Comment by ergo98 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergo98 | Hacker News Reader

"But it’s remarkable how much my appreciation for Google has shifted over the last year or two"

I suspect this shift in sentiment has more to do with Google evolving from being Microsoft's competitor (back when Microsoft was the boogeyman to Apple), to Google being Apple's competitor.

To many who hold Apple so dearly to their heart, this causes a serious conundrum. Suddenly every move by Google can only be seen with incredible suspicion and assumptions of worst intentions. See the recent raging about WebM as a perfect example.

The Android operating system it makes for mobile phones has become a viable challenger for Apple’s iOS. But for all the talk about it being open, they’re not giving it away out of the goodness of their hearts

The link provided to purportedly demonstrate this undermines the point, because it is, demonstrating the point above, nothing but the raging conspiracy by an Apple fanatic who abhors any perceived threat to his love Apple.

Nonetheless, as a consumer I am fully aware of Google's ambitions with Android, which is the same reason why I don't use Chrome. However Android is the best available option in the space for my rights, and the best opportunity to stop those rights from being trampled, however many ridiculous scarequotes are used to express the author's total misunderstanding of open.

Why all the hate for Apple? This article is about how opinion of Google has soured.

My theory is that "Don't be evil" isn't sustainable if society defines "evil" as making business decisions in the interest of self preservation. Society likes underdogs, and Google is now clearly the top dog fighting to survive instead of fighting to get the top. Once a company gets big enough, it becomes easy to be perceived as a bully because anything you do will have all that power and leverage behind it. And underdog entering a new market is innovative. A big corporation entering a new market is invasive. Firefox supporting WebM is practical, but Google supporting WebM is evil. Even Apple is generally perceived to be the evil Big Brother they so famously advertised against a few decades ago.

Why all the hate for Apple? This article is about how opinion of Google has soured.

There's no hate for Apple. There is, however, perspective on human behavior, one of which is a "with us or against us" mentality.

Even if you don't have a dog in the Android/iOS hunt, resenting Google is as easy as trying to use its search to locate information around anything even remotely related to commerce. Or programming questions.

I think that's a product of the same initiative, honestly. Like some sort of attempt to strike the achilles heal of Google. "Ha ha, your search stinks!"

Searching for programming questions always sucked on Google proper. The only redeeming target was the Deja News corpus Google acquired. I doubt I'm along in my sadness at seeing the beautifully categorized and well discussed Usenet groups descend to uselessness, replaced by a disparate collection of poorly organized, polluted Q&A sites.

Commerce -- like finding a review. When do people ever think that was good on Google? Seriously I'm seeing people talking about trying to buy iPhone cases -- come on. Again, it always sucked on Google. Always. It's worse now simply because there is remarkably little real content (the professional review industry has almost disappeared, as it was supported by magazines, and the consumer review space disappeared because people stopped hosting their own Geocities sites and the like).

Specialized sites were always a world above any search engine. For game reviews I go to Metacritic. For movie information I go to imdb. For restaurant reviews I go to yelp. And so on.

So no, I don't resent Google for those things, because it was never good at them.

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