Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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Historically, given Google's flexibility in transferring from project to project, and the lack of promotion benefit in working on a project that has already 'shipped', a "staff exodus" isn't really indicative of anything other than the engineers were moving on to something new to add to their Google Resume.

I think the article was trying to couch this more as a "barbarians at the gate" piece with Microsoft in the role of the Huns, but that analogy falls pretty flat given the amount of innovation going on in both companies.

What I found really interesting is that Apple isn't really mentioned. Yesterday I got a push notification on my iPad about all the new things Siri could do. I'm not entirely sure how to interpret that but I'm guessing the race is on to make the voice inputs more functional. That, for me at least, is a part that makes something like Google now useful or not. I've been developing a habit of adding reminders for things to do when I get into work and that helps keep things from dropping off the plate, prior to location based reminders it really wasn't frictionless enough for me. And the pre-processing of things like flight iteneraries has stuff like the flight confirmation code easily accessed.

The bottom line is I can see the path to a mobile device I talk to, and it talks back, much like an executive secretary, to keep the important bits in order so I can focus on other things. Is Cortana winning that battle? Siri? Google? Hard to say, but the battle is definitely engaged.

Can we stop talking about market competition as a battle where the only outcome is a single winner? That is almost never the result and almost never what you want as a customer/user/consumer.

Sure we can stop, although it is a competition. Its a competition for dollars, it has territory, it has strategies and tactics, and it generally is amenable to the same analysis you would use when analyzing armies attempting to capture, defend, or hold territory.

I called it a competition myself. My issue is only with the part where people look for an overall “winner”. It’s an evolutionary process, there is no winner. Your ending question will likely never have a meaningful answer.

But there are extinctions, which is kind of like losing. But more importantly there are technologies that become widespread (VHS) and those that never do (BetaMax) and understanding the successful technology as the area where additional investment is merited is often, if imprecisely, called the "winning" technology.

I can absolutely guarantee that my ending question will have a meaningful answer, either one or none of these systems will be the one that everyone uses, the other two will be the "niche" ones that hardly anybody uses (and I say this as a diehard Amiga fan boy). And as much as I might dislike the choice the market makes, I understand that once critical mass is achieved, it becomes economically unviable to continue investing in the "losing" technology.

I've tried Todoist, Wunderlist, Microsoft OneNote, Evernote, Google Keep, Apple Reminders and none of them coalesce into a nice simple personal task manager that keeps me happy.

I do have a Moto 360 and bark commands to that more often and I find that I keep going back to that to send me reminders. I believe it uses whatever is behind the reminders infrastructure in Google Inbox/Keep. Other than the fact that it sometimes has a hard time recognizing my voice it works well for the most part and I'm so busy that it is the simplest way for me to keep track of things in the moment.

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