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“Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

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Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#191

Post by FreezerburnV »

golfer wrote: post #189
freehunter wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget the time they refused to make a YouTube app for Windows Phone and when Microsoft made one, Google forced them to remove it. And then seemingly in retribution for making the app, Google blocked Windows Phone from being able to access Google Maps even though the browser was technically capable of using it. Google's reasoning was (similarly to another comment here) "it's too hard to check functionality…

Microsoft's YouTube app removed the ads. Violation of TOS. Pretty straightforward reason for wanting it removed. Don't act like Microsoft, of all companies, is some poor victim. They compete their ass off, and sometimes they win, sometimes lose. They lost that time.

Don't forget that Microsoft publicly offered to work directly with Google to get the Youtube app working correctly according to what Google wanted, ads and all. The only reason it "stripped" ads originally was because Google didn't work with them to add them in the first place. Also keep in mind that there were, at the time, other Youtube apps that worked (to some extent) just fine, and Google didn't go after them.

I also remember something about how Google demanded that Microsoft implement something that wasn't technically possible at the time in order to get the Youtube app to be fully compliant. I don't remember what that was exactly, but I think it had something to do with how they were rendering the videos.

I was a Windows Phone user at the time, and was very irritated about Google being petty and not working with Microsoft to get the app working with ads.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#192

Post by bennyp101 »

golfer wrote: post #189
freehunter wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget the time they refused to make a YouTube app for Windows Phone and when Microsoft made one, Google forced them to remove it. And then seemingly in retribution for making the app, Google blocked Windows Phone from being able to access Google Maps even though the browser was technically capable of using it. Google's reasoning was (similarly to another comment here) "it's too hard to check functionality…

Microsoft's YouTube app removed the ads. Violation of TOS. Pretty straightforward reason for wanting it removed. Don't act like Microsoft, of all companies, is some poor victim. They compete their ass off, and sometimes they win, sometimes lose. They lost that time.

Yes, but then they asked Google to help them show the ads - ie give them an API key so they actually could, but Google refused.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#193

Post by katastic »

freehunter wrote: post #107
Jonnax wrote: post #12

Google are really shitty with their web browser especially on mobile. If you run Firefox you get a stripped down version of Google Search also with no infinite scrolling for images and low resolution. Use a user agent spoofer like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-... And it seems to work fine on Firefox. I'm sure their official excuse is that they only support WebKit based browsers on…

Let's not forget the time they refused to make a YouTube app for Windows Phone and when Microsoft made one, Google forced them to remove it. And then seemingly in retribution for making the app, Google blocked Windows Phone from being able to access Google Maps even though the browser was technically capable of using it. Google's reasoning was (similarly to another comment here) "it's too hard to check functionality…

Ah... the pre-Eric Holder Department of Justice.

I'm not even kidding. Look it up for yourself. The Bush DOJ took down Enron even when it destroyed people's pensions. Meanwhile, Wall Street destroyed the country's economy requiring trillions of spending (read: debt) to "fix" and how many went to jail? Oh yeah... one--a scapegoat.

And the statistics don't lie. Prosecutions of white collar crimes have dropped from 17.6% in 1995-7 to 9.4% in 2010-12. Did everyone stop committing crimes? Did everyone say they're sorry? In 2015, prosecutions were at a "20 year low". 20 year low... during one of the largest economic collapses in US history, where there should be sky high rates.

http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/398/

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#194

Post by pgeorgi »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #139
cbhl wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the part they didn't tell you was that you should put more users first before putting fewer users first. (This is what "impact" means on the job ladder.) Given two otherwise equal tasks, if one helps 60M users and another helps 12M users, you are usually expected to work on the one that helps more users. And if a product develops too many bugs of the latter type (affects too few users to ever be priori…

The issue with this, that you have to focus on the largest group of users so you can "improve the lives of millions of people" is that it doesn't make sense: Google has hundreds of billions of dollars in cash they literally can't decide how to spend. Clearly, they have enough money to "improve the lives" of more people, so that answer doesn't satisfy. However, the idea that Google is first and foremost a business whi…

> Google has hundreds of billions of dollars in cash they literally can't decide how to spend.

Those billions of dollars don't code for themselves. You need to hire more folks (yes, overtime is a thing at Google), you need to direct them to do the right things (means: more hiring), and more infrastructure. Besides the cafeterias which boil down to "even more hiring" (and why not, we did that twice in our thought experiment already) those devs need office space (of some kind), equipment and server time for testing their thousands of additional commits every week. And more server time to cover the additional test cases (eg. for additional browsers), so this is super-linear.

Given infinite dollars (or any reasonable approximation of that), the problem really is how to spend them without ending up finishing nothing because you've just invested them in a giant gridlock situation.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#195

Post by mcv »

I guess this was the reason why Opera was the first browser to support native user agent spoofing? It was a great feature in the days of websites being developed for specific browsers. If that's still going on, that would be really sad and unprofessional.

As much as I appreciate the good work that Google has done, this is absolutely anti-competitive and deserves to be punished. I really hope Google turns good again, because otherwise they're really no better than Microsoft in their worst years.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#196

Post by fbender »

Endy wrote: post #56
kuschku wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're manually spoofing your user agent, then Google figures that you know what you're doing and it's "use at your own risk anyway", and that if you get a broken experience, your first thought will be to disable the user-agent spoofing. Actually, some browsers, including Firefox Mobile, now spoof the user-agent by default on some sites, because of Google's broken systems.

This strikes me as both a bad sign about Google's direction and Mozilla's willingness to accept that without publicly calling them out as Vivaldi just did.

Mozilla did multiple times and is doing it, sometimes even doing the work that Google is supposed to do (see e.g. the Webcompat project [1]). The point is, this problem is basically unsolvable without having the reach of Google and thus everone (incl. Microsoft!) is forced to spoof the UA.

See also https://webcompat.com/

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#197

Post by ZeroGravitas »

I've long maintained that the greatest benefit that Google gets from the slogan "Don't be evil" is how ridiculous it makes their critics sound when they bring it up.

I fully support pretty much everything he says in the article, but can't help but roll my eyes at the headline. I can't see it helping with anyone who isn't already on board with the message.

I think monopolies cause real societal harm, and that large corporations should be held very strongly to the rules by regulators but I still find it hard to use the term "evil" in relation to something that could well just be corporate bureaucracy gone wrong.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#198

Post by golfer »

FreezerburnV wrote: post #191
golfer wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's YouTube app removed the ads. Violation of TOS. Pretty straightforward reason for wanting it removed. Don't act like Microsoft, of all companies, is some poor victim. They compete their ass off, and sometimes they win, sometimes lose. They lost that time.

Don't forget that Microsoft publicly offered to work directly with Google to get the Youtube app working correctly according to what Google wanted, ads and all. The only reason it "stripped" ads originally was because Google didn't work with them to add them in the first place. Also keep in mind that there were, at the time, other Youtube apps that worked (to some extent) just fine, and Google didn't go after them. I…

Ahh, the public offer to help. Great PR move that ignores all Microsoft's other actions against Google throughout time.

Competition is fair game. Consider:

- the existence of Bing

- Every version of IE and Windows starting from over a decade ago has made it more difficult to change the default search engine from Bing. Comically difficult, even

- Microsoft's creation/funding of entities like Fairsearch.org, whose primary reason for existence is to destroy Google

- Stealing Google's search results

- etc etc

Microsoft has tried to defeat Google from day one. Again, they competed and lost. If they had built up any good will maybe Google would have helped. But they didn't.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#199

Post by lmm »

akerl_ wrote: post #13
tryingagainbro wrote: post #3

Vivaldi CEO – “Google: it is time to return to not being evil” Me: that train has left the station. When you have monopoly power (70%-98% of market share) the governments should return Google and Whatever Corp to not being evil.

It seems like companies are stuck in a losing game. We constantly push small companies to capture more market share. Any companies that fold during that effort, we bring out the pitchforks because the services they ran get shut off. Any companies that succeed , we bring out the pitchforks because they own too much market power. It seems a bit much that we ask for companies to constantly grow and simultaneously ensure…

Companies make sense for competitive markets. They're a poor model for winner-takes-all natural monopolies, which is why we prefer nationalisation for e.g. public utilities. A lot of the internet behaves that way too, as we're slowly realising.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#200

Post by lmm »

roblabla wrote: post #50
klondike_ wrote: post #39

I wish I could use Vivaldi, it seems like a nice browser for power users. Unfortunately it's closed source (besides the Webkit parts). Considering how much sensitive information goes through a browser nowadays, I would never consider something closed source. I'm sure Vivaldi has no intentions of becoming "evil" like Google, but because of its closed source nature it wouldn't be hard to slip a tracker or two in the br…

I don't know what browser you're using, but assuming chrome : it's not open source either. Chromium is open source, but Google Chrome is proprietary, much in the same way vivaldi is. If you want a truly open source modern browser, the only options are chromium or firefox these days, AFAIK ? (If you know an alternative I'm interested !)

Konqueror is still around (it's where the chrome rendering engine originally came from), and IMO still the best.
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