I try to avoid these sorts of submissions, mainly because of their non-content and the subsequent familiar discussion, but somehow they keep reaching the front page.
It’s certainly your prerogative to use whatever you like but the incorrect assertions bother me, especially the prevalent one: “It's because I think that Google is now working against the potential of the open web”.
Here’s a rebuttal in the form of a partial list of links to Google initiatives that exist primarily to advance the “open web”:
I don't think the closure of Google Reader was any indication to the contrary, and all of these are certainly much more important to the web than yet another centralized RSS reader.
Other errors in that post: Chrome never ‘dropped decent RSS support’ as it never supported it to begin with, it was actually Firefox that dropped their support. Also there is no evidence that Reader was closed to “drive users to Google+”, there is no proof nor common sense explanation to support that assertion.
Here’s a rebuttal in the form of a partial list of links to Google
initiatives that exist primarily to advance the “open web”:
http://www.chromium.org
That's funny. I see Chromium as their OSS alibi for doing whatever non-standard they want with open-web HTML, which doesn't exist in any other browser. But now it's not "proprietary", because it's in a OS code-repo somewhere.
So now it's "standards" even though it hasn't been submitted, ratified or approved yet. And everyone else, if they dont want Google's stuff to work poorly in their browser, has to be a dog and follow Google's leash.
I consider Chromium some of the worst damage Google has done to the open web.
Interesting opinion. I hadn't considered it like that at all, but I will give it some thought. How much of the non-standard stuff is getting any use/traction (honest question)?
For me, currently, Chromium seems like nothing like a good thing. For example, their Linux sandboxing appears to be at least a step ahead of anything else so far.
Postini as we've know it is shutting down. Google is forcing their Customers to move to Google Apps. I have several Customers who have been using Postini for multiple years each and I'm expecting a rough patch when we start being forced to "transition". As of the last "webinar" I attended w/ Google people there still isn't feature parity for the end user-facing portion of the service for those of us who still have on-premise email servers.
Yes, I read that page before they shut down my account. They sent it to me repeatedly, saying I needed to move everything to Google Apps. Completely ignores the fact that some features in Postini are not available in Apps; that Apps is several times more expensive; and that Apps includes a range of apps that are completely unneeded (if I wanted Apps, I would have signed up for it instead of Postini to begin with).
Edit: I should rephrase: they did not "shut down" my account. They just informed me I would no longer be eligible to renew my account when my subscription expired.
They do not "scrape" content on your local machine. They do incorporate stuff on their services including emails, as you mention (OpenTable, Amazon packages, etc).
If you've Googled these stocks/companies then they will show up on a Google Now card. Chrome has nothing to do with it, except maybe that you are more likely to be signed in when using Chrome.
Have you tried commenting on Google Play? You need Google+. I have an Android phone but I shouldn't need a Google+ account when I have my regular Google account which actually works on Google Play.
And it wasn't like this when I bought my phone. I can't "opt out" of my phone. I already bought it before they required Google+ for Play's comments.
Have you tried using YouTube? They keep nagging you to open a profile.
Google's argument is that they aren't different services, they are all 'just Google'. Say what you want about that philosophy, but it has worked well for many people, myself included.
Identity across Google's services is an absolute mess. They seem to be trying to integrate on one identity per person rather than separate YouTube, GMail, Google Search, Play, etc. accounts. Which makes perfect sense, considering they're all part of the same organization.
"I just want to register for courses, but my university wants me to make a .edu email address!" would be a better analogy. They aren't part of the same functionality, but the organization is moving towards one identity provider across all its services.
Could you imagine the nightmare for IT if email, library, VPN, course registration, brusar, Blackboard, facilities ticketing, software discounts, help desk, file server, 802.11X, workstation login, etc. were all separate usernames/passwords? There is a reason most universities have one central authentication service. My school's network IDs are even even integrated with ID cards so (as of next year) you can reserve space with your network login and then tap/swipe your ID to access it.
It isn't like Twitter asking you to open a bank account because Twitter doesn't also provide banking.
Just to play the devil's advocate here, it's not like Google Play is necessary for an Android device to work. That's already an extreme improvement over Apple's store, which is even less free, open, and modular and also requires you to create an Apple ID (though thankfully Apple hasn't tried fumbling with a tied-in social network or similar web services).
Everyone else has a "walled garden" why must Google be different? and why should they - arguably the least “walled” of said gardens - suffer the "openness" brunt?
The fact that they are not investing in RSS tools doesn't mean they're against them, it's just not in their interest anymore, and so I come to the conclusion that this is yet another Google Reader lament, and I thought we've already had our fill of these on the HN front page.
It’s the same discussion all over again, If you've not found a Reader replacement by now, or at least had your eyes on a couple of replacement candidates then you're just being stubborn.
Google lets you export your feeds and that is why they are not "evil", not because they refuse to indefinitely maintain a service that isn't of interest to them.
Also the crux or that post is an opt in feature that you have to install as a browser extension, if you don't like it then avoid the extension, but then how is it any different than Facebook's 'like' buttons or any of the other social widgets that are cluttering the web?!
The Chrome team argues that not enough people use RSS to justify having an icon in the URL bar by default. I personally think this is somewhat circular reasoning ("People don't use RSS, so we won't show an icon letting them know about RSS"), but sadly other browsers such as Firefox have followed their lead and removed RSS notifications by default.
Also, whether or not the browser implements native RSS auto-discovery is irrelevant to the point of the article. The Chrome extension in the article could be easily implemented by checking for a special <link> element, so that no URLs need to be sent back to Google just to know that the page is Plus-enabled.
However, off the top of my head, there's a good reason why this wouldn't do much good. The advertised functionality of the Google+ extension requires details about the Google+ stream that the page links to. If the extension checked for a <link>, it would still need to send the URL in that link to Google to get those stream details. The privacy improvement seems marginal.
In the end, I think this complaint is better served by declaring that the URLs aren't recorded. Google's DNS and Omnibox already have similar declarations, so it wouldn't be unprecedented.
It's not the responsibility of the Chrome team to promote RSS if the large share of users aren't asking for it. To do so would actually be kind of anti-user. Much of what Chrome's done over time has been to remove extraneous UX elements and reduce the browser to a frame; this seems consistent with that.
Firefox used to have an RSS icon in the address bar when a page referenced an RSS feed. This was an easy way to notify the user that a particular page supported RSS.
>Everyone else has a "walled garden" why must Google be different?
The FSF would beg to differ. Google does contribute to open source, claimed android to be open source, prescribed to the notion of "don't be evil", and seems to be enthusiastic about computer science in general. Suddenly having a walled garden makes their image not only the exact opposite of what their users thought they were, but now we can add deceitful.
It's not different, but what the article should have made you realize is how broken (or, if not broken, just fucked up) the system is if the average user (and even higher-than-average users) don't realize how all of these little pieces of the web are eroding their privacy.
So if a crack house opens up in your neighborhood the proper response is not invite them to the barbecue? Shouldn't we also use our voices to call attention to things we want changed?
"Who are these low karma users who keep submitting these Google bashing/feigned indignation post?!"
If you think HN is a haven for Google bashing you are hilariously off base.
uhh...what? This is an opt-in feature of the Google+ Chrome extension.
Meaning, you'd probably only install this if you wanted extra Google+ functionality in your browser, like, say, alerting you if the page you're on has a G+ page. Your analogy is terrible.
Because he talks about more than just this browser extension. Spoilers, I read to the end:
My personal stream was my RSS feed, you want me to replace it with a Google+ profile. My news aggregator was the RSS aggregator of my choice, you want me to use a semi-read-only version called Google+. My browser would auto-discover the stream related to any page I visited and would allow me to subscribe to it, now you want me to use a Google+ chrome plugin which in addition kills my privacy.
Everyting worked quite well, and you could pick our side and help us make it better -that’s what you’d do back in the “don’t be evil” days.
Oh, right, I forgot: You killed RSS auto-discovery in chrome, Google reader is dead, and Feedburner is a living dead. I get it.
I do hope regulators take into consideration the source of these complaints. Microsoft is investing a fortune on lobbying groups and PR campaigns attacking Google and this is just another cynical attempt to cripple their main competitor.
Whether it's a sensible approach is another matter. This warning from the Wall Street Journal is pertinent:
In 1999, economist Milton Friedman issued a warning to technology executives at a Cato Institute conference: "Is it really in the self-interest of Silicon Valley to set the government on Microsoft? Your industry, the computer industry, moves so much more rapidly than the legal process that by the time this suit is over, who knows what the shape of the industry will be? Never mind the fact that the human energy and the money that will be spent in hiring my fellow economists, as well as in other ways, would be much more productively employed in improving your products. It's a waste!"
He predicted: "You will rue the day when you called in the government. From now on, the computer industry, which has been very fortunate in that it has been relatively free of government intrusion, will experience a continuous increase in government regulation. Antitrust very quickly becomes regulation. Here again is a case that seems to me to illustrate the suicide impulse of the business community."
Difference is that Google lobbies for their own interests, Microsoft lobbies against Google.
And one assumes that much of Google's lobbying is to counteract Microsoft's.
Also Google's competitors are teaming with Microsoft to destroy Google, their agenda has nothing to do with consumer welfare. Case in point: now they're lobbying against open source software.
In terms of 1995 turnover, IBM was by far the biggest IT company ($71.95 billion) and it was trying hard to kill Microsoft. IBM was followed by HP ($31.52bn), Intel ($16.2bn), Apple ($11.06bn) and then Microsoft ($5.09bn). Sun was bigger as well, but I can't turn up a number.
Google's turnover for 2012 was $50.18bn, so Google is 10x the size now that Microsoft was then. And it's much more powerful.
It's not so much the difference between free and paid that matters as whether or not the pricing is actually economically viable. The original GAE pricing pretty obviously wasn't, so it might as well have been a free product in that you were relying on Google continuing to want to subsidize it for whatever reason.
How do we as customers know whether a pricing posted by a company is viable or not? What is the criteria for viability? Someone didn't get his bonus because of growth not meeting target? Or the engineering budget has blown up passed expectation?
GAE had to become self-sustaining and now it's less of a risk for its customers. Google wants GCE to compete with AWS so pricing will be have to be competitive.
It’s certainly your prerogative to use whatever you like but the incorrect assertions bother me, especially the prevalent one: “It's because I think that Google is now working against the potential of the open web”.
Here’s a rebuttal in the form of a partial list of links to Google initiatives that exist primarily to advance the “open web”:
http://www.webrtc.org
http://www.chromium.org
And their various web speed efforts:
https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed
And of course:
https://fiber.google.com
I don't think the closure of Google Reader was any indication to the contrary, and all of these are certainly much more important to the web than yet another centralized RSS reader.
Other errors in that post: Chrome never ‘dropped decent RSS support’ as it never supported it to begin with, it was actually Firefox that dropped their support. Also there is no evidence that Reader was closed to “drive users to Google+”, there is no proof nor common sense explanation to support that assertion.