Oh boy, this reminded me of university days. I wrote a little servlet which would pop out the CD drive on my friends computer in the lab, and I would trigger it at tense moments in Starcraft games. Good times.
Well that's a depressing progress report if I've ever seen one. Honestly I'm boggled at how many people seem indifferent to what could be an existential threat for many of us - obviously many of us care deeply but there's nothing resembling a code red happening in the public consciousness.
insightful comment. I'd like to think that Google will integrate AI in an at least mostly useful way, but it's clear that large scale reorgs like this around chasing a competitor can and do end badly.
This is one of those proposals that seriously made me wonder if the conspiracy theorists were right that he's intentionally running it into the ground. I don't believe that but... charging new users? that's an ostentatiously dumb idea.
Doesn't the EU law have a size requirement for the userbase before it ratchets up? that seems like a reasonable way to apply this law without unduly burdening small companies.
I'm pretty sure that for Google a "multi-million" sized venture is considered a complete waste of time; they probably don't consider it worth pursuing until it hits the hundreds of millions. The scale they operate at financially is beyond comprehensible.
I imagine its frustrating to be working on these projects which would mean untold riches to any individual or small group but having it get shut down because it's not making a half billion or so.
would be great to see a bulk import type operation at some point. i dislike having these kinds of things in multiple places but i'd have to upload a couple of hundred files to get my idea bank into this space.
Getting UX right is a lot harder than people realize for several reasons:
- You have the usual BigCo problems in software with prioritization and incentives and pressure to deliver new features
- Front-end work is less mathematically complex and is generally undervalued by large companies that rely on complexity as a metric for difficulty/value
- When you use a piece of software all day for months/years, you learn the happy path to get things done and you forget all the rough edges because "it works fine for me"
- It requires a lot of detailed thinking about how other people perceive your work which is not something that software developers tend to excel at
- The user story which led to the UI/UX is not explicit to the user and the ways that users will try to use your UI are almost infinite
- Writing tests for front-end code has historically been more difficult
- There are a large variety of devices out there and testing on them all is time-consuming and painful
- Software is hard. People are hard. Combining them is harder.
- Small companies have a small surface area (people x devices x products) to cover and thus get more focused attention from their devs. Large companies have team reorgs and turnovers and many people who might have different priorities working on the same product
- Large companies know that people will still use their products even if the UX is worse because breaking out of the Apple/Google/Microsoft ecosystem requires significant tradeoffs
- Bug reports from the general public are given lower weight at big companies because of scale. When you have 10 bug reports to sort through it's not that hard to prioritize and ignore, not to mention that early adopters and small software users are more likely to be good bug reporters. When you have 10,000 bugs of which 9,000 of them are filed by people who don't know how to explain the problem: "my X doesn't Y", you become numb to new bugs unless they are show-stoppers, which many UX bugs are not.