5 ms·

Job's is dead on. Google's goal is no less than to assimilate every piece of dearly held private information it can find about you to feed you advertising more

by aresant 17y ago

Job's is dead on. Google's goal is no less than to assimilate every piece of dearly held private information it can find about you to feed you advertising more efficiently, all while wiping out the individual industries that have made them popular (real estate's next!). Adobe hasn’t innovated a serious product since flash - it got huge, wiped out the competition through acquisitions and has been producing spammy me-too’s like their media player & mobile devices app ever since. Apple is of course, open to massive criticism themselves, but it’s fun to see Steve throw other monster media companies under the bus!

zitterbewegung 17y ago
Of course if we want to criticize apple in the same way they just want you to have complete and utter vendor lock in but thats almost the same as every other company.
Flankk 17y ago
I fail to see the problem here. All three of these companies produce excellent products. If this weren't the case, you wouldn't be so passionate in your arguments. I mean, your criticisms practically describe their business model.
chrischen 17y ago
Sorry I can't tell if you are sarcastic or not, but in case you're not: what's wrong with being targeted by advertising more efficiently. Theoretically speaking, isn't being targeted by advertising at absolute efficiency being given exactly what you want when you want it? I know in practice we get spammed by noise, but most of that noise is caused by inefficient advertising. But what's wrong with being targeted with something that genuinely piques your interest? People would love to pay for that, because frankly the information we need is not always presented to us right when we need it. Highly efficient advertising is giving people who have something to say, say it to the right person right when they need it. Don't misconstrue this as an endorsement of false or misleading advertising. I think there is the ability for advertising to serve the need to present the right information to the right people at the right time.
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  """Theoretically speaking, isn't being targeted by advertising at absolute efficiency being given exactly what you want when you want it?""" That sounds an awful like going to a webpage, for example Google, typing in a query, and having the results be appropriate and useful. (Roughly, how Google was before it stopped being that and started serving useless shit like dozens of the same mailing list mirrors, shareware download sites and shopping aggregate sites). """Theoretically speaking, isn't being targeted by advertising at absolute efficiency being given exactly what you want when you want it?""" No, because part of the point of advertising is to convince you that you want it. Perfect advertising would be such that whatever they show you, you buy.
  - chrischen 17y ago
    Well targeted advertising is when you're looking for a car, and you get presented with information about cars. Perfectly targeted advertising is when you're looking for a car, and you get presented with information about a car that you buy, but that you would have bought if you spent time doing the research yourself. This is my definition of theoretically perfectly targeted advertising. This is what I think Google is trying to achieve.
    - jodrellblank 17y ago
      But perfect advertising is when you're looking for a car, and you get presented with information about a (more expensive) car that you buy, but that you wouldn't have bought if you spent time doing the research yourself. This is a worse outcome for you, but a better outcome for Google and the manufacturer. I'm not sure if this is possible, presumably if there is something that would convince you to buy it, enough research on your part would hit the same thing and you would buy it anyway - in that case it would be the same as your suggestion - but you wouldn't be doing research on "what's the most expensive car I could possibly convince myself to buy", you would be researching "what's the cheapest" or "the best form/function/cost trade". It still seems like good search results are what you'd want when buying a car, and adverts are what you wouldn't want. What would it take you to get into a state where you skip researching a purchase and take the first advert Google shows you, confident that it would be close to what you'd have found anyway?
angelbob 17y ago
Adobe didn't "innovate" Flash -- it bought it from Macromedia, who bought another company to get it. So apparently you have to go even farther back to find something innovative from Adobe :-)
- cellis 17y ago
  Not true. They made massive optimizations to the JIT compiler as well as Actionscript. It still runs faster than js (even V8) for many pixel intensive operations. Just because the original idea of multimedia was from Macromedia, doesn't mean Adobe didn't innovate on top of it.
  - krakensden 17y ago
    The word innovation has lost all meaning. Improving a JIT compiler in 2005 (or later), by itself, isn't innovation, it's catching up to the state of the art. And saying Actionscript is faster than Javascript for pixel intensive operations is fairly meaningless, because that's not really dependent on the language, it's dependent on how those pixels get pushed to the screen.
    - cellis 17y ago
      I didn't say Actionscript was faster, did I? If you took it that way, allow me to clarify: I meant to say they improved the language, and that the JIT is faster than the chrome JIT.
      - catch23 17y ago
        How is the flash vm faster than v8? It seems like v8 would have a slight advantage since their JIT doesn't produce intermediate code.
- jdowdell 17y ago
  I was one of the first people at Macromedia to talk up FutureWave SmartSketch and CelAnimator. From what I've personally seen, the innovation of the entire Flash Platform under Adobe's stewardship has surpassed even the growth under Macromedia. You don't have to believe it. But that's what I've seen.

by aresant 17y ago

zitterbewegung 17y ago

Of course if we want to criticize apple in the same way they just want you to have complete and utter vendor lock in but thats almost the same as every other company.

Flankk 17y ago

I fail to see the problem here. All three of these companies produce excellent products. If this weren't the case, you wouldn't be so passionate in your arguments. I mean, your criticisms practically describe their business model.

chrischen 17y ago

Sorry I can't tell if you are sarcastic or not, but in case you're not: what's wrong with being targeted by advertising more efficiently. Theoretically speaking, isn't being targeted by advertising at absolute efficiency being given exactly what you want when you want it? I know in practice we get spammed by noise, but most of that noise is caused by inefficient advertising. But what's wrong with being targeted with something that genuinely piques your interest? People would love to pay for that, because frankly the information we need is not always presented to us right when we need it. Highly efficient advertising is giving people who have something to say, say it to the right person right when they need it. Don't misconstrue this as an endorsement of false or misleading advertising. I think there is the ability for advertising to serve the need to present the right information to the right people at the right time.

jodrellblank 17y ago
"""Theoretically speaking, isn't being targeted by advertising at absolute efficiency being given exactly what you want when you want it?""" That sounds an awful like going to a webpage, for example Google, typing in a query, and having the results be appropriate and useful. (Roughly, how Google was before it stopped being that and started serving useless shit like dozens of the same mailing list mirrors, shareware download sites and shopping aggregate sites). """Theoretically speaking, isn't being targeted by advertising at absolute efficiency being given exactly what you want when you want it?""" No, because part of the point of advertising is to convince you that you want it. Perfect advertising would be such that whatever they show you, you buy.
- chrischen 17y ago
  Well targeted advertising is when you're looking for a car, and you get presented with information about cars. Perfectly targeted advertising is when you're looking for a car, and you get presented with information about a car that you buy, but that you would have bought if you spent time doing the research yourself. This is my definition of theoretically perfectly targeted advertising. This is what I think Google is trying to achieve.
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    But perfect advertising is when you're looking for a car, and you get presented with information about a (more expensive) car that you buy, but that you wouldn't have bought if you spent time doing the research yourself. This is a worse outcome for you, but a better outcome for Google and the manufacturer. I'm not sure if this is possible, presumably if there is something that would convince you to buy it, enough research on your part would hit the same thing and you would buy it anyway - in that case it would be the same as your suggestion - but you wouldn't be doing research on "what's the most expensive car I could possibly convince myself to buy", you would be researching "what's the cheapest" or "the best form/function/cost trade". It still seems like good search results are what you'd want when buying a car, and adverts are what you wouldn't want. What would it take you to get into a state where you skip researching a purchase and take the first advert Google shows you, confident that it would be close to what you'd have found anyway?

angelbob 17y ago

Adobe didn't "innovate" Flash -- it bought it from Macromedia, who bought another company to get it. So apparently you have to go even farther back to find something innovative from Adobe :-)

cellis 17y ago
Not true. They made massive optimizations to the JIT compiler as well as Actionscript. It still runs faster than js (even V8) for many pixel intensive operations. Just because the original idea of multimedia was from Macromedia, doesn't mean Adobe didn't innovate on top of it.
- krakensden 17y ago
  The word innovation has lost all meaning. Improving a JIT compiler in 2005 (or later), by itself, isn't innovation, it's catching up to the state of the art. And saying Actionscript is faster than Javascript for pixel intensive operations is fairly meaningless, because that's not really dependent on the language, it's dependent on how those pixels get pushed to the screen.
  - cellis 17y ago
    I didn't say Actionscript was faster, did I? If you took it that way, allow me to clarify: I meant to say they improved the language, and that the JIT is faster than the chrome JIT.
    - catch23 17y ago
      How is the flash vm faster than v8? It seems like v8 would have a slight advantage since their JIT doesn't produce intermediate code.
jdowdell 17y ago
I was one of the first people at Macromedia to talk up FutureWave SmartSketch and CelAnimator. From what I've personally seen, the innovation of the entire Flash Platform under Adobe's stewardship has surpassed even the growth under Macromedia. You don't have to believe it. But that's what I've seen.