2k13 what's the worst enormous tech company?

prev: 2k11, what's the worst enormous tech company?

voted facebook, prob google

still voting for the 'book. Google and Apple have definitely taken a downward turn in product quality over the last couple years, sure enough. But it's pretty apparent that zuckerberg and crew are out to wreck life for our children and our children's children.

amazon, but they all suck in their own way

^^^

will facebook even be around in 5 years cmon

yes. facebook.gov

'fb doesn't exist' and 'fb is the biggest company in the country' seem like equally reasonable predictions

facebook will eat your family

Actually the real answer to this is "Oracle"

http://rack.1.mshcdn.com/media/ZgkyMDEyLzA3LzIxLzAwXzQ2XzM5XzY0Ml9maWxl/d1a78840

oracle has always been the worst, but only recently have they acquired sun and inflicted their terribleness on so much other tech.

kind of a Bilderberg vibe to that photo

lol oracle

Microsoft is still kind of all-time for their business practices over time, though. I'm sure Google and Apple have bought companies just to shelve competing projects, but MS was notorious for buying companies so they could shelve entire ideas that might chip into their marketshare.

oracle's pretty bad. heard from somewhere they played a key role in setting up the tech side of china's security state.

nevermind, that was cisco

if Oracle had set up China's security state the Great Firewall would have a lot of unpatched Java vulnerabilities

Photo needs Kanye.

lol Oracle, and lol Oracle Financials only running on an insecure no-longer-supported version of Java, as owned by, oh... Oracle

this is an issue at work but whichever management committee decided to spend millions on Oracle Financials when the previous system worked better anyway is way more important than anyone who knows what "malware" is, so IT roll out ancient versions of Java over the top of any newer versions on even non-Finance staff machines and we're p. much not even allowed to talk about it

getting increasingly suspicious of Google (this message posted from Chrome, so, y'know, not bothering to do anything about it) but still voting Facebook

Actually the real answer to this is "Oracle"

ilx does not offer the facility for me to indicate in sufficiently large type how otm this is

Haha I was gonna ask where Oracle was in this poll

Mr Veg had to take his dad to a hospital appointment at the "Larry Ellison building" (ugh) He made a point of ranting loudly about Oracle as he walked in

Oracle measurably lessening my quality of work life every single day. Does anyone itt have to wrestle with its hilariously named Agile application?

guys you forgot SAP too

well, and good ol' IBM, too

oracle sap etc arent really in the same category as the companies in this poll, anyway microsoft forever

idk tho microsoft is p fast becoming irrelevant, might be more interesting w/o them, in that case facebook

tho facebook isnt nearly as large as the other 3, so maybe facebook should be thrown out

amazon is just a retailer so maybe not them either

apple prob shouldnt be there cause they just make devices

the answer is google

amazon send me packages in the mail, I can't stay mad at them

google or facebook

amazon is pretty amazing, i would never vote for them

apple too

google i like gmail i google things all the time

facebook i use all the time and despise

microsoft i dont use any of their shit

yeah apple make magic enjoyable devices for wasting my time; and gmail is way better than hotmail i mean come on do you really want hotmail back; and Microsoft idk i use their stuff and it doesn't drive me insane anymore maybe they've worn me down

Facebook give me fun worldwide interconnectedness with my friends while using my data to make cylon clones that will attack us in 10 years mark my words

amazon is just a retailer so maybe not them either

def not true these days

i knew some one was gonna say that and well lets just say i knew you were gonna say that

isn't ilx hosted on amazon

they retail computer cycles who cares

iatee they send me stuff comeon have a heart

amazon is kinda evil for taking ubiquitousness-via-undercutting to the next level but i guess that's old hat these days. google's evil is more ambitious and in its early stages imo, has less to do with being cutthroat and more to do with owning a simulacrum of the entire world.

google makes all their money selling lil text ads, something they got into a decade ago, im sure they aspire toward world domination but its so not gonna happen

eh who knows what pies they have their fingers in rn, really who knows, i guess you could try using their search engine to find out..............

companies generally once they figure out how to make money from one thing arent the best at doing other things, example microsoft w windows/office

i mean sure google has lots of products but are any of them really meaningful, have they been successful doing popular new internet things like say social networking, andriod has been very profitable... for samsung, sick burn

google glass lmao my god nerds

The Microsoft Store is similar to the popular Apple Store concept, which has been largely successful.The concept aims to give a greater level of customer satisfaction by not only having sales staff but also employing "Technical Advisers" (similar to Apple's "Geniuses") to assist customers with technical questions and issues. In addition "Specialists" (or trainers) are employed to show customers how to get the most out of their software. Xbox 360s are also available to entertain patrons.

self driving cars will be a v big deal, but lots of other companies have been working on that stuff too, car companies for instance

http://blogs.technet.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-80-54-metablogapi/3201.event_5F00_11bostonStoreFeelIt_5F00_Page_5F00_3677CCFE.jpg

that looks so fun

Google announcing dropping support for CalDEV is making me think I should stop relying on their products before they close them off too.

just as long as they keep google plus i DEPEND on it

hmm i guess google's only revolutionary products are search, maps, and gmail and those are all kinda old, i agree that unless they find the next amazing data application to make consumer-friendly they're gonna turn into clowns, maybe they already have with glass. feel like reeder is a jumping the shark moment maybe.

they might not have created YouTube but owning it is non-trivial

yeah i mean all those things search, maps, gmail, youtube are good for what google is good at, selling lil text ads, and all of them are basically commodified or quickly on their way at this point

google has the most popular mobile operating system in the world and they havent figured out how to make money off it, mostly because its harder to put lil text ads on tiny screens

they should just focus on the mapping stuff and get with the government, then they would be more evil

they don't have to make money off it anytime soon and dominating the phone market has lots of hard to measure benefits when you are collecting all the information in the world etc. also isn't patent stuff really at the core of why they lose money w/ it?

i bet the government has some really nice drone maps already, but maybe google could sell them info on what people are searching for like jihad or gun control or w/e then the gov could drone them, they could even automate it

worst enormous tech company, not which one you glare at the most from yr desktop, looking at u, lag∞n

he's not a tech company

tho lagoon would be a good name for one

no I meant he's a desktop

they don't have to make money off it anytime soon and dominating the phone market has lots of hard to measure benefits when you are collecting all the information in the world etc. also isn't patent stuff really at the core of why they lose money w/ it?

― iatee, Sunday, March 17, 2013 2:12 PM (22 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah idk i feel like the collect the info then turn the money faucet on theory sounds like it makes sense but im not sure when its actually happened, at least not on the scale that a company like google requires, and they dont make money on android cause they give it away for free, and the reason its popular is cause they give it away for free, the really weird part of the equation to me is that its open source so any phone company can just fuck w it as they please and google doesnt even get any of that valuable info, this describes p much all the andriod phones being sold in china right now

the only thing thats keeping google collecting that info is that their services are good and its easiest for the handset makers, but like what if samsung signed a deal w microsoft to use their services instead, it could easily happen and where is google then, just making something for their competitors to make money off of

guys i can be a desktop and an enormous tech company, i contain multitudes

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/47/LagoonAmusementParkLogo.png

okay with u spying on me fyi

™

easily google or facebook, although microsoft recently patented this

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-patent-uses-kinect-and-mobile-cameras-to-count-people-in-your-living-room-2012-11

people buy new phones all the time so I def agree that their market share could collapse quickly but at the end of the day how many companies out there have the $ to put themselves into that position just in case it becomes worthwhile.

iirc there was some kinect related patent to read your face/mood so they could display ads for happy people or something like that

xp

android is def v interesting for them but it also seems particularly fraught

the only thing thats keeping google collecting that info is that their services are good and its easiest for the handset makers, but like what if samsung signed a deal w microsoft to use their services instead, it could easily happen and where is google then, just making something for their competitors to make money off of

― lag∞n, Sunday, March 17, 2013 2:19 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw to be clear what i was trying say here was not samsung switching to microsofts operating system but rather keeping android and turning all the google stuff email maps etc off which is fairly trivial to do, chinese companies do this now since a lot of google stuff is blocked in china anyway, obvs this is only possible because android is open source

isn't ilx hosted on amazon

― iatee, Sunday, March 17, 2013 10:31 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

~$ dig +short ilxor.com
184.73.174.86
$ dig +short -x 184.73.174.86
ec2-184-73-174-86.compute-1.amazonaws.com

also we pay amazon using google ad money

also SAP is less worst than Oracle simply because SAP doesn't own Java

ilxor.com is obvs the worst enormous tech company

search, maps, and mail were all done decently before google. google was just a bit faster and less irritating at all of them.

oracle's acquisition of first mysql and then sun gave it the ability to damage a much vaster swath of the tech world with its shitty practices.

p sure ilxor is a Java Tomcat application

search was def not done decently before google, mail neither

the upside is this is all open-source-ish stuff and everyone is just sort of walking away from them, so the disruption isn't necessarily long term.

the only big advantage gmail had for me over the also-rans was that you could get pop/smtp for free.

altavista and co were thoroughly... adequate.

gmails big advantage was functionally unlimited storage - and all the pre google search engines were terrible the entire internet was made up of huge keyword paragraphs!

gmail wasnt nearly as revelatory as search but it was still better

gmail's true advantage was that it was cool and exclusive and linked to a very popular company

does no one remember having to delete messages cause yr inbox was full ffs people

companies charging for or just not offering forwarding!

lock in!

spam remember spam

you are all so spoiled, forgot where you came from

i bet the government has some really nice drone maps already, but maybe google could sell them info on what people are searching for like jihad or gun control or w/e then the gov could drone them, they could even automate it

― lag∞n, Sunday, March 17, 2013 11:13 AM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol point taken, at the end of the day google really is a company for consumers and the money there is in ads or devices. i still think there's something about how good they've gotten at massaging a lot of data to fill a need, maybe they can sell that skill to other need contexts with a different kind of money in them, or maybe there are other companies in those contexts who are actually doing the equivalent or better but don't gain anything from being visible to the general public.

xp yeah unlimited storage was a huge deal (and still is imo)

man 'people just need more free space' was so not the dominant narrative, it was 'are you cool enough to have received an invite to this exclusive new thing'

i agree that googles data skills/cache could conceivably lead to new huge money (the internet of things?) but i just dont see them doing it cause theyre a mature company w an existing business to tend to, also even w/o that inertia its just really hard to hit it big twice, its v rare to do it once

man 'people just need more free space' was so not the dominant narrative, it was 'are you cool enough to have received an invite to this exclusive new thing'

― iatee, Sunday, March 17, 2013 2:56 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh this is just the nerd story, i mean it was opened to the public and then lots of people who had no idea still switched cause it was better, i mean having some buzz helps but if the products not better no one is going to bother to change

i only cared because 10 gb but i was a nerd (lol xp). it's true that past a certain point people don't actually care about unlimited storage, they just want to not have to do the deleting themselves and want it to look pretty (hence Facebook)

and free space was def a big deal when it launched

fb's early exclusiveness was also huge, people at low ranked colleges were so jealous they couldn't join the club

The worst, worst Java implementation I've ever used was SAP's. Sun really should have had most credit for making it a useless desktop platform. 99% of the use of it is on the server side these days, which is a lot more the fault of Oracle, IBM, and SAP than anything. Fine platform for server development, especially with ilx's tomcat approach (open software stack, for the most part) except for the fact the companies holding the software are so wrong-headed and slow-moving and unable to work with any organization under a thousand people

like, we complain about facebook and google, but in the backend, there are systems with mediocre security that manage your paycheck, insurance, bank transactions, and those of large companies and they're relying on these big companies that do not make consumer software

Amazon - helps destroy local retail, treats workers like shit, fucks suppliers over

wal-mart 2k13

capitalism 1700-

Apple, because they have fooled everyone

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

the good news is Amazon just bought a robot company last year so they can hire fewer people to move things around warehouses

i actually voted amazon fwiw

silby is actually a robot iirc

it's true I have a cold metal heart

By market cap, for the curious:

AAPL: 416.62B
GOOG: 268.44B
MSFT: 234.83B
ORCL: 172.04B
AMZN: 119.01B
FB: 63.47B

Facebook clearly the worst at being an enormous tech company

SAP: 100.85B

ahem

yeah, and IBM is 239.53B and they don't really make computers anymore, they are basically in the same line of business as Oracle and SAP. So much money to be made off of making miserable accounting and ERP software.

sap and oracle are horrible but they don't really work well w/ the rest of this group as a set, like they're not about to release a social network or a delivery service or w/e

oracle and sap and ibm can have their own poll

can't believe all these companies are making so much money of clouds, tbh, you can get free clouds just condense some water droplets in the atmosphere

we could poll telecom equipment companies: cisco, lucent, juniper, nortel, fujitsu, HP, etc

you should save that one for the future court cases xp

plz yes we need more boring polls

veg otm

facebook is just crm software with data entry done for you

let's poll internet backbone providers like Level3

also can we plz poll utility companies

I don't even know who the main ones are anymore! Back when I knew their names mci and sprint were still entities

ooh and dental insurance

idk, ILM polls musicians who are virtually identical, down to country, style of music, age, and gender. at least these companies provide diff services

I'm pretty sure my dental insurance comes from someplace like "Dental Insurance, Inc."

like beatles or rolling stones, they're both full of white british dudes, who gives a shit

amazon are a monopoly, dodge taxes, aren't even that cheap any more because they rely more on creaming off the wild west that is their marketplace (which is rife w/ incredibly suspicious sellers operating on an industrial scale) & bully even the biggest publishers for more margin incredibly blatantly. everything milo said too.

sorry mh guess I touched a nerve

idk, I think the "clever" people who have been stating that "if you think amazon is a company that sells books or even material objects, they are winning" might be on to something

not really I just find most ilm talk interminably repetitive

:)

amazon are prob the most objectively evil, which is funny cause everyone loves them

I did find a large poster in a Microsoft product box I was throwing out this week, though. Not going to wallpaper my cubicle with it anytime soon, though.

xpost

but iatee

they send me stuff

in the mail

idk, I think the "clever" people who have been stating that "if you think amazon is a company that sells books or even material objects, they are winning" might be on to something

― ☠ ☃ ☠ (mh), Sunday, March 17, 2013 6:46 PM (27 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

amazon mostly sells books and material objects!

what are your opinions on the unibomber xp

imagining him on a unicycle and lol'ing sorry

lol vg

well unAbomber sent bombs in the mail which wasn't very nice

amazon send me books and cds and things that I want so

Amazon have been a company more about making the supply chain and delivery of products more efficient, sometimes at the expense of local stores. In that way, they're like a new Wal-Mart, but in their overall portfolio delivery of physical products is just one type of supply chain they've collapsed. Currently they're killing VMWare and other virtual server providers.

yeah but what % of their business do you think that represents

http://www.zdnet.com/amazons-aws-3-8-billion-revenue-in-2013-says-analyst-7000009461/

idk, 3,8 billion seems like not much to sneeze at

sorry for comma, I am not euro

its not the majority ill save you the time

iatee did amazon send u bombs in the mail

oh it has to be the majority to be relevant, I guess it's a hobby or something

idk, I think the "clever" people who have been stating that "if you think apple is a company that sells ipads or even material objects, they are winning" might be on to something

BECAUSE ITUNES SEE, so clever

I think focusing too much on how much money they currently make on this or that is misleading, like some of these things are decade-long investments

that they can all finance w/ their respective monopoly profits

i love all these companies, they are all so big and scary, make me feel like im livin in a stross novel

Bezos is pretty involved with this if you want to know his actual hobbies http://longnow.org/clock/

gmails big advantage was functionally unlimited storage - and all the pre google search engines were terrible the entire internet was made up of huge keyword paragraphs!

― lag∞n, Sunday, March 17, 2013 2:51 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

yah it was def a very big deal when it launched.. i think this was before the era of Big Terabyte and having like, a 200GB hard drive was still a Big Deal, and people were really starting to feel the squeeze from torrenting everything. so like, even though in practice nobody really took full advantage of the Unlimited Storage, the concept of it was very powerful

typo silby you put an extra l in

its funny because gmails web interface is literally worse than the catholic church, cant believe im locked in smh

amazon is a supply chain and logistics provider, it's just their #1 client is their own online store?

and xxxp that is the exact view people have typically had on Apple in the past, that they're a hardware company that uses the software wing to sell the product, or a software company that uses the hardware, depending on the writer and the decade the piece is written. Arguably they did buy a completely separate software company circa 2000ish to refresh/replace their own operations

I think focusing too much on how much money they currently make on this or that is misleading, like some of these things are decade-long investments

― iatee, Sunday, March 17, 2013 6:53 PM (58 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

amazon doesnt have any monopoly profits because they sell everything basically at cost, thats why they are doing so well w teh cloud why they drove every bookstore out of business because they dont make any money

the gmail storage size was a huge deal, so was gtalk when they rolled it out, gtalk still is a huge deal

ok I'm going to shut up now before I pull out some horrible-ass startup company lingo like "pivot" but the idea that companies have to be able to come up with new markets to remain fresh or pull interest to their existing products seems pretty key

they don't have any monopoly profits cause they choose not to exercise them not cause they don't have a monopoly

amazon is so nuts, the best thing is all the companies using seo tactics to create wikipedia books and nonsensical shirts based on stuff people search for in amazon

max otm on gtalk and gmail, although I always loved reader as much as those two and they've been fucking it up piece by piece ever since they took the social bits out

like thats a pretty good example of what the here and now profits aren't that important when your goals are 'becoming the only company left in america' xp

all these insane books and like actual objects being created as like material seo byproduct

what the = why the xp

i cant tell if amazon isnt profitable because they actually arent profitable or if they are just using funny tax loopholes to hide their income

anyone who thinks that iPod-era Apple is in any business other than making a profit selling hardware devices is kind of being too clever imo. Apple makes a whole lot of money selling hardware devices. App store and music revenues are a rounding error.

yah the 'democratization' of the retail-side is def a huge deal xp

they don't have any monopoly profits cause they choose not to exercise them not cause they don't have a monopoly

― iatee, Sunday, March 17, 2013 6:58 PM (24 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

when is amazon going to exercise their monopoly profits this has been going on for a while, i mean you cant actually become a monopoly in america its against the law, at some point you think they would start selling things for a profit if they were planning on it

what's nuts to me is the companies who use amazon for fulfillment and then undercut amazon by a little bit? like, how does that work

I ordered from some company advertising on amazon a while ago where their m.o. was pretty obviously "wait until amazon runs out of the product, accept orders, wait for amazon to get it back in stock, then order from amazon and send it to the customer." As in, their entire business model was to be an intermediary that accepted orders when amazon was out of stock

silby otm, in that Apple is having their cake and eating it, too. Video game consoles are the only major thing I can think of that are still sold at a loss, and people are starting to realize that's not viable in the new market.

i loved that thing where those two amazon fulfillment 'companies' [which i assume are like just some guy sitting in russia with a hotline to a warehouse somewhere] using pricing algorithms that ended up in this escalating algorithm war where each was selling some copy of a nonexistent nonsense wikipedia book for hundreds of thousands of dollars

i mean if thats not the most amazing thing to you idk

the most amazon thing

oh yeah, the pricing algorithm bots are ridiculous. I was kind of wondering if this holding pattern thing I witnessed is like algorithm bot 2.0, where it just watches most sold items for sell-out status

max may be referring to http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

"five of this item left, order now"

bot orders five of them, accepts the next five orders through the site, then charges $10 for reshipping

ohhhh yeah thats definitely it

aw its a better story when its the nonsense wikipedia book

Oracle gave us The Master and Spring Breakers. (Ellison's 20-something producer daughter giving directors lots of freedom.)

i own an irl actual bound book ("book") consisting of a hoax wikipedia article + other related articles

i read somehing recently about how u can pay people on the internet to generate hundreds of 4 and 5 star reviews for ur amazon.com product

max conflating amazon lolz to make the most amazing thing in the world

write an ebook abt it

like you can just send them a text file of all the reviews u want them to publish, then they have ip addresses from all over the world post them randomly to ur product page... pretty cool

pretty... damn... cool...

Oracle almost gave Apple to Jobs, according to his bio. As in Ellison was like "Yo Steve, you could do a better job running that, want me to buy out the company and install you as CEO?"

sweet ass botnet

i own an irl actual bound book ("book") consisting of a hoax wikipedia article + other related articles

― max, Sunday, March 17, 2013 7:06 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

the bicholim conspiracy right?? i bought a copy too im gonna give it to my bro for his birthday, hes super into this computer glitch fake web authenticity 2.0 stuff

乒乓, it would be even cooler if you were hiring those people through Amazon's Mechanical Turk service

using amazon to game amazon

the amazon algorithms are scary & weird & beautiful. amazon sell a huge amount of books, mb the majority i don't know, at barely anything below RRP, other websites are much cheaper.

most of their books are well below list price, like at least 25%

where are these book sites where cheaper than amazon?

i bought a $14 dollar book new today for $5 from amazon as a matter of fact

amazon's mechanical turk service has done a pretty good job at discovering the market minimum wage in america, which is like $2 an hour

crowdsourcing is not big enough a thing right now that this really deserves to swing someone's vote but it might be one day

i went to some authors talk about her book, she was selling them above retail, i was like nooooooope went home and added it to my amazon cart at a big discount, suck it greedy authors

your brother owns

the same book as you

pro tip u should use amazon price trackers to figure out the best time to buy somthing u have ur eye on

there is nothing worse than authors who try to make money

I should have included them as an option

I mostly use amazon to preorder stuff when I'm drunk and forget about it

hes not my literal brother... but yes hes a cool dude. its funny, i sent him the smearogram stuff, he wrote a blog post about it, months later i saw caek link to that same blog post on facebook, what a small world

xp lagoon
for mass market stuff, yes, for academic books &c., not really. there are plenty of big textbooks heavily discounted, but for range abebooks & similar are cheaper.

who wants two copies of prometheus and a 50 gallon barrel of lube

smearograms, man what a world

did i just dox caek btw, mods feel free to und0xxxxx

its also weird how amazon has created this underworld of bloggers who literally support themselves by telling their readers to use their amazon referral links

i would appreciate it v much if lag00000n bought his books using my 乒乓 amazon referral link in the future, tyvm

not even an underworld man thats literally 10% of gawker revenue

i accidentally signed up for amazon prime i guess because i do not remember doing it, but anyway now its on, forget abt waiting to get over the $25 supersaver shipping threshold

hah i dont even know where to click on gawker.com to buy something from amazon

im really excited for when amazon rolls out same-day delivery... never gonna leave my house again

they should build apartment buildings on top of amazon distribution centers

feel like amazons push into being ur media consumption center should be noted as well... like, buy the physical copy from amazon and u can stream it from amazon... forever

they should build apartment buildings on top of amazon distribution centers

― iatee, Sunday, March 17, 2013 7:18 PM (42 seconds ago) Bookmark

the latest housing complexes going up aroudn my parents place in nj are literally built right next to a walmart shopping center... its insane

amazon is also like traditionally horrible too in the way it treats its labor force but so is apple

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

beautiful morning, birds are singing... gonna walk to walmart and grab a breakfast sub from subway, maybe get my nails done there afterwards, get a eye checkup hey why not, its right there

ya obvs like every company in the world wants to become yr media consumption center, be interesting to see how it plays out, i wouldnt bet on amazon

one plus for amazon is that they are the only one to have an urban hq

like I think apple is the least evil overall but their suburban death star campus is pretty bad

Yeah I can walk here in 20 minutes xp

(woo 12 hour weekend shift)

'Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies' reminds me of this sf story where a guy discovers faster-than-light travel by noting that it takes his package one day to get to mumbai and two weeks to get across the street via mail

like I think apple is the least evil overall but their suburban death star campus is pretty bad

― iatee, Sunday, March 17, 2013 7:22 PM (17 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the new one, that shit dope, looks like it should be on the cover of some scifi paperback

i mean

http://www.bloomberg.com/image/icPKN6sf14PY.jpg

im in favor of a suburban death star campus if there are sleeping pods in the basement so the employees never actually have to leave the campus

ready for blastoff

stock that thing w seo print on demand books and youve really got something

theres prob some super cool human sized pneumatic tube system for getting around that thing i bet

dayo you are looking for Google, all those much-vaunted perks and free food are just a cheap way of preventing engineers from ever leaving the office

why would u ever leave when theres a inhouse masseusse

in the nyt article about this the other day they mentioned a justin bieber interview

even justin bieber lives at google what a cool company to work for

man I wish I worked at a place where I could watch justin bieber interviewed on webcam how did any business ever exist w/o offering this perk

the times article abt googles ny hq was p lol, theyve def entered the baroque phase of employee retention

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/pixel.gif

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/business/at-google-a-place-to-work-and-play.html

i mean hey an office that looks like a lil apartment why not

why would u ever leave when theres a inhouse masseusse

― 乒乓, Sunday, March 17, 2013 7:26 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i would be taking advantage of this, between the food and the massages they would prob have to fire me

be a next level employee, instead of "working from home" and never actually logging in to work, go into your apartment-like office and just don't do any work there

u can slack off and have free food, think about it

btw i just visited the amazon page for that 23 million dollar book about flies and lol @ the most expensive copy on there right now

http://i.imgur.com/5jW9b9U.png

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/03/16/business/16stewart-web/16stewart-web-articleLarge.jpg

google notice how no one is sitting in front of the truck, hr protip dont make yr employees feel like theyre abt to get hit by a truck, they will go work at facebook

For a company with Google’s largess — and the profit margins that make it possible — it’s hardly necessary to require employees to be at the office. “People want to come in,” Ms. Mooney said. On average, she estimates she spends nine hours a day there, five days a week. She mentioned that she recently took a day off — and ended up at the office.

This graf at the very end is what seems so insidious to me.

i wonder which of these giant tech companies is the best at captchas, when u think about it captchas are just crude voigt-kampff tests, the turtle lies on its back in the hot sun, its belly just baking, beating its legs trying to turn itself over....

is that an indoor artisanal food truck? this is getting too conceptual for me

“I live in a studio apartment,” she explained. “And I don’t have free food.”

they tried serving the same food w/o a truck but it just didn't taste the same w/o truck fumes

look at that projector whitescreen, wonder if google has movie nights, hey i know everybodys worked real hard this week why dont we watch a movie to relax... tonights movie: the island

i wonder which of these giant tech companies is the best at captchas, when u think about it captchas are just crude voigt-kampff tests, the turtle lies on its back in the hot sun, its belly just baking, beating its legs trying to turn itself over....

― 乒乓, Sunday, March 17, 2013 7:34 PM (35 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha i read abt a study recently and they found they could easily break all the captchas except... googles

I wonder if they have converted a level of the building to 'brooklyn' so everyone in the office can enjoy brooklyn w/o having to make an hour long subway trip

ha i read abt a study recently and they found they could easily break all the captchas except... googles

― lag∞n, Sunday, March 17, 2013 7:36 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

my mother?? let me tell u abuot my mother!!!

if i recall the google ny offices have like some lift where they can pull foodtrucks from the garage into their cafeteria or something, or so i heard.

also another good amazon warehouse article: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html

http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/7f006cee-70cb-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.img

amazon is also like traditionally horrible too in the way it treats its labor force but so is apple

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

― max, Sunday, March 17, 2013 7:20 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

brutal

awful too how just some slight changes perhaps spurred by government regulation could make these jobs so much better

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

― mookieproof, Sunday, March 17, 2013 6:02 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

amazon is also like traditionally horrible too in the way it treats its labor force but so is apple

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

― max, Sunday, March 17, 2013 7:20 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no respect, i tell ya

tbf max couldn't see your post through his third chin

that and the google article are sort of interesting bookends

The moral of the story is that engineers are terrifyingly amoral.

And it's pretty easy to manipulating them into building things that can murder people from the sky or march people 15 miles through a concrete-floored warehouse.

http://gizmodo.com/5433487/the-secret-lives-of-amazons-elves

voted facebook, write-in vote for north korea

Google have been in the baroque phase for at least a decade, once it became clear that they had a world beating product and had the smarts for more (people need to gtfo of here with the idea that GMail was an incremental improvement over hotmail or yahoomail) then they totally let their freak flag fly.

Google also take in more than half of the global internet advertising revenue, more money in 2011 than Microsoft made selling Windows (though Microsoft also own about a dozen other billion dollar businesses).

Couldn't really vote for them as they have never charged me for anything - write in vote for Oracle, sure.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-future-of-google-and-tech-phones-and-computers-are-converging/274003/

re: earlier talk about android / why short-term profits aren't a big deal

Amazon -- gained competitive advantage and helped kill off brick-and-mortar retail by exploiting undeserved sales tax avoidance; "two-day" shipping no longer actually is anything close to two days; "free" shipping now requires these "add-on" items; products are often not as advertised (I have multiple times gotten cheap knock-off products or products that looked used); overrun with fake/shill customer reviews; has engaged in practices like differential pricing depending on what kind of computer you're using, etc.

if google got valve on board with making games for chrome os, they'd drag the steam platform with them and give developers motivation to join. assuming google lets you have stores other than the chrome app store or whatever.

that article is stupid

Does anyone else think that the only people walking around wearing google glass are going to be those same few assholes who walk around with a bluetooth earpiece all the time?

What have you received that looked used, Hurting? I've had the opposite experience, although I have amazon prime: two-day shipping arrives in two days 90% of the time, sometimes even when I order past the deadline, prices are lower even if sales tax were figured in (especially on books/music), and pre-ordered items end up charging me the lowest advertised price even if it goes up by shipping time.

I've also received things on Saturdays when (if I remember correctly) the two-day shipping doesn't guarantee that

Currently, Google doesn't charge a licensing fee to the companies, like Samsung, that make billions of dollars selling mobile devices that run Android. Google's only way to make money from Android is through the Google Play store, where it sells apps, and so far the Play store is not a material portion of Google's income.

google can never charge a licensing fee to samsung because android is open source, as it was when google bought it

But a fused Android and Chrome OS opens up a number of new potential revenue sources for Google. Foremost among them is simply charging for future Google services. While Gmail might always be free, Google is happy to charge users to store their data. As people move more and more of their lives to the cloud, Google could potentially lock them into life-long subscriptions to its data storage and other services.

why would people pay for these things that are offered by so many companies for free

there's a price, it's just not upfront

What have you received that looked used, Hurting? I've had the opposite experience, although I have amazon prime: two-day shipping arrives in two days 90% of the time, sometimes even when I order past the deadline, prices are lower even if sales tax were figured in (especially on books/music), and pre-ordered items end up charging me the lowest advertised price even if it goes up by shipping time.

― ☠ ☃ ☠ (mh), Monday, March 18, 2013 10:30 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I recently got a children's toy that came in an open, worn looking box and was a different (though roughly equivalent) brand. Another time I got a power adapter that purported to be the same maker as my laptop but looked cheaply made somehow and wound up smoking within a few weeks of use. I also received another electronics item that was supposed to be a brand name but had no brand on it.

We've also had really bad experiences with customer reviews of baby products, which admittedly are subjective, but I'm pretty sure there are a lot of fake/shill reviews. Often we find that the few one or two star reviews are exactly OTM and describe our experience, but are drowned out by all the raves.

As far as shipping, it seems to have gotten worse recently.

it would be highly ironic if google decided on a business model that depended on lock in when 'dont be evil' was specifically referring to lock in

their business model has depended on lots of lock ins

go ahead

I can't easily change from gmail because I have a decade's worth of old emails on google's servers

you can do it pretty easily

also compared to previous webmail regimes where it was impossible it is very easy

they're the only ones w/ the quantity of search data that they have = making a better search engine near impossible

bing is m/l just as good as google

what youre talking about is not lock in, its just inertia, theres nothing locked about it

you're locked into using it cause it's the best cause everyone uses it

like nothing is 'pure lock in' but microsoft at its peak wasn't either

google search used to be much better than everyone else so it got popular and everyone used it, now its maybe a little bit or not at all better than everything else but no one has any incentive to switch because the competition isnt any better, regardless anyone can go to bing at any time and search to their hearts content and the results will be m/l the same as google

I mean microsoft poured billions of dollars into making what is ultimately a second rate search substitute but there is no way some start-up could have even made bing, that's the problem

like nothing is 'pure lock in' but microsoft at its peak wasn't either

― iatee, Monday, March 18, 2013 10:47 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nothing is 'pure lock in' therefor every thing is lock in ~thinks abt it~

the right-now monopolistic stuff on its own is less worrisome than the fact that scale is going to keep allowing these companies to do things nobody else can, tho those are related. like, how many companies other than amazon and google could even theoretically attempt same-day shipping? walmart?

I want a Siskel and Ebert-style tv show where lag∞n and iatee just talk like this

there are always gonna be things that take a lot of money to do, like building cars or w/e, i think being internet companies makes them more vulnerable than their irl counterparts - i mean its interesting that you mentioned same day shipping cause that existis in the physical world, where as search i think is a much easier lift than having actual warehouses and what not, and i do think a start up can take google out in search it just will be a new type of search prob something thats not even called search

I don't think that amazon/google/walmart have a lockdown on the logistics of same day shipping. Not at all. In that regard, they are just platforms, and if we've learned anything in the past five years about tech, it's that platforms are subject to radical disruption.

google got good at search by software, sure, but also by throwing tons of commodity hardware at it. now they have highly-specialized data centers to support that.

so if you're going to compete with google, you either need something that goes from a completely different angle ("new type of search") which is pretty unlikely, someone insanely rich who can afford to buy data centers, or someone who's going to bootstrap off of a cloud provider like ec2.

web search is already less important than it was a few years ago because of mobile phones apps etc

'new type of search' gonna seem pretty unliekly until somebody invents a 'new kind of search'

i mean i def search for breaking news on twitter now not google

maybe the new type of search will be totally new and radical and beyond what we can even imagine, but atm new types of search seem like they're likely to be some siri-type-thing or fb-search-type-thing ie things dependent on the platforms and data controlled by these companies

wtf are you talking about, 90% of the stuff I do on my phone that's not social networking is related to "web search" if you factor in geolocative stuff

web search is already less important than it was a few years ago because of mobile phones apps etc

― lag∞n, Monday, March 18, 2013 11:22 AM (14 seconds ago) Bookmark

yah googles weakness does seem to be that they specialize in general search but dont specialize in specialized search, like restaurant search, product search, idk babysitter search, nyc cl search, used car search

if you factor in geolocative stuff

looking up stuff mid-conversation, checking to see if restaurants are open when I don't know their homepage, looking up directions to places on google maps, etc

like yelp, amazon, craigslist are all provide much better 'search' than the google version of those searches

google maps is just another search

new search is all context related

or, if you wanna buzzword, "smart search"

gone are the days when precocious smiths fans needed to find a place to talk about morrissey w/ google and found ilm, rip

I don't think that amazon/google/walmart have a lockdown on the logistics of same day shipping. Not at all. In that regard, they are just platforms, and if we've learned anything in the past five years about tech, it's that platforms are subject to radical disruption.

you can't just 'disrupt' warehouses the size of cities, I mean maybe when we can 3d print a computer or something, but that's about it

I guess! I hardly ever go directly to something like yelp, I usually just search for stuff via google then go yelp or w/e comes up

like yelp, amazon, craigslist are all provide much better 'search' than the google version of those searches

this is very subjective

my secret shame is that i use yelp a lot

google maps is just another search

― ☠ ☃ ☠ (mh), Monday, March 18, 2013 11:24 AM (3 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but it doesnt have to and wont be just google providing the maps, itll be whatever maps the carrier or app youre using uses, cause its part of the service youre using not a website you go to, its not the web even

"smart everything" = multiple data streams + algos + analytics

webpages, apps, appliances, it's all going this way

those warehouses are great only in aggregate. 15 years ago, EDI allowed only big companies to scale logistics.

one time google maps told me there was a burger king where in fact the burger king at that place had closed down, yelp did not make the same mistake

i just wanted a whopper jr google smh

right now, enterprising young companies can buy datastreams from a huge variety of sources. Inventory management is a granular option for just about any company. That's a radical change from five years ago. And it's global.

go for the full size whopper bro, treat yrself

w cheese

but all the stuff you click on via maps comes from the web -- if I search for hotels near union square or w/e, it's pulling up things that it thinks are hotels from indexing their websites

I've never actually gotten onto the craigslist bandwagon because I find the taxonomy and search to be abysmal; like, if I want to find info on a car, I want to narrow the search down parametrically as opposed to guessing at which keywords will sensibly partition the data and then having to read through every ad anyway in case the person who posted it fucked up something

well i dont work for google so im poor, i bet the truck in google chelsea provides as many full size whoppers to its employees as they can handle, what a life

idk, google has tried to get people to feed their search engine in non-web content ways a number of different times over the years, whether it's via a sitemap or their review-styled thing, but with varying success

craigslist is awful basically on purpose

I want to narrow the search down parametrically as opposed to guessing at which keywords will sensibly partition the data and then having to read through every ad anyway in case the person who posted it fucked up something

― Darth Icky (DJP), Monday, March 18, 2013 11:29 AM (23 seconds ago) Bookmark

my friend had the idea to make a website that would do ebay searches for common misspellings of high priced products, im sure somebody else has made that website in the meantime

it's 'the best way to look for an apartment' cause it controls that market not because the search engine is good, at all, even a tiny bit

but all the stuff you click on via maps comes from the web -- if I search for hotels near union square or w/e, it's pulling up things that it thinks are hotels from indexing their websites

― ☠ ☃ ☠ (mh), Monday, March 18, 2013 11:28 AM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i mean its the web as in http but not the web as in a series of linked pages you decide to goto

that is a decidedly non-technical way to look at that data

I think the most publicly visible Google data thing was their recipe search. They gave sites/blogs that provide recipes a format to upload index info to search, and people complained like crazy because anyone who didn't do their custom format would effectively get stuck below in search results.

It works pretty well, but for the most part, that prediction was right -- if I search for "recipe chicken noodle soup" or w/e you end up with the ones that respect the format first

buying Instagram was a data acquisition so that Google can sell more advertising

it's 'the best way to look for an apartment' cause it controls that market not because the search engine is good, at all, even a tiny bit

― iatee, Monday, March 18, 2013 11:30 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this really true anymore? There's trulia, streeteasy, padmapper, etc. Trulia would be great if it weren't for all the dead listings and listings that mysteriously show up in the wrong place on the map.

well craigslist is not really even a search engine, its just a collation of information that u can look at all in one place, which is what search kinda is in the end really

padmapper relies on cl for its listings, no? there was a lawsuit iirc

google fucking owns me.

craigslist is a virtual bulletin board, thinking of it any other way will just make you angry

classified ads, right

right but it's dumb as a post

craigslist is awesome because they dont give a shit, but yeah someone is obvs gonna take their business, or rather losts of companies are gonna take lil pieces of their business

idk about higher end stuff but for me anything else I've tried has been a waste of time. I think if craigslist had wanted to go evil it would possibly be up there w/ these companies, maybe not as big but still enormous.

Craigslist is barely more than a keyword search

I mean listings are more useful when there are more of them in the same place, it's a business that is always going to be like that, sorta like ebay

craigslist would lose a lot of utility and be replaced within a couple years if they went more commercial, imo

Craigslist is ripe for disruption

no way, nobody cares about how nice and non-profit cl is, they use it cause it's useful

lol it makes assloads of money and it could be made better

they are operating in Friendster fairy tale world if they think utopia lasts forever

they sue people who try and make it better

I think they're hesitant to make changes because it works, and any changes would destroy the magic

"magic"

the magic of being a crappy site that lucked into a network effect

it's a page that takes like zero bandwidth per load and its content is 90% ads

they're geniuses

not denying genius, am denying that they can't be blown out of the water

there's no such thing as invincible in tech

I love Craiglist, fyi

also, no one gives a rat's ass about bandwidth. It's irrelevant.

what Craigslist and Amazon and Google have are relationships with their users. And that's what's hardest to disrupt.

if cl had been run by a zuckergates it would prob have basically every apartment and job listing in america and you could easily search and organize stuff etc etc

Google Search is doing a lot of stuff that you might want an app for - search for a film, it'll tell you where it's playing, search for a football team it'll tell you the current score.

I can't easily change from gmail because I have a decade's worth of old emails on google's servers

Ridiculous though the name (and logo) is, this is what the Data Liberation Front is about.

i don't even have an opinion about this question

though yesterday in an inexplicable rage i nearly deleted my facebook even though i log in about once every 15 days.

correct me if i'm wrong but CL only 'works' because craig himself doesn't pay himself very much? like it's a shitty little site that only really scales because the proprietor isn't in it for the money. maybe that's bullshit, idk.

i suppose letting people hock furniture and hunt ass for free is some kind of innovation i'm still pretty pissed at the death of old print media as a consequence.

There's definitely an expectation that a dedicated app will automatically give better, more targeted search info than a general search engine, regardless of whether that is actually true or not

Like, I think the real reason Yelp is so big is not because it has better searching but because it allows its userbase of failed novelists the ability to contribute to their copy and build up a following, which they can only keep entertained if they continue to seek out businesses and write overly florid horrible novellas about their experiences there that are only vaguely about the businesses, and then rewards the especially unbearable ones with free egostroke parties. I have rarely found a situation where I haven't gotten the information I've actually wanted about a place from a Google search, with the added bonus of not needing to read someone mercilessly abusing adjectives and adverbs to overdescribe the act of biting into a burrito.

maybe u should be mad at print media for having 50 years to find a way to make money other than letting people hunt 4 ass and love seats and not being able to

yelp is useful for its stars and its pictures of food, you dont actually need to read any of the user reviews xp

and yet, i'm not

xp

Ass and Love Seats should be the name of an EP

"we spend money on gathering information, and take money from people wanting to put their own information next to it on paper -- wait, maybe in three decades, computers? somebody get on that"

Yelp is useless for its stars because half the people ranking these establishments are either super entitled dickweeds who will give a place one star if the server doesn't refill their water glass every five minutes, easily-pleased uncritical buffoons, virulent racists or fakes hired to artificially inflate/deflate an establishment's rating, and you need to read the reviews to determine which is which and what proportion of the reviews to ignore, at which point you are better off just murdering everyone.

correct me if i'm wrong but CL only 'works' because craig himself doesn't pay himself very much? like it's a shitty little site that only really scales because the proprietor isn't in it for the money. maybe that's bullshit, idk.

they could prob turn on the money faucet and still not make any improvements to the site, it works because there are more listings there than anywhere else. I think craig and the people who work there believe that they're doing it for the good of the world or w/e but not being in it for the money is related to them never improving anything.

idk, fuck improvements.

haha man I don't think I realized exactly how much I hate Yelp until just now

well the improvements are happening, just on other sites, and cl won't exist in 20 years

i'm not clear on what CL's revenue is -- who has to pay to put an ad up? realtors?

realtors and job postings in ny and sf iirc?

that's it!?!

Supposedly CL has over $100 million a year in revenue, so it's pretty unlikely that a single man's salary would be a make or break thing (you know, going from $200K to $500K or $500K to $1m or whatever).

"we spend money on gathering information, and take money from people wanting to put their own information next to it on paper -- wait, maybe in three decades, computers? somebody get on that"

― goole, Monday, March 18, 2013 11:54 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

what % of a newspapers revenue came from classifieds and what % came from yearly subscriptions?

how the fuck should i know

I thought it was common knowledge that classifieds were the cash cow of the newspaper industry, or at least common CW.

well the improvements are happening, just on other sites, and cl won't exist in 20 years

― iatee, Monday, March 18, 2013 11:57 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Right, e.g. Trulia already has a lot of really great functionality that CL doesn't have, it just has other flaws. And when it comes to buying as opposed to renting, CL is pretty much useless compared to redfin or realtor.com (although those don't cover manhattan and brooklyn yet for some reason).

According to the website, Craigslist makes money by charging a $10 fee for brokered apartment listings in New York City, $75 for job listings in San Francisco and charges $25 for job postings in six of its largest U.S. markets.

This website also charges $10 (in the US) for an ad that comes under the category therapeutic services. Craigslist charges $5 for re-posting an ad that is live. Other than these the organization doesn't have any other means of earning money.

classifieds were indeed the cash cow, followed by display advertising

and especially in alternaweeklies

conventional wisdom is that subscriptions covered very little of a given paper's costs; being able to pimp those numbers out to advertisers was the real prize.

and yes, classifieds were even more lucrative because there wasn't any negotiation there at all

xps

well... newspapers still suck

i mean the real culprit for the demise of newspapers was simply that the internet stole eyeballs, once that happened it was inevitable that people were stop gonna use them for classifieds + advertisers were not gonna pay top dollar for adspace anymore

the real culprit for the demise of buggywhip makers was the automobile

and thank god free internet porn killed sex phone lines

we all grew up in a weird period where most cities had reduced down to a one-paper monopoly. the political economy of all that is a little beyond me but lack of intra-city competition is a thing for recent newspaper history

amazon is the answer to this question, that will change when our insane regressive tax laws finally require them to collect state sales tax maybe

you mean that they can't survive a business model where they lose money?

someone alert their shareholders, which are legion

give me convenience or give me death, Amazon Prime.

i mean the real culprit for the demise of newspapers was simply that the internet stole eyeballs, once that happened it was inevitable that people were stop gonna use them for classifieds + advertisers were not gonna pay top dollar for adspace anymore

― 乒乓, Monday, March 18, 2013 11:07 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the real action here is that advertising may well have been overpriced all along. the old axiom was that half your ad budget is wasted (and you never know which half). it may be closer to 9/10ths and you can figure out what was useless a little better :/

tons of digital ad money is just as lol useless

yeah the answer for how to monetize anything these days being 'advertising!' seems a lil shortsighted to me, its a bit mystical

you don't love those ads that appear on your mobile apps? you mean you don't click through them?

i often wonder what will happen to these hot new websites like tumblr and twitter once the vc money dries up and the ad money proves insufficient

if coca cola stopped advertising for a month, do u think their marketshare would plummet. do u think people would stop drinking coke.

"Users really don’t know it’s an ad."

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/four-notable-startups-was-sxsw-147986?page=2

that article made me puke this morning

would u still kick it if it were a civic

w/ a company like coke those things are so hard to measure and even the people who measure them are kinda full of it

If Coke really stopped advertising its market share would gradually drop off, like let's say not only no more TV spots but no more special displays in stores, etc. I don't know if a month would be enough time, but I'll bet a year would make a pretty big dent.

corporate profits seem so mysterious. like after all the accounting and revenues been counted and expenses paid out and even after the multimillion dollar c-level salaries have been paid out and u have all this cash leftover. what do u do with it. dont need to pay dividends. put it back into the company? how much? R&D, yeah, advertising, okay seems like as good a use as any other. the vanishing marginal utility of a dollar. apple with 70 billion in cash and not knowing what to do with it. what is a corporation, where did it come from where is it going

Guinness still advertises in Ireland, one of the most sewn-up markets there is, because when they spend less their sales drop.

Basically if you don't constantly remind people to do something, they might start to get other ideas. Plus you have to capture every new baby out of the womb and immediately convince him to drink your product, before someone else does.

corporate profits seem so mysterious. like after all the accounting and revenues been counted and expenses paid out and even after the multimillion dollar c-level salaries have been paid out and u have all this cash leftover. what do u do with it. dont need to pay dividends. put it back into the company? how much? R&D, yeah, advertising, okay seems like as good a use as any other. the vanishing marginal utility of a dollar. apple with 70 billion in cash and not knowing what to do with it. what is a corporation, where did it come from where is it going

― 乒乓, Monday, March 18, 2013 12:21 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well yeah, any and all of the above. Retain some of the profit, pay some of it out to shareholders, pay bonuses, invest it back into the company in some way, etc.

... pay employees a higher wage?

never

Capitalism , man

http://schoolworkhelper.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Oliver-Twist.jpeg

lol exactly where do you think the median salaries at these companies lie

http://www.geekwire.com/2012/microsofts-starting-median-pay-beats-rivals-91500/

Basically every single exempt position at any of these places is going to be looking at a 6-figure salary to start

not the people in india

... pay employees a higher wage?

― Spectrum, Monday, March 18, 2013 12:32 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well yeah I agree, but to get technical about it, then it wouldn't be booked as profit in the first place, so that wouldn't really answer the question.

xxp

what about the amazon warehouse workers, sales people, and those lower in the corporate hierarchy? of course highly skilled specialists and uhhh ... CEOs are going to get more $$$.

yeah there are the 'people who work at these places' and 'people who work for these places' and group 2 is enormous and global

a lot of that money gets invested, does it not

a lot of it gets kept offshore until a tax holiday :)))))))))

Well yeah, any and all of the above. Retain some of the profit, pay some of it out to shareholders, pay bonuses, invest it back into the company in some way, etc.

― space phwoar (Hurting 2), Monday, March 18, 2013 12:29 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark

sure, i just have this vision of some incredibly successful companies who bring in far more revenue than they know what to do with it, just sitting on it. when u get everything u could possibly want done with 10 billion dollars what do u do with the other 5 billion, etc.

live like caligula, it's in the declaration of independence

u think a corporation ever just decides one morning to say fuck it, secretary book me the next flight to monaco im putting it all on black

AIG, iirc

sad lol

also, no one gives a rat's ass about bandwidth. It's irrelevant.

― I am only able to build things if Obama helps me (dandydonweiner), Monday, March 18, 2013 10:42 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people paying for servers, do

while we're on the subject, newspaper websites are some of the busiest most taxing bullshit ever. i run with NoScript, and seriously the amount of external garbage cued up on those things is crazy

the worst, for sure

i often wonder what will happen to these hot new websites like tumblr and twitter once the vc money dries up and the ad money proves insufficient

― 乒乓, Monday, March 18, 2013 12:13 PM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

twitters gonna be fine, theyre official now, theyre also an example of search thats better than google fwiw

Also news breaks on twitter before anywhere else. That's pretty cool.

yep

why is Twitter search better than Google, IYO?

for breaking news

also twitter beefs are pretty entertaining, especially between celebrities

that too the celebrity fights are better than on google

the character limit means they have to be pithy unlike FB where you can post a wall o text

so it's not the search itself as much as it is the data

right

does twitter do fun logos on fun days

how do i even sign up for twitter do i have to know anybody

http://nyulocal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/google_buzz_icon_extralarge.jpg

and can i use a 'nick' i hate using my real name on everything!!

wahhh

all this and more can be yours

oh i already signed up nm

namaste

Twitter is too worthless to be evil IMO

old manz milo has testified

twitter does one thing pretty well but it's never gonna be some monster company that gets into hardware or making an os. it's like eBay.

u mean ebay/paypal with special hp relaish

dude they made VINE

ok after an hour of trying to find people on twitter i'm following al jazeera english.

and that's a wrap, thanks folks.

Bullshit also breaks on twitter first, is the problem.

I wish the VCs that are dry humping Tumblr would tell the world how much porn they are currently serving

twitter does one thing pretty well but it's never gonna be some monster company that gets into hardware or making an os. it's like eBay.

isn't the new thing to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall in an incubator and see what works, then move on to the next thing? So for example Square is its own company rather than being somehow tied into twitter. That seems like a smart strategy to avoid the problems of a place like Microsoft or Google.

well there are problems that come w/ being a tech monster blob but there are also benefits, cause they can attempt things that twitter can't

So does anyone actually use Windows 8? Cause it looks awful.

the thing is that the "live tile" menu is really not pleasing to the eye nor does it feel intuitive or simple. the commercial where the dude can't figure out complicated things like a smoke detector or a stereo who breaths a sigh of relief at his phone (with a busier interface than anything else in his house) makes me wants to hit a wall

also it's constantly LIVE TILES LOOK AT THE LIVE TILES, I NOTICED YOU TOUCHED THE MOUSE DID YOU WANT TO SEE THE LIVE TILES???

Win8 would be better if it wasn't grafted on to the old Windows desktop. It's just terribly confusing now, and cycling through open windows/programs is painfully non-intuitive.

well there are problems that come w/ being a tech monster blob but there are also benefits, cause they can attempt things that twitter can't

the main problem these massive tech companies have seems to be branding. so I think it's smart to separate unrelated products into different companies. if twitter falls out of fashion it won't have any impact on square. the different products can still be integrated together even if they're owned and developed by separate companies. paypal's integration with ebay is arguably worse than the way it works with other sites that are not owned by ebay. I'm not convinced that there's anything important that google has been able to accomplish by virtue of having all of these disparate products collected under one brand. I think their attempt to unify all of their products under a single g+ umbrella is misguided and confusing to the user.

you can't see why google running the market in maps or online video is mutually beneficial to its search capabalities? and that both of those things integrate well w/ android? a lot of the things they're able to accomplish aren't necessarily something consumers would find useful - ie when I look at youtube google can show me ads that relate to my search and email history - that does not actually improve my life but it does mean that youtube can make more money than it would if it were a separate company.

saw another Google One commercial, which really is kind of their "future of geolocative/personalized search" thing

uh, youtube is a separate company with its own offices and everything afaik. and I think it's a huge benefit to youtube that it's not google branded and that it still lives outside of that google ecosystem as far as the end user is concerned. there's no reason that kind of information sharing and backend integration couldn't exist between separately owned companies and in fact google already does similar search-related advertising across the web with adsense, doubleclick, etc. but if google search falls out of favor for some reason as companies like aol, yahoo, and myspace did, then it's going to affect the rest of their google-branded products as well. there's no reason google maps for example couldn't be run as a separate company with its own branding but still be fully integrated into google search.
xp

I kind of want to not use gmail anymore but i can't find anything better out there that's free, largely because of integration with google docs etc...

when I go to my phone and search for an address I don't think 'oh what brand of map product am I gonna use' I just put in an address either in the apple app or my web browser, whichever is closest. gmaps being its own 'brand' would be totally pointless because the seamless integration is a big aspect of why people use them and why they're good. if g-search falls out of favor for something else it's not gonna stop people from using g-maps out of disgust for the word 'google' - unless that something else also leads people to a better map product.

in which case gmaps was already screwed, even if it was branded 'mapbuzz' or whatever

apple's integrated map app (and siri search for that matter) use technology that they licensed from other companies! integration does not require ownership of the technology. my point is that "twitter does one thing pretty well but it's never gonna be some monster company" might be the future of tech companies. or at the very least it's a current trend. it's not a defect of twitter or a lack of ambition on dorsey's part, but an intentional business strategy.

I mean you say people wont turn against google as a brand, and yet the whole premise of this thread is to complain about big tech brands.

well I'm trying to lead a revolution but atm amazon and google are as popular as free ice cream

also 'there are lots of tech companies' is not some crazy new trend and dorsey is just one dude

and fb has a pretty shitty 'brand' but it doesn't matter because it still has a network effect, these things aren't just consumer goods you can pick and choose from at the grocery store

you haven't noticed the trend toward simple apps and services that do one thing well? remember before soundcloud when every site had their own shitty embedded music player?

also, maps are so mundane that branding probably doesn't matter but I think there's a serious question whether google can really enter the music business like they want to. they'll presumably do that under the youtube brand though.

Can I just say that I really love Bandcamp

you haven't noticed the trend toward simple apps and services that do one thing well?

well these things used to be called computer programs

^^ otm

not really, most programs have had way too much shit in them for quite a while. I partially blame Microsoft and their idea that Office applications should be able to do anything that anyone might possibly want them to do, leading to tons of features that no one can find.

I don't think microsoft office represents 'most programs'

how many applications that aren't for a specific field do you use that aren't Office in a professional setting?

how many iphone apps do you use in a professional setting?

I mean, I'm a software developer and my work involves using:
1. Developer tools
2. Web browser
3. Office

My architect friend uses:
1. Autocad and Revit
2. Web browser
3. Office

People I develop software for use:
1. Proprietary apps we develop (some of which export to Excel)
2. Web browser
3. Office

sensing a desktop software pattern?

and fb has a pretty shitty 'brand' but it doesn't matter because it still has a network effect, these things aren't just consumer goods you can pick and choose from at the grocery store

FB's brand may have deteriorated but they certainly didn't start off with a shitty brand. the whole reason they developed a network effect in the first place is because they positioned themselves as the exclusive place for a select group of college students at a time when myspace had become a cesspool.

I don't use my iPhone professionally! But the iPads we deploy to the field are mostly proprietary apps, Dropbox, and file viewers to use files generated in... Office

the point was that most of these highly specific apps are functioning as the equivalent of a highly specific computer program (ie a computer game) and not as the equivalent of photoshop or office

Twitter and Square have nothing in common beyond some leadership (specifically Dorsey), so of course they're separate products/brands. I don't think that's a trend beyond 'one guy had two recent startup ideas that hit big.'
Google products are mostly integrated and share common features or revenue sources; Ebay/Paypal integration was huge for them, streamlining Ebay's processes completely.

I agree that there's a trend toward more simple apps/services, but that's a reversion of a trend where all-encompassing applications were becoming the norm.

I've some grudging amount of respect for Microsoft after using open source equivalents of their products at my current job (MySQL, LibreOffice) which are either somewhat buggy and lacking in features (LibreOffice) or steaming piles of dogshite (MySQL)

MySQL compared to SQL Server or Access?

you're using a handful of specific business applications to create this trend. 10 years ago I didn't use photoshop as my calculator or to check the weather, even though photoshop has a lot of features, it was never going to have those features. those things used to be programs or websites, now they are apps.

xp

xp SQL Server

app, program, and application are the same thing

arguably, a web app is also the same, but I think that there's still a bit of a distinction there, unless it's a prepackaged thing like a chrome packaged app

if FB has a vulnerability it's that it has become too big and unfocused. it's no longer the place for college kids to socialize but the place for your elderly aunt to send you stupid shit and weirdos to play farmville or whatever. if FB gets overtaken I think it will be by multiple sites that are more focused in their approach (a social network for your friends, a whitepages style site for everyone you've ever known, etc.). some of this activity has already moved to linkedin, pinterest, etc. google tried to do the "circles" thing in google plus, but nobody is using google plus (gee, I wonder why? couldn't be a branding problem could it?)

I think like the big bloated do-everything apps, the idea of having your entire digital life tied in with one company or service is going to become outdated and that's the single biggest threat to companies like google and facebook. not that they'll cease to exist, they'll still be around for eternity doing god knows what like aol and yahoo.

What about email? It's always been somewhat standalone on Apple platforms, but nearly every other vendor has at least one point shipped a combination email/calendar/task management application xp

google tried to do the "circles" thing in google plus, but nobody is using google plus (gee, I wonder why? couldn't be a branding problem could it?)

lol it has nothing to do with google's brand, people were dying to get g+ invites, it has to do w/ the fact that it is useless because nobody is on it and nobody is on it because it is useless. there is no 'too big' for facebook's network, its usefulness is completely dependent on it being so big. if something replaces facebook's network it will be something else w/ a billion people.

like, google is a more popular company than facebook, if 'brands' were all that mattered then the brand oracle would predict great things for g+

It's about the oldest comparison now, but facebook looks most like the online services of old -- a one-stop shop for social contacts, paid placement and landing pages for products and services, and some social interaction/game elements to keep people contained.

The thing that killed AOL/Compuserve/Prodigy wasn't necessarily the fact that they were walled gardens, but that they were unable to provide the depth of information or be competitive on the same resources/prices.

g+ is mostly treading water due to the lack of offering a specific thing that facebook can't, or giving people a good reason to use it exclusively over competitors.

I think they're probably not quite hitting the right data targeting with Google One (future of search, we tell you what you need to know before you know to ask for it) but if they can figure out how to do a good mobile application or surface that information in a way that integrates smoothly with G+ then they'd give people a good reason to use it over facebook.

To an extent facebook's graph search is mining the flip side of the coin -- instead of using search to grab what they think is relevant, they're taking what is personally relevant via your friends, locale, and connections and offering up specific data suggestions based on those defaults.

lol it has nothing to do with google's brand, people were dying to get g+ invites, it has to do w/ the fact that it is useless because nobody is on it and nobody is on it because it is useless. there is no 'too big' for facebook's network, its usefulness is completely dependent on it being so big. if something replaces facebook's network it will be something else w/ a billion people.

I think you're using an overly simplistic understanding of branding. the reason nobody is on g+ is because they didn't find a way to target it to any particular audience in the way that FB did when they launched. There is no such thing as too big from FB's point of view but there certainly is for the users. Most of the complaints you hear about it come from people being annoyed with who's on FB (i.e. it's for old people) and migrating to other more niche places.

I'd say it's even more general: nobody is actively using g+ because there's no hook. facebook used a sort of social targeting of schools and exclusivity, but I don't think that's going to work for any service from here on out.

btw do you guys want to be on my new service, it's like facebook but only for cool people

the hook is that facebook has everybody

smaller, simpler computer programs with targeted functionality used to be called utility programs or utilities. now they are called apps.

it's a good hook xp

the hook is that facebook has everybody

yeah, that used to be called the white pages

ya the white pages weren't replaced w/ niche booklets w/ only cool people in them

the 12 y/os are gonna crush fb by using some sexting app or whatever is a pretty niche trend, young people are still on facebook. they're not on twitter tho.

I doubt you guys would have experienced it too much but do you remember when WEB PORTALS were a thing? Mostly a product/marketing thingy for corporations but omg you just make everything a web app and you can put them on any page and make layouts for different audiences and they can be customizable and... oh god, it was like putting all your functionality in one computer program all over again

i thought the thing that people were jumping to from facebook was instagram. don't they have enough money now to simply buy up every successor?

teens are on twitter and tumblr now, it was a couple years ago they thought twitter was for old people

http://business.time.com/2013/03/08/is-facebook-losing-its-cool-some-teens-think-so/

ya the white pages weren't replaced w/ niche booklets w/ only cool people in them

oh you never got yours?

that teens in alabama think snapchat nude pics and tumblr are more fun than looking at your newsfeed does not mean that tumblr or snapchat could ever perform the same functions that fb currently performs for a billion people

Exclusivity got Facebook started, but by 2007 when it actually leaped beyond any other service, did anyone give half a shit that it started out exclusive to Harvard/Ivies?

if it leaped beyond any other service then why would people give a shit? feel like you just answered your question

well, yeah, that was the point

the reason it got to where it was from bootstrapping itself with a hook that appealed?

I was there man, I was there when fb was super cool and my friends from bad colleges couldn't even get on the site, I was there on easily the most tragic day in fb history - when they let hs students on, I am still there today even tho it's a terrible site and my grandma is also on fb, basically because my grandma is on fb. most people in the world really don't give a shit about how hip fb or google or microsoft is, they just want stuff that functions well, and snapchat isn't gonna perform the same functions that facebook does until it allows you to send a private msg to basically everyone in the developed world. fb got big because myspace was poorly run not because it was cooler, tho that didn't hurt.

the idea that Facebook held out over G+ because of exclusivity and branding is crazy, IMO
G+ just doesn't offer anyone a reason to use it over Facebook - no one can identify Google or G+ as being far superior about privacy rights, etc., so why bother changing services?

It was nice of all of those college students to beta test facebook for us for a couple of years considering that it was completely useless before it had a billion users.

i asked a buddy a bunch of times what kind of scenario it would take for him to delete his facebook account.
finally i asked what if i made a facebook app that let his boss integrate basecamp into facebook. that was the winner.

the idea that Facebook held out over G+ because of exclusivity and branding is crazy, IMO
G+ just doesn't offer anyone a reason to use it over Facebook

lol, you realize that your second sentence is the definition of branding

it performed a function that nothing else at the time did, ie 'everyone was on this one thing', functionality-wise it did suck

the idea that Facebook held out over G+ because of exclusivity and branding is crazy, IMO

no one is saying this

It was useful for insular populations who were all connected - it would have been useless for me if I was the only student at my college with access to FB, but totally useful if I needed to know who that hot girl in my class was and we were both likely to have Facebook.

facebook ~became~ #1 by doing a good job of orchestrating their rollout and appeal and had some definitive advantages over competition, but it ~stays~ #1 mainly by having a critical mass and not fucking up too badly

actually, wk pretty much is
"if FB has a vulnerability it's that it has become too big and unfocused. it's no longer the place for college kids to socialize but the place for your elderly aunt to send you stupid shit and weirdos to play farmville or whatever."
"the reason nobody is on g+ is because they didn't find a way to target it to any particular audience in the way that FB did when they launched."

Facebook became a multi-billion dollar company when it got "big and unfocused," and G+ didn't flop because it lacked a cool target audience, it flopped because it had no special utility over the existing service that accommodated cool and uncool alike.

i still don't know what G+ does and i'm afraid to try it to find out.

if only fb could go back to that era when it was cool and there were only 10,000 people on it

that was when i first was on it fwiw

I don't get where you're differing from wk's statement -- facebook's vulnerability is not necessarily google plus's "in" and the idea that targeting the exact same group is the only idea isn't quite right, either

my timeline goes back to 2004... DOES YOURS?

I don't think it's the idea of targeting a group, even, if facebook did anything well it was finding a good target group to begin with and expanding in a way that took advantage of the existing flow of trends between peer groups at different schools.

As far as niche appeal, iirc orkut was 90% brazilians by the time it became irrelevant and tribe.net was mostly burning man attendees, but having a foothold in those groups didn't really lead to domination

Joined Facebook
January 19, 2005

omg sonned by 乒乓

guys. remember aol. rmeember zune

pfft I could have started an account in 2004 I just didn't want to

I shouldn't have been able to but I still have an alumni email account

or had, rather

http://i.imgur.com/VxmBCKb.png

owned

how many people here have their first name as their fb url, that is even more impressive

no it's not...they snuck that shit out without telling anybody. not credited.

whatever, eeyore

it's funny to argue that FB's success didn't grow out of initially branding themselves in a really smart way but then 8 years later still be bragging that you were on FB before your friends from "bad schools".

who is arguing that their initial success did not grow out of that?

fb's success grew from myspace being horribly run

this is the one good thing in my life, wk. dont ruin it

as far as I can tell, everyone on the thread is agreeing in different ways that facebook became successful because of the way they rolled out and remain successful in 2013 due to already being #1

also, yes, myspace sucked

myspace was more popular so by your branding magic logic it 'had a better brand'

until you know it didn't

cause the website sucked

The disagreement is about why G+ flopped, tho

who is arguing that their initial success did not grow out of that?

iatee

the branding thing really depends if you consider having gone to harvard smart branding, which i think most people do, in a way.

myspace was more popular so by your branding magic logic it 'had a better brand'

I would probably never say that a company "has a better brand". it's not the simplistic black and white thing that you want to make it out to be.

like facebook's initial minimal layout, lack of ability to fuck with the appearance, and perceived exclusivity to college people was a direct response to the perception that myspace was buggy, unscalable, and full of high school kids. this is somewhat different than the targeted rollout, but the people they rolled it out to were pretty much the ones who had that perception and were most interested in showing that they *weren't* myspace users

who is arguing that their initial success did not grow out of that?

I don't think it was a totally inconsequential aspect but by the time fb opened up to high schools, a well run myspace would have already locked down the market

also just smart because myspace's ability to inject html and layout shit pretty much made it a free-floating security hole and was the worst example of "let the users do anything they want to"

in 2005, the myspace brand was more successful at targeting a user base of teenagers, shitty bands, and spammy porn stars, while facebook was better positioned to attract ivy league college students. those are just different brands. one is not inherently better than the other. in 2005 myspace's brand probably did make more sense as a business in the short term, but of course it was quickly overtaken by facebook.

it's not that the functionality of the product itself isn't a factor, but it's not the only factor. you can't just cite the network effect and assume that a network develops magically as in "g+ is useless because nobody is on it and nobody is on it because it's useless". iatee, you seem to be arguing that it's all about features -- that myspace was a technically flawed product, so facebook built a better product and everybody moved to it. but you also seem to be denying the possibility that the same thing can happen to Facebook because now it has a "network effect" and "everybody is on it."

well, he's right in that facebook would have to drop the ball like myspace did

the main refinements in facebook in the early days outside of cleaning up the UI were actually that they dropped things that made it more college-specific! I mean, can you imagine a "how we met" on g+ that includes things like "we hooked up"?

i still don't know what G+ does and i'm afraid to try it to find out.

― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, 20 March 2013 07:25 (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i've been using it for the best part of a week and i still don't know what it does

wtf are you talking about, g+ is 90% the same as facebook with the exception of the popular/promoted public post thing

I think a factor that gets ignored in facebook success is the priming effect of friendster and myspace. When friendster came out it seemed like a very bizarre concept to most people I knew, whereas by the time facebook became widely available, social networking sites seemed relatively normal and accepted. If facebook had been first I'm not convinced it would have been as big.

well, he's right in that facebook would have to drop the ball like myspace did

I don't think so. you don't have to make an aggressively terrible product like myspace in order to be overtaken by a competitor who makes a better product. see yahoo, altavista, friendster, etc.

facebook is a technically flawed product and even at the time it was pretty flawed (like there really was nothing to 'do' on it and its real appeal was 'everyone is on this' even at the time, it was just a smaller everyone). but it was not as technically flawed as myspace, not anywhere close, myspace was always an embarrassment across the board and never something that could ride its wave beyond emo kids and shitty bands and never really tried.

tech can scale pretty quickly and there will be more big social networks. but there is a difference between the multiple niche social networks that can exist in a post-fb age (tumblr, twitter, pinterest whatever) - some of which can ride their cool brand pretty far - and facebook. fb does a lot of things but the one thing it does best is provide a single platform w/ pretty much everyone in the developed world. having a 'good brand' doesn't matter once you have a monopoly. microsoft hasn't been well-liked or cool for decades and everyone still bought pcs. monopolies can last a long time - the end of microsoft's is not due to teenagers switching to a cooler os, it's due to people switching devices. the end of google's search monopoly and the end of facebook's social network monopoly will probably be comparable - it will not just be a 'better/cooler search engine' or a 'better/cooler social network', it will be something else completely, and it might not be anytime soon.

xp

The other thing I'd say is that people neglect the relationship between time and the desire for novelty. When people have only just gotten used to facebook, they're not going to be eager to migrate elsewhere, but it is indeed possible that after ten or fifteen years on it they'll be more ready for something different to come along.

wk, Facebook didn't just come along with a better product than MySpace and take all their users, they came along and took all the non-users as well. I mean, for me MySpace was "Everyone I know on the internet is here!" and Facebook was "Everyone is here!".

It popped a bubble of people who would be willing and recently able to give "The Internet" a try but were maybe burned by one site or another that their nerdy friends / kids tries to get them on to, but once they hear that three people in their non-internet social circle is on there, or that they can look up those nice people that they used to write to and see what's up with them.

I'm sure the college thing helped for the first year or so, but it just kept it afloat in a sea of other sites, it wasn't what made it Facebook.

xp ninjad by everyone :)

fb does a lot of things but the one thing it does best is provide a single platform w/ pretty much everyone in the developed world.

well this goes back to my point about doing one simple thing well. I think the few major things that FB does well are its social graph, functioning as a universal login for the web, and representing the user's irl identity. I think it could do really well owning those functions and existing as kind of an anonymous backend for any kind of social interaction across the web. but I'm not as convinced that it has a longterm value as a destination.

remember the dying days of myspace when they redesigned and made new music and video players, missing the point that you might as well just embed soundcloud/vimeo/youtube rather than duplicating that functionality? FB has kind of done one better by buying instagram instead of just copying it, but what happens when a new cool photo sharing app comes along? I think it would make more sense to let the photo apps be photo apps and simply provide an open social graph behind that stuff.

Oh yeah I am totally thinking of Friendster not MySpace in the first paragraph there. There was a sense of "One of these will probably take off, might as well get on board and start annoying my friends again"

One thing that kept MySpace (actual MySpace this time) alive a little longer after Facebook's growth was repositioning as the place for bands, where you can host your tracks and display your ugly ugly identity.

Lol I have just noticed that my Facebook timeline starts on 27 Jun 2006 and was clearly caused by "Can I say you're my girlfriend on Facebook?"

I had a Friendster account when it was new (probably still do have it, haven't checked in about 7 years). It failed because the they didn't anticipate how big it would become and the servers couldn't handle the load. I remember it taking 30 seconds to do anything.

I agree with others here - FB has jumped the shark. I loved it in 2006; now it sucks and is way to commercialized. When every business has a "like us on Facebook" promo, what does it mean anymore?

I mean you say people wont turn against google as a brand, and yet the whole premise of this thread is to complain about big tech brands.

Spoilers: Google are not finishing in the top four here, because free icecream.

xp that facebook is a better finder of local content than Google in some ways?

I can now, with facebook's social graph search, look for "restaurants nearby" and have an idea that the information displayed is correct because it's maintained by the restaurant itself and I don't even have to leave the site!

I'm not going to make the claim that businesses are people too, but the number of local businesses will far outstrip the number of national/chain places on facebook by numbers alone.

Google+ is loved by geeks but ignored by everyone else. The only network effect they are seeing is because Google is behind it. It is Google's Bing.

People do not have time to maintain 15 different social networks, just like they have little need to bounce around search engines. If you have built up a world in Facebook, you're not going to spend hours and hours and hours building your Google+ page unless you live in front of your computer. The advantages of Google+ over Facebook are not worth it, especially when none of your friends ever use it.

I use Tumblr but it is mainly a slicker version of MySpace.

otm, social networks are hassle for most people *unless* everyone they know is also on there (which obv brings its own special hassle)

I spend some time in contact with a community that has adopted Google+ to some extent (indie tabletop RPGs). I don't know why, offhand.

that said, a social network doesn't need 600 million active users in order to be useful xp

The first 100 million friends are the hardest

indie tabletop RPGs

god i'm old

Why I left the Google

I think you have to have some strong ideas, no matter how wrongheaded, to be a Google exec. Before ditching for Yahoo, Marissa Mayer alienated the design staff by insisting that all changes be tested statistically -- as in, if they were trying to find the right button size or color, they'd deploy small variations to subsets of users, see which color/size/layout was getting the most clicks, and go with that every time.

I'm looking forward to MM's 15 minutes being over.

data-driven design, ditching telecommuting seem like right-headed moves to me if you want to make for an efficient, profitable work environment. Is she secretly incompetent in ways the press hasn't gotten round to yet?

well she accepted a job at yahoo

that's true that a data-driven approach would have shown her that was a bad move.

there's a difference between data-driven design and ignoring your design department and treating them as dumber than an algorithm

she was also the person who instituted strict interview requirements and pretty much put up walls between positions. want to work at google? better have a 4.0 with honors from one of a few schools. have some cool project ideas? well, you better be a developer or product lead, as we don't take in ideas from anyone else.

I heard the latter from a dude who left Google and ended up starting a well-received company after leaving

She seems happy to play bad cop.

But she was hired by the Board, so it's all shareholder price.

"want to work at google? better have a 4.0 with honors from one of a few schools."
this seemed like it was true since the beginning. did she stop letting people develop their own ideas during 20% time? that definitely would be a boner move.

have heard that 20% time has seen some curtailment in recent years

I think the hiring practices were more by convention than policy, although that is mostly true.

also, the thing that the google designer guy posted a few years back when he left suggested that the data-driven thing was just part of google's DNA, and that it was a cultural problem before he was invited to join google. I didn't get the sense that there was a singular dilbertian overlord belittling everyone.

perhaps these two points were not directly attributable to her, but the points are still there

posted without comment

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/20/4127618/amazon-reportedly-building-a-private-cloud-for-the-cia

i wonder what the CIA will use their amazon points on.

I don't think I have a problem with that.

have you had to go through a security clearance check yet, agent silby?

From what I have heard about getting clearance it is a huge hassle and afterwards you can't even go to Canada without pre-approval so I'm not inclined.

uh wow they have changed some things in the past 15 years; I just had to fill out some paperwork and then wait 6 months

I don't think I have a problem with that.

― wk, Wednesday, March 20, 2013 1:33 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*phew*

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx

xp do you? should I?

just relieved my friend, relieved

Technically I suppose Google has always been an advertising company, but for the better part of the last three years, it didn’t feel like one.

lol GUESS WHAT

To solve this problem we’ve created Google Keep.

Blow me, Google. We already have Evernote. And it's way better.

they used to have google notes and then they killed it

Evernote seemed kinda pointless and feature-heavy when I dl'd it

Evernote is pretty awesome for project work, not to mention it OCRs PDFs and JPEGs...actually there are many things I like about it.

Google seems to be emulating M$ circa the 1990s.

Evernote's blocked at work, but if you have a MS-centric ecosystem, OneNote is pretty ok

oh I was only looking at it as an iphone app

you can't get into Evernote via the web?

The refresh of Evernote's iPhone app that came out (late last year?) has a killer UI.

that's one of the huge advantages of Evernote - it's platform agnostic and pretty much great on any device/desktop app/web access.

well what I meant was that I only thought of it as an iphone app

what iatee is saying is he only believes in "apps" which are different from the "applications" of old and only exist on mobile devices

grandpa tell us what it was like before apps

blackberry

lol remember how people thought blackberrys were so dope fn herbs

(Diplo blackberry commercial)

Signs it is all over

i love evernote

imo the best file system out there, or at least the best one ive found, its far from perfect, but as a kind of universal inbox/storage system its amazing

I dl'd the pc version, maybe I will find this useful but it still seems like a mess of features, I just wanted a marginally more useful versrion of sticky notes

yeah i mean if you dont care about saving images or websites or files then evernote is probably not what you want. google keep might be better. i really like workflowy for like really simple notetaking procedure stuff. notational velocity is supposed to be good

NV is great

yes it is. feel like someday i'm gonna need to grow up and move to evernote to take care of stuff that isn't text, though.

i share an office with the workflowy guys. (/bragging) they are astoundingly relaxed all the time.

been getting these annoying garbage emails from amazon for their local dealfinding whatever thing, too lazy/busy to do anything more than ignore them (i.e. unsign up for something i never asked for), and today…

It looks like you might not be interested in receiving daily deal
emails from AmazonLocal, so we will stop sending them to you. Instead,
we will email you only when we have big news or a national deal that
we’re sure you won’t want to miss.
If we are wrong, and you wish to continue receiving daily emails for
savings of up to 75% off restaurants, spas, events, and more from local
businesses near you, please [3]click here. You will be taken to your
city’s deal page where you can reactivate your AmazonLocal emails.
Thanks,
The AmazonLocal Team

FINALLY DOING SOMETHING RIGHT

workflowy is p sweet

evernote kinda sucks but kinda rules. its really hard to make something that can handle any kind of note that you want to throw at it but doesnt also have all kinds of formatting problems. i guess i just wish theyd let you direct-edit the HTML of the notes

is there no option for plain-text notes?

yes, there is, i mean more for stuff i copy-paste in, there's no real "strip formatting" option, that would keep it rich-text but remove header tags &c., this is a quibble that has more to do with my specific workflow than like a complaint that others might have

I can't get my brainz wrapped around a workflow for Evernote, as far as "notes" or note taking goes. For me, Evernote is a really good dumping station because of the way I can collect a wide variety of files, websites, articles, and the like.

yeah ive gone back and forth with using textedit or workflowy for pure text notes instead of evernote, its hard to get it to work right

I can't seem to get a task list/notetaking/project manager type of thing to all sing together and feel like I'm managing a bajillion ecosystems (email/address book/calendar/Omnifocus/Evernote/Basecamp) and searching all of them robustly to find my brainz is a full time job.

mainly that's because Spotlight on OSX blows goats

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/utilities

God bless the Economist and it's endless primal fear of The Government.