Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mourning Google

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 485 posts

Re: Mourning Google

#211

Post by naasking »

vanderZwan wrote: post #22

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…

> Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you).

The inability to avert or survive through an extinction level event literally proves that they are an evolutionary dead end. Extinction level events are inevitable. Humanity has the potential to deflect or destroy such asteroids (and other such events), thus we have the potential to not be an evolutionary dead end.

Re: Mourning Google

#212

Post by amadeuspagel »

the_doctah wrote: post #204
amadeuspagel wrote: post #202

> “Ten blue links” · I remember the dismissive phase well: Ten blue links was boring, it was the past, it was not what people wanted. They want answers to their questions, complete and correct, so much more wholesome than an abbreviated sampling of the General Internet Uproar. And that was partly right: When I type in “-12C in F” or “population of vietnam” I just want a number. > But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by…

Tik tok as a search engine on mobile? Huh? Does it search outside its own content?

No, but that's exactly why kids prefer it on mobile. It's a consistent experience that loads fast and doesn't show a cookie banner between every step.

Re: Mourning Google

#213

Post by crazygringo »

fidotron wrote: post #184
robin_reala wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary reason for Chrome’s success was literal billions of dollars in pervasive advertising (I remember years of Chrome TV ads and billboards), ads plastered all over Google’s products saying “better in Chrome”, and product bundling into many many pieces of software a user might download (e.g. Acrobat[1]). That’s not to say that it wasn’t a technically good product, but it wasn’t so much better than the competit…

Honestly I feel like I am in a parallel universe with ideas like this. Chrome was dramatically faster than anything else (thanks to v8 which was a total revolution for js engines) and each tab crashed separately, with far better security than other browsers of the time. On Windows (and initially it was only on Windows) this was a big deal and so it displaced a huge proportion of the tech aware userbase very fast, per…

Totally agreed. I remember the first couple years of Chrome, and I didn't work at a tech company at the time, but everyone did work in front of a computer.

It was remarkable how quickly Chrome spread among the employees. Nothing to do with advertising -- just that it was so much faster and the whole app never crashed.

Whenever you heard someone cursing because their browser had crashed and they lost their tabs and immediate work, someone in the next cubicle would go, "why aren't you using Chrome?"

It really was that simple. It was all word of mouth.

Re: Mourning Google

#214

Post by [deleted] »

verisimi wrote: post #10

My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that. It was marketing spin - and I bought into that. I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. There are lots of articles to this effect, eg: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... So, the hype, the free canteen, etc was all just spin to move people from…

[deleted]

Re: Mourning Google

#215

Post by pyrale »

vanderZwan wrote: post #22

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…

> If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down.

...Antitrusteroid, the extinction event that transformed the thriving tech behemoths into Standard Oil.

Re: Mourning Google

#216

Post by Multicomp »

Chathamization wrote: post #124
cousin_it wrote: post #16

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to…

That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not i…

> People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary.

I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top? Lasers, MOSFETs(?), UNIX, C, awk, all those came in one way or another from there.

Methinks Google got too impatient. Something like "hey we launched Google X, build it and the inventions will flow" but the Bell Labs model requires something Google was and is constitutionally incapable of rewarding: iteration, time passing, just plain putting in the boring work, year after year.

Google is forever more in hyper growth mode, like birthing a baby that doubles its size on X months. But an 8 year old is not double the size of a 6 year old like babies do. And same for a 10 year old, you need another 8 years (16 year old) to approximately double the size again, and that process assumes constant focus and maintenance of growth attempts so that the body doesn't have stunted growth.

Google seems to be great at launching new products, then utterly fails to iterate them, because of new shinyism or internal promotion incentives or something. I suspect that bled over into Google Labs / X / other company initiatives.

Re: Mourning Google

#217

Post by Eisenstein »

whythre wrote: post #173
glimshe wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large institutions have been "failing" for over a century, in most countries, similar to things in orbit being always "falling". Just go find old newspapers and you'll see similar wording. The constant criticism and renewal of our institutions is part of the system.

You aren’t wrong, but we used to teach Latin in schools. Things aren’t getting better in a lot of these arenas, they are being chipped away… and the center cannot hold forever.

They still teach Latin in Catholic schools.

Re: Mourning Google

#218

Post by burnerburnson »

samirillian wrote: post #25

I like Tbray's posts but I want to quibble over language. What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality. I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson.…

Most socialists only hang out with other socialists. This has tricked them into believing capitalism must soon be coming to an end because everybody they know hates it.

It's pure delusion. Capitalism isn't coming to an end any time soon. None of the candidates for the 2024 election are even close to being anti-capitalist.

Re: Mourning Google

#219

Post by treyd »

puchatek wrote: post #93

I really want to make the switch from Google maps to OSM but i always find that I also want to look up some data about the destination, usually the opening hours. Sometimes the reviews. OSM just doesn't have enough coverage for the place where I live. I wished there was some project that automatically looked up businesses in Google maps and copied their details to OSM but most likely that would violate some t&c or so…

The thing that makes me woefully unable to switch from Google Maps is how it's nicely integrated with the MBTA APIs and understands transit connections better when planning routes than anything else I've tried.

It's really the kind of thing that municipal and state governments should come together on and build common protocols so when Google is inevitably forced to break up we can take the pieces of Maps and make it less of a lever for monopoly power.

Re: Mourning Google

#220

Post by ericyd »

I really don't understand people who throw their arms up in exasperation and wonder what alternatives exist to Google (or other big tech) products. It's takes a little dedication because it's not as easy as using a conglomerate, but there are a bunch of easy and stable alternatives to core Google products just a... ahem... internet search away.
Post reply on HN