2k16 what's the worst enormous tech company?

Amazon is definitely the worst at this point.

It's still Google and I can't imagine a worse company.

what's the worst thing abt google

The worst? I'll just sum it up in that they are the entry point for most of the Internet and know more about us than any other giant tech company and are scaling in a direction to know even more and become even more powerful. The company that knows the most is the most powerful. And it's not a company obsessed with privacy.

I'm curious about who's gonna win the AI war--my vague recollection of things I've read suggest Amazon has the tech necessary to make big leaps but its Google that has the largest (and so most useful) data sets.

AI is probably better described as machine learning, and Google is way ahead of AMZN.

haha i typed and then removed the phrase "machine learning" on the expectation tombot would arrive to shit upon it from a great height for some reason

I anxiously await him to arrive and shit on both of us, it's always glorious.

alexa cannot even tell me "what a choo choo sounds like"

we've gotcha covered big guy

it's

CHOOO CHOOOOOOO

dirupted machine learning

After I read that Gizmodo article I unplugged my Echo Dot and put it in a drawer

it's still listening tho

its in a drawer in a BAG ok

it can still hear your bag

*hoos receives push notification*

"customers who stuffed their echo dot in this bag also bought:
--128-pack wolf brand chili (no beans)
--good housekeeping (12-month subscription)
--amazon ginsu knife (neck-sized)

"Alexa, what does a hoos bag sound like?"

"shamone"

Genuinely do not know why any of you nutbags voluntarily PAY to have a big tech company spy device in yr homes

http://gsb.haifa.ac.il/~sheizaf/ecommerce/timemagazine/intro.jpg

this was a good read. about things that are awful. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook

reposting from the Weinstein thread, h/t Simon H for catching this: https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valley-s-worst-apologies-of-2017-1821064631

I think the Best Buy one doesn't qualify (they're brick & mortar retail, their corporate hq is in the minneapolis burbs, and they committed a regrettable human error and said so) but there are some really good ones in there. key graf, imo:

As I mentioned earlier, tech companies love to point fingers at machines behaving badly. They spend a lot of time exalting their beloved algorithms as a solution to many of life’s grand problems, but they will not skip a beat before throwing them under the bus for the latest fuck-up. There is a hypocrisy in trying to boost one’s image using the same tools you’re exploiting as a scapegoat.

Was it a resentful AI bot that wrote that

This feels true to me as someone who uses the internet every day, but I also know it’s true because when The Verge partnered with Reticle Research to conduct a representative survey of Americans’ attitudes towards tech’s biggest power players, 15.4 percent of Facebook users said they “greatly” or “somewhat” disliked using the product, while 17 percent of Twitter users said the same. That made them the most disliked of the six companies in question, which also included Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. More than 10 percent of respondents described Facebook’s effect on society as “very negative,” and 10.5 percent said the same about Twitter — in both cases a higher number than the other four companies combined.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16795090/internet-community-2017-post-mortem-tumblr-amino-drip-tinyletter

wow Amino looks like an amazing mess that's so great

cash isn’t a problem for Amino, which raised $1.65 million in Series A funding last year.

most people have no idea of the reach of Google or they'd hate it worse than Facebook

google has useful products though (search engine, mail, drive, docs)

wave

orkut

google has one useful product

then bought another useful product

I thought they developed maps, mail, docs, drive themselves?

o i forgot abt maps

thats true, but i feel like apple maps is better imo

the rest i feel are not that great, like gmail steals all yr info and sells it while something like hotmail/microsoft weirdly enough feels safer

Apple maps is not better.

Apple maps is horrible.

gmail, the useless product used by more than 1 billion people

the way google has insinuated itself into so many enterprise situations should be causing people to scream holy hell

i do scream holy hell maura rly i do

google docs is a great free platform imo, use sheets quite a lot too - better than excel by now, imo

I've no idea why hotmail, which is terrible to use, would be "safer" than gmail, tbh unless you only send encrypted mails (or only send emails to people using encrypted email servers) I don't see the difference (apart from gmail basically being faster and better than outlook

drive also my goto, prefer it to dropbox, great syncing and indexing

I would never use any other maps service than google maps

the way google has insinuated itself into so many enterprise situations should be causing people to scream holy hell

otm

but somehow i know that i won't literally scream holy hell until one of these companies (google, amazon, facebook, apple, microsoft) merges with another.

Android also much better than iOS imo, at least I can do anything faster on an Android device and really enjoy that it's customizable

I hate every google product and do my best not to use any of them

so yeah, the hegemony of google is bad, but their products are simply the best atm imo (unlike FB which is horrible, they're leading the market by chance/being there first)

if only Google paid taxes and didn't have their servers in USA where apparently NSA has a claim to look into any data transfer

why is apple maps bad? i kno they got bad press w the australians who almost went off a cliff or whatever but google maps takes me into dangerous ways all the time in the city

apple takes me through major roadways and it feels easier to drive on those streets

wasnt gmail hacked before? i dont remember hotmail ever being hacked

why is apple maps bad, I dunno, cause it's clumsier, slower and just not as powerful as gmaps, kinda like why is Libre Office not as good as Microsoft Office

Here is a great link why Apple Maps is way behind Google Map:

https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps

all i see there is google overoptimizing probably to gather more data for whatever evil way they want to take over the usa then the world

Google is gathering data at a significantly faster rate than Apple is with regards to Maps. Their machine learning capabilities are significantly above Apple's, which means that Google's is not only gathering more data but able to do more with it.

specifically, more able to sell advertisements against your behavior patterns

are they able to do more w it though? how many people actually use all those little functionalities? its the same w all their failed products

https://www.computerworlduk.com/galleries/it-vendors/google-graveyard-3508070/