
How Google is slowing innovation - aytekin
https://medium.com/swlh/how-google-is-slowing-innovation-d53161108ea2
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kinkrtyavimoodh
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.

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aytekin
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.

~~~
pzh
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?).

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

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cromwellian
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/](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.

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mark_l_watson
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.

