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Yup, I read about that on Wikipedia, but I can't help but not care. If a company touts massive initiatives and then gets bogged down in lawsuits, it seems like

by voisin 4y ago

Yup, I read about that on Wikipedia, but I can't help but not care. If a company touts massive initiatives and then gets bogged down in lawsuits, it seems like they didn't do the basic due diligence to avoid that. (Uber, AirBNB, and others seem to also have these headwinds, though not to the extent that it led to permanent paralysis, so maybe Google made a bet they thought they'd win and then didn't, whereas these other companies did.). I can't help but wonder why, with Google's resources vs. Uber or AirBNB, they couldn't keep moving forward if they wanted to. Strike deals, pay people, whatever. If it matters (i.e. if it involved ads) they would have done it. Given Google's behaviour since the end of their period of true innovative excellence, I don't cut them much slack.

twicetwice 4y ago
This well-written article, "Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria"[0], might change your mind on that. I found it to be a compelling and tragic story. Edit: actually, I think this would make a good submission. Looks like it hasn't been posted since 2017. [0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...
- yourad_io 4y ago
  This was a great read and indeed quite tragic > People have been trying to build a library like this for ages—to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up. Could have been great but it wasn't perfect for everyone so it was scraped because surely Congress would take up this noble quest...

by voisin 4y ago

twicetwice 4y ago

This well-written article, "Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria"[0], might change your mind on that. I found it to be a compelling and tragic story. Edit: actually, I think this would make a good submission. Looks like it hasn't been posted since 2017. [0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...

yourad_io 4y ago
This was a great read and indeed quite tragic > People have been trying to build a library like this for ages—to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up. Could have been great but it wasn't perfect for everyone so it was scraped because surely Congress would take up this noble quest...