If you want this kind of company, come to Boston. The start-up culture in Boston is much more "change the world" than "make a buck." This results in fewer, deeper start-ups, as well as more not-for-profits.
Honestly, this is why I would never, ever consider using something like Google App Engine for anything other than a toy. Google is not a support organization. Except for ads, you can't count on them for anything B2B.
The article hardly even mentions a very real risk to Ivy league Universities - that they will be challenged from below by Khan, Coursera, and Udacity and the like. Ivy-covered buildings and in-person lectures cost a lot to keep going. As the article states, Universities are typically in debt and student fees are rising.
"Disruption" is an overused buzzword but it may apply in this case. Universities trade of the fact that their expensive product is important and exclusive. What happens when it isn't exclusive or expensive any more?
The Ivies are actually selling exclusivity by attendance along with acting a filter for employers: only the absolute top students have any chance of being admitted and physically attending.
The quality of education obtained at the Ivies is not part of that.
An interesting question to consider is whether admissions to Ivies followed by independent, autodidact study can work around the actual attendance. "Here is my online coursework portfolio, research, and my admission acceptance letters to Yale and MIT . . . "
Disruption happens from the low end up. MP3 players supplemented but didn't challenge CDs because they didn't have the same sound quality ... until they did challenge CDs, and now CD sales are in steep decline. It turns out that people valued having 10 000 tunes in their pocket more than the audio quality, and the audiophiles could use FLAC or high-bitrate MP3.
There's nothing stopping the online-U's from eventually working on reproducing or circumventing the Ivies' specific advantages.
Another outcome to look out for would be for cash-strapped Ivies to be hollowed out. i.e. become a cluster of buildings where students log on and do work online in exchange for an attendance certificate. That would preserve the quality of education and the social advantages of the university, while costing less. It would work, at least for a while until the next generation sees through the archaic model.
I would tend to agree. Google has been extremely monopolistic lately. The only reason for Google+'s and Google Chat's relative success is shoving it down the throats of users of GMail's throats. Google mission has moved from organizing to controlling the world's information. I really liked the former, and I'm pretty scared of the latter.
I want fast fiber. I also want to avoid another evil monopoly from taking over the computing landscape. I miss the old, trustworthy, don't-be-evil Google.
Carly Fiorina. She did the same thing to HP, very differently. Cut quality. Cut R&D. Cut support. Cut service. Slightly lower prices, while your reputation is still sky-high. Outsource anything that can be done cheaper not in-house. Scale back benefits and anything that costs money. Have layoffs anywhere that doesn't produce short-term revenue.
Profits soar. Share prices soar. A few years later, as reputation catches up with quality and support, as there are no new products in the R&D pipeline, and as you have no core competencies, and as your best employees leave, the company tanks.
You walk of with a ton of cash from early-year bonuses.
At this point, I think Google should have more worries about antitrust. Google is very aggressive about bundling G+ with everything. I didn't want to get on it, but I was on gmail, Youtube, and a few of their other products, and they stopped working well without it. Once I was on it, there is huge social pressure to use it.
Google Chat, I didn't want, but it was integrated into gmail. Suddenly, I'd have chats from friends pop up as I was working. I presume there's some way to unbundle, but at this point, it's too late.
List keeps going. Google is crushing competitors not by building better products, but by using search to steer them there, and the rest of their chain to force users into them.
Google's motto seems to have changed from indexing and organizing the world's information to hoarding, organizing, and locking down the world's information.
Like Microsoft, they're also getting less and less competent. 6 years ago, their software was phenomenal. Today, it's kind of below average -- they've had a huge brain drain to startups, Facebook, and other places (except for Google X, which seems to be poaching quite well).
It's not as bad as Microsoft in it's prime, but it's getting there. I think in a year or two, they'll actually be worse.
This is kind of a silly comment. Google is only crushing competitors where their services are actually superior. Dropbox still exists and I assume has many more users than Drive. Facebook still exists and is still by far the most successful social network. And even in an area where they were pretty much the first in the field, Maps, there is new competition from Open Street Map. These are just some examples.
People who really don't like Plus and its integration into everything seem to keep using it as some kind of example of Google using monopoly power to force it and its other services to market domination. This just doesn't seem to me to be how it's working. And it completely ignores the fact that all it's actually quite useful to the majority of users, the ones who don't for whatever reason have a problem with it.
> Google Chat, I didn't want, but it was integrated into gmail. Suddenly, I'd have chats from friends pop up as I was working. I presume there's some way to unbundle, but at this point, it's too late.
What does this even mean? Just set yourself to invisible or sign out, and don't go back.
Your "locking down the world's information" comment doesn't seem to make much sense either considering Google is one of the few (if only?) companies to have a data liberation teem, with the explicit goal of making all of your information exportable from Google.
And finally, to call Google's software in general "below average" is just weird. Think about it. Really. It's a weird statement. Their software is better and does more than it did 6 years ago, but has somehow gone from amazing to below average.
IMO Google still isn't anywhere near what Microsoft is. It has quite a long way to fall, if it does.
They may not be guilty of any of these accusations but they are probably better off taking measures to be as transparent as possible rather than continuously defending themselves...
The problem is not add-ons. Let me repeat that -- THE PROBLEM IS NOT ADD-ONS. I left Firefox about a year ago, once Chrome was good enough, because my plain-vanilla Firefox, with all the tweaks to limit memory usage enabled, would still leak memory until it crashed (my laptop has 1.5GB RAM and Ubuntu; it also had a few GB of swap). Closing tabs did not help either. The only response from Mozilla was 'add-ons.' Chrome does just fine with 30+ tabs open on the same machine.
Any organization that can live in denial for years and years about the core issue with their product is going to die. Mozilla is tightly connected to the web developer community, but has a complete disconnect from the problems facing its actual users. When Firefox shipped, it was a great, light-weight alternative to Mozilla. From my point of view as a user, I haven't seen any substantial improvements since 1.0 shipped in 2004 -- spell check is nice, and given how often it crashes, restoring tabs when the browser is opened is nice -- but that's all. Otherwise, if not for security issues and web site compatibility issues, I'd be on Firefox 1.0 (which worked fine on sub-GHz machines).
Aside from that, virtually all development effort has been aimed at making a better IDE for web developers. I guess that benefits me since, ultimately, I can visit nicer web sites in Chrome.
There are a lot of users here complaining about Firefox memory usage who don't use it anymore.
Which is expected, because why would you stay if you were really bothered?
Comments from an active user, though... I've stuck with Firefox out of habit probably more than anything else, but now most of the things people (including me) were complaining about are already gone -- as of the last update, Firefox with -- sheesh, I guess I have about 100 tabs in 2 windows -- takes up under 500MB after using it all day, and in the morning it starts in a few seconds (they don't force-reload all your open tabs on startup anymore, just the active ones and I think text from the others is cached locally).
Chrome becomes unusable if I try to use it like a to-do list like this, for UI as well as memory reasons; not that I could say easily how much memory Chrome is using at the moment, with 20 tabs; the separate processes defeats seeing that easily, alas (there must a simple way to check, but I haven't tried).
It's quite stable, and even when it was still crashier (last year?) it's been years since I've actually lost my tabs after a crash; they've always been auto-recovered (and it has that nice prompt to let me close the ones I think may be causing trouble before relaunching).
Given different usage patterns, etc., I have no idea if people trying the actual, current FF will want to go back -- but for anyone who left more than a few months ago (especially if you left due to memory footprint) I'd suggest trying it again sometime.
[And I like the more frequent releases, personally -- I always hated the slow release cycle, and feel like they're starting to get into the swing of it now -- but I obviously don't speak for the crowd on this one...]
