Over the two years Google has knifed a number of open net protocols, including CalDAV, RSS, XMPP, Atom and CardDAV and they split Chrome from WebKit. They effectively abandoned their wiki and web authoring platform. Most recently they killed Google Reader; the competition-crushing champion for standards-based change notification and information consumption. Feedburner is next, and Blogger will likely be subsumed into Google+ (and perhaps lose its RSS feeds).
It's almost as if Google wants to end the document-centric open web as we have known it.
But why would they do that? Doesn't Google make must of its money from searching that web?
Well, yes, they do. But, as many have noted, most recently Jason Smith, Google's search monopoly is shakier than it seems. Apple has been bowed by dual attacks from Google and Samsung, but they are likely to strike back over the next year -- probably allied with Microsoft and perhaps Yahoo (but not Amazon). Apple will use its massive cash reserves to survive dropping Samsung manufacturing, and Apple will switch its default search engine to Bing.
Google knows this.
Thousands of years of human warfare told Google how to respond. If an army cannot hold rich agricultural ground, it must burn it. Let the enemy eat ashes.
The web is a forest, and Google is burning it.
