2k13 what's the worst enormous tech company?

people buy new phones all the time so I def agree that their market share could collapse quickly but at the end of the day how many companies out there have the $ to put themselves into that position just in case it becomes worthwhile.

iirc there was some kinect related patent to read your face/mood so they could display ads for happy people or something like that

xp

android is def v interesting for them but it also seems particularly fraught

the only thing thats keeping google collecting that info is that their services are good and its easiest for the handset makers, but like what if samsung signed a deal w microsoft to use their services instead, it could easily happen and where is google then, just making something for their competitors to make money off of

― lag∞n, Sunday, March 17, 2013 2:19 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw to be clear what i was trying say here was not samsung switching to microsofts operating system but rather keeping android and turning all the google stuff email maps etc off which is fairly trivial to do, chinese companies do this now since a lot of google stuff is blocked in china anyway, obvs this is only possible because android is open source

isn't ilx hosted on amazon

― iatee, Sunday, March 17, 2013 10:31 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

~$ dig +short ilxor.com
184.73.174.86
$ dig +short -x 184.73.174.86
ec2-184-73-174-86.compute-1.amazonaws.com

also we pay amazon using google ad money

also SAP is less worst than Oracle simply because SAP doesn't own Java

ilxor.com is obvs the worst enormous tech company

search, maps, and mail were all done decently before google. google was just a bit faster and less irritating at all of them.

oracle's acquisition of first mysql and then sun gave it the ability to damage a much vaster swath of the tech world with its shitty practices.

p sure ilxor is a Java Tomcat application

search was def not done decently before google, mail neither

the upside is this is all open-source-ish stuff and everyone is just sort of walking away from them, so the disruption isn't necessarily long term.

the only big advantage gmail had for me over the also-rans was that you could get pop/smtp for free.

altavista and co were thoroughly... adequate.

gmails big advantage was functionally unlimited storage - and all the pre google search engines were terrible the entire internet was made up of huge keyword paragraphs!

gmail wasnt nearly as revelatory as search but it was still better

gmail's true advantage was that it was cool and exclusive and linked to a very popular company

does no one remember having to delete messages cause yr inbox was full ffs people

companies charging for or just not offering forwarding!

lock in!

spam remember spam

you are all so spoiled, forgot where you came from

i bet the government has some really nice drone maps already, but maybe google could sell them info on what people are searching for like jihad or gun control or w/e then the gov could drone them, they could even automate it

― lag∞n, Sunday, March 17, 2013 11:13 AM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol point taken, at the end of the day google really is a company for consumers and the money there is in ads or devices. i still think there's something about how good they've gotten at massaging a lot of data to fill a need, maybe they can sell that skill to other need contexts with a different kind of money in them, or maybe there are other companies in those contexts who are actually doing the equivalent or better but don't gain anything from being visible to the general public.

xp yeah unlimited storage was a huge deal (and still is imo)

man 'people just need more free space' was so not the dominant narrative, it was 'are you cool enough to have received an invite to this exclusive new thing'

i agree that googles data skills/cache could conceivably lead to new huge money (the internet of things?) but i just dont see them doing it cause theyre a mature company w an existing business to tend to, also even w/o that inertia its just really hard to hit it big twice, its v rare to do it once

man 'people just need more free space' was so not the dominant narrative, it was 'are you cool enough to have received an invite to this exclusive new thing'

― iatee, Sunday, March 17, 2013 2:56 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh this is just the nerd story, i mean it was opened to the public and then lots of people who had no idea still switched cause it was better, i mean having some buzz helps but if the products not better no one is going to bother to change

i only cared because 10 gb but i was a nerd (lol xp). it's true that past a certain point people don't actually care about unlimited storage, they just want to not have to do the deleting themselves and want it to look pretty (hence Facebook)

and free space was def a big deal when it launched

fb's early exclusiveness was also huge, people at low ranked colleges were so jealous they couldn't join the club

The worst, worst Java implementation I've ever used was SAP's. Sun really should have had most credit for making it a useless desktop platform. 99% of the use of it is on the server side these days, which is a lot more the fault of Oracle, IBM, and SAP than anything. Fine platform for server development, especially with ilx's tomcat approach (open software stack, for the most part) except for the fact the companies holding the software are so wrong-headed and slow-moving and unable to work with any organization under a thousand people

like, we complain about facebook and google, but in the backend, there are systems with mediocre security that manage your paycheck, insurance, bank transactions, and those of large companies and they're relying on these big companies that do not make consumer software

Amazon - helps destroy local retail, treats workers like shit, fucks suppliers over

wal-mart 2k13

capitalism 1700-

Apple, because they have fooled everyone

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

the good news is Amazon just bought a robot company last year so they can hire fewer people to move things around warehouses

i actually voted amazon fwiw

silby is actually a robot iirc

it's true I have a cold metal heart

By market cap, for the curious:

AAPL: 416.62B
GOOG: 268.44B
MSFT: 234.83B
ORCL: 172.04B
AMZN: 119.01B
FB: 63.47B

Facebook clearly the worst at being an enormous tech company

SAP: 100.85B

ahem

yeah, and IBM is 239.53B and they don't really make computers anymore, they are basically in the same line of business as Oracle and SAP. So much money to be made off of making miserable accounting and ERP software.

sap and oracle are horrible but they don't really work well w/ the rest of this group as a set, like they're not about to release a social network or a delivery service or w/e

oracle and sap and ibm can have their own poll

can't believe all these companies are making so much money of clouds, tbh, you can get free clouds just condense some water droplets in the atmosphere

we could poll telecom equipment companies: cisco, lucent, juniper, nortel, fujitsu, HP, etc

you should save that one for the future court cases xp

plz yes we need more boring polls

veg otm