Steve Jobs was “lying to us when it comes to FaceTime,” Zach Holman blogs.
“And we’re going to take it all the way. We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard.” – Steve Jobs, 2010 WWDC Keynote
“Steve went on stage and announced this to the world,” Holman writes. “Rumor is he also simultaneously announced it to the majority of the FaceTime team, who until that moment hadn’t yet been informed that their work was going to be standardized.”
“There’s certainly a possibility that FaceTime may still be ratified as an open standard. Maybe Steve just misspoke when he gave concrete dates and steps to open up the FaceTime protocol. Maybe it happens the day after I publish this blog post,” Holman writes. “But regardless of the reason, we are stuck here more than a year later, with FaceTime siloed strictly to Apple devices and (to my knowledge) zero standards bodies reviewing a proposed FaceTime protocol spec.”
Holman writes, “If FaceTime were open, we’d certainly see people working on integrating it. Within a day of Jobs’ announcement, Skype had said that they were interested in the technology available through FaceTime. I’d wager good money that some of the Android-based phones would add FaceTime as an option. And the indie market would have a blast…”
Read more in the full article here.