just a hypothetical, but if you were to assume that Google had no ill will here and was actually trying to make stuff better for users - what do you think the best way would be for people working at Google to do this?
I.e. say you worked on the gmail team, you really cared about users, you thought amp for email would be good for users, how would you go about making this happen in the world?
genuinely curious if its even possible for Google try and improve things without having some of the downsides you mentioned.
This is a pretty packed question, there's a lot of factors. The size of Google, and the fact that they own several complimentary monopolies makes it very hard for them to do anything without providing a new conflict of interest.
Take Chrome's ad blocking... there's no way this can be ethically done by Google, even if blocking annoying ads definitively improves user experience. If Chrome was not owned by Google, it wouldn't be at issue, but it is owned by Google, and there's no way for Google to approach this topic. Googlers who care about this should push Google to split off Chrome into an independent foundation.
AMP is a way to push content to centralized platforms. Even if others run AMP caches (which are pointless because Google Search uses Google's cache, etc.), it pulls the Internet towards centralized cloud providers of which Google is one of the top three. And again we cross a huge self-interest issue.
If Google wanted to retain enough goodwill to even start to walk this back, they need to move back to open protocols. RSS (or a newer JSON equivalent), XMPP (or a newer equivalent), etc. And deal with all the mess that comes with true decentralized open standards. It's not like Google can't afford the additional difficulties. If their AI is as great as they claim (it's not, G+ porn spam is rampant), it shouldn't be hard for them to provide good experiences on open federated systems.
Want to run apps in emails? Great. Does the user want it? Can I decide which apps I want running inside my emails, based on what's useful for me?
Will the user get to pick whether their AMP emails are dynamic or not? Google+ notifications have a long history in Gmail of overwriting the display of the actual email with a live page, which can try to obscure the email's original content, like in the case of a deleted message. You'd have to use an IMAP client to see the content of the message that was actually sent to you.
I was typing a long, long reply too but I just realized I wouldn't even use my own suggestions because I don't trust Google anymore, specially to do the right thing in the long run.
If I cared about users primarily, I would hope I wouldn't jump ahead to "amp for email is good." Your requisites for this thought exercise are too broad.
If Google wants to improve email, I would start by emphatically recognizing why their previous attempt to supplant it with Wave failed, and stop trying to break email's openness,
I wouldn't "launch this" because it's not needed in the first place. You should accept email for what it is. The same point the article is defending.
> and was actually trying to make stuff better for users
Now, if we're talking about making communication between users better than yeah you need to go beyond email. E2E, open protocol, something like jmap (imap sucks), focus on privacy and interoperability, yada yada, so many better stuff to "fix" before trying to amplify my inbox and adding more rendering issues between platforms. Do you see a trend? You're now treading a thin line between chat apps, social networks, Android instant apps and glorified iframes. And introducing a whole new set of problems at the same time, not to mention the monumental effort required for something like this to keep backward compatibility (just so you can still call it email and use the superset). And getting the implementation right the very first time.
I too want the worst problems of using email to be solved but since nobody wants to adopt open protocols and work with each other (or eee the whole thing a year later), like history showed us time and time again, it won't happen. So again, let's at least no lose what we have now.
The point I was trying to get at with the hypothetical is that its quite possible that a lot of Googlers are good people with good intentions and that they are trying to do good.
The hypothetical tries to demonstrate that if Googlers are good, they would behave in a way that is indistinguishable from the behaviour you are seeing and attributing to evil.
Basically I find it very hard to believe that Googlers wake up in the morning and think how best they can screw over the internet to make a few more bucks for not themselves, but the company they work for. Maybe I'm an optimist.
The point I was trying to get at with the hypothetical is that its quite possible that a lot of Googlers are good people with good intentions and that they are trying to do good.
And in turn everyone is trying to explain that individual intentions in the context of a large organization don’t really matter. The only meaningful choice the well intentioned have is to work for a different company. I couldn’t care less if a Google employee has good intentions, but is willing to hang them up for a paycheck.
No - expressing an opinion is called "freedom of speech", which goes hand in hand with the free market.
You'd be amazed at the number of initiatives launched by the supposed monopoly (Google) failing in the free market. Nacl lost out to wasm. Chrome OS never really took off.
Despite people's gripes about AMP, consumers are clearly loving faster, more responsive websites and hence it's relevance. Let this play out and we'll see where it leads
Also even if you believe in Santa Claus and free markets, people getting on their soapbox to say “this is a terrible idea” is part of the free market.