821–830 of 888 posts
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Off-Topic: I always thought they missed out on a great opportunity to name the umbrella company AlephBet instead of AlphaBet ([1]), perhaps with a tag-line that reads: "stop thinking in constants" (to contrast Googol being equal to 10^100). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number
frigging ...what?
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But who's the customer? Google is an ad business. It sells human eyes and ears to businesses. They own a massive chunk of the ad business and everything they make benefits ads. People who are buying ads (businesses) might benefit with more competition, because as it stands, we have dumb stuff like lawyers in Missouri buying ads and people in Bangladesh clicking them. Google gains money even though that ad was complet…
You end up in spam with Gmail if you haven’t got your email hygiene in order. I’ve sent messages from cold Hetzner IPs and a cold domain name and managed to deliver to Gmail inboxes by having SPF, DKIM and DMARC correctly configured. It really is that simple. Same goes for Microsoft. Follow the standards, avoid spammy looking words, avoid sending empty messages and you’ll be fine.
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I think it should be common sense that both Google and Apple should be treated equally on this issue, regardless of what you think about the actual issue. Instead, we have two virtually identical cases, and they were decided in completely opposite fashions.
Google chose a jury trial, rather than a bench trial. The judge maid their ruling based on evidence presented, and largely ruled in Apple’s favour based on evidence provided by both Epic and Apple. No two cases are ever the same, there are always nuances. Throw a jury in to that mix, it’s even more of a crap-shoot.
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>Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition? No? It used to be IE and Mozilla, and now it's Edge, Chrome, and Mozilla. Opera existed then and now, and probably more people use it now, but it's still small enough that no one cares. I suppose you could make a point about Ed…
Before: Trident, Webkit, Gecko, Presto After: Blink/Webkit, Gecko/Quantum We're seeing less engines which is far more important than the browser wrapper. Also Quantum's development is pretty much driven by a desire to maintain feature parity with Blink which means Google gets control over what the web is according to every major browser. The fact that there are a variety of companies whose browsers are under Google's…
That's moving the goalposts, but honestly in the past it was IE and sometimes mozilla deciding how the web was going to work and anyone else playing catch up, which is essentially still what it is.
Hilarious to see all the people lamenting the break-up of AT&T. That break-up sparked the long distance phone race, which became the driving force for the massive laying of fiber optics... which enabled the Internet boom of the 1990s.
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> I think it would be a major shock to the browser ecosystem. To repeat the question from above, where is the downside? Microsoft only abandoned EdgeHTML and adopted Blink because Google owned sites like YouTube were deliberately breaking in Edge. At this stage I don't imagine they'd go back (to EdgeHTML as their engine) specifically, but it's not hard to imagine a world where MSFT maintains its own fork of Blink for…
> Microsoft only abandoned EdgeHTML and adopted Blink because Google owned sites like YouTube were deliberately breaking in Edge. No they abandoned EdgeHTML because it was shit. Seriously there are plenty of posts right here on hacker news about the internals of that decision. The team and product failed to deliver so badly that it got the axe.
There sure are:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
> This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up.
> Now while I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced - and they're the ones who looked into it personally.
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>Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully PageRank Gmail Maps MapReduce Chrome Protocol Buffers Go
Maps was technically an acquisition (Where2). But like YouTube, Doubleclick, Google Docs (Writely), Translate (Word Lens), Google Flights (ITA) and many others, Google successfully grew these products into giants.
Technically, but it's morphed so much that it doesn't even resemble its former self. I remember when Google Maps first came out and showed AJAX technology, so obviously superior to the competitors at the time like MapQuest. However, these days Google Maps is really more of a business directory with navigation, and it wasn't like that in the early days: you needed an address to navigate to.
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I think that similar arguments were made about Ma Bell and Bell Labs back in the day. And it's true, a lot of great things did come out of Bell Labs. In fact, it almost seems like the only people able to produce great things in the 1970s were massive entrenched corporations like Ma Bell. Funny, that. Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google…
>Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition? No? It used to be IE and Mozilla, and now it's Edge, Chrome, and Mozilla. Opera existed then and now, and probably more people use it now, but it's still small enough that no one cares. I suppose you could make a point about Ed…
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> And why do you think that vendors create search-friendly pages? Advertising! No, Marketing. Advertising is only one form and the most antisocial one. There is a huge difference between making it possible for people interested in your product to find you versus going out of your way to shove your product in front of the eyes of people who are doing something at best tangentially related.
You won't be looking for a product you don't know exists.
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All ads are psychological warfare being waged by corporations against the public. They ruthlessly exploit human psychology to sell product.
People are mindless pawns? People are not free to say no thanks, ignore or tune out? That's what I do my entire life. And I actually appreciate and value highly targeted marketing messages that show me things I'm interested in and WANT to buy. Really good targeted marketing is a win-win, it helps consumers find stuff they want and it helps the companies generate profits. (which in turns pays salaries to employees) I…