fuck_google

Windows based EC2 instances represent maybe 10 % of all EC2 instances.

Building the service is not usually the hard part, but building the ecosystem around it is. There were/are countless services similar to Facebook or Twitter, but only a few of them can be really successful because of herd mentality.

Is it possible that the feature is only used by enterprises because no one else can afford it? Why would anyone contribute to an open source project without compensation?

I can imagine that anyone using cheap VPS hosting at multiple locations for better reliability/accessibility/latency could have use for cross-datacenter replication.

"The hard part [...] is done in the analysis phase..." smells like big design up front that is usually more likely to fail than not, especially so for complex systems.

It's sad how Google, Apple et al. have mostly abandoned the use of open standards in favor of locking users to their own closed, craptastic, proprietary services. Lack of interoperability severely limits the usability of cloud based services. Sadly these vendors seem unable to produce decent tools that work well together, so users are left with their data scattered across crappy services (e.g. Google Apps/Drive/Docs/Calendar etc.).

Lack of interoperability, vendor lock-in, poor usability of many web based apps and crappy touch based UIs makes me feel like we are living in the dark ages of the information society. It's almost as if people have forgotten how powerful tools we had 20 years ago compared to the current web app bloatware and how efficient keyboard + mouse is compared to most touch based UIs.

It's interesting how Microsoft is starting to feel like the lesser evil compared to Google. I wonder how many good services/companies have been killed by Google offering an inferior service for free, only to abandon the service later on.

Pretty much everything about Google is either hilarious or sad, depending on one's point of view.

Yes. Googlers only like their own standards.

It's a good thing that EA botched the new Sim City as it gave small game developers an opportunity to make their mark.

Why should OSM even try to attract users that don't bring in any value by contributing?

Your example seems to prove just the opposite, i.e. only in trivial applications such as web search client API is the API design trivial compared to the implementation. In complex systems, such as programming languages, IDEs, operating systems and scalable search engines, good API design is paramount to managing complexity.

Some good discussion on API design: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3720 http://www.infoq.com/articles/API-Design-Joshua-Bloch

I would argue that designing a good API is harder than making a good implementation of the API. The idea vs. execution juxtaposiion seems more apt to software patents that tend to express obvious ideas of low utility as ambiguously as possible.

It's pretty much certain, if you take taxation, need for continuos development, and long-term competence/competitiveness etc. into account. Especially with the public sector one should look at the big picture, which bean counters sadly seem to be incapable of doing.

> Being good at engineering doesn't in any way qualify you for being good at managing product.

You must be talking about the Google style engineering.

Googlers and Google fanboys are still living in denial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model

A Short Translation from Bullshit to English of Selected Portions of the Google Chrome Blink Developer FAQ: http://prng.net/blink-faq.html

Nomen est omen.

That makes one wonder what is the outcome of a dogfight where you only have aces. Clusterfuck?

Somehow that reminds me of the smart asses of Enron... http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm

Perhaps that explains why Google and other companies obsessed about hiring "the best of the best" seem to struggle getting the basic stuff done. The "A players" only want to work on the interesting stuff and nobody is interested in doing the "grunt work" and giving the users what they actually want.

For instance Google Docs still doesn't have decent table editing, header/footer handling or heading numbering, but for some reason they gave all kinds of useless stuff higher priority over the stuff that the users actually need. For instance automatic OCR + translation for scanned PDF docs somehow doesn't seem like the most useful feature for a word processor that is still missing much of the basic functionality.

Don't tell that to Googlers who even seem to have trouble understanding that smart != wise.

This made me laugh so much a little bit of crap came out. Reminds me of the recent product announcements by Google.

It could be argued that the "hire the best people and give them the tools and information to do their jobs" strategy hasn't worked out that well for product management at Google. Google Docs and App Engine are two prime examples of dysfunctional product management that seems to value the opinions of "the best people" (supposedly Google employees) more than those of the customers.

Malcolm Gladwell's article "The Talent Myth" seems fitting: http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm