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Comment by yanw | Hacker News Reader

This meme about Google turning into "old bad Microsoft" is a result of false dichotomy.

Search+'s effect on the results page is peripheral, manifesting on the right pane and search suggestions, the main results are largely the same and there is a handy toggle to switch modes.

Their browser is opensource, NaCl is opensource, Dart is opensource, the Microsoft stuff never was opensource.

They started charging for the Maps API because some German mapping company complained to the EU that they can't compete with free.

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The fact that they are opensource has very little to do with it. They are trying to push certain technologies into certain directions under the cover of opensource.

They are still in single control of the spec. This is not true with standard bodies where several companies can agree on it.

They are trying to push certain technologies into certain directions under the cover of opensource.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Firefox does it too, right? Not everything works well via the standards model; first you have to experiment and test before you can write a good spec. That's what Chrome is; Google asking, "how can we make the web better"? (SPDY is a good example of this.)

Ultimately, Google is like Microsoft in a lot of ways. They have a "platform" (the web via Chrome) that lets users use platform-specific applications in a variety of places. Apple is too; their platform is OSX and iOS. To provide the best user experience, you need to control the platform. Google is the only company that lets the Free Software community have the platform too.

You already disclose your employer in your profile, but you're probably going to want to do it in posts as well.

As a counterpoint though, I would argue that Google Chrome using Google services (seemingly exclusively) for its sync functionality kind of looks like a business decision more so than experimentation with poorly defined standards.

Yeah. I try to write as though I don't work for Google, because I know what the future looks like a few months out and am not supposed to tell anyone.

Honestly, the culture of Google is very "write software for the sake of writing software". I promise you that anything that looks evil is a mere accident; sometimes programmers don't consider the ramifications of their actions. Google doesn't want to know who your friends and family are to sell your information to credit reporting agencies; they want to know so that when you type "photos" you get photos that are actually relevant to you. (Similarly, Google wants to know your travel history so it can tell that you prefer Oneworld carriers, and when you search for flights, display results in the order that's most relevant to you.)

There's no way to prove this, though, and that's what's so frustrating. Come work for Google and you'll see :)

> sometimes programmers don't consider the ramifications of their actions. Google doesn't want to know who your friends and family are to sell your information to credit reporting agencies

I bet the execs and product managers realize the ramifications. If all of them profess to not realizing the ramifications, the following old quote probably applies.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/23510.Upton_Sinclair

FWIW, I was actually pretty well convinced of this by reading Steven Levy's In the Plex.

Even if the programmer's intentions are purely about code, and even if we assume management right now is entirely benevolent, data like that is hard to take back. If it is handed over to a Google that wanst to provide "photos that are actually relevant to you" right now, it will still be there if Google morphs into one that "sell your information to credit reporting agencies"

Overall I am a fan of Google's products and current policies, and I think some of the criticisms are overhyped. But with that said, I do think a "Google is benevolent, take our word for it..." statement should be taken with a grain of salt and an eye on possible futures.

sometimes programmers don't consider the ramifications of their actions.

And the google higher ups don't do anything about this because in the long run it makes them more money.

Yes, that's true. Google's goal is to organize the world's information for you. To organize it, they have to collect it. This makes them money because there's a lot of information out there, Google has a nice interface for searching it, and people will pay them (via their eyeballs currently) for that tool. The more information Google collects, the more convenient the product becomes, and the more value is generated. When you generate value, you generate money.

"Don't be evil" is not just marketing copy.

Aren't the higher ups at Goolge also programmers?

I like that Google does this and think it is in the best interests of the Internet and most people in involved. By creating opensource implementations and testing them we can move things forward faster; rather than letting people tie up standards in committee for years or creating something that can't be implemented well.

> They are trying to push certain technologies into certain directions under the cover of opensource

This is kind of a ridiculous statement, I'm sorry. The very definition of opensource precludes any kind of cover. The critical piece of "embrace, extend, extinguish" is the extinguish, and by being opensource that isn't possible.

Google is pushing technologies in certain directions, as other commenters have noted, but it lacks a threat because the second Google does something evil with their proprietary tech, it either gets forked or replaced.

That's completely false. You, as a programmer who wants to fork Chrome, do not have the advertising power and reach that Google has. You do not have the Google.com home page. You do not have the ability to air ads during the Super Bowl. You do not have the Google brand. Instead, you have a pile of source code and a compiler.

Despite what people would like to think, technologies do not generally win because of their technical superiority (although Chrome is a damn good browser). They win for innumerable other reasons unrelated to things that engineers do.

The fact is, open source or not, Google has total control over Chrome. The fact that somebody with vastly inferior resources could fork it is not a credible threat to that control.

What about a competitor with comparable resources? Not really challenging your claim, I'm actually just curious. Why don't Google's competitors just use Google's own OSS against them?

Say Facebook acquires Rockmelt, which is based on Chromium. Rockmelt as an independent browser isn't much of a threat, but with Facebook's resources (money, engineering, publicity), they could easily bake in their own social stuff on top of an already amazing browser.

Same thing with Amazon/Kindle and Android.

Because browser wars are expensive (look at how much money Google had to throw at Chrome to make it the #2 browser), and browsers are hard -- finding people who are qualified to work on browsers is not easy.

Well, yeah, those competitors could (leverage Google's OSS against it).

But an open source community, outside of some company control, not as easily if at all.

Take for example Mozilla/Firefox.

Well, didn't it do very well, and in many places, won over IE? It did. But it did it:

(1) Starting with the branding/product/code made by a huge (at the time) company (Netscape).

(2) Having mostly people from said company working on the Mozilla version.

(3) When Netscape died, it almost took Mozilla with it.

(4) Firefox revived the interest in the browser big time, but Firefox lives on a $100M a year Google subsidy.

Would Firefox still be worked at a competitive pace without Google's money?

I seriously doubt it.

""" The critical piece of "embrace, extend, extinguish" is the extinguish, and by being opensource that isn't possible."""

It's entirely possible.

A project that's open source but has 90% of the dev team, and especially the major players working for a parent company, it's not a "community" project.

And being a community project is what people most want when they root for open source software.

For one, the parent company, by simply hiring tons of developers, has the say in how the project is run and what it's roadmap is.

On top of this, it's extremely difficult or almost impossible to fork such a project. The fact that you have the LEGAL/LICENSING capability to fork it means nothing. What's important is the TECHNICAL/COMMUNITY viability of a fork.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3456594

> This meme about Google turning into "old bad Microsoft" is a result of false dichotomy.

I'll repeat my "mantra" here: Google, and almost every known web company is very close in terms of interoperability. It's false that they embrace openness and it's incredible how "our community" is so blind. When you run an application in your own machine, even if it's the closest one (i.e: Microsoft) you can reverse engineer it, but you can't reverse engineer the cloud. So, when Twitter is talking about APIs they are lying because if you, for example, try to analyze your social network with more than a few levels you will soon crash with their API call limit. If you want to automate Google searches taking advantage of their huge index, it will be impossible, they don't sell that service. They only make some things "open" if they don't clash with their business. In the case of Microsoft we can reverse engineer everything that's not in the cloud (Hotmail doesn't matter!)

I've written more about this in some of my articles at:

http://blog.databigbang.com/the-data-portability-fact-sheet/

http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/

Wow, three downvotes in a row and without any reply...

It wasn't me, but it was a little OT.

It's not OT, it's talking about interoperability. Twitter and Google issues are only a single case between a whole web community that want to integrate their applications with mainstream services.

After rereading up the chain, I see that someone did use the interoperability argument, so yeah, not OT.

Oooh, false dichotomy. Because you used big words you must be right. See my below comment: Open source does NOT equal standards. They are different.

Further, the picture in this article: http://mashable.com/2012/01/10/google-launches-social-search... clearly shows your Google+ results directly on top of your normal results.

See my comment regarding standards: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3456594

At the top it shows the number of public and private results, and the picture cluster always was there, they just added social relevancy to it.

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