The Sunday Paper 2018.01.27
Momentous
Pictured above: Falcon Heavy static fire
Elon Musk confirms first flight launch date for Falcon Heavy - Twitter
Curious
Why I left Google - Steve Yegge on Medium (I'm curious to hear people's opinions of this piece.)
- You can look at Google’s entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don’t have innovation in their DNA any more. And it’s because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers.
To be fair, there are exceptions. Google’s Cloud Spanner, BigQuery, TensorFlow, Waymo and a few others are generational innovations and will take some time for the industry to catch up with. But they do not excuse nor justify the parade of failed me-too consumer products that Google has been launching of late.
In short, Google just isn’t a very inspiring place to work anymore. I love being fired up by my work, but Google had gradually beaten it out of me.
I'm curious what people think about this article.
Hilarious
When is a meatball not a meatball? In corruption case testimony, apparently. - The New York Times
- Mr. Strathearn eventually responded, with a line that rivals one of Gertrude Stein’s finest: “The meatballs were the meatballs were the meatballs.”
Humorous
FOR SALE - ONE BANK - AMERICAN - SLIGHTLY USED - _refugee_ on Hubski
Funnies
"There's a mountain lion nearby, but it didn't notice you because it's reading Facebook."
Re: the post from the ex-Googler, it's just a long-form advertisement.
He starts out by acknowledging that he's moved to a new product/company, but doesn't tell you what it is. He talks about Google becoming "competitor-focused" rather than "customer focused [sic]." But who, exactly, are Google's customers? It's certainly not most of us, which he seems to be implying. Given Google's revenues, they seem to be pleasing their actual customers just fine. Then he goes on to criticize other big tech companies, sometimes while ignoring how they're different from Google, or by exaggerating their failures. (Amazon's same-day delivery, we're told, only applies to "a few SKUs in a few cities," so is basically worthless, evidently.)
Once he's done that, he can get to the money shot: why his new company is oh so much better. How excited he is to work there, how amazing and ahead of the curve they are, while also making sure to get in plenty of digs at Uber, their biggest competitor.
And I mean, that's all fine. This is what marketing is supposed to do. I'm just surprised at the number of other sites (including CNBC and The Register) that are taking his criticism at face value.