Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself

Post by Flenser » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 10:13 PM UTC

hilko wrote: post #179

fudged71 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does one mission statement really cover the motivations of a company that has branched out into so many areas? Reader is a huge blow to that mission.

Isn't that why they're consolidating and trimming the business, to be more focused on that mission statement? In itself, Reader could fit in (as the article by one of the original developers touched on). But for various reasons they never worked this out, or didn't put enough resources on it. So now they pull the plug. A stupid decision for many reasons, but not necessarily from a purely 'strategic' point of view. On…

Or perhaps there wasn't a large enough subset of that subset who work at Google. They don't have a use for it internally so there's no way they can dogfood it.

Post by mcovey » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 12:03 PM UTC

fpgeek wrote: post #148

mindcrime wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. It's very unfortunate too, as Google were uniquely positioned to be great defenders of the Open Web. Who else has the clout to do it now, as well as the motivation? Does anybody see Marissa moving Yahoo that way? I'm guessing "no" but would love to be proven wrong. It won't be Microsoft, you can bet on that. Red Hat are a moderately powerful company, but they aren't that big and could wind up acquired by Oracl…

Influential or not, Opera surrendered when they switched to WebKit/Chromium. In terms of defending the open web, they're irrelevant now. However, I wouldn't dismiss Microsoft so quickly. They're a serious problem on many fronts and will probably switch sides once this battle is done, but they have plenty of reasons to oppose a WebKit monoculture, at least. When you don't have many allies, you take what you can get.

Opera didn't have much choice after their 2012 earnings were well below estimate and the market for there desktop browser, despite how awesome it is, is just too small. Their only strong point is mobile. I don't know why they haven't open-sourced the old desktop core yet, I suppose it's possible that they are holding on to hope that they can mold most of it around webkit and keep it as good as it's always been.

Re: Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself

Re: Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself