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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#511

Post by edw »

an_d_rew wrote: post #343
edw wrote: post #340

My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning," whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the show. Chrome was the same thing, though the competitor was Microsoft. Google Docs? Same thing, Microsoft again. Google is good at building things 90% as good as they could be. For Gmail that 90% was leaps and bounds better than the web mail alternatives of 2004 w…

> ... SquirrelMail ... Oh thank you for that trip down memory lane! Ran my own SquirrelMail servers for years ...

Me too! It was bundled with OS X server, which I was running on the G4 Cube that got relegated to utility box status when I went all-in on laptop life.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#512

Post by thegagne »

realityking wrote: post #223
stickfigure wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mail, docs, drive et al ... they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite as a paid service, and "everyone uses the same service at home that they do at work" has clear advantages, whether or not there is advertising in your gmail. Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite (or "google apps for domains", as they called it then - h…

> Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite This is clearly false. The screenshots in this Time article show gmail having advertising from day one. https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/

My early adopter google apps account is still free and has no ads.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#513

Post by thomasahle »

roenxi wrote: post #360
thomasahle wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free. That's silly. Paid office suites use just as many computing resources, and Google docs use plenty resources through your browser as well. I think the "if you don't pay for it, you're the product" quote is fine. You just have to exclude free and open source software.

Excluding free software from a quote that starts "When something is free..." is equally silly. The quote stops being about anything. But yeah, good point that my argument didn't make sense.

> The quote stops being about anything.

It is still about stuff other than open source software.

You can't expect some Internet quote to apply universally. Just know the exceptions and use it when it applies.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#514

Post by dleslie »

joshuamorton wrote: post #421
znpy wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they don't sell it, they use it to profile you

From docs and drive? Which stuff?

Everything searchable is indexed. Everything indexed and associated with a user is used to profile that user in order to provide superior search results.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#515

Post by mav3rick »

abc_lisper wrote: post #196
EthanHeilman wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always ha…

This may be true, but there have been articles in public since 2010s if not longer, that show general contempt for having clean code and code maintenance, like having clean code is what lesser engineers worry about. I’m saying that thinking seeped into universities where smart kids, who generally imitate the smart professionals in their profession first. Google may not be the only company guilty of it, there are plac…

Google infra is far from duct tape.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#518

Post by solvorn »

thoraway1010 wrote: post #25

No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily. The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely. I used…

You should write a know about this.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#519

Post by solvorn »

PeterStuer wrote: post #310
johnchristopher wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product" So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?

Originally this product knwn as StarOffice ws not free. It only became so after Sun aquired it and reeased it as OpenOffice. This was basically a loss-leader not just fr sun but for other companies as well to break Microsoft's capture of the Knowledege Worker productivity which they leveraged into other areas. So the idea was you were the product, "sold" to the non-MS-Windows/Intel companies in te hopes of you being…

Nobody called them “knowledge workers” outside of Page Mill Dr. when StarOffice was made and Sun didn’t compete in that space as much though Microsoft was starting to eat their lunch in other areas, like academia, government, military, and high end computation.

I worked on a Sun at NOAA in the 90s in Hawaii and the computer we used for bathymetry imaging was a Sun and the ships used Suns.

Most of that equipment was replaced with a little Linux and Windows Servers.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#520

Post by solvorn »

haolez wrote: post #170
thoraway1010 wrote: post #25

No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily. The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely. I used…

> Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs You are in for a surprise. Office 365 (at least Excel and Word) looks like a toy compared to the desktop versions. I'm not talking about niche features or VBA, I'm talking about things like naming a table, which is explicitly only supported in the desktop version. Ah, of course! You need the table's name to use it in th…

Duck.
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