yarianluis

REI has a 100% satisfaction guaranteed. About a year or two ago I purchased a few different bicycle parts. I kept them without using them for a few months and decided I didn't really need them after all. Since they were a few hundred dollars worth of parts I didn't want to just keep them or get rid of them, I wanted to return them. Even though their policy is "satisfaction" guaranteed, I felt like I was abusing the good faith of the policy--knowing just how heavily discounted their garage sale items are.

What I ended up deciding to do was returning them but asking for an 80% refund. The guy behind the counter gave me a really weird look and told me he had to ask if that was even allowed. Luckily for me, it was. They refunded me 80% of the total amount and I called it fair.

As an Android developer, I love that Google is doing this!

Android has come a very long way in the last few years in terms of usability and design. A large part of this has been due to an increasingly uniform design language and feel. That, and the new distribution model for what are basically Android updates (Google Play Services) has made Android feel more polished and actually allowed it to stand on its own against iOS. It also means that developers like me don't have to spend nearly as much time worrying about fragmentation in the traditional sense. Each day the percentage of people using sub-ICS phones falls, and we all get one step closer to the day we can support ICS+ only.

However, companies like Amazon would force me to rewrite the maps integration, the sign-in portion, the wallet, etc... Amazon did a great job of replicating Google Maps API V1 but they have yet to mirror V2 and don't mirror the other components I mentioned.

Aside from fragmentation and developer sanity, the article mentions another key point here:

"[M]any of Google's solutions offer best-in-class usability, functionality, and ease-of-implementation."

Exactly! Google APIs are not perfect, and there's bugs (like when Google Maps broke map markers on high resolution phones like the HTC One). But generally speaking, I'm really happy with the quality of the APIs and services. In an ideal world, Amazon and Google would work together to provide great and uniform single-sign-in APIs, great maps, etc... As it currently stands though, I don't believe either party is interested in doing so. Prisoner's dilemma?

You know, I'll take you up on that. Is @bunsen Twitter? My family will never move--I've come to peace with that. So it'd be nice if I could at least tolerate Miami a bit better and maybe seeing it with someone from the HN community is what is required.

I was raised in Miami and my family lives there still as well! We should meet up some time and complain about Miami together, haha. I agree with all the points you made.

Miami has quite a shallow population. I've also found as time goes on that as I develop new interests, there is poor community around most of them--the little things like rock climbing or playing ping pong. It's even extremely difficult to find a coffee shop to work out of when I visit family.

This article makes points that sound fine on the surface, but ignore reality. There's a very good reason why a lot of sites do this and won't stop any time soon--it works. The article claims some effects to "conversions, usage and how people feel about your product" but is very light on the details of how it actually affects those things.

Getting a user to sign up facilitates a whole range of options (promotional emails being just one of them) that help drive user retention and engagement. I am not advocating making your product obscure until they sign up. The value proposition of your product should be clear, regardless of whether someone signs up or not. But it is not clear that making them signup before they can actually use it for themselves decreases conversion or usage.

The complaint made here will become ever weaker as "Sign Up with Google" and other single-sign-on services become more widespread. Signing up in those cases takes a single click, and my experience is in many cases instantly personalized with my data from other services. This might make some HN denizens cringe, but the average person seems to not mind.

Don't like how they use one image at the top which is from a completely different event, as explained at the bottom. The image seems to be chosen to generate a specific emotional response but I'm not sure it actually represents the events covered in the story very honestly.