bdowney

You're not missing anything. Most if not all of your concerns were voiced during the internal dogfooding phase and, as usual for G+ and Vic Gundotra, duly noted and ignored.

And still is really sad that Google employees still waste time creating memes about Michael in their stupid internal memegen site many months after his departure.

Personally I'd love to see a community driven extension to XMPP, with its corresponding RFC, which would allow feature parity with Google's proprietary crap while keeping interoperability and federation, so people could give Google the finger on this one.

Yep, I already warned about this a few days ago. I would like to encourage everyone to avoid using this walled garden service and make sure you tell both your friends and Google why. Say NO to proprietary network protocols!

The Netflix competitor is paid Youtube channels, except it only works in a few countries and it's not as good as Netflix.

Google has bet everything on social and are creating these satellite services to fuel G+ usage and adoption. You won't see anything revolutionary coming out of GOOG for a while.

I currently use Spotify and there is no way I'll be switching to a Google product. In fact I'm trying to reduce my dependence on Google products.

There is no successor to Reader, it's gone. Forever. Babel (Hangouts) is not theoretical, is very real and has been leaked already. It's just a walled garden (they threw XMPP away and went with their own proprietary protocol) so I personally would steer clear from it.

You should not be surprised, those people are stuck in the 12th century. I wish the rest of the world stopped buying oil from those idiots.

No they didn't. This is actually run by a third party as Google does not own these offices. FWIW Google has a pretty decent security team, although for some reason most of them are arrogant assholes (e.g. Tavis Ormandy)

Google just paid him so no more anti-Google articles will be written. Very clever of them.

My sentiments exactly. I've met plenty of condescending assholes at Google but them being geeks was not the reason why they behaved like jerks.

That's because that joke stopped being funny 10 years ago.

I never understand this blind hated for Sony. The OtherOS thing was a reaction to the Geocrap clown. The people who design the phones have nothing to do with that anyway. The Xperia phones are awesome and Sony is actually one of the few well behaved manufacturers in the Android ecosystem.

Looks almost as annoying a Google's reCAPTCHA.

I just found out about this comment. There is a bunch of arrogant and condescending Googlers that continue mocking you in both the internal mailing lists and the memegen site. Thought you'd like to know that they're still obsessed with you.

Why do you call those people hackers? Hackers build things, don't piss on other people's work.

He's the fella who shutdown the Atlanta engineering office and killed the projects that were being developed there. Not a big fan.

Edit: He's also responsible for the CalDav fiasco.

How could like the G1? The capacitive screen was awful and the performance terrible, although the latter was due to lack of optimizations and JIT in the Android VM.

Now that Sundar Pichai is in charge of Android I've been looking at alternatives and Firefox OS looks very promising. I don't use that many apps on my phone anyway and would like to steer clear of some Google products.

Google has made several mistakes re social products but it's definitely not against the open web. There's a lot of internal criticism every time one of these decisions is made but, at the end of the day, upper management gets to do whatever they want.

I've never met anybody at Google how was happy with the way G+ is being handled or liked Vic Gundotra. A lot of us rather he'd go back to Microsoft.

Why would you trust this so called "hacker", it's that Marcan clown after all.

No it isn't. It's been asked, like many other parts of the company, to integrate with the Google+ crap. How is that independent?

About the article, 300m is just pocket change for Google anyway, they blew 12 billion on Motorola just to get the patents, so 300 million is not going to make a difference for them even if it fails miserably.

Thanks for the info. I'd happily for a service like this than rely on Google's "free" stuff that they might the plug on any time they want to push their useless G+ crap.

Please ignore everything Schmidt says. He's creepy beyond belief.

About G+ I hope more people give it the finger so that Vic Gundotra finally understands that you can only alienate your users so much before they go somewhere else.

Vic's "Real Names" (TM) policy was bad enough, despite the massive internal feedback he received asking for pseudonymous support.

Andy has embarrassed himself several times by restricting access to the Android code while, at the same time, claiming that Android was open. Granted most users don't care about the source code but it's a punch in the face for all the OSS enthusiasts who believed in Android's open model.

And Android still developed behind closed doors for no good reason. Not only that but the team is siloed from other parts of Google, like some sort of exclusive club.

Not sure about that. Google is actually pretty bad at PR with idiots like Vic Gundotra and Andy Rubin alienating users left and right. Eric 'creepy' Schmidt wasn't much better and said many stupid things while he was CEO.

-- I'm the security master.