251–260 of 366 posts
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Privacy is usually not about things you don't want anyone to know. It's about things you don't want everyone to know.
I disagree, I wouldnt send a nude photo to a single stranger (even if they wouldnt send/show it to anyone else).
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I'm sure Larry Page is a smart guy, and Page Rank was clever, but I'm not really sure there's any particular reason to believe he knows where any industry is moving. Schmidt could predict technology trends well, while Page seems to just throw acquisitions at a wall, see what sticks, then sunset anything that doesn't.
most of pagerank predates larry; several people were already looking at using centrality measures for page ranking before him. And I think Brin contributed a lot more of the math and theory than Page ever did.
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Raising a bunch of money at a high valuation isn't enough to make a company "very successful" either.
Coinbase grew from zero to an $8B valuation in just over 6 years. If that isn't "very successful", what is? ;)
I'll remember Eric Schmidt for sabotaging XMPP progress by saying something along the lines of "no one wants to support IM federation, so we should follow suit" and killing off Google Talk (which caused me to lose most of my IM contacts at that time).
About that - Facebook was leaching off Google's network graph by allowing cross-platform chats (initiated from Fb), but Google couldn't access Fb users from GTalk. IMO, it's a perfectly reasonable response in terms of game theory; the best course of action when the other party defects in a Prisoner's Dilemma scenario is to also defect.
It was a pretty bad response in the terms of actually fixing the messed up IM situation. It only made it worse, basically axing XMPP adoption. Game theory doesn't advise doing that. Compare it to one ally defecting. Others defecting in response (instead of looking for more allies) means losing the whole campaign right away, which is exactly what happened.
I don't use XMPP at all today and naturally none of my IM contacts are from Google or FB. Good thing something like Matrix is gaining traction. But I have little respect for Google today because of the above.
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Wouldn't it need to be "the internet" for _all_ people to be a monopoly?
I don't necessarily see Google as having a monopoly over the internet, but more as "The Gatekeeper" to the internet. Most people around the world go through Google if they're trying to reach somewhere (especially if they don't already have the target site bookmarked). The fact that they're the de-facto curators of content gives them enormous influence over people's perception of the internet. The question is, do we w…
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None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling. Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products. I agree that was the wrong person for the job. But you can't even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with. I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but soci…
That’s interesting. I think Google would have been better aiming for something closer to Twitter instead of trying to copy and mimic Facebook with Google+. Google’s core strength has been organizing information as a data first company versus facilating social connections.
Google Buzz was closer to Twitter, and came and failed before G+ was a thing.
Eric Schmidt was the anti-privacy leader who dismissed privacy concerns. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid... Keep in mind this is the same guy who blackballed CNET reporters for finding personal information on him through google search. https://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology…
Privacy is usually not about things you don't want anyone to know. It's about things you don't want everyone to know.
What's your age, sex, and race? These are questions that, in and of themselves, are not private. Any stranger on the street who sees you could immediately answer them. And if you've ever posted a picture on the net, you can add far more people. And you probably wouldn't be bothered if every single person in the world knew the answer to this question. And in fact you've probably told everybody the answer to these questions, even if indirectly, in your own posts.
Yet in spite of all of this, you probably would not want to tell me. And that's largely because I have absolutely no justification in asking or knowing this. If I said I was surveying developers, and you believed me, then you'd probably be more than willing to submit this information to me however.
Google wants to harvest massive amounts of information on me to, at best, try to get me to purchase things I otherwise would have no desire to purchase. And that is, again, at best. This is the same company that literally black-listed the term "human rights" for their proposed engine in China. [1] To imagine they won't, if they are not already, use that information for even more nefarious ends is being naive.
So on this front I couldn't care less if every disinterested person in the world knows what I had for breakfast (it was muesli), yet I would not want Google to have this information, because I don't think they are justified in knowing it. More sensitive information just ends up reaching a higher and higher standard of required minimal justification.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/google-china-censorship-...
Does anyone inside Google care to share how Eric is perceived among fellow engineers?. From the outside, it seems many of the great innovations came when he wS CEO and Larry + Sergey were building the company culture.
He was very approachable and understood well the technology that we were building. Most of my colleagues seemed to like him, too. He wasn't the money guy at the top of the org chart that doesn't understand his own products. That was even clearer when I talked to him in person once, after a company-wide meeting. He wasn't in a rush to get away from us plebeians, either.
Someone next to me made a comment about surveillance and he replied along the lines of "You know, I grew up in the Hoover days", explaining that he had seen the potential for abuse of power or personal information since a young age and that he held that as something to keep in mind or avoid when making strategic decisions.
Eric Schmidt was the anti-privacy leader who dismissed privacy concerns. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid... Keep in mind this is the same guy who blackballed CNET reporters for finding personal information on him through google search. https://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology…
I will always remember him as the guy who would willingly collude with other mentees of Bill Campbell to not hire engineers from each others companies. Willingly trying to keep the salaries of engineers low is pure evil. They even tried to rope-in Zuckerberg into this gentleman's agreement. Zuck asked them to buzz off. When Eric is involved in shady practices like these, how do all other leaders on twitterverse who a…
Google is an internet monopoly with data and information. I think the only reason they've come this far without being exposed as such was cooperating with the government (learning from Microsoft's mistakes when they were exposed)
What do they have a monopoly on? The claim that Google, or any FAANG company is a monopoly is absurd. A monopoly is the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service. Google definitionally doesn’t have that, because competitors exist.
I. Where the monopolist lies not the exclusive power of production but only certain exclusive facilities as a producer, and can increase, with imdimimished or even increased facility, the amount of his produce....
II. A second kind of monopoly is in the opposite extreme. It exists where price is checked neither by the hopes nor by the fears of the producer, where no competition is dreaded, and no increased supply can be effected. The owners of some vinyards have such a monopoly....
III. A third and more frequent kind of monopoly lies between these two extremes, and is neither so strict as the last, nor so comparatively open as the first. This comprises those cases in which the monopolist is the only producer, but, by the application of additional labow and abstinence, can indefinitely increase his production. The book trade affords an illustration....
IV. The fourth and last class of monopolies exists where production must be assisted by natural agents, limited in number, and varying in power, and repaying with less and less relative assistance every increase in the amount of the labour and abstinence bestowed on them.
-- Nassau William Senior, An Outline Of The Science Of Political Economy, (1836, 1872) pp. 103-106.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.59405/page/n11...