wilsynet

I was a new employee at Google when we started talking to Firebase. The founders are super smart and get stuff done.

However, I remember saying to the VP who was leading the acquisition, “shouldn’t we decide what market we want to be in, then evaluate if we should build, buy, or partner?”

He said “no, we should buy it first then figure out what to do”.

I’m not surprised Firebase feels like it’s bolted on. They never really knew what they wanted to do with it. That was true then and it’s true now.

I do not recall Sun being renamed into “Java”. It was acquired by Oracle as Sun Microsystems.

It’s fine to have a conservative leaning news channel. It’s not fine to spend so much of the time spreading lies.

Steve Jobs was first a computer hobbyist, then later he worked at Atari before he co-founded Apple in 1976. He wasn’t a non-technical founder, although he was certainly less technical than his co-founder. He could program, he could do digital design, he knew his way around a bread board and an oscilloscope.

He isn’t famous for being a programmer, but he could do it, and he certainly understood it.

There were people who showed up to Washington DC on Jan 6, who were not affiliated with Proud Boys. Who saw the shattered windows and open doors, and decided to go for a stroll through the Capitol building. I think they just showed up and were interested in what was going on too.

There are almost two hundred thousand employees at Google. No matter what environment Google fosters, there are always going to be 0.01% who think it’s OK to stage a protest in the office.

There is no chance AI is making a junior engineer as effective as a senior engineer.

The business model was to license the browser to corporations. And they would have done pretty well except Microsoft gave away the browser for free.

The model of licensing software was pretty typical for the time. I disagree that they didn’t have a sustainable business model. Sure, IE4 was better and Netscape didn’t respond very well, but by 1997 it’s market share and revenues were already significantly eroded.

I am 50 years old and -14.5 diopters in both eyes. Slowing by half would have been a great outcome by comparison.

The NYT and other newspapers don’t go after the archived link providers. Probably because the newspapers scholarly mission includes things like preservation. But they also have a profit motive or they can’t stay in business.

This implicit permission for the archive links to exist, gives some of us the implicit permission to pirate the content.

Disclaimer: I am a happy subscriber to the NYT (and other digital newspapers).

Relying on the App Store to distribute your app is more than a little different than building an extension to iMessages. Apple and Google want you to use their app stores in this way. Apple does not want you to bridge iMessages to other platforms.

There were Internet search engines before Google, but Google did it way better.

I remember when Gmail was new. It was way, way better and more amazing than Hotmail. The idea was a practically infinite searchable inbox. Nothing else was like it at the time.

I think it would be unfair to not give credit to Google for YouTube. YouTube was indeed a visionary idea with legs, but it is so much further developed now than in 2005. And a lot of it has to do with the way Google has nurtured it over the years.

You could also say there were digital music players before the iPod, Apple copied the Mac from Xerox, and there were smart phones before the iPhone.

I used PFS:Write on the Apple II. Then later WordPerfect 5.1 on the PC.

When I was a kid, a university student who couldn’t type paid me to transcribe his essays.

Cars also hit bikes when cars are backing up, making turns, driving above the speed limit, driving below the speed limit, when the driver opens the door. Really, many varied circumstances that have nothing to do with making a U-turn.

Perhaps the phrase “perfectly safe” is wrong. Maybe “otherwise intrinsically safe” would be more accurate. Having said all that, I do wonder if we have U-turn accident statistics.

As merely two examples, both gRPC and Kubernetes are important to Google, and yet Google opened sourced them. "No longer used" is not the criteria Google uses to make their software OSS.

FYI, I work at Google.