Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
Wow: Google insider explains why Big G may lose the Internet wars
Deozaan:
I thought this was hilarious:
But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.-https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX
--- End quote ---
Renegade:
The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.
--- End quote ---
Bwahahahaaha~!
Man... it's a good read! :)
xtabber:
The problem is not really lack of platform, it's that Google cares all about its employees and nothing about its customers.
The nature of business is that you sell something to your customers. If you don't listen to what they want, you will eventually be replaced by someone else who does.
Google has been phenomenally successful because it built a better search engine and has kept improving it. That is the ONLY thing at which it has been successful AS A BUSINESS. It has been reasonably successful in some other endeavors, such as Android, but it has yet to make any significant revenue at that, and may never do so.
But Google shows no interest in even trying to find out what its customers want. The lack of adjustable font sizes in Chrome that Yegge mentions is typical of that. A more critical example is Google's refusal to accept that, for many people, an app that is not available offline is not functional, because only in Silicon Valley is the Internet truly 24/7/365, and because if your data only exists on Google's servers, you have no real control over it. See this article by James Falllows for an example of what that means.
Jeff Bezos may be as awful a boss as Yegge says (although one should take an ex-employee's gripes with a grain of salt), but he is all about satisfying the customer, not his staff, and that is why Amazon may be around long after Google, unless someone at Google eventually gets it.
40hz:
Jeff Bezos may be as awful a boss as Yegge says (although one should take an ex-employee's gripes with a grain of salt), but he is all about satisfying the customer, not his staff, and that is why Amazon may be around long after Google, unless someone at Google eventually gets it.
-xtabber (October 13, 2011, 01:28 PM)
--- End quote ---
Or until such time as either the Department of Labor or OSHA crack down on Amazon big time - or until enough employees finally get so fed up they vote to unionize. Boy will that ever cramp Jeff's style. I doubt Amazon could survive a three day walkout let alone a protracted strike.
Just like in the days of the old railroads and mines! History coming back I wonder?
;)
My favorite quote was this:
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
7) Thank you; have a nice day!
Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
--- End quote ---
;D
Renegade:
Or until such time as either the Department of Labor or OSHA crack down on Amazon big time - or until enough employees finally get so fed up they vote to unionize. Boy will that ever cramp Jeff's style. I doubt Amazon could survive a three day walkout let alone a protracted strike.
-40hz (October 13, 2011, 01:58 PM)
--- End quote ---
War chest > secretly setup operational infrastructure in cheaper place > transfer operations > inform staff in expensive place that they no longer have jobs > laugh all the way to bank.
I believe we've see that one before once or twice. Where is America's textile industry?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version