I'm very interested in the desire to and the frustration surrounding _not_ being able to "figure Google out". I wonder if different people (people ensconced in other domains, other fora) feel this same desire/frustration around, say, Unilever or General Electric?
I can certainly see it from a single tightly focused quantifiable predictibility measure ... like whether to buy a company's stock. But without that tight use case, and with a large multi-national beast with layers of varying liability, impact, presentation, etc., they strike me as complex beasts. Each aspect from which you measure them will present different, perhaps even incommensurate results. I know this was the case while I was working for Lockheed Martin. It was especially vivid to me since I was on loan to Vought systems at an old air base working on aircraft avionics, on loan from the missiles division, which recently bought Vought and which had been recently bought by Loral, which was soon to be bought by Lockheed Martin. I could no more imagine "figuring Lockheed Martin out" than I could imagine "figuring out C. Elegans". Because of this, it strikes me that what you're expressing is some sort of deep seated pattern recognition bias towards centralized planning. You're looking for a homunculus inside a machine. And that leads me to my fundamental gripe with web services. The whole point of the open source movement was to put upstream causal power into the hands of more people, to make the producer-consumer relationship more symmetric. In web services, it seems like we, as consumers, _still_ want asymmetric producer-consumer relationships. GMail is a great example. I hate GMail simply because I can't download the software and run my _own_ GMail server on my own hardware ... similar to SparkleShare, Tor, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. If they allowed that, then I'd love GMail. And, if they did that, you wouldn't have to worry about Google abandoning it, as long as it had a sufficiently pure free agent following (like the role Debian plays for Linux). Why? Oh why? Do we insist on these soft paternalist producer-consumer relationships? What's the underlying cause for people to prefer the Raspberry Pie over Arduino? GMail over postfix? [sigh] Owen Densmore wrote at 03/14/2013 09:34 AM: > Good by Google Reader (which I use a lot): > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371725 > .. and a host of others in this year's Spring Cleaning > http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html > > I will give them this: they have an export stunt, and I apparently can > move to others. I don't use the google front page they killed off, > Yahoo instead. > > But seriously, does anyone have a crystal ball? I just can't figure > Google out! > > - Are they consolidating? .. i.e. converting everything to G+? > - What's next to go? .. Google Docs? It gets use by digerati, but few > others. > - Is GMail safe? .. It gets a lot of use, but its easy to scrape off the > ads, so can't be a profit center. > > I'd certainly pay for many of google services .. although I doubt this > would stop them from randomly killing off ones I care about. > > Is there some obvious trend, like I mentioned above, for example .. > moving everything to G+? > > Damn! -- =><= glen e. p. ropella The dog is dead and the sacrifice is done ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
