261–270 of 463 posts
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Yeah no, I rather pay a fee for that
A paid version would be great but Google would have to figure out how to judge traffic levels without location data.
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On the other hand I think subscriptions have vastly improved the quality of software. Having to win your customer's business every month or year forces the product to continue improving. If the product doesn't get better, then customers leave.
I disagree. I think vendor lock-in is actually much worse with SaaS because you rarely control your own data or infrastructure. Quality can slowly erode over time and migrating from one SaaS provider to another is often more technically and contractually onerous than migrating between on-premises software products. SaaS apps are often data silos, where interoperability is no longer a necessity (or selling point).
We do continually improve the product which benefits all our clients: sometimes features for new sales, sometimes better responsiveness or error management, sometimes in response to competitors.
But our customers are quite locked in by momentum - it would cost them a lot to change and they wouldn't see much benefit, and certainly any costs in our area are pure overhead for their business (i.e. our product doesn't directly produce their product or service).
However there is a low bar below which our competitors would eat us.
We do strive to improve the product, and we actually really care about end user usability, partially because we believe happy users do influence sales to other organisations.
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On the other hand I think subscriptions have vastly improved the quality of software. Having to win your customer's business every month or year forces the product to continue improving. If the product doesn't get better, then customers leave.
I disagree. I think vendor lock-in is actually much worse with SaaS because you rarely control your own data or infrastructure. Quality can slowly erode over time and migrating from one SaaS provider to another is often more technically and contractually onerous than migrating between on-premises software products. SaaS apps are often data silos, where interoperability is no longer a necessity (or selling point).
I tried using Google Maps without search history turned on. It's basically a downgraded version. They tied saving locations with the search history, so it won't let you search for friends' contacts, set a home address, etc. Is it on purpose? I don't know, but I find it weird that they would tie some unrelated features together. Why does setting a Home address require search history?
> Is it on purpose? I don't know, but I find it weird that they would tie some unrelated features together. Why does setting a Home address require search history? I work at Google but not on Maps, opinions are my own. I don't know if this is why they did it that way, but it wouldn't surprise me if the reason was merely that 99.9% of users opt in to location sharing and the developers didn't feel it useful to spend t…
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> You’re being tricked by gurus of the mind to send your money to someone else. How this is legal represents a gap between traditional laws and modern times. Eh, this has existed for decades at a macro level in over-the-air television and radio. 'If you're not paying for the product, you are the product' is a quote that has been floating around since at least the 1970s. Methods and techniques now have the ability to…
I'm a relatively fresh grad working in development for a university. It's slow. It's stable. It's not very sexy. I could probably double my salary elsewhere. But, my conscience is pretty clean for this very reason. I build tools to make university operations more efficient, not to squeeze every last drop of data from our users or manipulate them into buying a product. There are definitely problems to be addressed in…
I have seen they can be fun places to work though, depending on the politics of the department.
I tried using Google Maps without search history turned on. It's basically a downgraded version. They tied saving locations with the search history, so it won't let you search for friends' contacts, set a home address, etc. Is it on purpose? I don't know, but I find it weird that they would tie some unrelated features together. Why does setting a Home address require search history?
it is absolutely on purpose. a workaround is you can set pins on the map. instead of a list, you have to zoom out of the map, but then you can click a pin, for example for quick directions to your home address.
I for one are happy to be tracked so that my experience is optimal. Edit: I understand the potential issues and especially with someone like Google using it for other things. But I am more concerned about the backlash against using data to improve our world. There are many different areas which would be improved greatly from more data and would be to everyone's benefit. Personally I have always shared as much as I ca…
> There are many different areas which would be improved greatly from more data and would be to everyone's benefit.
I agree wholeheartedly that data can be used for some really fantastic things, but it should not come at the cost of choice/freedom nor privacy.
I'm also thinking about it in terms of opportunity cost. Namely, companies like Google and Facebook are poisoning the waters for would-be data-based companies that would have much greater impacts on quality of life for everyone. While they help some things at the moment, I think they are ultimately hurting would-be bigger and better data driven endeavors.
Fuck surveillance capitalism
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Amazon finally exceeded my tolerance for slimy behavior last year, and I let Prime lapse. The amount of time and energy they have put in to making it hard to compare prices in their own goddamn store was enough by itself; behavior like this is motor-oil icing on the garbage cake. I had to readjust a few common purchases, but I was far less habituated to them than I thought I was. Having to actually pay attention and…
Yep, let Prime lapse a year or two ago as well. Moving my business to other companies now.
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What if we thought of software not as a product, or a service, but a utility or a public good? There doesn't seem to be any way to monetize software that isn't destructive to users, either through paywalls or tracking/advertising, so why not publicly subsidize its development and release it for free?
If you do that you still want to allocate money in a way that encourages constant improvement as well as rewarding successful radical new ideas. And that's not easy to do in a way that doesn't generate problems very similar to the free market. For example if "time spent in application" would be one of the metrics you use to allocate money then every user interface will be redesigned to require as many clicks as possi…
There exist organizations that treat software as a public good -- Software for the Public Interest, GNU, the Linux foundation, etc. These are relatively small in terms of funding but have a disproportionately large positive impact. Imagine if an organization the size of Google or Microsoft existed like that with public money, or if one or more of the big 5 tech companies were nationalized? It sounds unimaginable because of the political climate in the United States, but I can't see how this would be anything but a good thing. Tech companies behave much more like infrastructure, and thus are in my mind a very reasonable target for public ownership.