The Google+ thing was a great example of bonus-driven product design. My understanding is that effectively everyone at Google was told that their annual bonus would be directly tied to how well their team's products supported the rollout of Google+.

That's exactly it. In every large corp I ever worked at, the bonuses for managers always depended on whatever company initiative was happening at the time.

Incentives almost always drive the outcome.

It's almost as if that's what incentives are for. Whether the outcome is the intended one is of course another question entirely.

That is sooo google. Every big tech company has a defining trait. Microsoft is evil. Microsoft doesnt care about customers and never will. Apple is expensive. No matter what they produce, it will cost more than the alternatives. Such things are in the corporate DNA and we should not expect change in our lifetimes. Google? Google is internally focused. Every google product exists to leverage or prop up the others. The value of any product, new or old, is judged only by how much traffic/business/money it can funnel to others. Any product that doesnt support, even if profitable on its own, is a threat.

You look at ~15 year old comments and it's people replying to people that aren't there

I was at G when "mobile first" was the slogan, and it led to "odd" choices such as designing and leading with a travel app rather than the web site. Perhaps locally suboptimal, but in the long run brutal forcing functions were needed to move a company as big and successful as Google into something new. I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do. When ChatGPT, perplexity, and you.com came out, my immediate thought was "Google is toast", but they've recovered.

> I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do.

That's the opposite in my experience. It is driving long term google audience away from google's paying products.

why? I don't base my youtube subscription or my drive subscription based on my AI subscriptions

Sure I get gemini for free now for a year since I have bought a pixel, but I have no intention to renew, I'll likely just leech of the ones my employer pays for

When YouTube is replacing translations with AI-generated ones or if Drive is using all your personal documents as training data, that can definitely drive people away.

My take away from mobile first G was “sites need to be fast right guys for mobile?” -> amp -> actually let’s hostile take over the web, oh actually well rework chrome auto sign in, oh actually … just a long string of user hostility

Google is certainly looking better than stack overflow.

Yeah - Google really tried to get people to use Google+ but it always sucked.

YouTube, while Google nerfed and downgraded it, still works to some extent, though AI generated "content" is such a waste of time.

> Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.

https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/

Well for tech users it is at around 12% or so, give or take. More curiously Google chrome share dropped a little. I have no data about this, e. g. one website is too little info anyway but I suspect that Google killing ublock origin was a reason; right now I am using firefox and though it has tons of issues too, being able to lock away pointless "content" is so vital for how I browser and access information online.

My experience of Google+ was that it didn't suck, it just didn't offer much Facebook didn't already offer. So why would anyone use it. And then they started automated posting on Google+ for when you did something like comment on youtube, it would make a post on G+ which pissed people off.

I'm still super mad at Google+ because it was clearly the cause for Google Reader been killed.

That's when I started losing trust in Google as a company.

They could have led the way to a social web using Google Reader.

Make a Disqus-like comment section that shows the comments in RSS articles from Reader.

Also Reddit, by empowering the GReader Groups capabilities.

But no, let's copy Facebook and force everybody on it. And kill Google Talk while at it.

I'll never forgive Google for that.

It's the branding. When the button that explored the internet said "internet explorer" it was so obvious. Then every OS component had to become its own brand. Why can't it just be called "internet"?

I'm sure soon enough it'll be renamed "Copilot 365 Explorer" or something similar.

I'm holding out for Copilot 365 Explorer Enterprise Edition.

...the only edition where you can disable bing as default search engine

Honestly I didn't even realize Bing hasn't yet been rebranded as Copilot. And honestly who needs a "search engine" anymore when you can just ask Friend Copilot?

That seems far too clear, I'd bet more on "Copilot Online".

> Why can't it just be called "internet"?

Because the world wide web is just one of the many applications that is possible to implement on the internet infrastructure.

They were asking about "internet" versus "internet explorer", so that's not relevant.

The Internet Explorer is not for exploring the internet, but the world wide web, so the name never did make sense.

I guess intranets don't exist.

Actually, it views HTML. But if you call it Microsoft HTML Viewer and then wonder why nobody clicks on it.........

Looks like the context understander has logged on. Welcome!

That was the only time when YouTube actually had a proper comment system and you would actually get notified when someone replied to you consistently.

I wish they'd've kept the parts people used the most.

Frankly it's how they insist themselves onto their potential users. When I toyed around with Edge a year or two ago, just to get the t-shirt, it was impossible to set a custom home page for first-open instead of MSN crap. New tabs could be customized, but not the initial page. Apparently they fixed it since, but I still don't see Edge as a serious browser, just another rent seeking marketing tool.

>Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.

False, Edge is actually decent product and viable replacement for Chromium based browsers.

I use Firefox daily, but at work Edge is my way to go

Edge /is/ a chromium based browser, it makes sense people wouldn't feel the need to download Chrome unless they want to use their google account to sync devices.

for (other) chromium based browsers, I meant.

Agree. I gave it a shot recently after being a hater of MS browsers since the 90's and am actually very happy with it. I love the Workspaces and syncing features. Arc had something similar, but Arc started to stall out remain frustratingly buggy. Edge is now my go-to...

I really enjoyed Edge after it launched, but when they stuffed in all of the shopping plugins and integrations I bailed on it.

Does Edge share your browsing history with Microsoft?

Yes, also it's not even encrypted. It's the worst case of all major browsers.

Firefox & Safari: E2E encrypted, you hold keys, not possible for Mozilla/Apple to access it.

Chrome: Encrypted, Google holds keys meaning it is useless, they can read and give away the data. One can enable sync passphrase which would enable E2E however.

Edge: Nothing is encrypted and no way to change this.

Have you forgotten about Edge 1 that was the evolution of IE’s Trident rendering engine? It failed that’s why they then started with the rebranded Chromium Edge 2.

Did you miss the 2019 news that Edge switched to just being another Chromium reskin?

for (other) chromium based browsers, I meant.

Also Teams and OneNote.

If you're on Windows 11, search for "Startup Apps" and disable CoPilot, Teams and OneNote (if you don't use them). It'll speed up your system.

CoPilot is a great name. But Microsoft being Microsoft even messed that up. Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.

Those are just two of the several Copilots MS now has, including re-branding the entire Office suite as Copilot… It's is a brand - as you said, a name – not a product.

Flashback to the days when literally every MS product had “.NET” shoehorned into its name somewhere because they had to show they were hip to this newfangled information superhighway thing. The development platform that still has that name 20 years later was just one of a zillion confusingly named marketing initiatives back then.

Edit: Wikipedia sums up the "failed branding campaign" quite scathingly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy

I think that campaign followed on from everything being named "Enterprise" something. I still miss the days when SQL Server Management Studio was called "Enterprise Manager"...

ASP.NET has the dubious honor of featuring two generations of MS buzzwords: "Active" and ".NET".

> Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.

Given xbox one x and xbox series x, I still don't know which one is the latest one.

MSFT not being good at naming things is not new.

I actually think Google+ was a good idea and it's a shame google now has a dozen different products with completely different social identities. Facebook does this right, you have one profile.

Youtube comments might not be a cesspool if they were tied to your "Google identity".

Has been said many times, but Google+ was hoping to be as good as Google Reader and Google Buzz already were for people. Was a surprisingly good social layer on top of article aggregation that largely worked by leveraging GMail.

What they were not, of course, was a replacement for the "town hall" dream of social capture that places like Facebook are hoping for.

And, I'm a bit hazy, but didn't Youtube try and force comments to be tied to your google identity?

I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.

Comments in Facebook may not be perfect, but they are vastly better than youtube comments. This is a false equivalence.

Our experiences differ in that regard. And no it isn't a false equivalence since Facebook's "use your real ID" commenting system is directly comparable to any proposed system to mandate use of someone's ID to post on other platforms.

I've personally seen WAY more abusive and hateful comments on Facebook, from real accounts of real people, with pictures and friends and everything, than I have ever seen on YouTube. This may be very locale dependent, but in my country (Romania, which has a pretty large proportion of people online from very socially conservative backgrounds) you can easily find extremely explicitly misoginistic, racist, homophobic, and just plain hateful comments coming from real FB and Instagram accounts, again, from people using their real names and faces and everything. I've seen far fewer similar comments on YouTube videos, even ones from the same country.

> I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.

This should give insanely obvious evidence that clear-name policy does not lead to a more civilised discussion. I mean, everybody who went to a public school [in the American sense of the word] already knows this well: "everybody" knew the names of the schoolyard bullies.

The political wishes of clear-name policies are rather for surveillance and to silence critics of the political system.

It does change people's behavior. Perhaps the average person will use more polite language? But it's not uncommon for me to see dehumanization, threats, and calls for literal mass-murder-of-entire-demographics genocide promoted with polite language. Sometimes used by journalists. Sometimes by academics. Sometimes by podcast hosts. Sometimes by their fans. Sometimes by politicians. All using their real names.

I frequently encounter people using their real name saying my family deserves to die. Who would, in a heartbeat, threaten my employer by dint of a relative's place of birth.

Not having my real identity behind my posts is my only means of keeping myself safe from extremely sick people online who have a culture of intimidating into silence those that express views or belong to a demographic they detest.

Youtube comments have been nice and constructive for a few years now

Maybe this is just me only subscribing to channels where people behave in the comments and the channel owner actually does some moderation, but I actually kind of agree.

Sure, you find disagreements and arguments, but you don't get the 'ur mum gae', the reductio ad Hitlerum, the dongers, and the outright insane takes and paragraphs of all caps that I would expect from Youtube comments. Meanwhile, every time I open Facebook because of some event I need to press 'going' on, I get a glimpse of some inane take or someone writing in all caps because reasons.

There have been a few waves of comment spam, but maybe Youtube actually managed to curb that now? Only took them two or so years.

You're right. Youtube comments are great now. Granted, it means you can't have controversial conversations there, but that's not what they're for.