Umm, read further through his comments. Most of them are blatant lies about Apple/Microsoft/Amazon. He’s the closest to a paid Google shill that I’ve seen on HN
I am old and historically been a fan of Apple more than any other company of the past. Well besides DEC. Huge, huge, huge fan of DEC in the day. Never been a fan of Microsoft as felt they never strive to be the best and historically have provided a poor user experience compared to Apple.
But also MS just never seemed to care much about security and that really bothered me. Felt they had a responsibility with being the biggest tech company and dominated desktops. Took Google to do ChromeOS and that is wrong, IMO.
But today I am more of a fan of Amazon and Google more than any other company. I still use a lot of Apple hardware but I am very frustrated that they just lost their way on being the best and more importantly on user experience.
I am very into technology and more than anything the user experience. I love the interactions of humans and technology and this being the best it can be.
IMO, the best example we have to date is the Google search text box. That same text box is used by a rocket scientist, grandma, 7 year old kid, brain surgeon and everyone else in between.
That is the holy grail of UX. You type what you want and Google uses the computer to do all the work and you get your result. Quickly and accurately. Just that makes me a huge fan of Google. I can not think of any example in all of the history of computers that is close to what Google did?
But then the other aspect is I am an engineer by training. Founded a couple of companies and therefore had to do a variety of jobs but to my core an engineer.
So I spend a lot of time reading papers. The stuff Google has shared is just off the charts and no company in history can touch Google engineering. Not even DEC. I would say even surpasses Bell Labs.
So many things. Map/reduce, GFS, Borg, TPU 1.0, Beyond Corp, Wavenet, and I can go on and on. It is just amazing the incredible engineering things that Google shares.
I am truly in awe. I am all about fairness. There is ZERO question that Google provides a much better user experience in the things that are important today. Compare Google Maps to Apple Maps.
Compare Google Assistant to Alexa or even bigger lead with Siri. This is where UX is at today.
Larry Page in the late 90s was asked about using AI to improve Google Search. He responded they are using search to improve AI. From that day I was a HUGE Google fan. Still an Apple fan at the time but that is where it started.
I am also a big fan of Amazon and continue to not be a fan of MS. MS and Oracle are probably the two tech companies I dislike the most today. In the past it was IBM when I was a big DEC fan. I worked in VMS internals and was doing clustering internals like what is done today literally 30 years ago!
The other aspect that bothers me is the privacy one with Google and Apple. Apple privacy agreement is here.
"When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to participate in Apple services or forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number."
That is crazy. Then when we look at China we have
"Campaign targets Apple over privacy betrayal for Chinese iCloud users"
The China gov tried to hack Gmail accounts and Google instead decided to leave China. These are the facts without emotions or marketing.
It does bother me you suggest I lie? I try to share a lot of links supporting my points. I do get things wrong from time to time but never have an intention of lying.
So if I post something that is factually incorrect then please call me on it and if possible share a link.
But do NOT confuse opinions with facts as happens so often. I am an engineer to my core and I therefore tend to be very unemotional and fact based.
No worries. I am old and started on the Internet in 1986. So use to it.
My only issue with negative Google posts is only to be fair. There is so many things today that are common place because of Google and their generosity in sharing their secrets.
Giving away basically Map/reduce and GFS and a big one is Borg and just so many other things. Plus all the open source.
That should be praised. Think a lot of the issues around Google of late are related to social politics. That is fine but should not bleed over into technology type things.
Someone has an issue in them firing Damore then say that but not that Google sucks at engineering or something like that.
Same with their business model primarily being ads. You might hate that which is fine but that does not mean they suck at engineering.
AWS's UX is better than GCP in most aspects. You should be transparent about the fact that you work for Google. They did not "give away" Map/Reduce, they simply published a paper but that paradigm had already been in use. iOS's security is miles ahead of Android. Have you tried installing a notepad app on android until recently? How many permissions have you had to give up?
Do not work at Google. But would be cool if I did. I am actually old and retired. Do not think they hire too many old people like me.
But do suspect I will eventually have kids that work there or hopefully. I have 8 kids and a couple very good at math. My wife's father was an engineer as I was trained as an engineer so not surprising.
My oldest has graduated CS but does not have the passion I had so works at a pretty sleepy enterprise doing Java. But my next son just finished his junior year and he is crazy smart. Also studying CS with an emphasis in AI. He has the ability and think the passion. Driving him home from University last week he was pretty beat up by his AI classes. Had to give a bit of a pep talk.
Yes Google shared a paper on Map/Reduce as well as GFS and so many other things. Those papers gave away their "secrets" on how they do things. Same with how they use containers and Borg to manage their workloads. There is so many others and could go on and on.
I have never seen a tech company give back as much as Google. I would love to debate it and use facts to compare if there is anyone else close? The Amazon Dynamo paper was a fantastic give back but that is still well short of what Google gave back.
Heck Amazon uses Android still to run almost all their hardware. Where Google gave Android away to everyone.
On Android and security. It is a very different thing to support a wide variety of hardware that is not in your control versus Apple controlling the entire stack. I personally have a Pixel 2 XL and feel confident it will be as secure as my iPhone which I also use but less and less. More to share location in iMessages with my kids when on holiday than anything else. My iPhone is more of an iMessage phone. Even have the kids off of facetime and now using Duo.
Another great example is the Google WiFi. We can see the recent router security hack that hit so many companies but if you have a Google WiFi you are pretty comfortable that you are safe from such attacks. Google just built in much better security than any other router I am aware of.
Then on desktop ChromeOS is really the most secure machine you can buy. Just take a look at how Google implemented GNU/Linux on the Pixel Book versus MS adding some GNU/Linux support.
The Google approach is far more secure. The GNU/Linux applications separated by containers and then the entire thing using the hardware sand boxing. That is a far more secure approach.
There was one other topic wanted to address with you. I listen to a lot of podcasts and watch a lot of tech videos on YouTube. Plus went to Google I/O last year.
I am constantly amazed at the grace of Googlers. That should have been your first clue I was not a Googler.
They have every reason to be cocky but they are not. Either it is done in the hiring process or training or maybe both.
I would love if any googlers read this post if they would explain where it comes from?
