On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 2:57 PM, glen <g...@ropella.name> wrote: > > I'm very interested in the desire to and the frustration surrounding > _not_ being able to "figure Google out". I wonder if different people > (people ensconced in other domains, other fora) feel this same > desire/frustration around, say, Unilever or General Electric? >
Please, Glen. I do not wish to be mystical only practical. I use Google Stuff. So I want to know when it is likely to actually do what it appears it is going to do. When it goes away, I'm naive enough to be surprised. So would like at least a hint of WTF is going on. Normal. Human. Me. I can certainly see it from a single tightly focused quantifiable > predictibility measure ... like whether to buy a company's stock. But > without that tight use case, and with a large multi-national beast with > layers of varying liability, impact, presentation, etc., they strike me > as complex beasts. Each aspect from which you measure them will present > different, perhaps even incommensurate results. I know this was the > case while I was working for Lockheed Martin. It was especially vivid > to me since I was on loan to Vought systems at an old air base working > on aircraft avionics, on loan from the missiles division, which recently > bought Vought and which had been recently bought by Loral, which was > soon to be bought by Lockheed Martin. > > I could no more imagine "figuring Lockheed Martin out" than I could > imagine "figuring out C. Elegans". > > Because of this, it strikes me that what you're expressing is some sort > of deep seated pattern recognition bias towards centralized planning. > You're looking for a homunculus inside a machine. > > And that leads me to my fundamental gripe with web services. The whole > point of the open source movement was to put upstream causal power into > the hands of more people, to make the producer-consumer relationship > more symmetric. In web services, it seems like we, as consumers, > _still_ want asymmetric producer-consumer relationships. GMail is a > great example. I hate GMail simply because I can't download the > software and run my _own_ GMail server on my own hardware ... similar to > SparkleShare, Tor, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. > Er.. IMAP? You have complete control over gmail. I uploaded 20+ years of mail to it over a day or so and have it all cached on my IMAP clients (thunderbird and mail.app) .. yes one needs > 1 and I'm positive you have multiple clients. Protocols. Formats. That they get and I can use to my advantage. > If they allowed that, then I'd love GMail. And, if they did that, you > wouldn't have to worry about Google abandoning it, as long as it had a > sufficiently pure free agent following (like the role Debian plays for > Linux). > > Why? Oh why? Do we insist on these soft paternalist producer-consumer > relationships? What's the underlying cause for people to prefer the > Raspberry Pie over Arduino? GMail over postfix? > Generally our use of them. I actually used Goog Reader so now will look for a replacement. Now I do have to admit its generally fun! We get enough time to look at great replacements. Flipboard is really quite good as a media consumer and reader is basically that. But FB is tablet only. Might want something for laptop/desktop. I may however spend a bit of time trying to figure out why G+ is so popular. I do think Google is a fail in "social", don't you? But if they can make G+ a replacement for skype, facebook, reader and others, so much the better. They haven't a chance with twitter however, but they can use twitter's open formats and protocols to integrate twitter into G+. I suspect they already have .. or someone has. There is one other bitch I have over killing reader: Minimalist is a nifty chrome extension that lets you modify sites to your liking. Started with gmail but then generalized into others including reader. I sorta hate seeing innovative engineers get screwed by Google. But like the demise of delicious, I ended up with Pinboard which is so vastly superior, I'm extremely thankful delicious failed. What a weird world we live in. And yes, I still want to "get" google. Sorry! -- Owen
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
