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Google About Openness
sopssa writes "Several sites, including TechCrunch and The Register, are reporting about an email Google's VP Jonathan Rosenberg sent to employees on Monday about the meaning of open. 'At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. ... Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in.' But are we likely to see Google open their search engine, advertising or the famous back-end system? In their words, that would mean Google and other companies would need to work harder and innovate more to keep their users, for everyone's benefit."
We are seeing a shift from private to public, closed to open, secretive to transparent and it's all because of a far more efficient and cheap ways to communicate. The act of communication is so fundamental to how we relate to the world, that when you change the way you communicate, you change the shape of everything in the world.
Corporate structures will change drastically. How, exactly, no one know. Can corporations like Google still exist 50 years from now? Will there be any need for massive bureaucracies any more or will the opposite happen, and just a handful of bureaucracies be able to control everything?
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
i am a developer. leave aside the many measures google have taken to empower INDIVIDUALS, like enabling individual websites with adsense system and giving them the power to generate revenue whereas all of the big boys were treating small publishers as shit, google by itself provided many useful tools to aid us developers in the act of development. its so much that some of their accessories are invaluable additions to the dev environments and software we use now.
i think you confused them with another company, which treated everyone but the big buck like shit, for over 20 years.
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Just curious, what search terms are you using? I've found that adding "+datasheet" or "type:pdf" helps a lot in searching for pinouts, at least for things that are common enough to make it into digikey...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
There's a difference between using open protocols and using open source.
Personally, I have no problem with companies using open protocols. The only thing I think Google is missing is a way to export all your Google information into a data file you can upload into someone else (or a way to give someone a "key" to your information to side load it), otherwise, they don't use proprietary email standards (*cough* Exchange *cough*) or use proprietary web page extensions (*cough* ActiveX *cough*) that cause people to have to buy Google servers, software and equipment to be able to use said protocols.
I'm all for open protocols, even if you don't open source the code generating it as long as you don't need the code generating it to use it (or have to pay a patent or other license to use it.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I cannot trust them because in the United States a public corporation is required by law, first and foremost, to do what is in the best interests of shareholders which generally means anything which legally maximizes profits.
So what you're saying is that you don't trust them because you have no idea what the law actually says, or how corporations actually work?
Your name wouldn't happen to be Kyle Mortensen would it?
A publicly-traded company is required to maximize shareholder value in accordance with its prospectus.
Before a company goes public, it produces a prospectus. The prospectus details the business plan of the company, as well as its philosophy and self-imposed restrictions. It is the responsibility of the investor to read and understand the prospectus before investing. If the prospectus states that the company will place customer loyalty above short-term profit, then any lawsuit based on "the company didn't maximize short-term profit because they weren't pricks to their customers" will fail.
HTH.