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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

Struggling to see how google was harmed by this but yea it's true he didn't dot the i's and cross the ts.

I actually thought when it was released that it was a pretty clever move by google in a sea of bad decisions but they've cleared that misapprehension right up.

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As a customer and dev, it's confusing to me when I look at Google's stuff and see official-looking unofficial CLIs.

* when it's also alongside an official CLI for the same product

As a customer who uses open source I care more about whether it works well than whether it's officially sanctioned but I can see how some of google management and its employees would take a diametrically opposite view to the i dotting and t crossing.

There are a couple of unsanctioned clients in particular where I'd take a dim view of the company trying to kill them and one where it actually happened to wide condemnation.

Unofficial is fine. It's also fine if the only way to use it is some unofficial or not-fully-supported thing, or if there are two ways but the unofficial one is better. It's just, if there's a real supported tool, it'd better not be possible to confuse with the unofficial one. If I were evaluating using a product like this and got confused about such a basic thing, I'd be gone.

> but yea it's true he didn't dot the i's and cross the ts.

How do you know that's true? Do you have information the rest of us don't?

He probably read the twitter thread, it's all in there

I read the twitter thread, don't see any clear information about what the t's and i's even are, or if they were crossed and dotted.

The twitter thread was more than enough for me to understand what has gone on.

Are we talking about the same twitter thread? This one? https://xcancel.com/JPoehnelt/status/2069482265953087602

Right, but a single link is not enough as there are many off-shoots on the thread (it's not linear); other Google employs chime in and all sorts of other info.

Google could definitely be harmed by an unofficial product release that gets lots of users but doesn't have any kind of official support behind it, and hence could make those users pissed off in the future.

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