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How Google missed the boat
- meowface 13y agoInteresting how a lot of the advice in here parallels Steve Yegge's infamous rant. The link, for anyone who hasn't read it: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
- BorisMelnik 13y agoOhhh love the site framework and use of snap.svg. Interesting how he didn't mention Google+ not once.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- drakaal 13y agoThe premise that they missed the boat is wrong. They built a leaky boat because their core competence is in a different field. Google didn't "Miss the boat" they just never studied Nautical Science. Google is very good at things that are mathematical, predictable, quantifiable, and numeric. Google fails at things like Natural Language, Art, Social, Music, Video (youtube doesn't count that's just hosting and they bought it already successful, and it still doesn't hardly make any money) Facebook would "miss the boat on search". Apple will "miss the boat" on social. The difference is those guys won't go after a boat if they don't have the competency for it.
- joelrunyon 13y agoI don't think your other examples of FB & Apple are any good. * FB hasn't really given search a big go yet. They're working on getting onto everyone's phone. I think that's too early to call. * Apple bought Lala & has PING. Neither were great successes.
- drakaal 13y agoI picked those examples because both are looking at those as features not as core to their business. Google is trying to make Social a core of their business. Facebook is building a search engine. They are very proud of their "natural language" graph search. If they expand that to web sites they will likely fail. Apple is starting to look at social with things like Facetime. But they are looking at it as a feature not a core business.
- bentcorner 13y ago> FB hasn't really given search a big go yet. I'd be interested to see them try, because I have no idea what they could offer that I don't already get from the plethora of search engines available. I think Bing already has some social search thing that pushes up searches done by friends or something, but I don't hear much about that at all.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoFacebook doesn't just have the social graph of who your friends are and what they search for. They also have an increasingly insightful record of your personality. Probably moreso than Google, since Facebook gets more of your "casual" life than Google. Google is in a good position to record and analyze the intents you express, but Facebook likely has a better record of who you are outside of those expressed intents. Turning that into a useful product is difficult, but I'd be very surprised if they never work in that direction.
- human_error 13y agoI think Apple was just testing the waters with Ping; more like a social experiment for Apple. I don't think they actually cared much.
- yuhong 13y agoAnother HN comment on this issue (I wonder why HN don't allow its own comments as submissions): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754053 Makes me wonder how Larry Page was convinced that Facebook was a threat.
- mik3y 13y ago> Makes me wonder how Larry Page was convinced > that Facebook was a threat. Larry wasn't the only one. I don't think it was hard to see how Facebook posed (and still poses) a threat to Google: Their site generates (a) more content behind a walled garden, and can produce (b) better demographic targeting for ad sales, which together pose a pretty serious threat to Google's core business (of selling targeted ads against public content). Couple this with exponential MAU growth and a very "sticky" property and you better get worried. The comment you linked to is a bit ranty; IMO it confuses the execution flaws with G+ the product/business unit (of which there are many) with the overall decision to make a huge, concerted effort to compete head on in social. Half-assed efforts like OpenSocial and Buzz were not going to get anywhere close to Facebook-style data and ads. (And I don't mean to disparage those teams; the half-assed part regards the company's priorities.) In hindsight maybe the walled garden of Facebook isn't such an existential threat to Google's business, but in 2010 it was still very hard to tell. Larry would have been negligent not to act.
- yuhong 13y agoOf course, this still don't excuse the execution flaws. I wonder how Vic Gundotra was chosen. There is these articles which may give a clue: http://www.businessinsider.com/i-interviewed-to-be-googles-head-of-social-and-it-was-terrible-2010-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/i-interviewed-to-be-googles-h... http://piaw.blogspot.ca/2010/05/organizational-thinking.html http://piaw.blogspot.ca/2010/05/organizational-thinking.html
- voyou 13y ago"better demographic targeting for ad sales" Does Facebook really produce better demographic targetting? Facebook has more explicit knowledge about me, in that I've filled in stuff like my age and gender on my Facebook profile; but Google knows enough about my web habits that it ought to be able to work out that information and more besides (Facebook obviously also knows stuff implicitly about me from tracking Like buttons and so on, but it's not in any better position than Google in terms of implicit knowledge). Google viewing Facebook as a threat strikes me as Google having a lack of faith in its distinctive advantage (big data rather than conventional explicit demographics).
- dsl 13y agoGoogle missed the boat because they only hired academics, not hackers. They didn't need to embrace standards or build APIs, they just had to hire people who knew how to build products that real people outside the valley wanted. Google got lucky with its first product (search), acquired a company to make it a successful business (Adwords), and kept buying companies to try and onboard innovation.
- ajross 13y agoYouTube and Android only count as "trying" to onboard innovation? Seems like the strategy has been working not so terribly to me. This sounds rather like praise via faint damnation...
- drakaal 13y agoKeep telling your self that. Hackers rarely build things that scale to the size Google needs. A failure for Google has 10 Million signups the first day. The Product managers are what count in building a new product. Hackers are rarely good product managers. Academics are only a problem when they don't get user feed back before hand. A good researcher can build product that fits the needs of the users, and when paired with good UI people you get a winning product. Google isn't good at getting user feed back they work like Mathematicians, not like Anthropologists and Psychologists. Math and Anthropology are still academics. But not in the same field.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- alan_cx 13y agoIm not sure google have any clue what people want. The general impression I get is that they facilitate hundreds and hundreds of projects, let them develop, and if it looks good, let them loose into the wild and see what sticks. Most people only get to see the successful ones. I think the vast majority of these projects never see the wild. In contrast, I get the impression that other big tech companies lean towards thinking something up, then trying to push on to users. Perhaps I've just fallen for PR, but thats the impression I get.
- davewiner 13y ago
- sidcool 13y agoIt interests me how people expects Google to do all the things they want. Let's be sure that Google is a business, not a missionary organization. They will guard their business interests first.
- api 13y agoIMHO Google was somewhat psyched out by Facebook and made the classic mistake of copying their rival. Google+ is almost an exact copy of Facebook.
- chris_mahan 13y agoYet it's so much worse...
- Mikeb85 13y agoGoogle+ is also better in many ways...
- chris_mahan 13y agoSadly, these many ways are not my ways...
- agumonkey 13y agothe first two or three version were unbearably slow and awkward, but since the 'card' redesign, it's reactive (coming from a fps fetishist on a 2006 laptop) and usable. When G+ came, FB had all this in place, their html framework was hyper lean in all possible ways. Every time I had to use FB after G+ I was shocked to witness the difference. FB gained some weight since but it's still a smooth cut.
- scholia 13y agoOddly, I still find G+ almost unusably slow on a fast Core i5-powered desktop. And I use it every day. Facebook's performance is much better.
- toyg 13y agoDave Whiner lamenting the demise of RSS and OPML, you don't say!
- chris_mahan 13y agoBut he's not changing XML-RPC!
- smoyer 13y agoXML-RPC in its original incarnation DID need to be changed but from my read of that history, Microsoft turned what was an elegant proposal for making the content more contextual into the SOAP WebServices mess.
- __pThrow 13y agoHa Whiner, I see what you did there. No actual argument, just making fun of some guy's name. Very nice.
- jrockway 13y agoI don't think that was the parent's intent. Dave Winer basically invented RSS and OPML.
- auctiontheory 13y agoWhen you're just so damn rich, and the money keeps pouring in, it's very hard to stay focused, to relentlessly innovate, to admit (if only to yourself) that you're just as imperfect as everyone else, and make just as many mistakes. It was true for Microsoft, it's true for Google, and it's true for everyone else. (Well, those of us who are rich enough not to have to give a sh*t. Not me personally.)
- agumonkey 13y agoI wonder if there were some structural attempts (at Google or elsewhere) at mitigating this effect, like voluntary creating nano-competition by spinning off a bunch of companies just to see how the perceive trends and create on their own.
- mik3y 13y agoIt definitely happens in the valley; Cisco was notorious in the 90s and 00s for acquiring "spin-ins" (startups founded by ex-Cisco leadership/teams with an almost certain expectation of returning to the mothership), and I'm sure there are other examples. Less drastically, Google (and I'm sure many other valley peers) will often set up special incentive structures for certain teams: bonuses tied to aggressive adoption metrics and separated from the company-wide bonus, for example. I doubt it comes close to cutting that safety net (and making people truly hungry), but I give them credit for trying.
- agumonkey 13y agoThanks for the info, "spin-ins", is exactly the idea I was trying to describe. And I agree with you, in-house incentives are probably far from being enough.
- tostitos1979 13y agoI think VMWare does this. They even take stakes in the spin offs. Enlightened policy in my books.
- einhverfr 13y ago
- rsync 13y agoWrong wrong wrong. OP, comments, parent, children, all wrong. Tim Wu, Master Switch, monopoly over distribution channels - that is the answer. Either google ceases to exist or it becomes Ma Bell. There's no third way, and all of the things that google does that seem confusing make perfect sense if you view them through the prism of trying to become The Phone Company.
- jmspring 13y agoMaybe I am missing why this is top comment...more comment to the discussion would be helpful.
- wreegab 13y agoI think he/she is saying to stop idealizing an entity which primary purpose is to increase shareholders equity. I sure agree with him/her if it's what he/she meant.
- ronilan 13y agoSome things make sense, but surely not all; and surely not all as means to serve that goal. For example, storing all the world's videos makes sense while taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online does not.
- ralphm 13y ago“The technology of the last 10 years should have all been open to experimentation by developers without locking users in. There are a lot of developers who believe in this. It's central to the mission of WhatsApp, btw, so if you doubted that it could be lucrative, you should think again.” WhatsApp has changed and extended their XMPP basis such that it is not even remotely interoperable. They are actively battling third-party implementations. Their server is not federated. How exactly are "open", "experimentation" and "without locking users in" central to WhatsApp's mission?
- meowface 13y agoYou're right, I don't know what he's referring to. WhatsApp did not become successful through open sourcing or "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS".
- whitef0x 13y agoFirst of all twitter's growth is slowing, so its not very apt to compare them to google. And the same thing may start happening to Facebook in a few years (as people are notoriously fickle with social media sites - which depend on mass adoption - not innovation). I think google is doing the right thing - they are sticking to what they know instead of trying to 'build around the web' and become another Microsoft (who tries to make 'their own version of everything' example - Silverlight).
- Mikeb85 13y agoWhat boat did Google miss? Seems to me they're achieving their goals. They own search, they own video (YouTube), they have a very successful mobile OS, they have a successful desktop platform (Chrome OS and the Chrome browser), and they're innovating faster than anyone.
- nissehulth 13y agoWell, their "own" video was Google Video, that did fail and was replaced by Youtube.
- AaronIG 13y agoWhich they acquired in 2006 (less than 20 months after YouTube launched). They've been driving YouTube for quite some time now.
- coldcode 13y agoYes but the problem is most of their revenues come from one thing - advertising. What their leadership is innovating desperately is to have something else people will give them money for. Successful companies have many things they make money on. You can be successful giving everything away for free when you are small and hope to IPO or get WhatsApped. When you are a real company you need lots of things that make money so that no single one of them failing will hurt you.
- troymc 13y agoBlogger isn't the winner of the blog engine wars anyway. That would be WordPress, which is open source and now runs about one in five websites. http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all It's fun to imagine a world in which Blogger was open sourced, with the core developers working for Google. Would WordPress have "won" in that alternate universe?
- kcbanner 13y agoCare to cite that "one in five" figure?
- troymc 13y agoI did: just follow the link.
- hmsimha 13y agoI've seen different figures (http://trends.builtwith.com/cms/WordPress http://trends.builtwith.com/cms/WordPress), but I'd say 1 in 5 doesn't sound too far off, though perhaps it's a little exaggerated.
- mseebach 13y agoIn a long tail world, it only really matters if you're in the tail or the "body". If you're in the body, there's no big difference if you're 1 in 5 or 1 in 50 - you're huge.
- urethra 13y agofucking owned
- mirsadm 13y agoI'm glad we have this guy to tell Google how to run their completely unsuccessful business that missed the boat.
- sergiosgc 13y ago"this guy" is David Winer, not some random guy. Go look him up.
- gknoy 13y agoI had to [0]. Thanks for the suggestion. 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer
- jrockway 13y agoI miss his old blog, with ¶s next to every paragraph for purposes of linking.
- zupa-hu 13y agoevery guy has a name, makes no difference
- jakegr 13y agoNot a random guy. Just a guy that once said apple was dead, and called the iPad a complete failure when it was released. Not a random guy, just a guy that has no idea what he's talking about.
- WWKong 13y agoI strongly believe that was the right way to go. I never understood why Google didn't make a big push for standard structured information. They could have published standards for different industries similar to RSS. Everyone would have gotten on board similar to how every blog was pushing a RSS feed. Once the web moved towards structured data it would have been the first big step towards Semantic web. Imagine writing apps that could do this: "Phone, please book top movie at the box office and dinner for Friday evening and adjust Nest at home accordingly".
- B-Con 13y ago> Their search engine was and still is the glue that holds the web together. So, why didn't they build around that? Yeah, if only every product they offered either: a) had comprehensive search capabilities (YouTube, GMail, map, etc) b) was at least decent integrated with their flagship search (News, YouTube, images, Blogger, heck, Android, etc) c) was a variant of their flagship search (images, news, sound, etc) I think it's fair to say that Drive/Docs/Keep and Calendar are fairly independent of Search. Tsk, tsk, for shame.
- dredmorbius 13y agoIt's worth noting that when G+ launched (oddly missing from your list), it didn't have search. Even now, while G+ has search (and yes, it's both fast and comprehensive in that everything is indexed), it's missing tools -- you cannot search by author, by date, or by content type (posts vs. contents). Search is balkanized: you can search ... "pages" from the search bar (along with posts and content which is what you likely want), but to search a Community you've first got to navigate to it, then realize that the thing that doesn't look like a search dialog is actually a search dialog. There's no negation (you can't exclude people or terms), you can't search by user, you can't search by date ranges. All that said: search was the one thing G+ really had going for it.
- B-Con 13y agoThat's a good point. It was missing from my list because I honestly never use G+ search and didn't know how to best assess it.
- dredmorbius 13y agoI was pretty gobsmacked when it showed up missing. For a while there, before Google's "you will be assimilated* policy really showed itself, Search was about the best thing about G+. I've since abandoned it largely for Reddit, which does have a featureful search, though it's not comprehensive (comments aren't indexed).
- soup10 13y agoSo google failed to catch the social bus, who gives a fuck. Google is an engineering company at it's core, and as long as they continue to do ridiculously cool and useful R&D with their search advertising revenues in the hopes of developing new killer products. They are a far more impressive and valuable company than their derpy cousins at facebook who mostly just capitalize on people's vanity and boredom.
- chappi42 13y agoWell and google capitalizes on the fact that most normal people are too lazy to install adblockers and bored enough to watch youtube videos. I admire their engineering capabilities but for me they are no longer cool and the 'one google' doctrine is something I actively try to resist (multiple accounts, log out, avoid services, use alternatives).
- m3mnoch 13y agoi'm happy to explain it to you in four easy steps. first, look at this chart: http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/services/ranking-factors-2013/ http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/services/ranking-factors-201... second, notice how all of the highest ranking seo factors are social. third, google makes more money on search ads because it monetizes intent. you know what else monetizes well? recommendations. fourth, owning both the recommendation data AND the ad data enables even better (aka more expensive) ad targeting.
- kriro 13y agoI think they could have done Google+ and the whole social aspect better but they are still driving a couple of important buses. I think they should work on an open source WhatsApp clone with strong crypto. - The browser it the platform of the future...they have a good browser - Mobile is in everyone's pocket...they have a mobile OS - Shocking newsflash...people still use mail...they have a good email service - They provide "cloud office" - Search is still search And they have a bazillion other good projects. If you want to say they slept on something I wouldn't even pick social. I'd say their biggest mistake in recent tmes was that they let Amazon get such a lead in cloud hosting/infrastructure and they aren't the #1 there.
- higherpurpose 13y agoThe problem with Google and also open source apps is that they don't promote their products very well. It's more understandable with open source projects, though, since they don't have the funding, but Google has no excuse. Take Hangouts for example. Android is now on over 1 billion devices, and will be on 3 billion in ~2 years. Most of those people should have Hangouts by default. But I'm willing to bet most of those people will not use Hangouts. Most of them won't even know what the heck Hangouts is. And since Google isn't promoting it heavily, that means that even if someone wants to use it, he knows it's going to be hard to get his friends to use it if they haven't even heard much about it or what it does. Larry Page was right about needing to be "all-in" with a mobile company like Motorola. It used to be much worse while Eric Schimdt was leading it, with products like Google Checkout or even Google Docs being in a sort of coma-like state for years before you'd see any improvements. But even today, Google still seems to make a lot of stuff just for the sake of it, and don't seem all-in. It feels like they want to just do the minimum amount of work for a product. With Hangouts they probably think "we've made it available to everyone with an Android phone - we don't need to do more than that now, do we? I should just become popular by itself!" The difference between Hangouts and Whatsapp is that the company behind Whatapp treated it like a product - a product they needed to be as successful as possible to survive. Google treats Hangouts as a feature - a feature of which they don't necessarily think they need that bad to survive. That's why something like Whatsapp becomes popular, and something like Hangouts not so much. That being said, I've love for them to integrate TextSecure/future Whisper (1) into Android, at the very least as an underlying layer, the way CyanogenMod did it recently (2). As soon as Whisper is out, I'm going to recommend everyone I know to use it, and same for e-mail as soon as a nice DarkMail-based client appears that's easy to use. But if Google offered me all of that, I wouldn't have to do it. 1- https://whispersystems.org/blog/a-whisper/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/a-whisper/ 2- http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/whisperpush-secure-messaging-integration http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/whisperpush-secure-messaging...
- voyou 13y agoOdd that Winer doesn't mention Google's actual attempt to do what he suggests here, which was called OpenSocial (and had buy-in from MySpace, back in 2007 when that might have mattered): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial I'm not sure why Google gave up on this approach, but it's not the case that no-one at Google was thinking along these lines.
- NicoJuicy 13y agoAnyone who thinks Google+ has missed the boat doesn't understand Google+. Google+ brings together: - SMS - Chat - Likes (+1), on apps, youtube, websites - Videochat / screen-sharing / helping out - The easiest OAuth implementation (Facebook needs an App-ID), google needs nothing - Your location information (Android) - GMail - Contacts (backup of your cellphone) - SEO (their platform is OPEN for the web, while Twitter and Facebook wants to hide their information) - Information for businesses (Google Places) - and probably a lot more that i didn't thought about right now. - Pictures (backup of your android phone, default tag= personal) - Documents (Google Drive) Now, to create a social network, what do you need and what does Google + doesn't have? Google+ is probably one of the most used communication social network... But a lot of it is going on in the backend and you don't see it on the web.. Because people don't really use it right now (they don't use it by going to Google+ and enter their message there).
- ulfw 13y agoAnd what does the end user get out of all of this exactly?
- NicoJuicy 13y agoHere are some practical innovations that are usefull when i'm going out with my car. When you lookup a bussiness in Chrome/Google on my PC, Google Now (your mobile) will suggest the navigation to this business, included with traffic delays. Just click on it (you don't have to enter an address), and it will navigate to that place. (ps. this is a less user friendly method: http://gps.about.com/od/gpsmapscharts/ht/google_garmin.htm http://gps.about.com/od/gpsmapscharts/ht/google_garmin.htm ) Traffic delays can be calculated by people who navigate with Google Maps (or are using Google's Localisation Service). Low Battery localisation (with WIFI) can be calculated by the combined power of collecting MAC-address by the Android platform and/or the cars that are used for Google Street View. I can view the surroundings of where i'm going with Google Street View in my navigation app. It will ask me if this information is correct, if it's not correct. I can correct it and the business has a improved place on the Google Maps platform.. (without doing it themselves) Google+ is not only a social network. It's an authentication system where the pk is your email, the frontend is www.google.com/+ (social network) and the backend is a collection of meta-data (big data?) that can be used to make your life easier... And on top of that big data, you have a learning skynet ;-)
- mcv 13y agoThey did try to provide an open platform with Wave, which was amazing, powerful, innovative, open source and decentralized. And it failed. I wish it hadn't; I liked it a lot.
- mark_l_watson 13y ago+1 totally agree. Wave was really good. I sometimes use Apache Wave, but not having the combined AppEngine support for Wave Robots makes Apache Wave less useful for my interests.
- judk 13y agoWave's problem wad that it was all complicated plumbing, and no product. It isn't clear to me why no startup has built a product on the Wave code or concept.
- izietto 13y agoIn Italy we say "missed the train" :-)
- izietto 13y agoIn Italy we say "missed the train" :-)
- pointillistic 13y agoWhat is unbelievable about this conversation is that the question about how content creators will get paid for the content is never raised. In fact this is biggest mistake. There are questions about how app developers get their exits but not how people who create content get paid. This is the heart of the problem with the internet today, not how someone can build the next bottleneck aggregator that rides on the wave of users creativity but pays them nothing in return. Social or not.
- willholloway 13y agoThe answer to how do content creators get paid? Dogecoin. Hack on that.
- pointillistic 13y agoIn fact micro payments might be the solution but Google have chosen to monetize with ads, this meant nothing flows for the content creators and everything for the sponsors and the toll collectors at Google. In other words the next television. This is what is out of balance now.
- Sven7 13y agoContent creators get paid for their content. If it's peanuts, it is because the internet is the largest market out there.
- gbog 13y ago> how people who create content get paid You are assuming they must be paid. But that's a questionable assumption. Content producer can have other means of living. Content creation could be a hobby, something you do because you have to, but not necessarily because you have to fill the fridge. Just one example: China has most likely produced more poems than any other countries. Probably the same with paintings. And even more obvious with calligraphy. But, except for some few public writers, poetry or painting was never considered a professional activity. It was a skill, a way to spend time with friends, or alone, a way to cultivate oneself, a way to become fully human. I think it was similar in ancient Greece and some parts of Europe in the Renaissance. Is it a coincidence that these periods are the most flourishing of human history? Some might say that people of those times had leisure because they had slaves, or were aristocrats. That cannot be the difference: With all the machines we have now we could have as much leisure time. And I would trust much more a blogger writing for the sake of it than writing for money.
- perfunctory 13y agoGoogle is a public company whose goal is to make money for their shareholders. How projects described in this post help them achieve that?
- varelse 13y agoVic Gundotra ruined Google+, which could have and should have relegated Facebook to 2nd place, but then Real Names happened and the rest is history. Google hires generalists: jacks of all trades, masters of none. Their web services and Android applications suffer greatly because of this ongoing idiocy. Don't believe me? Cool, go try building a house using only a Leatherman tool and get back to me. They need some sort of proven design czar to make dangerous choices and they need the specialized talent to execute on them. Finally, when they went public, they were gradually coerced into being a profit-driven company over being a technology-driven company. Only Jeff Bezos seems to have figured out how to give Wall Street the middle finger so he can do as he pleases. That said, their moonshots remain cool, and I'd get acquihired by them in a second given the kind of money they shell out.
- wdr1 13y ago> Google hires generalists: jacks of all trades, masters of none. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norvig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norvig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Abelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Abelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bloch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bloch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Tveit_Alvestrand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Tveit_Alvestrand
- varelse 13y agoYes, Google hires specialists for their moonshots. And in doing so they make it extra difficult for existing employees to escape the tedious work they're doing by transferring to them. As an example, when I worked there, I was told (by someone on Glass) that the only real way on to the Android team was to be hired into it from outside. Using these black swans to disprove my point seems akin to "proving" that playing the stock market is easy because Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch got really rich doing so. So are you actually unaware of the blind allocation process at Google for most incoming employees or are you just trolling me? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713077
- robg 13y agoAll good points on openness, but I don't want services built off of my searches or history. That's their core product but it's one based on the assumption of privacy, not sharing.