How Google is slowing innovation | Hacker News Reader

How Google is slowing innovation

medium.com

37 pointsaytekin12 comments

I will save you the click. The article spends 1100 out of its 2300 words sitting by the campfire, retelling the epic saga of "Microsoft the arch-enemy numero-uno", followed by another 1100 words about how GMail was Google's attempt at almost extinguishing other email providers, how it was bad to kill Reader (RIP) and how AMP is Google's most brazen evil.

Author here. I think one of the important points that hasn't been talked about somewhere else is how Google is using Chrome to do things very similar to what Microsoft has done.

For example, Google has taken over the PDF format (Most PDFs today open in Google Chrome) and not supporting all of the features PDF. They have stopped the further development of PDF format and also blocked the previously made features such as fillable PDF forms by not supporting them.

Isn't supporting a subset of PDF features pretty standard for most browser plugins? These are meant mostly for reading PDFs online and not necessarily making modifications to them and saving them (in the browser cache?).

I wouldn't call something a plugin when it comes bundled with the browser.

Meanwhile the whole web is held back by the Safari browser on a platform where you're forbidden from creating a better competing browser by decree and DRM.

That's true. But, unlike Chrome they don't own the majority of the browser market.

They own the most important and most profitable segment of the mobile browser market, so practically all mobile web sites are designed for Safari. Every startup is iOS/mobile Safari first.

Do you believe that if apple owned 90% of the market that they would open up iOS?

And to "save" even more clicks, it gets flagged off the front page like that.

So much for shallow dismissals... "sitting by the campfire, telling the epic saga", while knowing full well a snarky reply to you isn't allowed.

I read the article before reading the comments.

It feels like what is written in the comment above and then a section blaming Google for not supporting a feature yet.

It's weird how you blame them for slowing innovation, but you admit Email hadn't been fixed or improved for years, and Gmail was a step-change improvement in access to email, cost, storage, spam filtering, and filter management.

And despite your claims that they about gmail, Gmail is still using SMTP and MIME, it's still using the same transports, headers, and RFCs that most email clients are designed for. Yes, they've added additional content types you can display and you can write "add-ons", but that's not any different than what native desktop clients did before in terms of what built-in media types they handled vs external plugins.

The real impediment to slowing innovation in mail, is the same impediment we see in TCP/IP, or BGP -- a huge legacy deployment makes upgrading any of the formats or protocols quite difficult. Around the time Blackberry was killing it at mobile email ("Crackberry"), about 3 years before the iPhone, I worked on the IETF IMAP Lemonade group which was trying to add push-email notification capability to IMAP so that it could operate efficiently on mobile, work like the Blackberry, scale well, etc. Suffice it to say, trying to get a dozen MUA and MTA vendors onboard for any improvements was difficult.

The real innovation slowdown came from the protocol being widely deployed.

How do you measure innovation anyway? Did Inbox (I know, I know) count as innovation, automatically picking out trips, assembling itineraries, delivery notices, bills, tasks, forums, newsletters, et al, into bundles, and making them easy to peruse as entities?

Do you count incremental improvements as innovation, or only radical 'step-changes' like the iPhone? because those kind of shocking new products happen only once or twice in a lifetime, and I don't think they are affected by the presence of dominant players. We've seen dominant players get disrupted time and time again by step-changes.

Or are you claiming incremental innovation has slowed? But if so, how do you categorize it? I mean, I pointed out in Techcrunch years ago (see https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/25/sugar-water/) , that the vast majority of 'innovative' SV startups ship toys and amusements, not things that radically improvement productivity or health.

I think the real innovation to come isn't in improving more toy apps for photos or selfies, or messaging, but in human health, education, and well being.

Later in the article: Google vs. Apple: there is no mention of Apple’s business model’s compatibility with customer privacy! I believe that this will continue to be a killer feature for Apple.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com