sasidharm

Product Management and Marketing

By stealing data from competitors?

Congratulations. You get the google customer of the year award.

The appointment of Eric Holder as the head of DOJ could be the defining moment of Obama's presidency. Everything Eric Holder is involved in is turning into a huge pile of shit.

First world problems.

Did you mean Google strategy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google

Only 5% of all android devices out there have ICS (http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...). Even if you are correct that ICS has no fluidity issues at all, that means 95% of android devices out there have these issues.

Anyone who truly believes Samsung wasn't just ripping off Apple's product (hardware/software) need only look at the Phone App's icon here http://cdn3.sbnation.com/imported_assets/844649/2011-04-19ap... (Link from the parent).

Even if the data is stored encrypted, Google can always decrypt it on an as needed basis (since they serve ads based on the content of the email messages.)

I cant help but think that there are a lot of other personal grudges at play here instead of just an honest discussion about iPhone 4S vs Galaxy Nexus

Apple didn't build a freaking photo-frame..they built a tablet computer...

I read Google's post and Microsoft's response and Google's update to the post and Microsoft's response to the update as well: http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/04/gentlemen-take-this-outside... Considering all arguments, I think there is more to this story than what Google told in the blog post. The fact that they did not even mention that they were offered to be part of the joint bid in the initial post raises a lot of questions.

How is it unfair?

That's because they don't have any patents of their own to sue with. Before they acquired IBM's patents, they had a total of less than 800 patents.

They are being hypocritical by saying that Apple and Msft bid many more times than what those patents are really worth, when Google itself bid upto 4 billion dollars. And what gaurantee does Google provide that they wouldn't sue competitors aggressively? Dont tell me its because their 'motto' is Dont be evil.

Gruber is no Google-lover, but in this case he is right on the money for calling out Google's hypocrisy. What if Google won the Nortel patents with their pi billion dollars bid?

Truth is on the cloud.

I think he is talking primarily about OEMs. Except HTC, i dont think any other OEM building iPhone/iPad competitors is making much money.

Google is not evil by nature (though i have my own doubts) and Facebook is also not evil by nature. Facebook simply has a different philosophy on _sharing_. They believe that people should share everything and be more social. If this is not something people are not comfortable with, then those people have no business in signing up for facebook and complaining that everything is shared by default. As far as Google's privacy 'glitches' are concerned, in my experience bugs make it into production accidentally. But pieces of code that are developed specifically to sample wifi packets that might contain sensitive data or code that exposes all my email contacts to the entire world do not make into production accidentally.

If you already trust Google with your email, then it cant be that bad.

I am not trying to start a debate of sql vs nosql, but i have an honest question. What if foursquare was using a standard RDBMS like Oracle? Would they have run into the same problem?

I thought i was in the same boat as you until recently. Now the same job, which i thought was excellent, is boring and not interesting anymore. The people i used to love working with dont seem so nice now. What do i do now?

I hate software patents, but it is the reality of the world. Google had a chance to license with Sun, but they did not want to yield any control to Sun and implemented their own technology for the mobile platforms. Sun/Oracle believe they violated their patents in this process. So they are suing Google. I do not see this as Oracle going after open source technologies. Google is no champion of open technologies. No corporate company that has to answer their stock holders every three months can be a true champion of open source. They are open only as long as it suits their business model. Right now making Android open source suits their business model bcos every stupid carrier on the planet can build a stupid android skin on their own, and Google can claim that Android is not a locked platform. Sun tried to be truly open and they literally went bankrupt.

Not sure why Oracle is getting so much flak for protecting and monetizing their acquired assets. They are doing what Sun had failed to do, which is monetizing the Java platform effectively, thus leading them to sell themselves to Oracle. Granted, software patents can be pretty meaningless and i believe that there should be no software patents at all. But this seems like the only way Java platform can be monetized (through licensing). I kind of wish Sun had the balls to do this kind of thing earlier.

Prices can be negotiated with the carriers. Remember the original iPhone's 600$ price tag? Infact, MS supposedly got a very good pricing deal with Verizon which they botched up by not meeting the agreed upon timelines.

Now I am really starting to feel for ATT. I can't help but feel that it might be the iPhone(3G and 3GS) that should be blamed for all the dropped calls and not ATT :P

Microsoft will be 3.5 years late to the smartphone party when windows phone 7 series will eventually be released. People would have already made their choice between iPhone and Android.

Actually i blame nokia for the sad state of mobile user interfaces until the iPhone came along

The author seems to be under the impression that programming is same as building a product. Building a decent product is much more time consuming and mentally exhausting especially if you are on your own (sure being on your own gives you a lot of flexibility in making decisions quickly). If you want to build a product that does good business, what you need is a decent team with at least one developer/product owner, one sales person/marketing person and one customer.

Certainly no one expects anyone to get everything right in their first try. One expects to see a few bugs here and there in the first release and that is fine. In the case of Google Buzz, the basic idea of the product that 'all your frequent email contacts are your friends' is flawed. The manner in which they rolled it out without any regard for the privacy of its users is most disconcerting.