Who was asking for Woke Clippy? Is Google just bored and completely out of ideas?
They seem increasingly disconnected with what their users actually want.
They seem increasingly disconnected with what their users actually want.
As annoying as a woke clippy might be, at times I realize that we're lucky we don't live in a racist clippy alt reality. "Would you like to expand all mentions of "n-word"?"
If someone is being racist, wouldn't we arguably be better off if they used language that made it transparent to the reader-- rather than disguised it with the magic of search and replace?
Real prejudice can't be erased by search and replace but it can be made more plausibly deniable.
So for example, a writer of British English may want to be warned that "Bring me some fags when you return" may be misunderstood by American readers.
This hypothetical checker might still warn you about "master"-- for example-- as there is now a sizable contingent that finds it controversial. ... but it would equally warn you against terms like "birthing person" which is considered by many to be biologically reductive to the point of being offensive, and by most people to be at least highly loaded.
Such a tool would almost certainly not caution you against "landlord".
Being passive-aggressively told "blacklist" is a no-no word is not.
If you were really clever, you'd let the user set a "sensitivity" level for the writing from "normal human speak" to "corporate PR approved".
Like, 'I identify both as a mainboard and male, your use of motherboard offends me'???
And this isn't some made up controversy. The Biden administration has been replacing "mother" with "birthing person."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/09/pregnan...
But what if the company found out (and some employee leaked) the fact that most people deliberately set the default level to "normal human speak", and its campaign to replace and redefine words doesn't have any democratic legitimacy (let alone add any commercial value)?
I interpret Microsoft’s as helpful when considering ESL or other cultures. I interpret Google’s as straight woke. Very different products but you’re probably right that Microsoft led them there.
... and the willingness to take risks has historically served them pretty well.
The idea that there are millions of people who want to be told that motherboard is a dirty word every time they write it, but won't realize that desire until Google foists it on them, just strikes me as absurd.
Apple is a different story of course.
I feel like I can just gesture to the stock price and say "scoreboard," but that seems an unfair dismissal of the question.
To expound on the topic a bit: I think when they were a smaller company it served them well consistently. Photos and Drive have become an enterprise cornerstone that supports their "light cloud" business space (quite a few people pay for that extra storage). Ads doesn't get talked about much, but the internal culture is very quick-innovate. Chrome went from being a wild idea to dominating the browser-share (and therefore giving Google a foot in the door on everyone's desktop computer), and then they parlayed that into a whole operating system play. Maps basically displaced most of the other players in that space and now competes with only a couple other contenders.
I don't know if it will continue to do so now that they're an 800-lb gorilla in the room. They've certainly become more structurally conservative in the decade-plus since their founding. And I think their push into Cloud is putting pressure on them to act a lot more starched-collar; Enterprise is a different customer than they're used to (or comfortable with) dealing with.