No, I arrived at that conclusion because KitKat and Google have both publicly announced the tie-up, and Google doesn't seem to understand, or more likely doesn't care, what it means to actively promote a company like Nestle. There are plently of other "K" foods they could choose if they wanted to.
To be fair, it's not just this incident that helped me reach the conclusion, its been festering at the back of my mind for a while.
You would be surprised at what you can achieve with a little effort and using mainly smaller companies with an ethical bent (certainly ethical clothing and bicycles are available).
Nevertheless, I agree it is hard, and I'll likely be using some of Googles services for a while yet. My main point is how my view of them has changed, and that will make me seek out alternatives when possible.
But it's a co-branding strategy with a company that is widely condemned as having some horrible (and illegal) practices.
It's trivially easy to find these. I cannot believe that anyone at the largest search engine company in history failed to find or read criticism of Nestle before announcing the co branding.
The only conclusion to draw is that Google knew about, and did not care about, the criticism of Nestle.
Why not go the easy route and find a less obviously evil company?
Another possible conclusion is that they selected a few possibilities, including other K-desserts (Kakao? no, too Cocoa; Kremlin Cake? too sovietic; Kaki jam? Weird, too Chinese; etc) and decided the less bad one was Kitkat.
I'd say the problem is to be too systematic. Same with Ubuntu Zoomy Zoo and Apple iSeries. Would a writer submit himself to such a gimmick for his book's names?
However, my main grip again Kitkat would be that it is the same as all other "chocolate" bar: it is industrial junk-food, making us all obese, and it do not contain chocolate.
Cal Murphy (by Jack Patterson) uses Cross in the title - "Cross Hairs", "Cross the Line", "Triple Cross". (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jack-Patterson/e/B0098F2E48/ref=ntt_...) (This last one feels odd - the author name is close to James Paterson, and the series titling uses a word ('cross') that happens to be the name of the James Paterson protagonist.
Google could not have adopted marketing like this without Nestlé's approval. Nestlé are truly vile and "do no evil™" are in some form of partnership with them, at the very least it is cross-promotion.
Nestle have given press releases describing their 'collaboration', and even set up this website. Its inconceivable that Google did not demand payment; Google could have called it something generic like all their previous versions.
Google of course probably approached Nestle. They created a new revenue generating angle on creating an OS.
Debian ought to go get money from other brands through similar version naming.
Seriously, why isn't the next Ubuntu called "Head&Shoulders"?
Right. Why does Google need to paid for this? Any dollar figure would be insignificant, not scaleable and not part of their core business. Selling naming rights to their SDKs?! Are these baseball stadiums?
With regards to the third, I've seen this gripe before, but I feel its misplaced.
This author has personally noticed a parallel between the reaction of his friends to wood-burning and religion. Something he though was interesting and decided to write about. Expecting him to fit that realization in to an analogy that would cater to the entire world, will water down the effectiveness of his point.
Additionally, he may not have any inkling about what will cater to the world audience. When I write something, I write from my own experiences, I have no idea if a reader in the U.K. will relate to my problem or my thoughts.
I'm just scared that doing more complex stuff will turn our current, simple, app into a bit of a battery hog itself :) But I think Android does a decent amount of that for you.
Funded vs. Bootstrapped is a false dichotomy. Not every business model will succeed as a funded company and the opposite is true too.
While the author claims there is a charm to the "37 Signals" profitability approach vs. the "Twitter" growth approach. There's a reason those companies operate on completely different models and on completely different products.
In hindsight, would you have believed Apple could have existed without capital infusion? It is, arguably, a very profitable tech company.
I think there is a reason for both types of companies to exist. Generalizing the problem in to a pseudo duel between the two are the beginnings of a flawed decision.
It isn't that they raised $41 million, that was the issue. It was the fact that they raised that amount without any real metrics to back the team or the product.
Someone gave me this analogy that I thought was quite well put. Michael Jordan kicked ass at basketball, but it would have been a foolish manager who gave him a $41 million contract when he decided to try baseball.
Hindsight-20:20 here - Color might have been an incredible story on paper, and it might even have warranted a stratospheric valuation. But nothing besides cold, hard numbers warrants cash of $41MM for a web/app startup.
Browser marketshare was only one metric for winning. Controlling the way browsers worked and how people used them was much more important. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" never got much farther than the first stage.
What's the point of doing all the work and paying for all the support if you can't control the game?
It's more appropriate to say he lost to the internet. Even by 2006 it was obvious that OS didn't matter any more. Not that I agree with the grandparent.
This might just be my conspiracy radar turned to 11, however, it seems very suspect that a blog with only 1 post ever, is using that post to rave about AirBnB right in the middle of their storm.
I want to supplement this by saying I really admire AirBnB and have no doubt that they will over come this security lapse with the killer product and marketplace they've built. However, this suspicious orphan blog post has my BS antennae throwing out sparks.
In the same vein, this applies to demographics outside the 'Tech' world too. We build several products for a film festival market. Our support for IE is very product specific even within this niche domain and not something you would risk generalizing without testing the hypothesis out yourself.
For example, two of our products are (i) A film submission form field and (ii) A schedule for the screenings at the festival.
With basic IE support for both, we noticed <3% of the traffic using IE for the "Submission forms" and ~40% of our traffic to the "Schedules" use IE for a festival in Phoenix.
In hindsight this makes sense. Most people submitting films are the filmmakers or their crew- think Apple's primary target market, hence Safari and FF is what we see a lot of. We've stopped incremental updates for IE on the submission form as long as it remains functional.
However, people looking at schedules are at their enterprise jobs possibly in Phoenix during the day and trying to figure out what films to catch after work. That might explain the high prevalence of IE.
While it is obvious in hindsight, these are not assumptions I would be willing to make without looking at hard data specific to my product. Regardless of whether it's Tech or Filmmaker centric.
