51–60 of 101 posts
Why is Apple not also in trouble? The way safari runs on iOS compared to other browser is very similar to how Microsoft shipped explorer with windows. Except windows did not prevent other browser from using the full API and your app didn't have to go through a approval process.
From Kantar: https://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/screen-shot-2015...
Wow...
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And yet when they don't, people decry (accurately!) the crappiness of non-"Google Edition" phones. For years now, the only Android devices truly competitive with iPhones have been the various Nexus/Google Play Edition/etc. devices - ones where Google has taken a heavy hand and enforced a more integrated (one might say "Apple-y") experience. Indeed, early on in Android's life, Google was much more hands-off with the O…
I agreed with you until this past year. If you play with a Nexus 5 or 6, and then you handle a Galaxy S6/Note4, LG3 or HTC M8/9, the user experience of all the of the non-Nexus devices is actually quite good and the OEMs are now allowing users to either disable or remove OEM apps & skins or skin elements they don't want. Frankly, the UX of stock Android is pretty crappy in several areas, and a lot of third party ROMs…
It ought to have been transparently obvious to Google execs from when Google became utterly dominant in the web search space that the risk of anti-trust violations was very high and if they wanted to avoid being censured they needed to consistently take the high road & avoid using that dominance to force entry into other fields at the expense of competitors. It has always looked to me that Google was consistently ste…
More than the fines is the ability to impose changes on their business practices. Imagine if Google could no longer require OEMs to bundle various Google products in order to get the Play store.
It's like saying "so many people are driving BMW, it's not fair for Audi, BMW should include an Audi advertisement now and then. If they don't, they will have to pay us a big fine!". Isn't Europe a free market?
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As an American living in Italy, there really are more taxes and "death by a thousand cut" fees and rules here than in the US, from what I've seen. I like to pay a little more tax and actually have a decent healthcare system, social security net, and retirement. One of the problems is that many of the large US corporations legally avoid tax via one of the tax havens (including my country of origin, The Netherlands). I…
This is a complex topic: * There are taxes and taxes. Pay a % every month, simply and easily? That's not such a big deal - everyone has different tollerances and preferences, but it is what it is. Italy has lots of little, annoying taxes and gotchas, though, which take a lot of time and are irritating. For businesses, a lot of these need to be paid even if the business is not profitable (like startups!). * Healthcare…
I would suspect that things are better in the Nordic countries, and maybe the Netherlands too.
Definitely. I have my gripes about social security in The Netherlands and I think basic income would be better, but social security is pretty good: 75% of the last income for the first two months, 70% for the remainder of the year. After that, a single gets Euro 960.83 per month, a married couple Euro 1,372.62 per month, plus an extra amount quarterly per child (which IIRC everyone, including working people, gets).
With regards to retirements, everyone gets so-called 'AOW' (850,97 per month or 2 * 586,56). Normally when you work, you also collect money in a private pension, which gets added to the AOW. AOW is directly paid by taxes, the private pension is a fund.
Normally, when you work all your life, AOW + pension + home ownership gives you a royal retirement.
Those graphs are so sad. It's all American companies competing among themselves: Twitter, Bing, DuckDuckGo... Even on our home turf, even with natural advantage (not so much in search but definitely in shopping), local competition is at the bottom, far behind Amazon and Ebay. And this doesn't seem to worry anyone here. We continue to tack on more regulation, tax rules detrimental to small businesses in their complexi…
Would you mind elaborating on what makes the EU not as good as the US for startups? From spending some time in Berlin, it reminded me of a smaller, cheaper, and overall much nicer San Francisco.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet when they don't, people decry (accurately!) the crappiness of non-"Google Edition" phones. For years now, the only Android devices truly competitive with iPhones have been the various Nexus/Google Play Edition/etc. devices - ones where Google has taken a heavy hand and enforced a more integrated (one might say "Apple-y") experience. Indeed, early on in Android's life, Google was much more hands-off with the O…
I agreed with you until this past year. If you play with a Nexus 5 or 6, and then you handle a Galaxy S6/Note4, LG3 or HTC M8/9, the user experience of all the of the non-Nexus devices is actually quite good and the OEMs are now allowing users to either disable or remove OEM apps & skins or skin elements they don't want. Frankly, the UX of stock Android is pretty crappy in several areas, and a lot of third party ROMs…
But I do agree, that OEM skins do improve some lacking features of the stock Android, they also bring in tons of dark patterns and just terrible UX design with them - TouchWiz (Lollipop) for example removes all timed audio profile functionality, brings confusing duplicated apps for pretty much all standard applications (Play Store, Google Fit, Calendar, Mail, Keep, etc.) with their own separate accounts, hides camera functionality in public API and several other problems. Not to mention a completely different design of the OS from the whole Material ecosystem.
And thats a tip of the iceberg considering the times of Android 2.3/4.0 when Google CTS tests weren't so strict and developing anything worthwhile was practically impossible since OEMs kept overwriting even default integrated themes - stuff like setting black text to be white, removing fonts and other fun stuff we had to deal with.
It ought to have been transparently obvious to Google execs from when Google became utterly dominant in the web search space that the risk of anti-trust violations was very high and if they wanted to avoid being censured they needed to consistently take the high road & avoid using that dominance to force entry into other fields at the expense of competitors. It has always looked to me that Google was consistently ste…
The bundling issue on Android is basically what Microsoft were censured for with IE and Media Player. The real question is what happens when the competition authorities question the market for iOS apps (which is subject to arbitary veto and 30% fees).
If they did have a dominant market position, there is all sorts of tying going on between OSX and iOS lately.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More than the fines is the ability to impose changes on their business practices. Imagine if Google could no longer require OEMs to bundle various Google products in order to get the Play store.
This is, to me, the big one. The OHA is a huge agreement across an entire market segment not to compete with Google on a ton of products and services. There's no way Google gets out of an investigation with that practice intact.
But without Motorola in the picture, it's an easy argument to make that if the EU wants to encourage a competitive handset market (Android) over a monolithic one (Apple), the core product feature set has to be centrally controlled. Too much fragmentation of the platform would lead to the emergence of a dominant vendor (likely Samsung) and actually decrease competition as their competitors will no longer be at sufficient scale to support a differentiated product in both hardware AND software.