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My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning," whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the sho
by edw 6y ago
My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning," whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the show. Chrome was the same thing, though the competitor was Microsoft. Google Docs? Same thing, Microsoft again.
Google is good at building things 90% as good as they could be. For Gmail that 90% was leaps and bounds better than the web mail alternatives of 2004 which included…SquirrelMail.
Does Google care that you're switching to Hey or Safari or whatever has replaced Google Sheets? No. Are they going to buckle down at finish the last 10% of all of these products? No. Is that an opportunity for all of us reading this story? Yes.
One way to think of Google's products as the equivalent of Microsoft Write — or Apple's iWork. Google's platform is not Windows or Mac OS or iOS: it is the Internet. Google's products come free in the shrink-wrapped box when you drive to Egghead Software pick a copy of "Internet" up off the shelf.
- an_d_rew 6y ago> ... SquirrelMail ... Oh thank you for that trip down memory lane! Ran my own SquirrelMail servers for years...
- edw 6y agoMe too! It was bundled with OS X server, which I was running on the G4 Cube that got relegated to utility box status when I went all-in on laptop life.
- karmakaze 6y agoYes, but why doesn't Google "run away with the show" themselves while in the lead?
- kccqzy 6y agoIt's a free product. They can spend more money and more engineering resources on a project to improve it, but with little financial results to show. Google has only been very slowly figuring out how to make money from anything other than ads.