Devoid of anything new or insightful, this article sounds like a teen being 'edgy'.
Bullshit
61–70 of 233 posts
Re: Bullshit
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
"There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second." — Jeff Bezos "We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business. " — Jeff Bezos "We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to…
How is this bullshit? >"We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business. " If anything thats being upfront that Amazon is a business in the business of making money.
Probably parent implied that many AWS services are run at zero margin or at loss to block competition from entering.
Re: Bullshit
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're all bullshit except the 'Android is open' thing. That's just a plain fucking fact. Despite the incessant barrage of snarky 'open' jokes from professional Apple frother John Gruber (typically redeemed somewhat by being funny) and M.G. "Mini-Gruber" Siegler (not so much), you can go download the fucking source code : http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html Sure, tons of manufacturers will sell you jun…
"Android is open" is BS for the plain and simple fact that (time delayed) source code availability is of no consequence to the vast majority of Android users. They say it as though it means something, it means nothing, rather like water vendors claiming "100% fat free" on a bottle of water. Marco didn't say the claim was factually incorrect, he said it was BS, it is.
Although I'd love to have a few bottles of your fat-free water, it's a bogus analogy. It's more like claiming "100% trans fat free" on a package of cookies. That the vast majority of eaters don't care about or even know what trans fats are doesn't make the statement less true, or less relevant to those who do know and care.
Android's openness is consequential to those who care about openness. And almost every Android user I know (yes, all fairly technical) likes that aspect and indeed takes advantage of it.
To such people, the open aspects -- both the fact that the OS is open source, and that they can install whatever apps they want without having to find a buffer overflow bug in the OS somewhere to exploit first -- are attractive.
The "vast majority of users" aren't the arbiter of whether or not something is consequential to me, or to the other people who generally prefer their systems to be more open.
Re: Bullshit
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with Google is you get tracked even if you don't use any of their services. Almost every single web page has one of Google Adsense, Analytics, Maps, ... all of which can build up a profile about you. To a degree this same effect is happening with FB as more and more sites add like buttons, though they remain less common than Google's array of libraries.
Does Google have a look at Google Analytics? I thought it was only for the webmasters who set it up and that Google did not touch it. It is nearly their only service that I haven't blocked (with the libraries available on their CDN).
Here's what Google says about analytics:
Website owners that use Google Analytics have control over what data they allow Google to use. They can decide if they want Google to use this data or not by using the Google Analytics Data Sharing Options. When these options allow, the data is used to improve Google products and services. Website owners can change these options at anytime. http://www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/privacyoverview.html...
Since I have no control over it, I block Google analytics.
Re: Bullshit
#65> Facebook: "Our users want to interact with brands." As distasteful as the hacker crowd may find it, this is probably a true statement. A significant number of people (in the developed world) really do construct a large part of their personal identity by buying branded products from companies in order to signal something about themselves. There's a section on this on the Wikipedia page for "Brand": http://en.wikiped…
What yeswecan said, but to expand: people like brands - they will gladly and openly declare their brand allegiances on their profiles. We saw this before Pages even came out. What people don't want to do is to be constantly bombarded by bullshit communications from said brands. In many ways, openly declaring your brand preferences is signaling - the "liking" of brands is for their friends , not an enthusiastic wish t…
But it works, which is why they do it.
Re: Bullshit
#66With Apple, I'm the customer, not a marketer. This makes me comfortable with our relationship. I don't really care about Ping or app store approval policies, so, meh... With Google, I can see their ability to become a shady company pretty easily, but it is just too damn easy to switch search engines. Bing isn't so bad you know. But Facebook knows so much about me, and the network effects are so strong -- this is the…
> but it is just too damn easy to switch search engines. and personal email, and collaboration tools, and project mailing lists, and photo service, and maps service, and video hosting.. If you consider google as the search engine maybe not, but if you consider google the company the it's downright scary how hard it would be to get out of their grasp, IMO.
So? Google is "bad" because they provide a lot of really good services that are also well integrated? How dare they!
Re: Bullshit
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now that is Bullshit. Yes, Google makes money from their advertising. But Google does things that directly limit their ability to make money from advertising, when those decisons are in the interest of consumers. Take the whole design and UX of Chrome. There are many, many ways Google could have changed the design to make more money from it, and yet they haven't because they aren't in the interests of the users. Addi…
Google chrome isn't exactly a good example, considering that it's the only browser I've ever heard of embedding advertisements in its default homepage - http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/googl...
I remember Firefox also had Thunderbird ads on it's homepage at some point. Google could have done much worse imo.
Re: Bullshit
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now that is Bullshit. Yes, Google makes money from their advertising. But Google does things that directly limit their ability to make money from advertising, when those decisons are in the interest of consumers. Take the whole design and UX of Chrome. There are many, many ways Google could have changed the design to make more money from it, and yet they haven't because they aren't in the interests of the users. Addi…
Google chrome isn't exactly a good example, considering that it's the only browser I've ever heard of embedding advertisements in its default homepage - http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/googl...
The Safari homepage cross promotes.
The IE home page cross promotes and/or has paid advertising (depending on your market).
Even Firefox has done cross promotion occasionally.
I don't use Opera often, but I don't think I've seen advertising on their dial-page thing.
Is there some critical distinction I'm missing?
Re: Bullshit
#69With Apple, I'm the customer, not a marketer. This makes me comfortable with our relationship. I don't really care about Ping or app store approval policies, so, meh... With Google, I can see their ability to become a shady company pretty easily, but it is just too damn easy to switch search engines. Bing isn't so bad you know. But Facebook knows so much about me, and the network effects are so strong -- this is the…
App Store policies restrict what I can put on my own device. I do care about that.
Switching search engines seems pointless as they all have the same business model (maybe duckduckgo is different), but blocking all the tracking and analytics stuff solves this problem.
Facebook isn't a huge problem for me either. I basically use it in read only mode, blocking them on all third party sites.
Re: Bullshit
#70With Apple, I'm the customer, not a marketer. This makes me comfortable with our relationship. I don't really care about Ping or app store approval policies, so, meh... With Google, I can see their ability to become a shady company pretty easily, but it is just too damn easy to switch search engines. Bing isn't so bad you know. But Facebook knows so much about me, and the network effects are so strong -- this is the…
> but it is just too damn easy to switch search engines. and personal email, and collaboration tools, and project mailing lists, and photo service, and maps service, and video hosting.. If you consider google as the search engine maybe not, but if you consider google the company the it's downright scary how hard it would be to get out of their grasp, IMO.
But then Google has a very active engineering team, the Data Liberation Front, whose goal is: "[...] to make it easier to move data in and out."
http://www.dataliberation.org/
These are the products you can easily export: AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, App Engine, Apps for Business, Blogger, Bookmarks, Calendar, Chrome Bookmarks, Docs, Finance, Gmail, Google Storage for Developers, Health, iGoogle, Latitude, Maps, Notebook, Orkut, Project Hosting, Reader, Sites, Voice, Web History, YouTube
And via "Google Takeout" you can export all of these products in one go: Buzz, Contacts, Google+ Stream, Picasa Web Albums, Profiles
I think there's plenty of competitors for all of those products if you wanted to move.