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Web by Google (TM)

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Re: Web by Google (TM)

#91

Post by dakna »

doliveira wrote: post #53

Didn't we do this to ourselves, though? The tech community did decide that vendor lock-in is okay, walled gardens are okay and also that a browser monopoly is okay. My impression is that this is what's different this time: it was chosen by developers themselves

I think Chromium/Chrome won because it was the better tech product and also mostly open source and free to use. Closer to web standards, faster to use, isolated process rendering etc. This was and still is fueled by lot's of money, coming from platform economics, not from a walled garden strategy in the sense of AOL (proprietary standards, locked down access). Users actually like it, because it's free and works well. Developers like it because it's actively supported including dev tools and has a large enough user base to treat it as the default platform. It's just not possible to have a competing product based on the same open standards if you don't have the same amount of cash to give it away for free. And IT budgets are cash-strapped outside of the VC bubble too, it makes sense to choose the market leader and code against that platform. Similar to the old "Best viewed with Internet Explorer 3" back then, but now at least with better standard compatibility.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#92

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

mattacular wrote: post #9
texasbigdata wrote: post #4

AMP still makes no sense. On iOS, Android and Windows it’s completely broken and friction increasing to grab a link to send to a friend in another medium. Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes. For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? Maybe that’s naive but we already have “request desktop mode” to allow for bifurcated experiences. Why do we need a third thats seemingly even worse…

It's a lot of effort to maintain AMP pages for all your site content alongside the standard pages over time. That's why they tend to degrade.

Reminds me of the old-fashioned "m." sites we used to have to maintain for mobile browsing; often using wonderful tech like WML.

That sucked.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#93

Post by PaulHoule »

mrweasel wrote: post #30
andai wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that kinda like saying that the electric companies do the same thing, though?

True, that’s why in some markets the electric companies have been split into transmission companies and delivery companies. You buy power from the delivery company and the transmission companies are paid to maintain power lines.

Isn't that a scam from Enron that we are still living with?

In New York we have almost as many ESCOs as there are shady looking prepaid phone cards. Maybe they save you 0.001% over the real electric company if you cash the check for 78 cents they send you every six months.

I thought the point of that was financial engineering. Used to be if you wanted to shut down a coal burning power plant the power company would be sued by creditors. Now the creditors can sue a shell company with no assets and get nothing.

It is good that coal burning power plants are being shut down, but rather than having an engineering or environmental based plan they do it this way. There will be plenty of money for solar roofs if they government is paying but private money will not be there for other investments if it doesn't have to be paid back.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#94

Post by avasthe »

NateEag wrote: post #82
staticelf wrote: post #17

This is depressing, we as developers have to take the bull by its horns. Simply stop using their services, advocate against AMP etc. But in the end, the US government will most likely have to split the company in order for stuff to really change.

I'm posting this from Firefox Mobile. Works just fine for my day-to-day surfing. DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, and it's not perfect or a panacea, but it works well enough (and there's "!g" for when it doesn't). What we really need to do is be willing to pay for our tools, though. Wikipedia estimates there are 21 million developers in the world, so if one out of twenty developers donated $1 / month to Mozill…

Yeah I believe many programmers don't like their donations going to a non technical overpaid CEO's salary or activism instead of browser or technical projects like rust.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#95

Post by crispyporkbites »

simias wrote: post #84

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…

Meh, I think the longest lasting protocols are the decentralised ones, the good ones just can’t fail by design. SMTP is still going very strong, BitTorrent isn’t going away, bitcoin won’t die anytime soon

slack/discord will probably disappear and be replaced by another closed system until we find the right way to do real time chat in a decentralised way.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#96

Post by brianush1 »

crispyporkbites wrote: post #95
simias wrote: post #84

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…

Meh, I think the longest lasting protocols are the decentralised ones, the good ones just can’t fail by design. SMTP is still going very strong, BitTorrent isn’t going away, bitcoin won’t die anytime soon slack/discord will probably disappear and be replaced by another closed system until we find the right way to do real time chat in a decentralised way.

As for SMTP, most people use Gmail nowadays anyway. Google might be able to kill SMTP if they wanted to.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#97

Post by alangibson »

Spivak wrote: post #47
alangibson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They kind of do, which is why alot of big tech should be highly regulated like utilities.

I feel like saying that AWS should be regulated like a utility because lots of businesses use their products is a little sill. They have heavy competition in basically all of their markets, their moat is their breadth of services and they’re constantly at risk of being unbundled by a competitor that has more time to devote to a single product segment. They have persistent natural competition with colo-ing that keeps…

AWS wouldn't be my first choice to regulate, but at this point they can turn any competing business into a feature of AWS without breaking a sweat. I know for sure this stifles innovation because I've watched people abandon promising ideas because of that fact.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#98

Post by tomschwiha »

reaperducer wrote: post #74
tomschwiha wrote: post #3

You can blame Google for a lot - however I believe if it wasn't about Google someone else would dictate the game. In the past it was Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, XFire, .. I mean those companys were so big (e. g. XFire for gaming streaming) but they failed to stay ahead of time - lets see whats up with Google or Facebook or Amazon in 15 years.

You can blame Google for a lot - however I believe if it wasn't about Google someone else would dictate the game. Are you proposing that we don't do anything about a specific problem because there may be other theoretical problems? That's like saying, "If this guy in this dark alley doesn't kill me now, a heart attack might eventually kill me, instead; so I'll just stand here and make it easy for his knife to find me…

I'm wondering what the actual solutions are - we've got plenty of alternatives but we tend to not use them as its comfortable to use Google solutions.

They put plenty of effort into their software and at that scale it is amazing how fast it returns results.

For my websites I achieve better ranking placements in Bing then I do in Google - we should probably all start using Bing from now on?

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#99

Post by duncanawoods »

huffmsa wrote: post #83
mnd999 wrote: post #8

I think we’re in a real low point right now. Gmail, AMP, Chrome, Android. So many peoples internet experience is from one place. With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players. I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.

Amazon is only 4% of the US retail sector though. I wouldn't call that dominant.

Do cars and houses count in that measure?

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#100

Post by acdha »

mattacular wrote: post #11
mnd999 wrote: post #8

I think we’re in a real low point right now. Gmail, AMP, Chrome, Android. So many peoples internet experience is from one place. With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players. I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.

Don't forget that Amazon dominates a lot more than just retail on the internet. With AWS they effectively run large portions of it as well.

That’s different, though, in that they have significant competition and the users don’t care at all. They have a lot more ability to affect prices on retail sales.
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