Valve seems to have like 6 developers that work there and since nobody seems to fucking manage the company (literally, this is how they operate) I am not surprised at all. How they managed to put together half life alyx at all is astonishing.
Their development philosophy makes sense on the face of it. People, properly empowered, left to work on what they think is best, might produce really great results.
Unfortunately most of the time they don't produce any results at all.
Last time I heard there was less than a dozen developers "in charge" of Steam. Everything else was an ancillary project that sprung up and shut down around it.
Valve is a dream job because of that philosophy. It's like the golden age of Bell Labs (which got us things like C and Unix...). "We're printing money. Let's get a bunch of smart people together and see what they come up with."
Valve has made enormous leaps in the quality of gaming on Linux. If they keep that up, I don't care if they never release or update another game ever again. They also designed the Index, which is probably the best VR headset on the market right now, and are engaged in VR research in general. HL Alyx (which I want to play, but don't have the hardware to do so yet) is basically a tech demo...and that's really what Valve has always done. They make tech demos that just happen to be full games that people like. The lack of a Half-Life game for so long speaks more about the lack of anything revolutionary in gaming for multiple decades.
A mountain of money does not necessarily (or even likely) make a good game. Yet Alyx was one of the best titles of 2020 and probably the best VR game ever made. Color me impressed by Valve’s game development team, regardless of the incompetence of their security practices
What harm would it do to post some Bible passages under such posts? That might help someone. If we’re just doing everything that might help and wouldn’t seem to hurt.
Google has lost all of its allure. I once dreamed of working there. Now, I think their employees drink the kool aid hard, and they are generally inept. Working at google isn't really impressive.
While those are cool open source projects, Googles actual products are the things that suck. Take GCP - they don't really dogfood ANYTHING. They still run half their stuff in borg! AWS dogfoods almost all of their services. The polish and integrations speak for themselves.
And look at their other product lines - android, communication apps, etc. They are generally a mess besides their absolute core offerings (Gmail, gdrive, and maps)
How is it that the "best engineers" in the world can't make good products?
You can't just point fingers at a specific company and say, yes that giant monopoly out of the other 50 monopolies is the bad one. The others are perfectly fine.
The solution to this is to hold them all accountable for anti-competitive behavior, and not to ignore anti-competitive behavior of one company just because another got away with it at one time.
Microsoft doesn't own 95% of the ad market, pretty much the entire search market, the browser market (and thus web standards pretty much), and also email, storage, etc.
Google owns the internet.
But hey, you are right. Split MS up as well. All of these companies have gotten too damn big.
Presumably splitting up the company would also involve restrictions about other large tech companies gobbling up the resulting Google-chunks. Anti-trust law is a thing that the US could enforce if they so chose.
Simple domain name trademark dispute