Google's Growing Silence on Saving Open Internet Leaves Fight to Startups

Re:Google's Growing Silence on Saving Open Internet Leaves F... by pessimizer on Tuesday July 08, 2014 @06:17PM (#8007019)

Because they determine the level of access that their customers have to their own devices based on strategic business reasons rather than for reasons that benefit their customers. They construct their devices specifically to thwart user-serviceability. Their phones don't have battery doors. They don't allow for any usage of their devices independently from their ecosystem. These decisions are aimed directly at restricting their customers, no one else. This is not done for the customer's own good, but Apple's own good.

>they're the only hardware vendor with plenty of branded retail outlets that dispense plenty of free tech support?

There's supposed to be nowhere else to get an iDevice serviced, so without them, who?

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Re:Google's Growing Silence on Saving Open Internet Leaves F... by vacri on Tuesday July 08, 2014 @07:39PM (#8007341)

I'm not defending their practices, and generally find them awful and elitist - they make a nice product, but at what cost? Nevertheless, the general message from Apple is "give yourself wholly over to us, and we will take care of you" - something that doesn't agree with 'they don't even care about their customers'.

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Re:Google's Growing Silence on Saving Open Internet Leaves F... by simonh on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @05:39AM (#8008792)

Sure, but you know about that going in. It's part of the deal. You pay a premium and get a premium product with pretty well defined limits on it's features. It's a fair deal.

The problem with Google is so many of the product they put out are utterly unfit for purpose, showing a blatant disregard for and contempt of their customer's right to a reasonable product in return for their money. First near-unusable first gen Google TV, Nexus phones with fuzzy cameras, The first gen Nexus 7 tablet with not TRIM on the flash storage for a whole year leading to rapidly degrading device performance, Chromebooks sold with 2 years of free mobile service that suddenly stops after a year, encouraging the growth of a whole ecosystem around Google Reader that suddenly goes away.

I don't think Google intentionally set out to do any of those things, but equally they didn't put any significant effort into stopping them happening either. They really just don't care. Move fast, break things, iterate. That's fine for them, but it's leaving a long wide trail of broken promises and damaged users and customers in it's bull-rush into the future and it's taking that approach for entirely selfish reasons.

Google may be giving you free things, I'm a happy Gmail and Google Docs user myself, but they're not doing it because they're your friend.

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Re:Google's Growing Silence on Saving Open Internet Leaves F... by vacri on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @09:24AM (#8009474)

Sure, but you know about that going in.

I would not agree that people know about those things going in. Some techies do. Very few non-techies do. Some techies are suprised when you tell them the extent of the limitations. Some are just so used to the ecosystem that they don't even think that there might be a use case outside of it.

The problem with Google is so many of the product...

The lucky thing about Apple is that people seem so willing to forget their cavalcade of turkeys. But anyone else who makes a misstep - google, microsoft, whomever - bang! never let it be forgotten.

The first gen Nexus 7 tablet with not TRIM on the flash storage for a whole year leading to rapidly degrading device performance

And here's a case in point. Google 'has a problem' because of the design, but we happily ignore the "you're holding it wrong" event from Apple, a problem due to an astonishingly fundamental design flaw. And wow, you're listing a bunch of first-gen hardware issues, something every large-scale manufacturer has issues with.

Apple does almost all of the things you're pinging Google for in this comment, and it befuddles me that you give them a free pass for doing so. I really don't understand why Apple gets the kid-glove treatment when it comes to criticism.

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Re:Google's Growing Silence on Saving Open Internet Leaves F... by bjelkeman-again on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @02:08AM (#8008296)

I find that significant use of an Apple iPhone or iPad fore most people I meet is web browsing, email, SMS and phone usage. All which is outside the Apple ecosystem.

I can not figure out how we are going to achieve a healthy open ecosystem of apps with significant applications without a major malware problem. I'd be interested to see how that would work.

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