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History as a guide, we will look back on this for the tire fire it is. monorepo and projects like Chrome and Android to me look like a company that is trying i

by kev009 10y ago

History as a guide, we will look back on this for the tire fire it is. monorepo and projects like Chrome and Android to me look like a company that is trying its best to hold itself together but bursting out at the seams the same way Microsoft did in the '90s with Windows NT and other projects. Googlers frequently use appeal to authority to paper over the fact that they are basically the new Microsoft.

commentereleven 10y ago
OK, interesting point of view. Can you justify it with examples?
- kev009 10y ago
  That was just my reaction to the article. I saw Google and ACM so thought it would be something good, but in the end I fell victim to the authority click bait. The article is written in a scholarly style, but it is neither academic nor profound. It is the engineering equivalent of an intra-office memo describing how a massive company is going to organize their sales regions and Take Over The World. Imagine for a moment if IBM, Microsoft, or the Department of Defense wrote this exact piece today... would ACM have published it? Would it have made the front page of HN? I simply felt disappointed and expressed that reaction. For examples of Google non-superiority (remember, this is a hacker/entrepreneurial forum, we should seek solidarity in outdoing behemoth entities with agility), I simply encourage you to think for yourself and not put any credence into lore, methodology, or tech simply because it comes out of Google. I see a 1:1 comparison between Android and the non-WinNT kernel Windows releases. Google put a festering pile of code out and allowed handset makers and carriers to basically never patch any type of vulnerability. The permissions model and app over reach are just barely now contained in Android 6... seven years after release. Chrome bundles tons of third party libraries... it's another moving train wreck with enough bodies to somehow deal with the naive vendoring, scope creep, and general upkeep but it's still a nightmare to correctly build and package for an OS. By comparison I have immense respect for the Servo developers who are making an interesting reach with far less resources than Google.

by kev009 10y ago

commentereleven 10y ago

OK, interesting point of view. Can you justify it with examples?

kev009 10y ago
That was just my reaction to the article. I saw Google and ACM so thought it would be something good, but in the end I fell victim to the authority click bait. The article is written in a scholarly style, but it is neither academic nor profound. It is the engineering equivalent of an intra-office memo describing how a massive company is going to organize their sales regions and Take Over The World. Imagine for a moment if IBM, Microsoft, or the Department of Defense wrote this exact piece today... would ACM have published it? Would it have made the front page of HN? I simply felt disappointed and expressed that reaction. For examples of Google non-superiority (remember, this is a hacker/entrepreneurial forum, we should seek solidarity in outdoing behemoth entities with agility), I simply encourage you to think for yourself and not put any credence into lore, methodology, or tech simply because it comes out of Google. I see a 1:1 comparison between Android and the non-WinNT kernel Windows releases. Google put a festering pile of code out and allowed handset makers and carriers to basically never patch any type of vulnerability. The permissions model and app over reach are just barely now contained in Android 6... seven years after release. Chrome bundles tons of third party libraries... it's another moving train wreck with enough bodies to somehow deal with the naive vendoring, scope creep, and general upkeep but it's still a nightmare to correctly build and package for an OS. By comparison I have immense respect for the Servo developers who are making an interesting reach with far less resources than Google.