3 ms·

I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C rather than like Microsoft built Money. Yes, I am disappointed by this move, not because I worry

I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C rather than like Microsoft built Money. Yes, I am disappointed by this move, not because I worry about the travel industry or the potential monopoly power google is holding in its hand. I'm disappointed because Google has yet to re-define the business rules for growth. Allow me to explain. I understand that as a public company, it's Google's responsibility to create values for its shareholders. But that doesn't mean it should keep expanding into anywhere "consumer-facing problem that can be solved with huge amounts of (needs for) computation". Just like Microsoft keeps on expanding into any desktop software market that has a rapid growth. There are so many important questions that are yet to be solved. The search is still a pretty dumb statistics engine. Google still can't distinguish between "who wrote python" and "when was python written?". Wikipedia's Python entry shows up in both cases and other results are irrelevant. Why wouldn't the company who invented "20% time rule" continues to make the web better? Maybe that's the nature of public company and maybe this is just another case where human gets sucked into the rules of wall streets.

hga 16y ago
Perhaps ... but this does fit very well with their stated mission: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." (End of first paragraph at http://www.google.com/corporate/ http://www.google.com/corporate/) There are at least two dimensions to this: "organize and make accessible and useful" and "the world's information". You're complaining about inadequacies in the former, this is a move to expand on the latter. Hmmm, for that matter, they're buying some brainpower that could help them with your specific complaint but also the "organize and make accessible and useful" part of their mission in general.
jmount 16y ago
"I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C." Well you have to remember more of the Unix Wars of the 80s. AT&T tried to sue everybody who had any dialect of Unix. The main thing that stopped that was showing that many of the code segments shared by BSD Unix and SysV Unix were due to AT&T lifting code from BSD (not the other way around). Plus in that era people started removing the C compiler from Unix distros as it was "too valuable" to give away. A very different world than now.
- hga 16y ago
  "AT&T tried to sue everybody who had any dialect of Unix." Perhaps. They started with BSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi), suing the initial commercial BSD vendor and the university proper. They utterly lost when it was shown they hadn't followed the BSD license with BSD code they'd incorpated in their own versions, that had been licensed to others and that were used for their own operations (they were thrown a face saving bone in the settlement that required a relative handful of BSD files to be re-written, but were otherwise skunked). I'm not sure why they stopped doing this, although it's telling that Novell bought UNIX(TM) in the middle of the year in which AT&T settled with Berkeley.

hga 16y ago

Perhaps ... but this does fit very well with their stated mission: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." (End of first paragraph at http://www.google.com/corporate/ http://www.google.com/corporate/) There are at least two dimensions to this: "organize and make accessible and useful" and "the world's information". You're complaining about inadequacies in the former, this is a move to expand on the latter. Hmmm, for that matter, they're buying some brainpower that could help them with your specific complaint but also the "organize and make accessible and useful" part of their mission in general.

jmount 16y ago

"I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C." Well you have to remember more of the Unix Wars of the 80s. AT&T tried to sue everybody who had any dialect of Unix. The main thing that stopped that was showing that many of the code segments shared by BSD Unix and SysV Unix were due to AT&T lifting code from BSD (not the other way around). Plus in that era people started removing the C compiler from Unix distros as it was "too valuable" to give away. A very different world than now.

hga 16y ago
"AT&T tried to sue everybody who had any dialect of Unix." Perhaps. They started with BSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi), suing the initial commercial BSD vendor and the university proper. They utterly lost when it was shown they hadn't followed the BSD license with BSD code they'd incorpated in their own versions, that had been licensed to others and that were used for their own operations (they were thrown a face saving bone in the settlement that required a relative handful of BSD files to be re-written, but were otherwise skunked). I'm not sure why they stopped doing this, although it's telling that Novell bought UNIX(TM) in the middle of the year in which AT&T settled with Berkeley.