@ainmosni IMO both GTalk and GMail overtook their respective ecosystems in the same way; by providing a significantly better user experience than any of the other options, and then tying that experience into a service.

For GMail, that was a huge amount of storage space and a much better webmail UI. For GTalk, that was a client that was usable *at all*, really; pretty much every other XMPP was 'mediocre' at best, and that's what attracted a lot of folks to GTalk.

Of course, the GMail webmail interface only worked with the GMail service; and the Google Talk client only worked with the Google Talk XMPP server. So it superficially seemed like e-mail and XMPP, but you couldn't *actually* use it with those ecosystems more broadly.

So I'd say that probably the most important defense against this for the fediverse right now, is to ensure that there are highly usable service-agnostic clients that a corporation like Google couldn't improve on *enough* to become the Obvious Choice.

(Of course, current-day Google is pretty terrible at usability and doesn't have a great rep, so they're realistically not the big threat that they used to be, but the same risk still applies from other tech companies.)