This argument is false. Google contributed the protocol to IETF. Where the competitors introduced a lot of incompatible changes, which Google then implemented. The blog post is literally Google's announcement that they are moving to that public standard.
What other company could have done this? Was the fact that Google controls so much of the entire usage chain (chrome, google.com, youtube.com) irrelevant?
In this specific case only three other companies make web browsers with significant market share (Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft), so I guess you could argue only those three companies could have done this particular thing and you're correct that only Google owns Youtube.
But more generally companies have written up IETF paperwork for other protocols. Lots of Microsoft protocols have RFCs for example. But one thing that's less common is actually engaging with full-blown IETF working group standards development like Google did here, as opposed to just saying "Look here's the protocol we built, you can use that, or not". The IETF is totally happy to accept what I guess you could call a "donation" of that sort, and it's much less effort. Maybe you take some internal documents, you reassemble them into the rough shape of an RFC, you publish that draft, you get a bunch of feedback about that document, focused on clarifying the explanation, making sure you cover everything required, and so on rather than altering the protocol (which you've maybe already actually shipped in a product) and after maybe 6-12 months you've got a polished RFC ready to publish.
If you use a work VPN for example, or a corporate WiFi network that's not just a few home WiFi routers with a more professional SSID and password, you probably end up using protocols Microsoft "donated" in this way, like PEAPv0/EAP-MSCHAPv2 - these protocols are awful but there was no multi-step process where other vendors improve on it and then they eventually reach consensus and publish. Microsoft shipped products that do MSCHAPv1, then wrote it up so that other products could interoperate with Windows, and when they made MSCHAPv2 they followed the same path.
It might have worked if the majority of web servers had been Microsoft’s, but my recollection is they never got close to having the majority of the web server market.
The crown went from NCSA to Apache and then only recently to Nginx.
@doctoring Do you think that those 5 pharma companies would be interested in the service that would take care of data collection and alerting patient/911?
If it is possible I would like to talk to you about this and other ideas. Could you contact me at redant409[at}gmail.com?
The author and some comments tend to confuse skills, success, and intelligence.
I think the author describes successful and skillful software engineers who are far from being highly intelligent. It just happened that their skills of constructing program is highly valuable in the current market conditions. Which feeds their arrogance and leads to all kinds of ugly consequences.
The hardware engineers of the 20-th century had the same issues. The main hero of the movie Falling Down is an excellent example of such guy.
Could you provide an algorithm for deciding how many children to have? Then could you apply it to an average American family in 1950? I bet that any algorithm would tell them 'Are you crazy to even consider having kids? You just witnessed a global war that took tens of millions of lives. The world economy is still anemic. And the world is on the cusp of the nuclear war.' And every algorithm will be proven wrong by the baby-boomers generation.
I think your argument is a suggestion to over-rationalize in the absence of information. Exactly what the article is describing.
