Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Which Tech Company Do You Respect Most?
dryriver writes: On Slashdot, we often discuss the missteps and non consumer-friendly behavior of various tech companies. This company forced people into a subscription payment model. That tech company doesn't respect people's privacy. Yet another tech company failed to fix a dangerous exploit quickly, protect people's cloud data properly, or innovate and improve where innovation and improvement was badly needed.
Here's a question to the contrary: Of all the tech companies you know well and follow -- small, medium, or large -- which are the ones that you respect the most, and why? Which are the companies that still -- or newly -- create great tech in a landscape dotted with profiteers? Also, what is your personal criteria for judging whether a tech company is "good," "neutral," or "bad?"
Here's a question to the contrary: Of all the tech companies you know well and follow -- small, medium, or large -- which are the ones that you respect the most, and why? Which are the companies that still -- or newly -- create great tech in a landscape dotted with profiteers? Also, what is your personal criteria for judging whether a tech company is "good," "neutral," or "bad?"
Whoever it was that decided to shutdown their secure email service instead of hand over info to the feds.
The only truly ethical tech company I can even really think of.
Respect? duh! None! why should we?
;)
Just my 2 cents
Seems like real innovation.
None of them. The age of heroes in tech (as in many ither areas) died with the insertion of millennials. It's all an ungodly and ethically bankrupt mess at this point. Nothing left to do but watch it burn and try not to say, 'We told you so.'.
PS - $$$ are indicative of nothing but the fact that the right people were sufficiently hoodwinked, so spare us the profit-margins.
Do No Evil.
It's all been down hill since then.
Didn't they create the plague that is systemd ;) lol
;)
;)
Puts on flame suit
Just my 2 cents
I think Mozilla is doing wonderful things and a single mistake doesn't change that.
DuckDuckGo is the other one...
Onion.com is suffering a slump because real news from the White House is more zany.
Table-ized A.I.
As far as I'm concerned they burned whatever goodwill they ever had when they fired Brendan Eich for political reasons that had nothing to do with his abilities. But even if they hadn't, their recently bullshit with killing XUL extensions and destroying the UI to turn the browser into a poor Chrome clone is enough to evaporate any respect I might have had left.
But wait, there's more, I keep on seeing ADS for their stupid browser. Ads proudly proclaiming the death of extensions and then using BS biased tests as "proof" of the browser's speed.
In short: I have no respect for Mozilla and even less for people who still shill for them.
What tech companies respect you most?
I love Texas Instruments. When I was designing a power supply for a hobby project I came across their web bench design site. I just plugged in the numbers and out pops a schematic, BOM and board layout with parts that are in stock from Digikey. I've always found TI's documentation to be top notch. That's not to say that some of the other semiconductor manufacturers also don't have great sites either, but I haven't yet found any that match TI. I also respect a lot of the other companies you listed.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Mozilla's treatment of Eich is 100% on them. They decided that rather than stand for freedom they'd rather censor unpopular views.
They literally replaced their addons system with Chrome's WebExtension API. The new Firefox is quite literally a Chrome clone.
Beyond that, you're, my respect doesn't matter. But they also pissed away the respect of the web development community. Modern web apps target three browsers: Chrome, Mobile Safari, and Internet Explorer. And that's it. Firefox is now a rounding error in usage statistics.
Respect that.
RedHat is for sure on the list, alongside Canonical. They have done more for Linux and FOSS adoption by corporatizing than countless other projects combined. The profit motive is powerful and it gets products into the hands of willing consumers. RedHat and Canonical are the great heroes of FOSS.
Open Whisper Systems deserves great praise, though it is financed by some large donors and thus isn't really a company.
Ixquick, DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail all also deserve great thanks.
Are you trying to say "hardware", that only hardware is technology? Because Google / Alphabet creates a lot of new technology - new speech to text technology, self-driving car tech, etc mostly created in software.
> My standard is how they get their revenues. Making tech - like chips (Intel) makes them a tech company. Using tech to say get revenues from say advertising (Google, Yahoo! & facebook) makes them not tech.
Advertising is a *payment method*. You can pay for YouTube by watching ads or by Visa. What generates the revenue is the cool stuff Google provides such as YouTube videos and Google maps. Slashdot and Google maps aren't in the same business, just because they both offer the same payment method. Ads are just the method of payment for the maps and videos, or articles and discussion.
Lavabit was a mixed bag, they had their pros and cons.
Pros:
* Provided free email service
* Simple
* Most of the features you expect from an email service
* Spam and virus filters were customizable and much easier than most other services.
* They shut down their servers instead of giving up Edward Snowden.
Cons:
* Buggy, bugs were never fixed, bug reports were never acknowledged
* Poor communication skills from the developers, both free and paid accounts
* Actively lied when they shut the service down. For about 2 days they insisted that it was just an upgrade, would be back up soon, and that our emails were not being lost. If they couldn't tell the truth for legal reasons they should have said nothing instead, there was no excuse for the lies.
* For about 2 days after the shutdown they continued to accept emails sent to users, instead of just rejecting them so the senders would know that the emails had not been delivered.
Lavabit is back up but I don't use them anymore because of their behavior the first time. They are just not trustworthy.
Actually the brings up a good point. It isn't what company that you respect the most, is where was that company when you respected them the most?
Being that most companies are For-Profit there seems to be a time, where the lust for cash crosses their main values.
The big companies Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM... All had their high points where they were respected at one time for being the best example of a company. Then they will undoubtedly trim the fat too much, treat customers poorly, or move the company in a direction people don't want to go and use the companies size and influence to push it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.