Funny.
Going back to Hamming's lectures, again, in one of the early ones he
lays out the case that scientific knowledge is growing exponentially,
that most scientific researchers who ever lived are alive now, and
that keeping current is "a very awkward problem" both personally and
institutionally. It was true in the 50's when they made up the
argument at Bell Labs, it was truer in the 90's when Hamming was
giving the lectures, and it's still truer now.
I started ignorant, I'm getting exponentially more ignorant all the
time, and I'm never going to the reverse the trend -- now, go back to
work and do something really smart.
So, Google the search is an attempt to ameliorate this problem: if
you can guess what the answer is called, then maybe Google can find it
for you, and maybe you can figure out if it's really what you wanted.
And Google the company is a place founded on the same principle: its
projects and knowledge grow exponentially, no one person can ever know
what it's doing, all they can do is occasionally kill some of it off
to make some empty space for the rest of it to grow into.
So, why is progress supposed to make sense?
-- rec --
On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Steve Smith <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Glen -
I appreciate your analysis here at several levels (assuming I
actually sorted it correctly), it is nicely dense and layered,
appropriate for my particular palate at least.
I'm very interested in the desire to and the frustration surrounding
_not_ being able to "figure Google out".
It *is* entertaining.
I can certainly see it from a single tightly focused quantifiable
predictibility measure ... like whether to buy a company's stock.
Obviously (to me?) Owen's (and the others discussing such things)
stake is not whether to buy GOOG but rather whether to invest
one's personal/professional energy and attention in
learning/using/integrating their tools into one's workflow (or
Digital Ecology as Owen is wont to say).
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.
Absolutely... and secondarily to considering Google and
how/when/if/why you might integrate their products/systems into
your workflow/ecology, there is the more speculative questions of
"what would I develop if I were GOOG" or "since I am not GOOG but
the ARE the 800lb gorilla, where do the tools I might develop fit
into whatever oddly shaped phase-space is left after GOOG takes
theirs?"
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".
This is a moderately apt analogy. My daughter (PhD microbiology
living in your neck of the woods... Portland/OHSU) were just
using C. Elegans as an example in another discussion over the
weekend. In this case, C. Elegans relative simplicity and
ancient roots are roughly opposite Google's complexity and very
recent roots. Despite the gray hair contributed by Andy
Bechtolsheim, their *intellectual* roots are pretty shallow
compared to say... Lockheed or Martin (both established 1912?).
On the other hand, GOOG *is* highly studied by many, though
arguably maybe less than AAPL or the ancient IBM.
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.
I'm not quite clear on this point. It sounds as if you are
identifying corporations such as LockMart and Google as being more
like evolved organisms than machines?
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.
This fits my biases as well... but apparently in a different
way. There are many services I am happy (smug) to provide for
myself (heat and water) and/or at least lust after being able to
provide for myself (electricity). There are others I suppose I am
happy to defer to "the cloud". While I *likely* am able to
rebuild my starter motor or alternator, I probably wouldn't be
able to fabricate a good enough bearing or brushes to do the
rebuild and therefore depend on the "cloud" including AC/Delco and
many other industrials of that ilk to supply me with such things.
I definitely am happy that we have a Michelin and Yokohama in the
cloud, I can't imagine making tyres that would be useful to me.
Having a public/common Internet or even a private/common telecomm
or private electrical grid (cloud) are almost required... I'm
still holding out for a fully distributed mesh network to grow
together from it's many tiny patches (see the recent posting on
Mesh networks here) or a fully distributed electrical grid
(home/neighborhood solar/wind/???) but there are good (non
political, non-social) reasons that we didn't get broadly scalable
infrastructure until it came from one or a small handful of
entities (public or private), behaving in a "paternalistic" way
for the most part.
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.
Ma Bell used to provide handsets with phone service but eventually
gave over and allowed customers to procure their own, but I don't
think they ever offered customers the option of setting up their
own switch downtown (although I suppose the did allow/require big
customers to set up their own switchboards, etc). So maybe your
example *does* apply here... Ma Bell established the designs and
standards for old-school telephony (and telegraphy) as well as
providing the actual service and infrastructure itself, but
eventually the actual hardware and services got replaced by a
myriad of cooperative/competitive providers.
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).
I'm not sure *that* follows... I suspect they could *still*
abandon it on a whim. You may be arguing that it would not be in
their (obvious) best interest but then you'd be up on the same
soapbox as Doug (and no matter how big, I'm sure that soapbox
isn't big enough for the two of you) who argues that delivering a
smartphone whose firmware/configuration won't allow BT and WiFi to
run simultaneously is a patently stupid move at many levels.
Or maybe I'm missing your point?
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?
Because we are Consumers? Why do Serfs defer to Lords who defer
to Kings?
[sigh]
IMO the very best rants do end in a [sigh]. As with Dennis
Miller back in the day when he started with "Don't let me get off
on a rant here" and ended with
"Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong."
Carry On,
- Steve
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!
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