Not sure what Marissa Mayer has to do with this. But please don't blame an entire company for the decisions of a single person: Vic Gundotra.
There's plenty of engineers at Google who feel incredibly frustrated every time one of these decisions is made and remember the good ol' times when Google used to put the user first.
People use Pro Tools because PT has been the industry standard for years. For tracking and mixing PT11 is pretty good. Some people master using PT, others prefer something like Sequoia.
For MIDI work PT is several years behind Cubase, Logic and Ableton. Everybody has their own favorite. I've found Logic to fit my workflow very well and is not any less of a professional tool than the other DAWs I mentioned.
Being professional means you leave emotions at the door (like in poker) and back your argument with data.
The algorithm might be stupid, that doesn't make the person stupid. Ad hominem attacks are a very poor way to defend your point and will result in people not wanting to work with you.
Saying "grow a thicker skin" won't make it better either.
Linus is a brilliant engineer, his people skills not so brilliant. But we all knew that already.
Yeah, it didn't make any sense to me either. I'm all for running your own mail server but that alone will not make it any more secure unless you only communicate with people using said server.
If I care that much about the content of an e-mail it will be encrypted or I will tell the person via other means. I assume everything I send via e-mail to be available to 3 letter agencies all over the world, regardless of what server I use.
Surely the NSA has a pretty thorough screening process that you have to go through before you're allowed to work there.
Also, when you think of the consequences of leaking ( basically giving up your life in the USA) I'd guess most people would think twice about it and go with the pragmatic option, the same way that most of the population is ok with the NSA's actions as long they protect us from the terrorists.
I fail to see what this has to do with the protest or the 4th Amendment for that matter. Seems to me like you're treating the symptoms but not the cause.
Au contraire. This is exactly the Google of today vs back then's Google.
The Google of today focuses only on social and mobile and, GoogleX aside, will not green-light anything that will not benefit those two. You can ask anybody who works there how the 20% project time policy has changed or how certain teams have all the resources and cool stuff while others struggle.
Android under Sundar Pichai is not much better than it was under Andy, although I'm glad the latter is gone. And Vic Gundotra, well, he's one big hypocrite.
Google is still a great place to work, but the politics and trying to create the next Facebook have pretty much ruined its culture.
Chrome also phones home all the time, which is why I stopped using it. I don't notice much performance difference between Firefox and Chrome anyway, and always use Noscript, Adblock+ and Disconnect.
A lot of Googlers asked for reader to be saved as it was considered a very useful tool used by small amount of very devout users. The Google of today will cancel any product that cannot be monetized properly, ignoring all internal feedback.
Another example of how things have changed is the Hangouts app. Pretty much everyone who tested it internally asked for the status settings to be implemented before going public. It was ignored and that was the most criticized aspect of the app when it was publicly released.
The consequence of this is an eroded trust in the company and a reduced brand loyalty. I will think twice before using another Google product that might disappear in favor of some half-assed feature in G+, just because management has decided to bet the future of the company on social.
I do not use Google products either, but you need to add more companies to that. You can't use Facebook, or Yahoo products.
Funnily enough I stopped using Google products because they keep alienating me with their decisions like the Real Names policy or killing Reader. Taking my privacy back is an added bonus.
That also means no Android phone, although FirefoxOS phones look promising.
There's plenty of engineers at Google who feel incredibly frustrated every time one of these decisions is made and remember the good ol' times when Google used to put the user first.