If you want this kind of company, come to Boston. The start-up culture in Boston is much more "change the world" than "make a buck." This results in fewer, deeper start-ups, as well as more not-for-profits.
Honestly, this is why I would never, ever consider using something like Google App Engine for anything other than a toy. Google is not a support organization. Except for ads, you can't count on them for anything B2B.
I would tend to agree. Google has been extremely monopolistic lately. The only reason for Google+'s and Google Chat's relative success is shoving it down the throats of users of GMail's throats. Google mission has moved from organizing to controlling the world's information. I really liked the former, and I'm pretty scared of the latter.
I want fast fiber. I also want to avoid another evil monopoly from taking over the computing landscape. I miss the old, trustworthy, don't-be-evil Google.
Carly Fiorina. She did the same thing to HP, very differently. Cut quality. Cut R&D. Cut support. Cut service. Slightly lower prices, while your reputation is still sky-high. Outsource anything that can be done cheaper not in-house. Scale back benefits and anything that costs money. Have layoffs anywhere that doesn't produce short-term revenue.
Profits soar. Share prices soar. A few years later, as reputation catches up with quality and support, as there are no new products in the R&D pipeline, and as you have no core competencies, and as your best employees leave, the company tanks.
You walk of with a ton of cash from early-year bonuses.
At this point, I think Google should have more worries about antitrust. Google is very aggressive about bundling G+ with everything. I didn't want to get on it, but I was on gmail, Youtube, and a few of their other products, and they stopped working well without it. Once I was on it, there is huge social pressure to use it.
Google Chat, I didn't want, but it was integrated into gmail. Suddenly, I'd have chats from friends pop up as I was working. I presume there's some way to unbundle, but at this point, it's too late.
List keeps going. Google is crushing competitors not by building better products, but by using search to steer them there, and the rest of their chain to force users into them.
Google's motto seems to have changed from indexing and organizing the world's information to hoarding, organizing, and locking down the world's information.
Like Microsoft, they're also getting less and less competent. 6 years ago, their software was phenomenal. Today, it's kind of below average -- they've had a huge brain drain to startups, Facebook, and other places (except for Google X, which seems to be poaching quite well).
It's not as bad as Microsoft in it's prime, but it's getting there. I think in a year or two, they'll actually be worse.
The problem is not add-ons. Let me repeat that -- THE PROBLEM IS NOT ADD-ONS. I left Firefox about a year ago, once Chrome was good enough, because my plain-vanilla Firefox, with all the tweaks to limit memory usage enabled, would still leak memory until it crashed (my laptop has 1.5GB RAM and Ubuntu; it also had a few GB of swap). Closing tabs did not help either. The only response from Mozilla was 'add-ons.' Chrome does just fine with 30+ tabs open on the same machine.
Any organization that can live in denial for years and years about the core issue with their product is going to die. Mozilla is tightly connected to the web developer community, but has a complete disconnect from the problems facing its actual users. When Firefox shipped, it was a great, light-weight alternative to Mozilla. From my point of view as a user, I haven't seen any substantial improvements since 1.0 shipped in 2004 -- spell check is nice, and given how often it crashes, restoring tabs when the browser is opened is nice -- but that's all. Otherwise, if not for security issues and web site compatibility issues, I'd be on Firefox 1.0 (which worked fine on sub-GHz machines).
Aside from that, virtually all development effort has been aimed at making a better IDE for web developers. I guess that benefits me since, ultimately, I can visit nicer web sites in Chrome.
With Amazon, we have a business support contract. The first-line phone operators are pretty bad -- they're neither technical nor fluent in English -- but we've been able to work up to competent people pretty quick in the one emergency we've had since launching. Both organizations are courting us pretty hard, so we may be a special case.
Google is a little weird. They've insisted on e.g. a conference calls with a half-dozen guys from Google, including one executive-level. That call was entirely one-sided. They told us about all sorts of features they were building because they thought our market segment needed them (zero of which were actually useful to us, and which they could have discovered with even very minimal market research). In that conference call, they didn't listen to any of our bugs or feature requests. Whenever we've submitted support requests through official channels, they went into what was effectively a black hole (sometimes, we'd get a slightly derogatory response from someone clearly powerless and clueless). Things we submit to through high-level contacts get handled -- roughly as well although slightly slower than normal, paid contacts at Amazon. The culture at Google is a little weird, at least with respect to dealing with large customers.
We do use Google Apps internally. It's imperfect and has showstoppers, but in my experience, corporate IT departments are even more imperfect, and have even more showstoppers. Based on our experiences, I'd be absolutely terrified of using Google for anything customer-facing.
This is quite exactly why I would never consider using the Google cloud, or any customer-facing Google services for our business. Google is set up for B2B, not B2C. Their job is to minimize customer service calls. We use Google Apps at our business. The absolute only way we've been able to get useful support when something breaks was to either call up a VP-level contact, or call up a colleague who works at Google, and ask for a personal favor. This does not scale.
I also know of the number of serious Google bugs we've run into that we just didn't report because, quite frankly, we gave up on any bug reporting process having any effect.
Contrast this to Amazon where our rep can put us in contact with engineers in a few minutes, and who are of the caliber that they can e.g. help us recover a database where the RAID volume Amazon hosted it on was damaged in a power outage.
Whoever wrote the article should take the course. Lots of numbers are wrong. The plot was wrong -- MIT would take over 2000 years to reach 160,000 students with the intro stats course, not 40. Of course, it's actually a bit less than that -- most MIT students take some course that includes stats. One name per second is over a day, not 4 hours and 27 minutes. Etc.
I tried to post a correction, but it's 'awaiting moderation'. Traditional technique for scammy magazines for avoiding negative comments.
I have an extremely, extremely, extremely healthy level of skepticism. We do substantial business with AWS. When they went down and came back up, some of our data was damaged. I called my Amazon rep, who put me in contact with Amazon engineers, who helped us recover. Amazon can do that -- they're a service organization, and they're used to working with customers and making them happy.
Google's customer service, in contrast, has a raison d'etre of avoiding customers. As a customer, the feeling you get is mild disdain. This is necessary -- one support call for Google.com can wipe out the profits from thousands of people. This translate into how they handle the enterprise market. I use Google Apps for my organization. I needed to enable Google+ for a social presence. This required applying into a black hole which, for a long time, did nothing. Support e-mails went to someone who clearly was in the business of neither having nor giving out information.
Here's an experiment for you: Pretend you want to try Google App Engine, but your cell is not on one of the providers Google supports (I've been there). You just a credit card, and a willingness to spend a bit of cash. Try to buy some service. See how far you get.
I use Google internal to my organization for things like Google Apps; if it has issues, employees will deal, and it saves a big chunk of work and cash. For anything customer-facing, I really do want a partner whom I can talk to if there are issues, not a black box designed to reject support requests.
reddit don't aspire to democracy. Note that the set of links on the default page aren't the most popular or up-voted; they are from a pre-selected set of reddits that e.g. include atheism but not e.g. hinduism. This gives a feedback loop -- Hindus see offensive hate speech, and go away. Atheists see an accepting community, and more come in. The types of content and community you see there is clearly engineered -- I think most incidentally, and a little intentionally.
The major problem I have with reddit isn't censorship, although that's certainly occasionally there. It's not even the increasing stupidity of the users and the move to the lowest common denominator. It's not the astroturf advertising that pops up every day. What bugs me most is the blatant support and promotion of certain classes of bigotry and hate speech by the owners. Yet I still keep coming back...
* RMS is technically competent. ESR is technically clueless.
* ESR is more charismatic. He manages to convince people he's important. RMS has on charisma.
* ESR will do everything he can do undermine RMS. It's a way of building himself up. RMS will do whatever he believes will further free software. They're both often wrong.
* RMS's writings from the late nineties are prophetic. ESR's writings from the same period are, in retrospect, idiotic.
* RMS created the whole movement. ESR did little bits of damage to it.