Posted by
Steve Smith on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Google-Reader-and-More-Google-Abandoning-of-Apps-Services-tp7582001p7582019.html
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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