As is the nature of dualities, the web has benefit immensely from Google's investments even if it would have chartered a different (and in your opinion, a better) course had Google not existed in the first place. Someone pointed out, you couldn't say the same for Amazon. As for incompetence: imho, webrtc, which Google standardized and open sourced, is likely the single most important innovation on the interwebs (in terms of impact) just ahead of Microsoft's XMLHttpRequest.
Thats a really weird claim. We can point to some real ways google has benefited the web: Their search engine is excellent, and was a huge leap forward when it was released. SPDY/QUIC are set to become the next HTTP2/HTTP3. And google chrome has made the browser a much more powerful and compelling platform over the last few years. If anything they're investing too much - and hurting the web by making it hard for other browser vendors to keep up.
But webrtc?? Webrtc is still mostly a toy, barely used outside of video conferencing. Its insanely overcomplicated for any other use case. And I still haven't seen a compelling reason to use it for anything else. Decentralized communication doesn't buy you much when the site itself is still loaded from a centralized server.
More important / impactful than XMLHttpRequest? No, I think not.
RedHat benefited significantly from funding by large corporations in it's early days.
Undoubtedly these companies helped shape the Linux ecosystem. A single company doesn't control it, but as big as Google is a single company doesn't control the web either.
To be fair, I am not the one that's assuming things here. I am speaking of how Google has indeed contributed when they really didn't have to (as pointed out with the example of Amazon).
> Linux happened without single corporation controlling it.
A consortium of corporations, sure: linaro.org
I meant to highlight that Linux, not in its entirety but parts of it, is indeed driven by orgs (that you haven't even heard of).
Maybe someone could set up a library that implements Swing on top of a HTML Canvas? Just waiting for all the classes to download would help with that nostalgic feeling.
They’re a lot like a revolutionary government that gradually becomes corrupt and as bad as the regime they overthrew.
Retrospectively, I feel so stupid to have promoted « free products paid by an advertising company » for years.
I know Google duped everyone on this so I don’t feel to be stupid alone. But still, in hindsight, there were no possible future where Google could stay on top without doing dirty things. We didn’t see the targeted ads coming.
I've seen censorship, identity theft, money laundering, online harassment, online crime, information theft on very large scale to target, arrest and hang political opponents... All of which Google used to oppose more than any other big tech co. But somehow, the pitchforks are out against targeted ads.
For me, Google is "evil" for what it is, not what it does. And I think that Google is an utterly dangerous company with such unbelievable amount of precious data that could change the course of the history in a really bad way if it falls into the wrong hands in the future.
Who knows who will control Google in 5, 10 or 50 years ? Nobody knows. But we can be sure that in 50 years, the data that Google collects about us today will be lying on some hard disk drive, ready to be used for who knows what.
Google is able to define and store indefinitely "who you are". And the human history is full of times where "who you are" or even "who you were" were some really dangerous information that threatened your liberty or your life.
I would sometimes worry about that. At some point internet privacy will be completely erased, not by malicious or greedy corporate practices but by algorithms scraping all of big data on the internet. This will ultimately be inevitable, almost everything you've ever posted on the internet will at some point be retroactively traced back to you.
The upside is that this isn't what's going to happen to your data, nor to my data. This is what's going to happen to _everyone's_ data. As long as the whole world bites the dust together, I can see the actual damage being minimized.
Of course, this does not take into account living within governments that don't care about human rights and that you happen to disagree with or be critical of.
50 years from now the technology should have improved so much that Google will look laughably blind and powerless, I'm afraid. Let's not forget that Google, for all its evil, is still just an aging part of the dying old internet, that was naively brought into existence to be interesting and useful at a time when the world was not expecting that such a thing was possible. Now the technology is slowly aligning with expectations and will soon assist on surveillance and control. We will miss targeted ads.
Complex browser-based alternative to TCP? Standardized alternative to Socket.io? I can't say its not useful but webrtc is hardly the most important thing...
I'm not as positive about Google today as I used to be in the past, but I don't feel it's fair to pretend that they didn't help us take giant steps forward.
One consequence was the preceding generation of search engines being harder to drive for everyday folks, and a relevance approximation thereby more immediately accessible on the consumer scale, but let's face that the algorithmic approach also spawned a whole bottom-feeding industry of SEO snake oil vendors and their merry-go-round of clickbait, malware, and global-scale consumer surveillance. The incentive to hang yourself from a single keyword means that Google became the foster parent of AOL's Eternal September.
My personal feeling on the matter of Gmail and Google Maps is that they are best attributed to their personal creators (Paul Buchheit, and the Rasmussens, respectively), not the corporation. The seed of Google Maps was an acquisition, after all, and many other technologies I've seen offered up in neighbouring threads as proof of Google's benevolence were either acquisitions, or ones where substantial parts of any credit must be shared (webrtc has been mentioned; it is both).
Javascript in the browser still sucks mightily, and although it's not an argument I particularly wish to stir up there's plenty to say in support of that perspective. What's more, many of the best solutions are the product of independent/small/OSS groups, although I will confess a soft spot for TypeScript. Consequently, and especially w.r.t Gmail, Youtube, Maps, and <whatever Google Apps is called this year>, Chrome starts to look like the Lotus Notes of today: a thick client, developed by a large firm, in support of its specific service & platform offerings.
That’s the reason why Google, a very small newcomer, crashed the entire search engine market.
The world would be a better place if google search had been made a not-for-profit (maybe like wikipedia?)
By this point I would (maybe) pay a monthly subscription for a really good websearch like google circa 2005-2010
UI changes and new features aside, the web is just so much more adversarial nowadays. It's no wonder so much rubbish floats to the top of Google because the reality it's drowning out all the other content.
If you had the source code for 2005 Google it would be objectively worse today than it was then.
Just be prepared: the future of the internet is navigating politics. You better be prepared for people to be upset at query X returns results too right/left/up/down for their political preferences. Then senators start tweeting at you.
Also, my search engine will be called "Jays Favorite Websites" and the right side of politics can bite me.
I'm trying to think of any changes to Wikipedia that happened after it launched and can't think of any. It surely does its job, but it doesn't change and there is no drive. Wiki concept was novel at the time, they did and continue to do an amazing job, but there's no evolution there. Or maybe I'm just a blind or unaware or biased - but, honestly, I tried to think of something and nothing came to mind.
Google constantly tries out some new things. They're really bad at maintaining them, they can't stop inventing chat services, they suck a lot and we could bash them endlessly, but let's credit what's due - they're always exploring some frontiers.
Just because cars still mostly have 4 wheels doesn't mean automotive engineers haven't been innovating the past 100 years.
Which among other things shows that patents are bad for innovation in new and quickly changing industry. Google came up with their algorithm and heavily patterned it. As an invention it was not ground-breaking, but it matched very well how web worked. This gave them essentially monopoly in search from which they massively profited. At least now those patents expire.