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Free market? Is that what we call it when one member of the duopoly controlling most email clients decides to embrace and extend the standard? Also even if you

Free market? Is that what we call it when one member of the duopoly controlling most email clients decides to embrace and extend the standard? 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.

mankash666 9y ago
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
- ZephyrP 9y ago
  > No - expressing an opinion is called "freedom of speech" imagine thinking this was a killer counterpoint
  - mankash666 9y ago
    I don't know what a "killer" counter point is, but I do know that it's accurate
- SquareWheel 9y ago
  Isn't ChromeOS very popular in schools? I would assume so based on the sales of Chromebooks anyway. Re: Amp, this topic always leads to people foaming at the mouth on HN. I don't expect to see much actual discussion occur.
- taeric 9y ago
  Strictly, freedom of speech is a political term, not a market one.
alooPotato 9y ago
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.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  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 Hypothetically, you’d be making an assumption at odds with years of anti-consumer behavior.
- pwinnski 9y ago
  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,
  - alooPotato 9y ago
    That was part of my hypothetical, that you actually believe amp for email is good.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  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.

mankash666 9y ago

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

ZephyrP 9y ago
> No - expressing an opinion is called "freedom of speech" imagine thinking this was a killer counterpoint
- mankash666 9y ago
  I don't know what a "killer" counter point is, but I do know that it's accurate
SquareWheel 9y ago
Isn't ChromeOS very popular in schools? I would assume so based on the sales of Chromebooks anyway. Re: Amp, this topic always leads to people foaming at the mouth on HN. I don't expect to see much actual discussion occur.
taeric 9y ago
Strictly, freedom of speech is a political term, not a market one.

alooPotato 9y ago

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.

IntronExon 9y ago
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 Hypothetically, you’d be making an assumption at odds with years of anti-consumer behavior.
pwinnski 9y ago
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,
- alooPotato 9y ago
  That was part of my hypothetical, that you actually believe amp for email is good.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
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.