Good points. I applaud Google for acting responsibly here by taking down HuddleChat quickly. In general Google is a "good" company; they certainly don't deserve the "shit" treatment in the way that MS does.
Google had two engineers in their off time who copied an extremely generic idea and placed it in their gallery of "look what you can do with this new toy we have!" and took it down when it became apparent that there would be hard feelings over it.
I agree that Campfire is a totally generic idea; however, its execution is not. Of course it only took Google employees two weeks to copy Campfire... after all, the Google guys didn't have to do any thought, they just had to bang out code to do mimic Campfire's ideas. How long would it take for two Google employees to create a carbon clone of facebook? Maybe four weeks, maybe five. How long would it take for you to create your own Jackson Pollock?
The point is: it's the creative thought that's the hard part, not actually executing an idea. People who defend Google's actions by claiming that Campfire is "generic" don't realize how much work actually goes in to designing a product.
Another reply said that I must work at 37 Signals. No. I'm a happy PhD student; I don't want to be a code monkey because cranking out code to do exactly what someone else's spec says is thoughtless.
I'm surprised most slashdotters seem to think that Google was in the right here. Let's leave out Google's name and see how the story sounds:
A company with over 10,000 employees duplicates a 10 person company's product feature for feature, even down to the animation effects, and gives it away for free.
Substitute MS for Google in this story and slashdotters would be flaming mad. It's not that Google just created a similar chat app to Campfire, it's that they created a carbon clone of Campfire, which is despicable no matter the company that does the cloning. The argument that Google's not responsible, since they're just hosting, is bogus. Google employees created this clone, meaning that it's Google's property.
Agreed. First off, they managed to afford MIT's insane tuition and housing costs, so you know they aren't hurting too bad (rather mom and dad aren't hurting). But seriously, a projector, fog machine, strobe lights and so forth? Those things aren't cheap, and most college students are about as destitute as one can be.
I could be wrong and they might just work really hard and have huge loans, but it doesn't seem like it.
And finally, the party mode is a cool idea and all, but it doesn't make up for the biggest problem: finding girls and someone to buy two 19-year-olds booze.
The college I attend does the same thing, only they don't tell you about it. AND what's worse is my old isp did the same thing to their cable modems. In fact, they actually blocked a few P2P applications without telling customers.
My advice, find a program that they haven't capped because it isn't widely used. Last year in the dorms, I ran a Carracho server and ended up being able to use over 1meg of bandwidth per second!
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Good points. I applaud Google for acting responsibly here by taking down HuddleChat quickly. In general Google is a "good" company; they certainly don't deserve the "shit" treatment in the way that MS does.
Google had two engineers in their off time who copied an extremely generic idea and placed it in their gallery of "look what you can do with this new toy we have!" and took it down when it became apparent that there would be hard feelings over it.I agree that Campfire is a totally generic idea; however, its execution is not. Of course it only took Google employees two weeks to copy Campfire... after all, the Google guys didn't have to do any thought, they just had to bang out code to do mimic Campfire's ideas. How long would it take for two Google employees to create a carbon clone of facebook? Maybe four weeks, maybe five. How long would it take for you to create your own Jackson Pollock?
The point is: it's the creative thought that's the hard part, not actually executing an idea. People who defend Google's actions by claiming that Campfire is "generic" don't realize how much work actually goes in to designing a product.
Another reply said that I must work at 37 Signals. No. I'm a happy PhD student; I don't want to be a code monkey because cranking out code to do exactly what someone else's spec says is thoughtless.
I'm surprised most slashdotters seem to think that Google was in the right here. Let's leave out Google's name and see how the story sounds:
A company with over 10,000 employees duplicates a 10 person company's product feature for feature, even down to the animation effects, and gives it away for free.
Substitute MS for Google in this story and slashdotters would be flaming mad. It's not that Google just created a similar chat app to Campfire, it's that they created a carbon clone of Campfire, which is despicable no matter the company that does the cloning. The argument that Google's not responsible, since they're just hosting, is bogus. Google employees created this clone, meaning that it's Google's property.
Agreed. First off, they managed to afford MIT's insane tuition and housing costs, so you know they aren't hurting too bad (rather mom and dad aren't hurting). But seriously, a projector, fog machine, strobe lights and so forth? Those things aren't cheap, and most college students are about as destitute as one can be.
I could be wrong and they might just work really hard and have huge loans, but it doesn't seem like it.
And finally, the party mode is a cool idea and all, but it doesn't make up for the biggest problem: finding girls and someone to buy two 19-year-olds booze.
The college I attend does the same thing, only they don't tell you about it. AND what's worse is my old isp did the same thing to their cable modems. In fact, they actually blocked a few P2P applications without telling customers.
My advice, find a program that they haven't capped because it isn't widely used. Last year in the dorms, I ran a Carracho server and ended up being able to use over 1meg of bandwidth per second!