in the towel

Friday, February 12, 2010 by Dave Winer.

It's 3AM in NY and I'm wide awake. So I'm surfing the web, looking for an idea worth writing about. I found it on Tim Bray's blog. 

I see he has now accepted RSS. There was a time when he didn't. For some reason one of the guys whose name is on the XML spec didn't want to support the most popular form of XML. Like all such people (or so it seemed to me) he made it personal. I kept wanting to say to him "It's just a format," but the argument wasn't about XML or RSS, it was about something else.  

Throwing in the towel is a good thing to do. I don't know if the anti-RSS advocates understand that I threw in the towel too. I was originally supporting a different format, but had learned in previous tech industry battles that it's better to let the other guy have his way, if what you're doing isn't working. I learned this when I went first and did an IAC protocol for the Mac only to have it replaced by one from Apple. Should have thrown in the towel as soon as they moved, I later learned. Instead I tried to make the two ways co-exist. (My innovation in RSS was writing apps that support it, authoring tools and aggregators. I helped others bring their content online. But my involvement in RSS was the result of throwing in the towel.) 

This goes for everyone, large or small. Once a consensus has built, even if you're late to realize one is building, you do best if you don't fight it. That's why everyone in the tech business, from Apple to Oracle and Microsoft and Salesforce has built on RSS, and not been ashamed to say so. Everyone but one: Google.  

But it's not just RSS that they fight. Turns out their decision to not support the Twitter API in Buzz is not an oversight, just another application of not throwing in the towel. They say it's not an open standard, so they can't support it. I laugh when I read this. Is this the same company that scanned all the books without the authors' permission and then when they cried foul, forced them into an uneasy compromise? This is the tiniest of fig leaves, an excuse for programmers to go on an adventure of reinvention. To think that Twitter would fight them for being plug-compatible is ludicrous. They didn't object when WordPress implemented their API, or when Tumblr followed suit.  

It's time for Google to look at their culture and ask why they are this way. They hurt themselves more than they hurt anyone else. Ask Vic Gundotra how Microsoft overtook Netscape. They sure didn't get there by fighting them on HTML, which was every bit as much an open standard as RSS or the Twitter API. 

Yes, this impracticality of Google played a role in my dismissing "Buzz." But it was the bigger picture that makes me shake my head, thinking that Google could try to be great, could try to be a leader, try to foster innovation by acknowledging it. Stop being such a big company, at least a little, if only in spirit, and stop fighting the inevitable. If they want to be in this market they're going to have to be compatible with the leaders, before they themselves can lead. They could have waited until they had a developer proposition that was so juicy that every developer couldn't resist stopping everything and building apps for their platform. That isn't happening because their developer proposition isn't actually a proposition, it's a fig leaf.  

At dinner a couple of nights ago, my companion asked me to explain what I meant by the growth of the tech industry slowing. I was glad to be asked the question, because I wasn't using numbers to draw that conclusion, because as far as I know the companies of the tech industry are growing. What isn't growing are opportunities for developers. The tech industry, in my experience, has thrived only when there were no barriers to growth for small developers no one has heard of. The smart VCs know this. Bill Gates certainly knows this. But Google and Apple? If they know it, they're ignoring it. They're tightening the pipe, controlling it. Apple is doing this openly, by making developers submit their apps before they can be published. Google is doing it by fighting against obvious open standards, things like RSS and the Twitter API.  

A lot of tech companies, and Google is very tech, fight stupid battles, they're sure to lose. If they stopped to think, they'd realize they don't really care about winning them. Someday perhaps, like the boxer who has met his match, they'll throw in the towel. If they do it in time, they'll be a leader, and the growth will be amazing. But most Silicon Valley companies never get there, by the time they realize they're fighting wars they shouldn't care about, it's too late -- the cursor is somewhere else.