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Steve's Google Platform rant

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Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#351

Post by leoc »

nirvana wrote: post #330
mun2mun wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Bezos has a technical background... I thought he was a hedge fund guy before moving out to Seattle. So what can you say about this post posted here 3 years ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465882 . The blog post was down, archive.org didn't help also :). But as far as I remember the blogger was praising about bezos leadership skill. Also comments on HN supported that. I am reading HN for about 3…

There is a PR war, and it's been waged by Amazon since the mid 1990s when they went public. They had terrible numbers, and so they reframed themselves as a "tech startup" to get in the dot com boom.... and it worked. There has been, and continues to be, massive propaganda efforts from Amazon to try and pitch them to people, and to position Bezos as a visionary in the style of Steve Jobs. In fact, I saw an article the…

> There has been, and continues to be, massive propaganda efforts from Amazon to try and pitch them to people, and to position Bezos as a visionary in the style of Steve Jobs.

I couldn't help noticing that if you go the Amazon.com page for Isaacson's Steve Jobs bio http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/14516485... , you see http://www.amazon.com/One-Click-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon-com/dp/159... on the first page of "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" results; I couldn't help wondering if that placement is solely determined by a computer assessment of what customers also bought. But who knows, maybe it is.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#352

Post by nl »

aangjie wrote: post #135

Hmm.. Great level of detail in steve yegge's post for a rant....Infact one of my pain points with google+ is not being able aggregate(#tags) and publish feeds from my blog. slightly OT: does anyone else think there seems to be a trend of ranting recently, i mean Ryan Dahl,ted dziuba, and now steve yegge??

You obviously weren't around when the Bile Blog was active. Eg: http://www.bileblog.org/2006/12/open-sores-scams/

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#353

Post by calibraxis »

nl wrote: post #337
noblethrasher wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viewing ads makes you the product not the customer.

There is a thing called a "multi-sided market". Saying "you are the product not the customer" is not only popularist, but wrong. Think about Skype - most of their customers don't pay, but they derive value FROM Skype - AND they add value to the paying customers. Simplifying complicated markets with statements like "you are the product not the customer" is a disservice to the discussion.

I've worked with a number of tech/advertising corporations. The parent poster is right. The real product is eyeballs, and the customer is another corporation called the advertiser.

For example, The New York Times offers some value to the owners of those eyeballs, but note how they work: they lay out the advertising first, then what's left is what they call the "news hole" and they put some stuff there. The news hole lets them farm the eyeballs. (The ripe juicy professional-managerial variety.)

This is not something programmers like to think about, so they tend to wear ideological blinders. They don't simply observe the money flow: who is buying and who is selling? The eyeball owners are not participating in a market transaction as either buyer or seller. Their attention is the product.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#354

Post by johnyzee »

notatoad wrote: post #314
asnyder wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the above might be true, I know that Amazon excels at customer service whereas google's is essentially non-existent. So from the customer perspective, I would choose Amazon over google any day.

do you give google money? if not, you're not a customer and have probably never experienced their customer service or a "customer perspective".

I give Amazon money for AWS and no customer support in sight.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#355

Post by potatolicious »

leoc wrote: post #351
nirvana wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a PR war, and it's been waged by Amazon since the mid 1990s when they went public. They had terrible numbers, and so they reframed themselves as a "tech startup" to get in the dot com boom.... and it worked. There has been, and continues to be, massive propaganda efforts from Amazon to try and pitch them to people, and to position Bezos as a visionary in the style of Steve Jobs. In fact, I saw an article the…

> There has been, and continues to be, massive propaganda efforts from Amazon to try and pitch them to people, and to position Bezos as a visionary in the style of Steve Jobs. I couldn't help noticing that if you go the Amazon.com page for Isaacson's Steve Jobs bio http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/14516485... , you see http://www.amazon.com/One-Click-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon-com/dp/159... on the first pag…

I can't speak authoritatively since I didn't work on that component, but Amazon takes the integrity of these things very seriously. I would be extremely surprised if any of these widgets are "tainted", as it were.

For all the crap I've thrown at Amazon in this thread, if there's one thing they are clean of it's working against their customers. It is, by a very long shot, the most customer centric big company I've ever seen.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#356

Post by danmaz74 »

suivix wrote: post #326
danmaz74 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the kindle fire a success? It just launched...

Perhaps the number of pre-orders was a success, along with their claimed features at a low price point?

My point is: Only time will tell. For now, you can call it a PR success, but this is not what we were talking about, I guess ;)

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#357

Post by Bootvis »

bmj wrote: post #106
johnyzee wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Six weeks here in Denmark and a maximum work week of 37 hours. You have to wonder how we ever get anything done here...

Out of curiosity, is there much of a start-up culture there? If so, do founders (and first employees) adhere to the same guidelines? At least here in the U.S., founding/working at a start-up basically assumes long-ish hours.

I think the the start up culture is less prevalent here in the Netherlands than in SV but it certainly exists.

From my personal experience I can say these guidelines are not strictly adhered. The young, university educated people I hang out with all work more then 40 hours and take about 20 vacation days and work 40-60 hours, more if necessary.

However I think direct comparison is pretty hard. What does count towards the total amount worked? For example including social drinks in their total biasing the amount upwards.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#358

Post by JezChatfield »

notatoad wrote: post #314
asnyder wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the above might be true, I know that Amazon excels at customer service whereas google's is essentially non-existent. So from the customer perspective, I would choose Amazon over google any day.

do you give google money? if not, you're not a customer and have probably never experienced their customer service or a "customer perspective".

I'm a multiple paying customer. I use Google Apps, AdWords. I can't use Google Plus under the same ID as Apps, because Google appear to think that paying customers are less valuable than free users. And we (Apps Users) went for ages without any explanation other than "we're working on it".

To do any work using AdWords and Google Apps and Google Analytics, and Webmaster Tools I end up using three accounts and two browsers.

If Google did Platforms, then the first one to fix is "who the F* am I?" (Authentication and Access Control) and make it get used everywhere.

Hell, Google can't even work out what to name things. So you get scammers exploiting Google.com naming to convince marks that the scammer really works for Google. This is also a Platform issue - Google.com should be for Google stuff - not abusable to allow, for example, spoofing a search results page so you can claim that Google has given you special access to modify search results (one SEO scam that I keep encountering). Non-Google stuff should be on an identifiable domain, which will eventually permeate user consciousness as being "not Google content".

I speak as a pure outsider and consumer of Google stuff. But I'm sufficiently vexed by Google Apps/Accounts/Profiles to want to lose the paid for services as much and as soon as possible. I get better (or no worse) treated when I don't buy. :)

And Stephen's point about Google arrogance - yes, I think Google is arrogant. I was an AdWords Help Forum Top Contributor until Google decided that small businesses should only receive AdWords support from other users, not Google. That's seriously annoying. I stopped contributing when it became clear that Google thought small businesses should be denied any customer service - you really can't have third parties answering questions about why Google isn't accepting a specific credit card, or even why a specific disapproval has been given in an account you can't see. That was pure arrogance - dumping on volunteers and crapping on small businesses. I'm told it's different now but I still have such a bad taste in my mouth from the experience I don't want to get involved again. Google can be arrogant, 100%.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#359

Post by DanBC »

aangjie wrote: post #135

Hmm.. Great level of detail in steve yegge's post for a rant....Infact one of my pain points with google+ is not being able aggregate(#tags) and publish feeds from my blog. slightly OT: does anyone else think there seems to be a trend of ranting recently, i mean Ryan Dahl,ted dziuba, and now steve yegge??

Have a browse through alt.sysadmin.recovery

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#360

Post by nl »

calibraxis wrote: post #353
nl wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a thing called a "multi-sided market". Saying "you are the product not the customer" is not only popularist, but wrong. Think about Skype - most of their customers don't pay, but they derive value FROM Skype - AND they add value to the paying customers. Simplifying complicated markets with statements like "you are the product not the customer" is a disservice to the discussion.

I've worked with a number of tech/advertising corporations. The parent poster is right. The real product is eyeballs, and the customer is another corporation called the advertiser. For example, The New York Times offers some value to the owners of those eyeballs, but note how they work: they lay out the advertising first, then what's left is what they call the "news hole" and they put some stuff there. The news hole…

To say "eyeballs are the product" simplifies this too much.

Think of sports teams - advertisers pay their salaries, but when they are performing on the sports field advertisers are irrellevant.

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