I don't know about the apple watch, but the android wear watches by default always show the time, just in black and white. When you move your wrist to look at them, the screen lights up in its full glory, but if the motion isn't detected, the watch is still readable. The OLED ones are decent to read in sunlight, the others are ok-ish unless its noon in California or something.
You never need to touch them since its all voice activated, aside to interact with specific apps or to swipe away notifications.
It will affect church going catholics to some extent. Which means in the US, it will matter very little, and well, having been raised catholic north of the border, very few people I knew rejected evolution as it is...
Yup, but like I said above...anywhere you'd actually want to work at lately will either have HR who did hear about it, HR thats so bored they pass almost every resume over to engineering, or, more and more frequently, an army of gold digging head hunter, with at least one who know about it.
Sure, that random mom and pop shop who picked up and need to hire an IT dude don't know about this crap. But the big name companies do. And the trendy tech start-up doesn't even an HR person looking at the resume, they have to do it themselves.
Source: my own experience has someone without a CS degree who was looking to make a switch 2 weeks ago...and did. No one (worth working for) is in a situation to care.
The closest thing to needing a CS degree you'll come to, is to pass some of the interviews. ie: Amazon ask stuff like writing a binary search on a white board...which is trivial, but its not something you'll ever have to do, so if you didn't see it in a text book, you may have to hesitate and think it over for longer than the interviewer likes. Others like Google definitely didn't seem to like seeing someone who can't write an A* purely from memory in a few minutes. But thats it... HR's no longer a gate keeper.
These days even Amazon/Microsoft/Google/whatever will take you without a degree if you're good enough (ie: equivalent experience). The FIRST job will be trickier to get though. Usually you start as something else and move laterally to a software engineering job in the company, or have a substantial github portfolio (the later, if significant enough, often does better than a CS degree...and it takes less total hours to get there, haha)
Yeah, there's the occasional place where HR will skip you over it, but nowhere you'd actually want to work for. In the big tech hubs (Boston/NYC/SF, etc) a lot of HR folks are bored by how few applicants they get...they can't afford to skip someone with enough keywords just because they're missing the degree.
If you can talk the talk in the phone screen and walk the walk in person, no one will care.
The cost of the windows license is actually pretty complicated, unless its a machine with JUST windows. The bloatware and trials and all that garbage count, as the OEM is being paid to include those. For low end hardware, one could argue you'd owe the OEM money when you tell them you're not using Windows (not really, but they certainly don't owe you much, since you're buying subsidized hardware...).
In a similar way, the Apple hardware premium subsidize the OS. Sure, these days, Apple doesn't have a very big premium on hardware, because they cornered so much of the supply chain, but if they didn't have to spend a penny on the development of the OS, they could cut down their cost quite a bit.
Amazon already does that in some countries (in some countries, you HAVE to. UPS/Fedex isn't everywhere), and in some cases even in the US they'll use local shipping companies (ie: companies that are only doing business in a specific part of a specific town).
Thats not enough. I was working for a very large (not as large as amazon, but still large) retail company trying to do business internationally. Just the fact that it was an American company hurt it. A trick was to just buy the name of a small local company, and do business through that. Same website (just different branding). No difference aside from that. And boom, it does fine. Even if the business you bought the name of wasn't doing that great.
But matching local custom is pretty standard for large international companies. In some part of China and India, the only way to ship stuff is via bicycle riders who take cash on arrival. And the "big evil american corporations" doing business in those areas do it that way too. I don't know if Amazon does business in those sectors, but if they do, that's how they ship.
Since most of the loss comes from reinvesting revenue, at any point they could theoritically stop investing so much and turn a profit. They just choose not to.
Because Amazon isn't nearly as big outside of the US. Amazon's revenue from all other countries combined add up to something like 2/3rd of what they make in the US alone. Its significant, but when you split it between all the major foreign markets, its not that big of a threat.
As most US based e-retailers have to deal with, europe and asia tends to favor local companies, even for e-commerce, and regardless of if the foreign company has a local presence or not (so shipping isn't an issue). So they're not seen as that much of a threat.
English is not my native language (French is), but as virtually anyone in engineering has to, i learnt it. It didn't take that long or much effort, no real format training...just guessing at the word's meanings when playing video games and watching TV and eventually I picked it up... now I live in the US and most people can't tell I'm not a native speaker unless they see my first name. My writing could be better, as you probably can see, but I'm even worse in French, so its more that I suck at writing in general.
I tried learning Chinese (my wife is Chinese, so I'm immersed in it a lot). Unless you know a lot already, guessing the meaning of a written word is almost impossible, since its pretty binary: either you know that character, either you don't. People who know a lot can somewhat guess from comparing against all the words they know, there's some patterns, but still. It obviously also affects writing, though you can use input systems that use latin characters...you should won't know if you made a mistake.
Talking though, you don't have that issue, and the grammar is easy, but the tone system is very foreign to someone only used to western languages. Thus what happened as per the summary. He was able to speak, but sounded like a kid. Learning how to speak it is easy, but not sounding like a westerner is very difficult. At least it wasn't Cantonese:)
Boys still have the relentless pressure. There's just less of a social trend to try to change it, so people don't even see it. Act a little weak? Get ready to be tossed in the trash can. Interested in books instead of football? LOL!. God forbid your favorite color be pink. And it also starts very, very early.
It comes from everywhere. Advertisement, TV shows, friends, school... you can't avoid it. And then there's probably SOME biological factor...at the end of the day we're just very complex chemical reactions-based machines, but machines just the same. No sane woman would agree to go through giving birth without some pretty strong biological programming/instinct.
I think the "trick" isn't to fight it, but to embrace it with some steering. There's a lot of unisex toys and crafts that will fall into the silly gender bucket, but steer them toward more diverse options. Think Lego Mindstorm for example. And if they like dolls, get them both the ones advertised to them and action figures (if you try and only buy "boy toys", it backfires because they want what they cant have...but if you get everything, they'll stop caring about the difference and make their own choices...). If they like cooking, you can encourage them to experiment, which ends up being chemistry.
All companies have slightly different promotion processes, but its a small world, and everyone ends up working everywhere, knowing each other, and trading notes. Google's promotion process is nothing uncommon. You just didn't happen to work somewhere that had a similar one, thats all. I only worked for 3~ Big Bank (tm), 2 of which had a very very similar process, the other did not. Maybe my sample just isn't representative. There are thousands of companies out there after all:) About about a 1/4th of other companies where Ive been had a very similar process. Thats just what I'm basing myself on. Your millage may vary.
Once you're talking 130-180k/year, no one moves jobs for the pay. The difference between making 140k or making 180k isn't going to change your quality of life enough to leave a job that wouldn't be as good. Thats why you'll never see someone switch away from Google for money.
For the rest, it depends what you compare to. If you're comparing to other companies that are similar, of course the pay will be similar. I live a block away from the Google office in Cambridge, so 75% of people I know work there or have worked there, half of which have moved between the Silicon Valley office and here. Quite a few are downright geniuses that could move anywhere and ask for a fortune, yet they're T4-T6, often making a lot less money than me, even though I couldn't dream of doing their job.
A lot of AAA videogames have been done single threaded. Web apps can be done the same way.
Have the action change the state, and use requestAnimationFrame to update the UI nicely, v synced. 60 frames per second is enough to feel snappy. Of course, all I/O is already happening asynchronously, and for the very few cases that are left, you can use workers.
It will mainly depends where you come from... Google was unique a few years ago, but now a lot of companies are "cool", and Google has a lot more silly bullshit process than many others (ie: the promotion process, which has a lot in common with how big banks do it for engineers...and thats not a good thing).
For the pay, its because the tiers are shifted. An engineer lvl 2 (making up titles, read between the line) at Google is paid the same as a lvl 2 engineer elsewhere... but a lvl 2 at Google could be a lvl 3 or more elsewhere, and thus be paid a heck of a lot more. That made sense and was fine when Google was unique, but I guess they did a bit too good of a job at spreading their culture.
Its no longer "THE" place to work, for sure, but they do have all the nice perks and benefits and all the on-site stuff, interesting problems, and interesting culture. You also don't have to worry TOO much about them hiring a few retards that never get fired (at least not on the engineering side).
There's a lot of companies that provide the above, but not that many are well established with as many benefits (usually they'll be "profitable startups"). So while its not the "OMG OMG OMG OMG I NEED TO WORK AT GOOGLE" scenario anymore, its still on the list of places to consider.
Of course, then you have their "1 size fit all, basically random depending on who does the interview" interview process to go through, so it may not be worth the trouble, unless you're feeling lucky.
Just be a software engineer in one of the tech hubs. Problem -> solved.
Its still going to sting, because SOME companies have automatic policies, but I used to work with a guy who, we eventually found out (there was no BG check at that company) was a convicted felon, and if you googled his name, the FIRST thing that came up was a picture of his mug shot and a lot of details on what he did (it was pretty bad).
He eventually got fired (for completely unrelated reasons...ie: he was terrible), and got a job 2 weeks later FOR A BANK (again as a software engineer). He's still there as far as I can tell.
Companies in the booming tech areas are desperate.
Joke aside, that's basically the issue. "You're doing it wrong". Now there's various flavors of Agile, and one size doesn't fit all. But often, when people use "hybrids", instead of using the best of both worlds, they use the worse.
So we want sprints, but I can't just let my engineers work unchecked! So we'll have a full day planning meeting every 2 weeks, and a checkpoint meeting every week. The daily standups are going to last 45 minutes, and the PM will also have a 20 minute talk with each individual every day to see if anything changed during the day!
Now, I also want the full design documents and architecture up front, before the sprint start, lets have everyone sign off on it, and if anything changes, we'll just extend the sprint./true story, happened at my last job...I quit a month and a half in.
Nothing is set in stone and each company has to figure out what will work for them...but virtually all the "hybrid methodologies" or pseudo-agile I've worked in only took the parts of Agile that suck, slapped in the worse parts of Waterfall on top, then wondered why it was a shit show.
That doesn't change my point though: that his argument would be just as strong, valid and convincing otherwise. The strength of Linus' arguments come from the details and the logic trail he puts out when he argues. My personal favorites are when he argues Git design decisions.
Without the language and offences, the amount of people he convinces wouldn't change. AT ALL.
At which point its literally just a matter of self control.
Now before you think I'm just a delicate little flower: I'm probably far worse than Linus in that regard. That doesn't change that its unnecessary. Best case scenario, it changes absolutely nothing (see above), worse case some people get defensive and miss the point completely.
Its a balance. The important part is knowing when and how to be assertive. Being an arrogant asshat is a variation of that for sure, and it will work to some extent, but the important part is that you're assertive, not that you act like a 9 years old who just learnt "bad" words.
If you know your stuff, you assert that you know your stuff, and can make coherent arguments, you'll get somewhere.
Take any of Linus' more famous mailing list arguments where he rips someone to shred, remove the "offensive" words, and the argument would still stand on its own and he would still have "won" those arguments hands down, in the vast majority of cases.
Heck, I'd dare say if you act like a little kid when arguing, you need to be 2x as good and have an even more solid argument for anyone to take you seriously.
I'd say growing a thicker skin is probably as important as having enough self control and creativity to get your point across without using extra words that don't add a whole lot to the discussion.
ie: if your neighbors above your apartment are too loud, you should get used to dealing with noise, but they ALSO shouldn't have their sound system at max.
Purely supply and demand. The amount of people who go in computer science or what have you to start making games is crazy. Stupid mini-games aside, the effort/knowledge/skill it takes to make even an average game is absurd compared to most other type of applications, yet programmers flock to that industry in droves. That lets companies be more picky.
This is in contrast to average, more business-oriented fields (law, banking, data, etc), that can be interesting if you're into that stuff, but doesn't have the same kind of appeal. Very very few people get out of school thinking "Damn, i can't wait to write the next stack to handle SWIFT messages!". Thats why developers working for big banks in NYC make a crazy amount of money.
There's no money to be made in a field a lot of people find fun/easy/exciting, because too many people are willing to do it for peanuts (there's a reason so many open source projects have terrible UI... very few people get excited about UX development). Find a niche that interests you if you want to make money.
You can't be a special snowflake if you look like every other snowflake.
They probably have pretty extensive usage statistics that made it easy to push down in priority until it totally fell off the list of things worth doing.
At that time, bad publicity wasn't part of the metric. Now it is. Thats probably all there is to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about the apple watch, but the android wear watches by default always show the time, just in black and white. When you move your wrist to look at them, the screen lights up in its full glory, but if the motion isn't detected, the watch is still readable. The OLED ones are decent to read in sunlight, the others are ok-ish unless its noon in California or something.
You never need to touch them since its all voice activated, aside to interact with specific apps or to swipe away notifications.
Am in the US, seen paywave terminals, never heard of CurrentC until it was in the news recently, so its not too different. They're just not used much.
Probably mainly because I didn't even know those things took Google Wallet until last week when I heard CVS/RiteAid took them down.
It can get more convenient than tapping a card though. Tapping your -watch-. And thats coming. No need to reach into my pockets at all? Yes please.
It will affect church going catholics to some extent. Which means in the US, it will matter very little, and well, having been raised catholic north of the border, very few people I knew rejected evolution as it is...
But hey, baby steps.
Yup, but like I said above...anywhere you'd actually want to work at lately will either have HR who did hear about it, HR thats so bored they pass almost every resume over to engineering, or, more and more frequently, an army of gold digging head hunter, with at least one who know about it.
Sure, that random mom and pop shop who picked up and need to hire an IT dude don't know about this crap. But the big name companies do. And the trendy tech start-up doesn't even an HR person looking at the resume, they have to do it themselves.
Source: my own experience has someone without a CS degree who was looking to make a switch 2 weeks ago...and did. No one (worth working for) is in a situation to care.
The closest thing to needing a CS degree you'll come to, is to pass some of the interviews. ie: Amazon ask stuff like writing a binary search on a white board...which is trivial, but its not something you'll ever have to do, so if you didn't see it in a text book, you may have to hesitate and think it over for longer than the interviewer likes. Others like Google definitely didn't seem to like seeing someone who can't write an A* purely from memory in a few minutes. But thats it... HR's no longer a gate keeper.
These days even Amazon/Microsoft/Google/whatever will take you without a degree if you're good enough (ie: equivalent experience). The FIRST job will be trickier to get though. Usually you start as something else and move laterally to a software engineering job in the company, or have a substantial github portfolio (the later, if significant enough, often does better than a CS degree...and it takes less total hours to get there, haha)
Yeah, there's the occasional place where HR will skip you over it, but nowhere you'd actually want to work for. In the big tech hubs (Boston/NYC/SF, etc) a lot of HR folks are bored by how few applicants they get...they can't afford to skip someone with enough keywords just because they're missing the degree.
If you can talk the talk in the phone screen and walk the walk in person, no one will care.
The cost of the windows license is actually pretty complicated, unless its a machine with JUST windows. The bloatware and trials and all that garbage count, as the OEM is being paid to include those. For low end hardware, one could argue you'd owe the OEM money when you tell them you're not using Windows (not really, but they certainly don't owe you much, since you're buying subsidized hardware...).
In a similar way, the Apple hardware premium subsidize the OS. Sure, these days, Apple doesn't have a very big premium on hardware, because they cornered so much of the supply chain, but if they didn't have to spend a penny
on the development of the OS, they could cut down their cost quite a bit.
Amazon already does that in some countries (in some countries, you HAVE to. UPS/Fedex isn't everywhere), and in some cases even in the US they'll use local shipping companies (ie: companies that are only doing business in a specific part of a specific town).
Thats not enough. I was working for a very large (not as large as amazon, but still large) retail company trying to do business internationally. Just the fact that it was an American company hurt it. A trick was to just buy the name of a small local company, and do business through that. Same website (just different branding). No difference aside from that. And boom, it does fine. Even if the business you bought the name of wasn't doing that great.
But matching local custom is pretty standard for large international companies. In some part of China and India, the only way to ship stuff is via bicycle riders who take cash on arrival. And the "big evil american corporations" doing business in those areas do it that way too. I don't know if Amazon does business in those sectors, but if they do, that's how they ship.
Since most of the loss comes from reinvesting revenue, at any point they could theoritically stop investing so much and turn a profit. They just choose not to.
So in theory at least, they should be fine.
Because Amazon isn't nearly as big outside of the US. Amazon's revenue from all other countries combined add up to something like 2/3rd of what they make in the US alone. Its significant, but when you split it between all the major foreign markets, its not that big of a threat.
As most US based e-retailers have to deal with, europe and asia tends to favor local companies, even for e-commerce, and regardless of if the foreign company has a local presence or not (so shipping isn't an issue). So they're not seen as that much of a threat.
English is not my native language (French is), but as virtually anyone in engineering has to, i learnt it. It didn't take that long or much effort, no real format training...just guessing at the word's meanings when playing video games and watching TV and eventually I picked it up... now I live in the US and most people can't tell I'm not a native speaker unless they see my first name. My writing could be better, as you probably can see, but I'm even worse in French, so its more that I suck at writing in general.
I tried learning Chinese (my wife is Chinese, so I'm immersed in it a lot). Unless you know a lot already, guessing the meaning of a written word is almost impossible, since its pretty binary: either you know that character, either you don't. People who know a lot can somewhat guess from comparing against all the words they know, there's some patterns, but still. It obviously also affects writing, though you can use input systems that use latin characters...you should won't know if you made a mistake.
Talking though, you don't have that issue, and the grammar is easy, but the tone system is very foreign to someone only used to western languages. Thus what happened as per the summary. He was able to speak, but sounded like a kid. Learning how to speak it is easy, but not sounding like a westerner is very difficult. At least it wasn't Cantonese :)
Thats probably what they meant.
Boys still have the relentless pressure. There's just less of a social trend to try to change it, so people don't even see it. Act a little weak? Get ready to be tossed in the trash can. Interested in books instead of football? LOL!. God forbid your favorite color be pink. And it also starts very, very early.
It comes from everywhere. Advertisement, TV shows, friends, school... you can't avoid it. And then there's probably SOME biological factor...at the end of the day we're just very complex chemical reactions-based machines, but machines just the same. No sane woman would agree to go through giving birth without some pretty strong biological programming/instinct.
I think the "trick" isn't to fight it, but to embrace it with some steering. There's a lot of unisex toys and crafts that will fall into the silly gender bucket, but steer them toward more diverse options. Think Lego Mindstorm for example. And if they like dolls, get them both the ones advertised to them and action figures (if you try and only buy "boy toys", it backfires because they want what they cant have...but if you get everything, they'll stop caring about the difference and make their own choices...). If they like cooking, you can encourage them to experiment, which ends up being chemistry.
Changing job is always a gamble. Your next place could be better, it could be worse. By the time you know if you got lucky or not, its too late.
Never leave a job you're happy with unless you have a HELL of a good reason. Money rarely is a good reason unless its an absurd amount.
All companies have slightly different promotion processes, but its a small world, and everyone ends up working everywhere, knowing each other, and trading notes. Google's promotion process is nothing uncommon. You just didn't happen to work somewhere that had a similar one, thats all. I only worked for 3~ Big Bank (tm), 2 of which had a very very similar process, the other did not. Maybe my sample just isn't representative. There are thousands of companies out there after all :) About about a 1/4th of other companies where Ive been had a very similar process. Thats just what I'm basing myself on. Your millage may vary.
Once you're talking 130-180k/year, no one moves jobs for the pay. The difference between making 140k or making 180k isn't going to change your quality of life enough to leave a job that wouldn't be as good. Thats why you'll never see someone switch away from Google for money.
For the rest, it depends what you compare to. If you're comparing to other companies that are similar, of course the pay will be similar. I live a block away from the Google office in Cambridge, so 75% of people I know work there or have worked there, half of which have moved between the Silicon Valley office and here. Quite a few are downright geniuses that could move anywhere and ask for a fortune, yet they're T4-T6, often making a lot less money than me, even though I couldn't dream of doing their job.
Adobe Reflow was what I was thinking of*
A lot of AAA videogames have been done single threaded. Web apps can be done the same way.
Have the action change the state, and use requestAnimationFrame to update the UI nicely, v synced. 60 frames per second is enough to feel snappy. Of course, all I/O is already happening asynchronously, and for the very few cases that are left, you can use workers.
Atom editor isn't as good as more mature equivalents, but its close.
Adobe has a tool to create responsive website mockups thats also all in javascript/html while still being a desktop app, I forget its name.
A lot of stuff is done in Node-Webkit, and in many cases you probably don't even know.
It will mainly depends where you come from... Google was unique a few years ago, but now a lot of companies are "cool", and Google has a lot more silly bullshit process than many others (ie: the promotion process, which has a lot in common with how big banks do it for engineers...and thats not a good thing).
For the pay, its because the tiers are shifted. An engineer lvl 2 (making up titles, read between the line) at Google is paid the same as a lvl 2 engineer elsewhere... but a lvl 2 at Google could be a lvl 3 or more elsewhere, and thus be paid a heck of a lot more. That made sense and was fine when Google was unique, but I guess they did a bit too good of a job at spreading their culture.
Its no longer "THE" place to work, for sure, but they do have all the nice perks and benefits and all the on-site stuff, interesting problems, and interesting culture. You also don't have to worry TOO much about them hiring a few retards that never get fired (at least not on the engineering side).
There's a lot of companies that provide the above, but not that many are well established with as many benefits (usually they'll be "profitable startups"). So while its not the "OMG OMG OMG OMG I NEED TO WORK AT GOOGLE" scenario anymore, its still on the list of places to consider.
Of course, then you have their "1 size fit all, basically random depending on who does the interview" interview process to go through, so it may not be worth the trouble, unless you're feeling lucky.
Just be a software engineer in one of the tech hubs. Problem -> solved.
Its still going to sting, because SOME companies have automatic policies, but I used to work with a guy who, we eventually found out (there was no BG check at that company) was a convicted felon, and if you googled his name, the FIRST thing that came up was a picture of his mug shot and a lot of details on what he did (it was pretty bad).
He eventually got fired (for completely unrelated reasons...ie: he was terrible), and got a job 2 weeks later FOR A BANK (again as a software engineer). He's still there as far as I can tell.
Companies in the booming tech areas are desperate.
Joke aside, that's basically the issue. "You're doing it wrong". Now there's various flavors of Agile, and one size doesn't fit all. But often, when people use "hybrids", instead of using the best of both worlds, they use the worse.
So we want sprints, but I can't just let my engineers work unchecked! So we'll have a full day planning meeting every 2 weeks, and a checkpoint meeting every week. The daily standups are going to last 45 minutes, and the PM will also have a 20 minute talk with each individual every day to see if anything changed during the day!
Now, I also want the full design documents and architecture up front, before the sprint start, lets have everyone sign off on it, and if anything changes, we'll just extend the sprint. /true story, happened at my last job...I quit a month and a half in.
Nothing is set in stone and each company has to figure out what will work for them...but virtually all the "hybrid methodologies" or pseudo-agile I've worked in only took the parts of Agile that suck, slapped in the worse parts of Waterfall on top, then wondered why it was a shit show.
That doesn't change my point though: that his argument would be just as strong, valid and convincing otherwise. The strength of Linus' arguments come from the details and the logic trail he puts out when he argues. My personal favorites are when he argues Git design decisions.
Without the language and offences, the amount of people he convinces wouldn't change. AT ALL.
At which point its literally just a matter of self control.
Now before you think I'm just a delicate little flower: I'm probably far worse than Linus in that regard. That doesn't change that its unnecessary. Best case scenario, it changes absolutely nothing (see above), worse case some people get defensive and miss the point completely.
Its a balance. The important part is knowing when and how to be assertive. Being an arrogant asshat is a variation of that for sure, and it will work to some extent, but the important part is that you're assertive, not that you act like a 9 years old who just learnt "bad" words.
If you know your stuff, you assert that you know your stuff, and can make coherent arguments, you'll get somewhere.
Take any of Linus' more famous mailing list arguments where he rips someone to shred, remove the "offensive" words, and the argument would still stand on its own and he would still have "won" those arguments hands down, in the vast majority of cases.
Heck, I'd dare say if you act like a little kid when arguing, you need to be 2x as good and have an even more solid argument for anyone to take you seriously.
I'd say growing a thicker skin is probably as important as having enough self control and creativity to get your point across without using extra words that don't add a whole lot to the discussion.
ie: if your neighbors above your apartment are too loud, you should get used to dealing with noise, but they ALSO shouldn't have their sound system at max.
Purely supply and demand. The amount of people who go in computer science or what have you to start making games is crazy. Stupid mini-games aside, the effort/knowledge/skill it takes to make even an average game is absurd compared to most other type of applications, yet programmers flock to that industry in droves. That lets companies be more picky.
This is in contrast to average, more business-oriented fields (law, banking, data, etc), that can be interesting if you're into that stuff, but doesn't have the same kind of appeal. Very very few people get out of school thinking "Damn, i can't wait to write the next stack to handle SWIFT messages!". Thats why developers working for big banks in NYC make a crazy amount of money.
There's no money to be made in a field a lot of people find fun/easy/exciting, because too many people are willing to do it for peanuts (there's a reason so many open source projects have terrible UI... very few people get excited about UX development). Find a niche that interests you if you want to make money.
You can't be a special snowflake if you look like every other snowflake.
They probably have pretty extensive usage statistics that made it easy to push down in priority until it totally fell off the list of things worth doing.
At that time, bad publicity wasn't part of the metric. Now it is. Thats probably all there is to it.