9,912 karma · joined September 1, 2011
I will argue that pointing out the hypocrisy of a megacorp complaining about the anti-competitive behaviour of another magacorp, when it engages in the same type of behaviour but at a much bigger scale, is a pro-consumer move.
That's also what Amazon does, except with everything.
It's terrible what Apple is doing, but is peanuts compared to what Amazon does.
That's true .. but the problem is that there is a long tail of more advanced features than are needed. That is, for any given advanced feature only a small number of users care about those, but if you aggregate all the 'small number of users' that need some advanced feature, that number can be quite substantial.
>If you remember, at launch Google Sheets were relatively bare-bones, as were Google Docs.
Right, and Google Docs did not make any meaningful traction in the enterprise - and it still has issues outside of education. What Google Docs did do well when they came out was 1) Have great live/collaborative document editing, 2) 100% web-based - so it worked great on Macs, PCs and Linux systems and 3) even though they were feature-poor, they still had a base level of features that was much greater than what Nino has today ..
So Google Docs was able to find a nice niche - I was finishing up University that around that time, and it was great to use that for projects.
Keep in mind, Google Docs was released mid-2000s - it could get away with being feature-poor compared to Office and rely on its 'secret sauce' of being free and 100% web-based. This isn't enough today.
No, they aren't. I'm not trying to be argumentative, but there is a difference between true support and a superficial check-mark.
>I get the best-of-breed argument. Nino's thesis is that people will find more value if enough tools are bundled in one place
I'd like to interrogate this a little more. Why would someone not go with MS365 or Workspace?
I can see your answer of: >Nino has a better foundation to (1) consolidate a lot more apps than they currently do, (2) drastically improve speed with offline architecture, and (3) offer unmatched privacy and security with end-to-end encryption (coming soon)
Taking this point by point: 1) Your ambition is to have more apps, but the reality is that TODAY, both MS365 and Workspace actually have MORE applications integrated, and those applications are much more feature-rich. 2) MS365 certainly has deep offline integration. Workspace, I'm not sure what their capabilities are. 3) Neither MS365 nor Workspace supports true e2e (though I seem to remember Workspace having some option to import your own keys for client-side encryption) - regardless, I'm not sure that's enough as a selling point. Also, e2e has many challenges around the UX of key management, rotation and sharing.
By the way, MS365 and Workspace are not the only games in town. If you want to see another example of a 'super-app' that supports a million 'modules' take a look at ZohoOne - they support everything under the sun for a relatively low price, and all of it is mediocre (at best).
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Another thing I can't gauge from your page is, what it means for one of your modules to be very well integrated against another. You have a chat app and a slide app .. how do those work together that puts MS365 to shame?
Is it really 'interoperability' if it cannot integrate with any external applications?
Maybe I can see some use-case for personal use (big maybe), but right off the bat, you can't use this at any company (small startup or enterprise), for several reasons: Lack of functionality, lack of organization-based group and access control workflows, auditing, user provisioning/de-provisioning, lack of cross-organization document sharing and collaboration and compatibility, plugin support, email integration, domain hosting, etc. etc.
I'm not even sure a motivated individual contractor could use this professionally due to the need to collaborate with their customers. I'm not even sure you could dog-food this while managing Nino Inc.
>Nino is one (super)app that supports 18 modules, saving you time from switching and integrating between different providers.
Is that even a real problem?
Most places will use either Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace - those platforms are very well integrated internally. MS365 has all the apps you built except they are feature-rich and some are industry standards (like the Office suite), plus much more - and everything is very well integrated.
But that isn't enough. Sometimes users may prefer, for example, Confluence as a wiki instead of the MS365 Sharepoint wiki - the reason why is because they want to choose a 'best of breed' solution for their use case .. or it may just be a subjective preference. In that case, yes, the integration isn't as great but it is workable (there are plugins to allow deeper integration of external applications). Your solution won't be able to get away from that either. Even if I like your Todo and Notebook apps, I may prefer using Zoom for conference calls and Slack for chat .. what happens then?
Can you elaborate? Isn't that a good thing to have those in the corridors of power directly communicating with the global public? I'm not a big fan of the Ayatollah of Iran, or Putin, but I want to know their perspective on current events, even if that perspective is 'regebait' and full of 'misinformation' ... and we had that, for a little bit of time, and we're losing that.
What is the alternative? That news is filtered through some cabal of the 'chosen ones'?
That isn't going away. If Twitter goes bankrupt, something else will play that role. And this trend has been happening for generations. Books/Scrolls -> Newspapers -> Newspapers + Telegraph ('wire services') -> Radio / TV / Cable 24/7 news -> Internet ... If some technology provides a faster way to share information and news then people will make use of it.
I don't know ... Twitter as a news aggregator was (could have been) a public good. I think it was probably the least bad out of the group of: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat
Let's be honest, nobody had 'Airplane' as some critical part of their business.
That's the PRIMARY function, eh?
What is the corruption here?
Did you say that Firefox is a 'money sink' for Mozilla? The thing that brings them half a billion dollars a year and corresponds to the vast majority of their revenue ... and is the only thing that gives them relevance .. to you, this is a 'money sink'?
That would be an improvement. Being a browser developer does not factor in anything they focus on.
Sure - let them squeeze out the last drop of their one and only cash cow before it becomes utterly irrelevant - instead of investing in it and making it a core pillar of their strategy.
>See how Wikimedia Foundation is basically flush with cash,
Mozilla was (is?) flush with cash. Browser market share and corresponding user eyeballs are immensely valuable. That money isn't going back into Firefox development. This is why it is borderline criminal that they choose to focus on everything except Firefox.
Alternatively, what are they without Firefox?
This hurts because Firefox should have been that embedded framework powering browsers like Brave and electron apps. But that would have required them to invest in R&D to match performance but also to make their rendering engine easily embeddable (with a corresponding investment in documentation and outreach).
This is why it is critical to have a meaningful alternative. Developers and end-users are pragmatic - all things being equal they will choose privacy and openness, but not at the expense of performance and capabilities.
This is why it is so perplexing seeing Mozilla just focus on everything except for the one thing that gives them relevance and is actually important.
Yes .. and that is the core problem. Their relevance (and income) only comes from Firefox and its market share. But for some reason, they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge this. The income they generated from Firefox, should have been re-invested in Firefox. They should have been organized as an engineering company at the forefront of web technologies.
>Given that Firefox has kinda lost the browser war it seems obvious that they should be focusing efforts on other things that further that mission besides dumping money into a browser a tiny slice of people want to use.
That is their strategy. Right now, Firefox is still the only thing that gives them any sort of relevance.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mark-surman-mozilla-25-y...
Adobe does not compete with Microsoft in any meaningful way. There is some overlap in some products here or there, but it's not meaningful competition.
If I was Figma, and I had to choose, I would go with Adobe. Adobe would have made Figma a core strategic product and would have made them much more relevant in a space that they deeply care about. Microsoft would never care that much about Figma, because the design/UX space isn't core to Microsoft. Also, Figma is too small for Microsoft to make it a centrepiece of any of their strategic initiatives.
AWS neither provides nor promises 100% availability. AWS will have SLAs on various services with the penalty only being a discount on your bill.
It's _your_ job to make your service resilient to a point where you are comfortable with your mitigations.
Oh really? Twenty years of professional experience say otherwise. I don't remember if that came up in either my graduate or undergraduate classes, but I also remember this post going around: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... - in my experience, this post is as true as it ever way. Sometimes a ground-up rewrite is necessary, but more often than not, you do it at your own peril.
>Encapsulation at a larger grain level.
Encapsulation has nothing to do with it. The value of compile-time support rises as LOC and complexity goes up - this is irrespective of your development methodology, or the architecture of your stack.
>It's the entire premise behind agile software development.
No. It's not. Agile does not directly address code maintenance or code quality since Agile is (as Wikipedia puts it) "an iterative development process". You can perfectly follow Agile, and turn out unmaintenable code.
>You should be breaking down those large applications into smaller more maintainable micro-services.
This take ... I'm not even sure where to start: 1. Everything I said applies equally to microservices as it does to monoliths. 2. You must have never worked with microservices if you think they are a panacea. 3. What is the difference between the same amount of code but split between one monolith versus many microservices?
>It's the 4 hour compile time problem from C++ revisited.
Do you know what's even more expensive? Tracking down TypeErrors at Runtime.
> As business requirements change over the life-time of a software project, you need to retire and replace old code with new code that better meets the changing business needs.
Yes .. keep rewriting working code - that's a path to success.
OK ... If you want to claim that the future is wind + natural gas/coal - go ahead, but that's not what the public is being told. The public is told that wind/solar can replace fossil fuels, and they can't.
Here's the reality:
If you have nuclear, you don't need wind/solar - at all. In fact, you will not be able to use wind/solar, because nuclear can't be easily spun up and down to deal with the wind/solar intermittency. In your France example, wind/solar is pointless.
If you have hydro, and you have enough of it, you don't need wind/solar. If you don't have enough hydro, you need natural gas though you can optionally throw in wind/solar. Once you hit your geographic hydro capacity, the only way to increase is to build out your natural gas/coal infrastructure (regardless if you throw in wind/solar in there)
If you don't have nuclear, and you don't have hydroelectric, then wind/solar will not be able to replace fossil fuels. You will be forced to build out coal or natural gas infrastructure (or burn wooden pallets), as your Danish example shows.
Here are other examples: - Germany, which closed its nuclear plants, and now is using wind but also more coal/gas than ever before: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
- Portugal, which is blessed by geography that gives it access to hydro, but because they don't have enough, and they built out their wind infrastructure, need significant natural gas capability: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
- Costa Rica is another poster child for renewable usage .. but really, it's a poster child for hydroelectric power. They don't need wind/solar at all. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
I agree, but in that case, using a scripting language to build and maintain applications with significant LOC ... is poor engineering.
Static typing is there so you can get compile-time support for validating assumptions made throughout your source code, which is critical for developing and maintaining LARGE applications by teams of engineers of all skill-sets, over significant periods of time.
Renewables (wind/solar) could be free and they wouldn't be able to support a modern economy - that's the problem. It's why wind/solar, today, do not even power a small city, much less a nation.