Muntz

ike17055 said:

franklinjackcon said:

mike1 said:

I really wish Apple offered a web interface for Apple Music. I may be in a small subset of users, but I can't install iTunes on my work PC and therefore can't use Apple Music at work.

I'm in the opposite boat. I tried Google Play Music for a month but one thing I didn't like was that there's only a web player, no DT app. It drives me crazy as I have a million Chrome windows open and struggle to quickly spot which one is the music player.

Google has a mini player on the desktop that provides instant access to basic music controls. 

bigmushroom said:

tmay said:

franklinjackcon said:

tmay said:

franklinjackcon said:

Meanwhile, in the real world, Google is setting the standard for autonomous cars, has the best assistant on the market, and keeps making advances in photos. It's still early days for all AI but to suggest they've squandered their lead is plain silly.

I think that the point of the article is that it isn't innovation if you aren't making money at it, and almost without fail, Apple, with a small share of the smartphone market is grabbing most of the revenue and profits comparative to Android OEM'a and developers.

Google itself is doing fine, excepting the scrutiny given it's near monopoly in search, and privacy issues, and it's persistent inability to generate much revenue off of consumer hardware. Google has noticeable leads in services and technologies that the OEM's and developers have, for the most part, been unable to leverage to enhance revenue and profit, and Google I/O doesn't appear to have accelerated that.

If that is the point of the article then I disagree with it. Google makes its money in advertising - much of it on mobile - and uses the profits to fund innovative technologies that won't be profitable in the R&D stage. 

How are the OEM's doing? Which "innovative technologies" has Google released that have generated any income other than from search or advertising?

Google technologies generate a lot of social surplus even if the benefit does not go always to Google.

Kubernetes is the standard for container orchestration and was donated by Google to an open source foundation. It's the standard now for everyone including azure, aws, even Oracle cloud.

Tensorflow is the most popular ml framework both in production and for teaching. Donated by Google.

Hadoop and all its countless derivatives are built a set of papers from 2005 on MapReduce that essentially tool Google's system as a blueprint.

Angular is one of the most popular web dev frameworks. By Google.

Go is a fast growing system programming language. Also by Google.

This is an eclectic list which is easy to continue. Google has been great about open sourcing high quality frameworks or published enough about their production systems so that others could copy it.

Apple also did great things such as webkit. Microsoft has been fantastic recently as well.

There is no reason to view this as a zero sum game. We live in great times where many companies produce great tech that is open sourced from the start. 

sfolax said:

I used to enjoy DED articles, but to be honest this constant bickering and "everyone else is wrong" is starting to get boring and monotonous.

At least the other writers here bring some variety in their articles.

gatorguy said:

Why would anyone care about "Google's Pixel supply chain"? What exactly would you realistically expect reported and why?

With that said the lack of sales didn't prevent the blogosphere blasting at full-volume every perceived failure of the Pixel line whether real, imaginary, widespread or one-off. The tech writers are equal-opportunity click-baiters. If there's a "name" and a possible nega-story they will write it. Apple fans already know that. 

As for HTC they were pummeled by an overwhelming Samsung ad campaign in the West going back to 2010, and hammered by an aggressively-priced Xiaomi in China ever since too, with Huawei putting last nails in their coffin. Their unimaginative 2012-2016 phones helped hasten the slide.

Google's hardware orders from them were never going to be any more a blip which surprises absolutely no one, so HTC's poor showing since their heyday certainly can't be blamed on Pixels. May as well blame it on Windows Phone which is what they started out with years before Android. It's the HTC Sense phones for T-Mo/Verizon/Orange and those built for the massive Chinese market that were left wanting and thus competed poorly. Where HTC once was in the forefront on smartphone design many of their recent handsets now look dated and uninspired. They simply weren't prepared for the dual assault of Samsung and the high-spec/low-price Chinese manufacturers.

In hindsight they might have been better off as a contract manufacturer which is where they started. The expectations for their demise have been in the news since 2011, this ain't nuttin' recent. 

maestro64 said:

Soli said:

1) I’m going to continue to use FB because it’s the only reasonable way for me to stay connected to many people, but people should know what that they are the product and how to reasonably secure themselves from run he mill data thrives.

2) It’s hard to put faith in a pool that puts Twitter and Apple so close.

3) I didn’t see this referenced but the “logic” speaks volumes.

• https://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-was-ready-to-pounce-on-apples-data-practices-at-senate-hearing

There is a thing called a phone which is really good at allow you to talk to people and share important things in real time.

The only difference between all these companies from a survey stand point and Facebook is blind faith, People are not blind to Facebook anymore, they now know what they wish they did not know. For all the other companies people still do not know so ignorance is bliss.