dant

I think the core argument here is that if the majority of the users don't understand the implementation details of the software/hardware they're using, then selling them new stuff might actually involve spelling out the benefits in practical terms that users can relate to. I really can't see the problem with that.

I also can't see why the Car analogy is somehow invalid because cars only do one thing. For years having a car was essential for living in many (not all) modern cities, without a car you couldn't get to work, visit family or buy groceries. It was an essential tool for living in much the same way as computer will be in coming decades. People did not generally understand the inner workings of fuel injection, anti-lock brakes or catalytic converters, but that didn't mean engineers weren't able to introduce those things. They just had to articulate the performance/safety/economy/environmental benefits in terms that people understood and cared about. The same will be true for computers.

You have a contract directly with the borrowers, not with the institution. If the borrowers don't pay up, you loose that money. Zopa doesn't pretend that you have money sitting in a vault somewhere that you can take out whenever you like.

To be fair to banks they don't really try to push that vault myth either, but that is the mental model people still use when interacting with banks.

Birmingham, England

Good point. I think Microsoft have failed to spot that the computer market is going the same way as the car market. You can buy a car very cheaply if you just need to get from A to B. But people who have more money choose to buy BMWs or Mercedes. It's an aspirational purchase.

So what's your point? That the people who want a say in how they're governed shouldn't express a view because the people who don't like to have a say are sick of hearing it?

I don't think the argument is that "you're bad anyway". Regardless of who you are, how you got into that situation and whether the protesters have a point, with a protest movement that big and motivated your options are same: crush the protests, re-run the election or form a unity government. If you choose to crush the protest then you give up the "government by consent of the people" type contract that you have with society. I think it's that fact that will drive western opinion more than the actual legitimacy of the result.

I agree. Facebook's data on me is not of a particularly good quality. Most of my "friends" are former colleagues or school friends. I wouldn't trust any of them to recommend a restarunt any more then I would trust 300 anonymous reviews on an independant restarunt listings site.

True. I'm not passing judgement or using subjective terms like "bad guys", I'm just saying that the OP highlights what a robust monopoly Google has and that the counter arguments that some have offered are wrong.

If true, this strengthens the case that Google's monopoly is dangerous. The defence of Google's market dominance has always been that users are not locked in to Google and would switch the moment something better arrived. If Google have built a brand loyalty that transcends that then they would be virtually impossible to challenge.

Give the guy a break, he clearly does now how to code, he writes well crafted blog entries in which he humbly explains some of the mistake's he's made for the benefit of others. If he's being voted up in news aggregator then a lot of people must appreciate what he's doing. Why is that so bad?

"Smart" in this context means "engineering smart", sounds like they lacked some business smarts... There's more than one way to be smart.

It's all about network effects. I think the hype is bad for Twitter, it makes people aware of the service before any of their friends are on there, so they try it, subscribe to Stephen Fry and Jeff Atwood and then give up.

Me and a few of my friends in the UK .net development world are on there but we go days between tweets because that's what everyone else is doing. There's no conversation for me at the moment. At this point I'm just sitting on my user account and waiting for the network to become worth being a part of.

I think pg has misjudged what stage of the start-up revolution we're in.

He notes that the industrial revolution spread quickly because there were geographical areas with middle class populations and cultures that let people keep the large sums of money they made. He also notes that the culture necessary for large numbers of start-ups is not present in many areas.

IMO, we're no way near the railroad stage of the start-up revolution. I think we're in the early renaissance. The valley is like Venice in the 1400s. It's a very localised concentration of merchant traders and a culture of what we now call "modern values", meanwhile the rest Europe is living in the "dark ages". It wasn't until the plague spread across Europe and gave the surviving working classes more influence that the culture started to change. Even then, it's another 300 years before society really starts to change.

Looking at Europe in the 1400 hundreds you might well have thought that Venetian style modernism would be a very localised revolution and that these new fangled "banks" would only ever be established in small areas.

Start-ups are not the "railroads" of the industrial revolution. They are the "banks" of the industrial revolution.