moca

Assembly line in China makes sense. VW and Audi have been there since 80s. Anything more than assembly line would be very questionable. It is much like how Apple builds iPhone in China, plus many others.

Chrome is more like Java or .NET runtime than C runtime. You can build full blown apps as Chrome packaged apps. Google has not polished it very well. If done well, developers can use it to build apps that run on Windows/Mac/Linux without change.

We can also raise exodus tax. :P

I think asm.js is the greatest runtime design that I have seen over past 20 years. It gets the job done cheaply. That is the ultimate goal for any runtime system. It is not designed for human to write asm.js code manually.

On the other hand, most programming languages are full of hacks. Even simple language like C has all kinds of weird behaviors on different platforms. Someone would need at least 1-2 real world experience before he can become a professional C developer in minimum way. asm.js was developed way faster than any other systems that I can remember.

He is really good at negotiating offer letter.

The Internet access cost tends to be higher than advertising cost. You can just compare revenue of AT&T to Google. I pay about $600/year for cable internet, and my advertising value is much less than that. As long as bots pay for the internet access, I think it is just fine.

If we want sustainable nuclear energy, the only solution would be fast reactor that can burn nuclear waste. Politically, it is near impossible to find a place to build nuclear waste storage. Nobody know how safe is such a storage. If we can burn nuclear waste, we will have sufficient clean energy for several hundred years. By then, nuclear fusion will be harnessed, and we will have enough energy for next many million years, and they have much less environmental impact.

Variable encoding is absolutely good choice for i18n. It forces you to give up random access, which is nearly impossible for i18n text processing (just thinking of a vowel followed by 2 or more accents). i18n libraries, such as popular regexp package, can easily deal with utf-8 with much penalty. Of course, the library has to deal with all kinds of complexity anyway, the random access was never a real need anyway. DISCLAIM: I contributed to regexp package of a major programming language.

The answer is pretty simple: the Google+ deciders don't get social. They think very differently from their users and they refused to listen for past 2-3 years.

Some people wanted to build optional-typing language for real world for decades, and finally made it. That is a great achievement.

From product point of view, Google would be much better to port Android Dalvik to Chrome. You can run GWT Java code in browser years ago. Running the same code using JVM would be much faster with much less code change. 5-10 man-year would be enough to do the porting, and it will share work between Android and Chrome for years to come. Of course, it would be much boring research work though.

From performance point of view, asm.js gets much better performance with way less work. No matter how good Dart performs, it would never make sense to port high performance C/C++ game code to Dart, so you end up having to use both Dart + pNaCl, which is an awful solution. Technically, TypeScript is more interesting if Microsoft can keep it simple and fast, but I doubt Microsoft would make anything simple.

This is absolutely great for Microsoft and its employees. Grade by curve creates internal friction that is harmful to the team. I am a manager in a large company. I always suggested to grade by performance against job level. There is written requirement for each job level, it is relatively easy to measure against the written description by both managers and peers. Everyone has incentive to get salary raise, bigger bonus, promotion. There is no need to use internal competition to add more pressure.

On the other hand, the lower 5% people only cost about 2% of companies spending. It is not even worth to worry about it. You need to interview equivalent to 50% of employee count to replace that 5%, plus whole set of HR bandwidth to handle it. Microsoft has been losing a lot of value to fire lower 5% while keep a lower 5% CEO at the top for so many years.

By running at zero profit margin, Amazon is essentially growing itself as fast as it can manage, i.e. reinvest every dollar. Its current revenue growth is even faster than Google. That ensures itself as the biggest ecommerce platform for years to come. If it wants more profit, it can certainly do it. I believe Amazon will eventually automate most of its systems, like using robots instead of humans for warehouse, and gain significant profit margin. Chinese company Taobao (like eBay) provided free service for 5 years, and gained dominant market share. Now it is hugely profitable.

On the other hand, Jeff is likely more interested in just growing the business than counting profit dollars.

Yes. Capital expenditures don't disappear. You can buy a piece of land to build a warehouse. You can sell the land to get money back if needed, so you can't report the money for the land as loss.

It is a common misunderstanding. Xiaomi updates its beta channel once a week, and stable channel once a month. It is still an amazing pace though.

"the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel" means it is at least 4 orders of magnitude away from being useful.

Since we still depends on nuclear power for decades to come, it is much cost effective to invest safer and cleaner nuclear fission reactors. The kind of fast reactor that can burn down nuclear waste so we don't need to build nuclear waste storage system, which nobody knows how to build anyway. That would give us power supply for several centuries (along with renewable energy). Too many countries wasted too much money on fusion reactors for decades, while we are still running nuclear reactors designed/built more than 30 years ago. Just wrong priority order.

If Windows has good enough support for symbolic link, this wouldn't even be a problem in practice. There always is some way to solve the problem other than declining it.

The success of Surface Pro largely depends on other people's failure. Nexus 10 is $399 with 2560x1600 display. Many decent Windows 8 laptops are selling at $600. MacBook Air weights 2.4 pounds vs Surface Pro 2 pounds. Technically, it is feasible to build a lightweight laptop with high-res touch display. It would be more functional than Surface Pro (larger display, real keyboard) and cheaper than Surface Pro + keyboard. As a business user, a great laptop is still better choice than SPro.

If Surface is super successful, PC OEMs would fail a big time, which is not good news for Microsoft either.

In term of global sales, Android tablet could be more than iPad these days. In term of usage, iPad would be much more than all Android tablets [1]. Additionally, an iPad has 2-3x life span than Android tablet on average (I has used over a dozen tablets). I seriously don't like to see so many low-quality tablets thrown into market. You are much better of buying second hand iPad.

[1] http://www.cultofmac.com/233063/ipads-web-usage-share-hits-5...

The article mis-interpret the data. It actually measures the full UI latency, which includes touch input, event system, and UI graphics system. It is somewhat well know that Android event and graphics systems have higher latency. At least, I took it for granted for 5 years. The touchscreen is a hardware component, its latency mostly depends on hardware choice. Nintendo 3DS and PS Vita have much lower latency, because the software stack is highly optimized for games (which obviously wants low latency).

I have built software for large BlackBerry customers and met with RIMM people before. 3 years ago, I had suggested they should create an enterprise-oriented Android phones, such like Amazon created media-oriented tablets. 3 years ago, RIMM was still the #1 in enterprise smartphone market, and they had great chance to succeed in that area.

However, most companies are afraid to compete on fair battle background (Android). So instead of one, RIMM chose to fight 4 battles at the same time, hardware, software, ecosystem, marketing, and it lost on all of them. Now it is too late to change the fate. RIMM management was too afraid to change (really really afraid). It is said when I met RIMM people, and saw they couldn't do anything to save the sinking ship.

It happens to most OS updates. Wait 24 hours for things to settle down, then measure again. On Android, some app may go crazy after update, you have to reinstall it to get out of bad state. I have seen it too many times. Not sure how to troubleshoot the same issue on iOS though.

It is tricky to manage any large company. The more tricky problem for Microsoft is that it heavily depends on old business models. A significant portion of Microsoft profit comes from Windows and Office. Other companies, like Google, can offer competitive products almost for free. That could happen eventually. It won't take Google too much efforts to provide a desktop version of Android and Office-like product. Even at several billion dollars R&D cost, it is still much cheaper than Motorola purchase.

Microsoft enterprise business is hugely competitive. But other than that, it is hard to achieve meaningful profit margin (xbox may earn couple of billions, internet services always lose money, Nokia probably break even for next few years). So the problem is more about innovate than manage Microsoft.

Most Google services are blocked in China by Chinese government. Chinese companies, like Xiaomi and Baidu, want to build their own ecosystems to make profit. Their management said so publicly during talks that I attended in person.

You missed a critical issue. Carriers don't like fully controlled verticals like Apple, as they don't want to compete on a fair battle ground. Apple is too powerful in US today, but no carrier wants another Apple. Several friends from Microsoft said this over past couple of years.

Another issue is Microsoft does not have profitable consumer services other than Xbox. Even Microsoft can integrate a lot of its services with Windows Phone, it is a big money sink until Microsoft can make profit on search, maps, outlook.com, skydrive, etc. They have tried for over a decade by now.

In the end, I really like to see 3-way competition between Apple, Google, Microsoft.

Android is about as open as it used to be. The core OS is mostly open source, the drivers are mostly closed binaries owned by chip vendors, the apps are closed binaries owned by Google. Google Play services, by its name and nature, is part of Google service. So it is just as closed as it used to be.

Over time, more features are added OS, drivers, apps. That doesn't really change the overall picture much. Amazon and Chinese companies like Xiaomi are pretty successful using the core Android OS for their devices.

Considering the cost, time of construction, time saving, the project doesn't seem to make much sense. China already dropped maglev due to high cost. On the other hand, Japan is making very slow progress on cleaning up its nuclear mess and almost all of its nuclear reactors are suspended right now. Why a new railway is more important than nuclear disaster in hand?

Shanghai has been operating Maglev line for more than 6 years, see [1] and [2]. The top speed is 431km/h and 268 mph. The Japanese line will have much higher capacity as the Shanghai one is not full production design, but I don't think it has material advantage. The real challenge is economics and noise, and China decided to go with conventional high speed railway system. Even HSR was designed for 350km/h, it is actually operated at 270-300 km/h to reduce operating cost.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-54gBLwK3s

Cheaper, but not that cheap. Moto X, comparable spec with Nexus 4, has $210-220 Bill of Materials (BOM). Adding cost of sales, warranty, customer service, there is very little margin left, if any.

As an observer of mobile market, I don't think this is normal price cut. Galaxy Nexus was more reasonably priced, $399 initially, then $349, see http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/27/3120987/galaxy-nexus-hspa-.... There is no chance for Google to make any profit on Nexus 4 at $199, if warranty and customer service cost is factored in. If the product is good, price cut to $249/$299 would be reasonable. There is obviously serious issue to justify such aggressive price cut. NOTE: Microsoft wrote off $900M after Surface price cut.

Regarding Nexus product quality, it is well known problematic. I never saw any Nexus phone with good camera, battery life, wireless reception. The customer service is problematic at best. These problems existed ever since Nexus One.

Since Hugo's departure happened right after Nexus 4 price cut, they are very likely related. It is embarrassing + losing money for Google to sell 16GB Nexus 4 at $249 while 16GB iPhone 5 at $649. As the product VP, Hugo did a poor job on Nexus product quality, marketing/sales, and inventory management. Not surprised to see him leaving the ship.

NOTE: Nexus 7 2013 recently had GPS and touch problem and required another OS update to fix them. In fact, Nexus phones never had good product quality ever since Nexus One.