Google and Microsoft show lots of possible futures for their products and research. Apple keeps most of their stuff behind curtains, so it's unclear what they're working on.
178 karma · joined June 13, 2011
It's also hard not to recognize that consumer technology shifts further towards entertainment than utility. It's bizarre and selfish how consumer technology alerts you immediately about friend requests but not local emergencies. It's bizarre and selfish how your phone can show people your apps, contacts, and calendar, but not emergency medical information. Having apps x, y, and z can someone solve these for an individual, but as a society we haven't progressed much with this technology. The idea that the person beside me might have a heart attack, and I'd have to navigate their phone to find an ICE contact just baffles the hell out of me.
Did you hear about how Google dogfooded Google+ for months, and when it was released to the public, people used it entirely differently than they had used it internally?
It seems to me that Google is so stuck in the mindset of "Release a Beta, assess the adoption, iteratively improve" that they don't know how to make a product that people will actually want from the start.
Chrome took a while to be adopted because everyone was still stuck with useful extensions in other browsers. Wave had neat interaction, but failed the adoption hypothesis. Google+ correctly assumed the need for a sharing-centric network to replace Facebook, but botched the actual social aspect of it.
Google is the polar opposite of Apple in this regard. They need to learn to keep things under wraps and understand the userbase for the product before it actually reaches them. In the case of Google+, for instance, it's impossible to change the sharing mechanism that has been there from the start, as fundamentally flawed as it may be.
I think that there are a couple important reasons for this. Google+, a big alternative to Facebook, wasn't a viable option for most people, so they recognized the comfort of Facebook's features. Also, Facebook implemented a bunch of new features that made Facebook more lively (friend lists, timeline, ticker, etc.).
Google had a great opportunity, but they really missed out. Games could have been a great factor in getting more users, but I think that the fundamental issue lies with the actual sharing and interaction mechanisms! Not being able to write on someone's profile was a huge mistake for familiarizing Facebook users with the site, and getting new users. The circling and filtering behaviors still haven't changed. Pinterest came along and did sharing the right way: users posting categories of posts that other people can choose to voluntarily follow. Google+ isn't useful to me because the signal/noise ratio is through the roof because of this fundamental flaw. And there is still no way to exclude individuals from seeing a post.
In many ways, Pinterest is wiping the floor with Google+... an actual content-sharing network, with a well-designed intuitive sharing mechanism. An actual companion to Facebook rather than competitor. Making people choose between the two (Google+/Facebook) was far too large of a challenge.
The transition into a world with only self-driving cars brings up the issue of pedestrians and other drivers with malicious intent. Your car is going 120km/h and someone purposefully jumps in front of the car; what does the car do? Or maybe other drivers would try to snake their way through traffic like an emergency vehicle by attacking this accident avoidance system vulnerability. Do we record all these instances on camera and report them automatically to police?
Yeah, in Calgary people lose their shit when there's a light dusting of snow... it's ridiculous.
I'm returning my new iPad this week because 1) My Macbook Air is light and more useful, I have no drawing ability, and I don't read much; the iPad is no more than a toy and waste of money in my ecosystem, and 2) The app store ecosystem is dreadfully boring on iOS. On Android I feel like I'm actually rewarding the good developers by buying their Pro versions of apps and such... on iOS everyone wants your money, regardless of how shitty the product is. On Android, I see so many developers experimenting across so many categories just for the fun of it. 3) High-resolution has hardly benefitted anything that I do on the device. The majority of content that I see (images and video) are low-res. Plus, very few apps that I use have been upgraded to 'retina' quality. ALSO, retina doesn't just mean scaling everything up... why is nobody making their content more detailed? Orthogonal lines don't render that differently in higher resolution.
For root 2: Version 1, Version 1.4, Version 1.41, etc.
2) Ars had a great article about this one month ago http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/how-red-hat-kil...