Earlier quoted context omitted.
What am I missing out on here?
WEI == web environment integrity
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Google's 25th Birthday
71–80 of 103 posts
Re: Google's 25th Birthday
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not as if Google invented the idea of a website the plots directions. Sure their product was better than all the rest, especially once they started purchasing satellite imagery, but Bing and Nokia Here were not that far behind, not to mention the traditional GPS players. I'm not trying to be negative, just don't see where the praise is coming from, it's a crowded market.
They took a chance on mapping and photographing damn near every road on the planet. They had a huge number of business/restaurant locations marked on the map which you could search for. They were the first to have great turn by turn directions that rerouted if you make a wrong turn (this existed but the user experience sucked and they had to be manually updated when roads changed). They created Google Earth which was…
I'll grant you those points, I was 13 or 14 when all this was happening so I wasn't aware of the finer points. Now that I think of it I remember all the trouble they went through to send physical mail to business addresses to allow the owners to update their own data. That was smart.
I wasn't sure of the details of acquisition vs invention so I went to Google Earth's wiki and found a pretty interesting timeline. iirc Google News was invented right after 9/11 because the news sites themselves were falling over from increased traffic, and Google Earth has its ties to the war as well:
>> During the [2003 Iraq] invasion, It was used extensively by Miles O'Brien and other on-air broadcasters, allowing CNN and millions of viewers to follow the progress of the war in a way that had never been seen before. Public interest in the software exploded and Keyhole servers were not able to keep up with demand. Keyhole was soon contacted by the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, for use with defense mapping databases, which gave Keyhole a much-needed cash infusion.
>> In October 2004, Google acquired Keyhole as part of a strategy to better serve its users.
Re: Google's 25th Birthday
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There has never been such a world, Book publishing. Fine art. Music. Poetry. Travel and tourism. Food.... need I go on? > Capitalism abhors competition "One of the foundational blocks of capitalism is competition." [0] > I would argue that a strong unified platform ... the web, whatever) is good for user and developer "The Web" was [1] a standard , not a company or "platform". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capi…
>Book publishing. Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan combine for 77-91% of the market: https://www.statista.com/topics/9280/book-publishing/#topicO... >Fine art. This isn't an industry, just a tax evasion scheme for rich people >Music. 3 players control 70% of recording: https://musically.com/2023/04/26/music-copyright-publishes-i... >Poetry. Not an industry, never has been…
I take it that your catalogue of the failures of modern "capitalism"
is not an argument in favour of it, but you concurring with me that
it's destructive. That we are in a catastrophic local minima in 5,000
years of human history isn't a great argument that "no such world ever
existed". That would be parochialism [0]
Re: Google's 25th Birthday
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not as if Google invented the idea of a website the plots directions. Sure their product was better than all the rest, especially once they started purchasing satellite imagery, but Bing and Nokia Here were not that far behind, not to mention the traditional GPS players. I'm not trying to be negative, just don't see where the praise is coming from, it's a crowded market.
Of course they haven't invented it. But it's the execution and scaling that's more difficult than ideas. Like Elon Musk says, Ideas are easy, Execution is difficult and scaling is excruciating. I find it amusing how much we as a civilization don't value execution, scaling and operations.
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Re: Google's 25th Birthday
#75Obviously denting the universe at such scale comes with upsides and downsides. Aside from the impact they've had product wise, it's important to highlight the contribution they have made by shaping the culture of Silicon Valley technically, socially, and economically and second and third order effects of that (e.g. folks find their partners and have kids at Google :). I myself am a beneficiary and thankful for that.
Re: Google's 25th Birthday
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not as if Google invented the idea of a website the plots directions. Sure their product was better than all the rest, especially once they started purchasing satellite imagery, but Bing and Nokia Here were not that far behind, not to mention the traditional GPS players. I'm not trying to be negative, just don't see where the praise is coming from, it's a crowded market.
Of course they haven't invented it. But it's the execution and scaling that's more difficult than ideas. Like Elon Musk says, Ideas are easy, Execution is difficult and scaling is excruciating. I find it amusing how much we as a civilization don't value execution, scaling and operations.
oh come on, of all the things Elon can take credit for, paraphrasing thomas edison cannot be one of them
"Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration"
Re: Google's 25th Birthday
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not as if Google invented the idea of a website the plots directions. Sure their product was better than all the rest, especially once they started purchasing satellite imagery, but Bing and Nokia Here were not that far behind, not to mention the traditional GPS players. I'm not trying to be negative, just don't see where the praise is coming from, it's a crowded market.
People used to pay hundreds of dollars for GPS units and hundreds more for annual maps updates before Google entered the picture. There may be alternatives now, but Google Maps absolutely revolutionized the space when it showed up and brought online maps/GPS to regular consumers for the first time.
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Re: Google's 25th Birthday
#78I’m surprised the first result today for “how to cut a pineapple” isn’t an SEO optimized recipe with a wall of nonsense to scroll past before the actual instructions How much tuning did Google need to do for that?
No need. Back in the days, as you can see in the video, you just needed a couple of sentences and a few images.
Interesting to see the big adsense block present on the page and the example being an exact match domain, which is clearly an MFA (Made for Adsense) website.
Re: Google's 25th Birthday
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Book publishing. Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan combine for 77-91% of the market: https://www.statista.com/topics/9280/book-publishing/#topicO... >Fine art. This isn't an industry, just a tax evasion scheme for rich people >Music. 3 players control 70% of recording: https://musically.com/2023/04/26/music-copyright-publishes-i... >Poetry. Not an industry, never has been…
I take it that your catalogue of the failures of modern "capitalism" is not an argument in favour of it, but you concurring with me that it's destructive. That we are in a catastrophic local minima in 5,000 years of human history isn't a great argument that "no such world ever existed". That would be parochialism [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parochialism
There is no period in recorded history where an economy was dominated with a number of small players of roughly equal status in competition for an extended duration.
5,000 years of human history is roughly as long as we have the concept of an economy. Before that, you had access to the people in your immediate vicinity and "competition" for services was not a concept.
Re: Google's 25th Birthday
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Book publishing. Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan combine for 77-91% of the market: https://www.statista.com/topics/9280/book-publishing/#topicO... >Fine art. This isn't an industry, just a tax evasion scheme for rich people >Music. 3 players control 70% of recording: https://musically.com/2023/04/26/music-copyright-publishes-i... >Poetry. Not an industry, never has been…
> taxis have been cannibalized by Lyft/Uber - what's your argument here? Once the market figured out how to sidestep government regulation of the ride-hailing industry, it got significantly cheaper, easier, and more accessible?
And consolidated to one or two players.