4 ms·

I'm sure they wouldn't mind the G diaspora going out and documenting all of the Secret Sauce at great length, then. After all, the things which prop up all of

I'm sure they wouldn't mind the G diaspora going out and documenting all of the Secret Sauce at great length, then. After all, the things which prop up all of that web searching, web indexing, and all of that "original stuff" inside is pretty great. So, come on, share them. "Indeed, many of the same interoperability benefits that the FTC and others have touted in the SSO context also occur when one firm publishes information about an otherwise proprietary standard and other firms then independently decide (whether by choice or of necessity) to make complementary investments to support that standard in their products. " I mean, that is, before those people get hired by Facebook or whatever and then make a newer version of the same thing and open source it. What happens when the secret sauce isn't secret any more, and the people who made it have moved on?

beedogs 14y ago
What happens when the secret sauce isn't secret any more, and the people who made it have moved on? Sun Microsystems happens: a decade of stagnation followed by a quick and brutal collapse.
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  Fair enough. I like using SGI as an example, especially given that G moved into their campus right there. There are still a few reminders of that which came before, like the plaque in the park, and until a few years ago, a list of conference room names: superscalar, pipeline, etc. I understand that SGI had a whole wing of building 40 set up for customer demos. G turned it into a bunch of interview rooms named after programming languages. Well, that is, until 2011. Apparently it's been turned into a huge customer demo room again if my mol^H^H^Hsources are to believed. There's a lot of eye rolling any time I ask about it.
  - beedogs 14y ago
    Wow, good call actually. SGI were doing amazing things in the early-to-mid 90s and then... linux workstations? I never understood that one.
    - antidoh 14y ago
      They were in the workstation business, and couldn't raise their head up out of that rut.
fpgeek 14y ago
Your analogy is broken on many levels. No one is alleging that anyone hired Apple employees to learn iPhone and iPad secrets (which is what the Google diaspora documenting the Secret Sauce would be) or stole Apple's trade secrets in other ways. For that matter, no one is even alleging that anyone reverse-engineered an iPhone in these cases (even though that is generally legal). That was obviously not required to reproduce the behavior as issue (e.g. universal search, slide-to-unlock, phone number and other "data detection). Instead, at most, we're talking about someone looking at the external behavior of an iPhone (something publicly available for Google's search engine) and trying to incorporate parts of that behavior they found useful. In many cases, we're not even talking about that. After all "universal search" is the Android analog of Google Desktop Search, released a couple of months before Apple applied for the patent (Oct 2004 vs Dec 2004), plenty of smartphones detected phone numbers before anyone outside Apple had seen an iPhone, slide-to-unlock was anticipated by Neonode and so on. For Google's behavior to be analogous to Apple's, they'd have to be suing someone for copying Google Instant, the way they surface interesting links from a search result, copying Android's Intents (I think they're actually collaborating with Mozilla and others on a copy) or something like that. Last I heard, they're not doing anything like that.

beedogs 14y ago

What happens when the secret sauce isn't secret any more, and the people who made it have moved on? Sun Microsystems happens: a decade of stagnation followed by a quick and brutal collapse.

rachelbythebay 14y ago
Fair enough. I like using SGI as an example, especially given that G moved into their campus right there. There are still a few reminders of that which came before, like the plaque in the park, and until a few years ago, a list of conference room names: superscalar, pipeline, etc. I understand that SGI had a whole wing of building 40 set up for customer demos. G turned it into a bunch of interview rooms named after programming languages. Well, that is, until 2011. Apparently it's been turned into a huge customer demo room again if my mol^H^H^Hsources are to believed. There's a lot of eye rolling any time I ask about it.
- beedogs 14y ago
  Wow, good call actually. SGI were doing amazing things in the early-to-mid 90s and then... linux workstations? I never understood that one.
  - antidoh 14y ago
    They were in the workstation business, and couldn't raise their head up out of that rut.

fpgeek 14y ago

Your analogy is broken on many levels. No one is alleging that anyone hired Apple employees to learn iPhone and iPad secrets (which is what the Google diaspora documenting the Secret Sauce would be) or stole Apple's trade secrets in other ways. For that matter, no one is even alleging that anyone reverse-engineered an iPhone in these cases (even though that is generally legal). That was obviously not required to reproduce the behavior as issue (e.g. universal search, slide-to-unlock, phone number and other "data detection). Instead, at most, we're talking about someone looking at the external behavior of an iPhone (something publicly available for Google's search engine) and trying to incorporate parts of that behavior they found useful. In many cases, we're not even talking about that. After all "universal search" is the Android analog of Google Desktop Search, released a couple of months before Apple applied for the patent (Oct 2004 vs Dec 2004), plenty of smartphones detected phone numbers before anyone outside Apple had seen an iPhone, slide-to-unlock was anticipated by Neonode and so on. For Google's behavior to be analogous to Apple's, they'd have to be suing someone for copying Google Instant, the way they surface interesting links from a search result, copying Android's Intents (I think they're actually collaborating with Mozilla and others on a copy) or something like that. Last I heard, they're not doing anything like that.