Google Blindness
marco.org
marco.org
Meanwhile, to everyone else on the thread: GUESS WHAT? You're never going to resolve this issue. None of your comments are convincing anyone of anything. They're generating head-nodding from people who already agree with you, and rageposts from people who don't. It has ever been thus, since the moment where someone wrote a second text editor in the history of text editors, and it will always be thus. At least you're part of a noble, silly-looking tradition.
If the National Security Agency required us to notify it whenever we made a new friend, the nation would rebel. Yet we notify Facebook. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded copies of all our conversations and correspondence, it would be laughed at. Yet we provide copies of our e-mail to Google, Microsoft or whoever our mail host is; we provide copies of our text messages to Verizon, AT&T and Sprint; and we provide copies of other conversations to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever other site is hosting them.
The primary business model of the Internet is built on mass surveillance
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/08/the_publicpriv...
Google's primary business is surveillance of their users. Selling the results to their customers, advertisers.
I see no clear utility out of letting the NSA know who my friends are.
I'm interested in Google here. What are our limits feeding it? Are we really aware of what we are doing, in the name of convenience?
Is it worth giving someone $100 if they turn around and turn it into $10,000 when you get nothing in return? (Note: we're not designed to think on such expansive macro-connected scales, so nobody (except weirdos) cares to stop enabling such broken behaviors.)
Google's primary business is advertising, meaning that like the publishers of yore they sell "space", now with the advent of technology that "space" gets populated with what the algos determine to be the best suitable ad according to data about the would be viewer of said ad. They don't 'sell their users to advertisers', they offer them a dashboard with which they supply the content of the advertisement, choose the interests they want to target, and measure the effectiveness of it all. Advertisers do not get exposed to user data - they deal with abstractions.
How we got here: Moxie Marlinspike, 2010:
The bottom line is that more data makes better apps, and yes, better ads. I doubt they know you better than "your mother or partner" because I don't know how to measure that (it's an anecdotal, and a fear mongering thing to say).
They collect whatever you allow them to, and they provide ample means of transparency and control. Not to mention the usefulness of their services.
And we slowly got accustomed to it, noticing less and less. The process of it is described by Moxie in the video I've linked to. Do try to watch and think about it.
Btw, it seems this article was flagged to death. Google seems to be sacred here.
while i see the argument for "facebook is using the data in a way that we haven't given our consent for," i think it's a lot less severe issue because a) Facebook openly admits how it's using it, which makes the company honest (unlike the NSA) b) Ensures us that no human other than the ones you authorize will ever see said data. (unlike the NSA)
we can be angry because the NSA abused our trust, while Facebook has yet to break it. it's also very tiring to hear people and see them live defensively and not use facebook or google in case they might break your trust, its starting to border paranoia.
They also aren't honest with how they use that data either, and they definitely don't "ensure us that no human other than the ones you authorized will ever see said data", there have been several huge incidents about that, including one involving Zuckerberg's sister. They continually break our trust, it's not paranoia, look this stuff up, or pay attention to terminology news..,
On the hardware front: I don't really buy the notion that Android hardware is up to par with Apple. I realize this is an inherently subjective argument: I've played with my friends' Android phones and I just don't like the way they look or feel compared to the iPhone.
On the services front: I think the argument that "Google is an advertising company and that makes them an inherently worse ecosystem" is weak, but I absolutely agree that we're past the point of "this is the best solution for everyone."
Personally -- I don't use any Apple services besides, well, the App Store, despite relying on them 100% for the hardware side (iPad + MBA + iPhone). And I don't use Google to the extent Paul does: I use GMail, Search, and Chrome.
This has the advantage of portability: I don't have to tie myself to a given ecosystem because I'm stuck there. I tie myself to whatever makes my life the easiest.
It's not totally related to this discussion, and I'm not picking on you - but I had to mention this: I have a friend that bought himself a MacBook Pro (for around 2200€) and then went on to observe how this laptop is far better than any previous he owned, and how it's better than what his colleagues ad friends own. I agreed with him, and then told him that most of them paid way less than 1000€ for their laptop, and probably noone paid even close to what he paid (alas. there are not a lot of MacBooks around here), ofcourse a MacBook is way better than a 600€ HP laptop.
People forget that, most of the Android devices (analog to laptops) are actually cheaper than a iPhone.
The Core2Duo Macbook I bought in 2006 is almost as useful (albeit with an SSD now) as it was when I got it. It runs the latest OS and has decent enough graphics.
Most Windows systems just don't age as well (exception being perhaps an Thinkpad, but then again, that's cost equivalent to a mac anyway).
For phones, the argument is skewed by mobile operators as that service cost over a 2 year period greatly exceeds the cost of the phone itself.
This isn't to indict any particular brand, but when a brand is strong enough consumers of that brand use it to self-brand themselves. They wear the halo effect. And as I read Paul's essay I get some undercurrent that he's "hey, it's ok" to self-brand differently.
Somehow OP glossed all over that and shifted the discussion to a troll baiting exercise. The truth is that whether you're wed to Google's services or to Apple's you're make certain tradeoffs, but one key difference remains is that you can be a Google user on the iPhone which puts them ahead in my opinion.
Also I don't buy the disingenuous argument that since Apple is less adequate at services they are somehow better at privacy - more data makes better apps.
To be fair, my Nexus 7 hasn't quite given up the ghost yet, but now that its successor has been released, I'm counting the days until it too becomes as responsive as Karen Ann Quinlan.
And that's a shame because Android's interface has really come a long way in that time. Paul Stamatiou's article showcases some really cool design advances that have happened since Android 4.0.
For me it all comes down to Google seeming to not care one bit about anything except the latest and greatest devices. Yes I know that Android 4.3 is supposed to address that - good luck shipping that one out to all the major carriers.
In closing, the same brickification that hit my Galaxy Nexus this year happened to my original droid in 2011 - fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...
It's as close to a stock install as you can get, too. It's so disappointing to see perfectly good hardware be so incompetently misused. This phone should fly. So I wonder if this is on purpose to force people to buy new hardware every few years, or if the people working on Android are either understaffed or just not very good developers.
Probably this judging by how many years the UI ignored the GPU on that platform.
What about the updated GMail and GMaps don't you like? The user experience has been beefed up significantly - going between user accounts and organizing mail in GMail has never been easier. The Google Maps interface is really pleasant to use and doesn't clutter up the screen when all you want to do is view the area.
Obviously those are two quick personal observations, but I'm very curious as to what recent features may have introduced friction to long-time users.
Also – and I don't mean to sound like a fanboy – I personally think that Google Maps and Gmail even better than they were two years ago. At which point did they start to suck in your opinion?
Yet if the technological elite (as represented by HN) is unwilling to do this, what chance do the rest have? [2]
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht...
Domains are not the only thing you need to take into account. There is hosting, deployment, and keeping things up to date and secure.
Take email for example. Google no longer offer free Google Apps accounts, so you have to spend at least $50/year for a single user to use Google Apps Mail with your domain while you prepare to switch to your own server.
To run your own server, you may wish to use a VPS. You can find a cheap provider on LowEndBox, but for additional safety and reliability, you decide to sign up for a DigitalOcean VPS for $5/month.
Then you have to install it, keep it updated, etc.
It's not expensive, but it's not $8/year, and it's not as easy as just having a Gmail account.
This is just email; other services introduce other complications. I really don't want to spread FUD, and I wish more people would break away from the Apple/Google/Microsoft cage.
Other services may be harder to migrate, but they usually don't have the same cost of notification. If I change where my calendar is hosted, I don't need to inform all my contacts.
There are better and cheaper alternatives, but I just wanted to point out that you can't get free Google Apps accounts anymore.
You can do this with Gmail over IMAP as well, though I just use the first-party apps on my devices for the most part. But for the record, if you set up a "Gmail" account on an iOS device this doesn't work; you have to set it up as IMAP and monkey with the settings a bit.
The Tech elite have the same chance as the rest of us. We're all humans, vulnerable to loneliness, envy and every other mortal sin. The pain of switching is not technical, but social and political.
It is a deeply political and social decision to disconnect from our social fabric and not one that even the most ostracized members of society make in haste. I just think you're ignoring the real costs in favor of the monetary concerns.
How can we make the preparation for flexibility become a pure technical problem and not a social one?
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Disclaimer: I use Google's services myself. I can't imagine who doesn't. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I think about it sometimes...
He's not quite the shill that Gruber is, but it all adds up that he's popular on HN.
The better question the Android community should be asking itself is why it hasn't attracted or developed great writers and evangelists as well as Apple has.
People are going to be coming online for the first time. There’s this vibrant community of young app developers growing in Kenya and Nigeria. - Jimmy Wales.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/10/50-android-smartphones-are-...
I've chosen google but what would make an interesting article for me is one which explained whether iOS or android was better if / when I want to cut myself off from either apple or google's online services and replace them with self hosted email / calendar / etc.
It's a shame that the internet seems to be on day four of groundhog day, seeing the same story played out over and over.
1. a dominating ecosystem or a couple of ecosystems exist (e.g., AOL in the early days) 2. increased lock-in makes people yearn for alternatives 3. open alternatives spring up, gain momentum and overcome the dominating ecosystem 4. the previous alternative is now successful and starts to diversify its offerings 5. with increasing adoption and an increased market share, the company tries to connect services, for the convenience of its users (that's what they say) or for increased lock-in (that's what they don't say) 6. over time, now this former upstart becomes the dominant ecosystem, increasingly removing the openness from its services and connecting its offerings so that you don't have to leave them ever (we are back at 1.) 7. users start to feel the pain of being locked-in and yearn for open alternatives...
The only way to break this cycle is by actively pursuing alternatives, by diversifying its providers and by making a conscious decision to forgo immediate convenience gains by using the same provider for different services.
The only product that would concern me is Voice, and even then I believe a suitable replacement would pop up and Google would provide a relatively easy transition.
Google gave months of advance warning, and made it easy to export your feeds and data in a cross platform, open format. The fact that their API was open for other clients to use meant there was already an (admittedly limited) ecosystem of feed-reader UI apps that could pick up where they left off, such as Feedly and TheOldReader.
You lost a good product when Reader shut down, but you didn't lose the kingdom by any means
"We can make a living developing for it."
Android has (roughly) 4X market share but just 1/3 of the revenue compared to iOS. When the per user revenue gap closes, Marco's preference may change.
* you are locked in, no matter if you prefer android or ios * choose you poison?
come on, it took years and a lot of effort to take us all out of the nightmare of the windows ecosystem lock in.. so we can fall out in the same trap all over again?
and while this is a natural behavior of apple that we should be all expecting, i expected more from google.. because nowadays google is looking like a schizophrenic, working for the web and open ecosystems, creating a lot of awesome opensource projects with one hand, and creating more and more closed ecosystem that try to lock people and developers in.. google looks like dr jekyll and mr hyde..
i hope the open google, the google with the hacker culture, that the "Dr Jekyll" google wins in the end..
but nowadays it looks that google is more in a love affair with its mr hyde side.. i hope it gets cured preety soon and come back to its hacker spirit roots.. with no traps in their products..
apple will just loose more and more market share, because its acting like if it was the 90´s.. and we see now with microsoft that this way of doing things its a thing of the past.. so it will fall by its own steps..
but google with a candy in one hand, and a knife in the other hidden on the back.. thats a behaviour that should be feared..
He makes a good point.
Absolute power gets abused absolutely.
Unless the person to whom the power is handed is some kind of Zen master, it's likely they'll use that power for personal agenda.
The groups they like will become elites. The ones they don't will get lined up against walls and shot.
That's just how it is.
Even though Google says, "Don't be evil," they aren't Zen masters.
Well, not all of them, at least :)
Normal Buddhism does deal with these extensively, Four Noble Truths are all about suffering. But Zen Buddhism tends to dismiss these concepts as unimportant. They may be true, they may not be true, but while you're looking for happiness and success, Zen offers nothing.
Mindfulness meditation is rather cool, as is general Buddhism. I'm just trying to distinguish a bit here.
Google blindness? Or blind hatred for Apple's competitors?
Some gems, though:
I think it’s unwise to use many proprietary, hard-to-replace
services in such important roles, and I think it’s downright
foolish to tie that much of your data and functionality into
proprietary services run by one company in one account that
sometimes gets disabled permanently with no warning, no
recourse, and no support.
The Google search he links to is some useless Google search on "google account locked". Here's the equivalent Apple ID search:
https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+account+locked 26.7 million results.
Here's another:
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=apple+i... Over 29 million results.
I could go on a side-discussion about the number of Google users vs Apple users and then compare percentages and Google results and point out that there seem to be more issues with Apple IDs than Google IDs per capita, but why bother?
What does it mean? People using both ecosystems get their accounts locked up for some reason or another.
If Apple somehow irrevocably locks out my Apple ID, which
I’ve never heard of happening, it would be inconvenient.
My contacts and calendar would temporarily stop syncing
during the 20 minutes it would take to create a new
account and point my devices to it. The biggest problem
would be losing my app and media purchases, although I
wouldn’t lose any local copies of anything*
and there’s a phone number I can call to convince a human
to give me a transfer or credit.
It’s important to maintain diversity of services.
In fact, I'd say that Android is better at maintaining diversity of services. You can install an account for a wide variety of providers in the Settings app, whereas Apple forces you to stick with whatever they choose for you (Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, etc). Occasionally, they might remove a provider for you.
It’s foolish for people on either side to ignore the
other or the middle, because despite what it sometimes
looks like to geeks like us, we’re not everyone. Not
even close. Even within our world, we can’t agree on
much.
like Paul says he does
I'm not a particularly big fan of Google or Apple or Microsoft, and I despise Facebook. But I still use all of their tech daily, but I'm sure as hell not going to cheer lead for any of them.
Edit: Fixed broken copy-pasted links, thanks anonymoushn.
I've noticed a significant decrease in Daring Fireball posts hitting the front page in recent months, is Gruber now the new Apple shill^H^H^H^H^Hevangelist we have to deal with on HN now?
The only interesting point he makes here is that users shouldn't monoculture their services -- which I think is a good point. Then he proceeds to undermine his own argument.
I bet there are millions of Android users who'd love to use iTunes on their latest Android phone, or some other company's service, but Apple itself is responsible for not rolling these services out beyond their hardware ecosystem (acknowledging the incredibly shitty Windows ports of iTunes), thus preventing non-Apple users from become users of components of Apple's services.
But as it stands, Apple is not a good supporter of Marco's own arguments. In fact, if I don't want to use either company's services, I bet I can use more on my Android device. Hell I can even run my own mail server on my Android phone with half a dozen screen presses if I want to.
Google says they like open things. Google had "Don't be evil" as a motto. However, Google does things that aren't open and things that are evil. That is why you shouldn't use Google's stuff.
My strawman isn't perfect, but it gets the gist of what Gruber, Marco et al say: Google tries to present itself as a better company, but they're not, so don't do business with them.
It's a noble point, but it completely glosses over Apple's equally bad behavior under the excuse that Apple, unlike Google, never pretended to be nice.
I haven't had any experiences that bad with Google. Losing Google Reader was bad, but also made me appreciate the existence of the Data Liberation Front[1]. And I know I can install non-Google android or Ubuntu on my phone if it comes to that.
That link acknowledges a kill switch for malicious apps, which they've never used.
Exactly this, they are more defensive each month it pass
The latter question of course is just a fanboy debate, and the former question elicits a "no-duh". But to boil it down to just Google vs. Apple misses the bigger picture: to spread our eggs across different baskets raises new issues of security and convenience, which are always going to be tradeoffs.
For example, if you're paranoid that either Apple or Google is going to shut off access to your contacts and calendar, is the solution to spread your information across both?
If so, how do you keep the two in sync (let's assume that at some point in the future, there was no first party support of syncing services)? Or let's say you want to use another calendar/contacts app completely. Then you rely on a third-party service, which raises the issue of 1. How long will that service stay in business? 2. Can you trust it with your data? 3. Do you have to learn another interface?
With the adoption of either iOS/Android, I think customers have shown that they do not want to live a splintered digital life. They want a future posited by sci-fi shows, where "things just work." It's not Apple vs Google, it's convenience vs. personal responsibility/maintenance.
Other than that both are for-profit companies seeking to lock you into their ecosystems as much as they can. And in order to do that they need to compete for customers - who are varied and have different needs and expectations. Some will choose Android, others will choose iOS. Meanwhile the earth will keep turning.
So to get a user like me to switch platforms - it's a huge personal expense, not just of money, but of time and intellectual bandwidth. I don't need a device that's just arguably better, or a little better... I'd need a game-changer of a device to switch, something that does basically everything I do on my iPhone more efficiently, faster, better, cheaper. I don't see that.
I'll probably stay on iPhone unless Apple really screws up.
In my experience, you want apple software/service, you have to go apple hardware; and essentially vice-versa. (Correct me if I'm wrong!)
But if you go with Android (or other OSes) you can choose whatever "cloud" services you want. Just cause Paul used Google with his android phone doesn't mean you have to.
Really, yawn. I'm personally very much in the Android camp (though not a big cloud user -- I like the photo backups and bookmark synching, but don't use gmail or Google Now much at all), and found Paul's "Android is better" to be a refreshing confirmation that as the market matures and stabilizes iOS users are finally looking at alternatives. But clearly not all of them agree; I don't think I needed to read Marco's blog post to know that.
that's one horrific run-on sentence. it's both grammatically flawed and descriptive solely of the platform the author is attempting to defend.
i can no longer tell if this guy's serious or just trolling.
I'd rather pay
A lot of people are Children of The Church of Apple. They're happy with letting Apple carry buckets of data across devices, but the buckets of data remain in the person's control. That's Apple's entire business model: help people do what they need to do and don't encroach into lives needlessly.