ZShakespeare posted:

Can android do gapless music playback yet? I never understood why my sandisk MP3 player from 2003 could handle it but not an android smartphone.

PleasureKevin posted:

did you root and install app2sd and mp32sd

LastInLine posted:

it claims to but doesnt do it properly

cremnob posted:

ive got a massive rock hard woody because of this EU anti trust case (and also into android too lkmao). google is hosed

cremnob posted:

uh this is a big deal and the fact that it got to this point at all and wasn't settled shows just how much bite there is. and the android investigation is an even bigger deal

fishmech was wrong

poty posted:

can someone get a google plus mod out of the ballpool to look at the flagged reviews https://plus.google.com/u/0/105900044828587807365/about?hl=en&gl=ch

this is assuming they employ humans to look after the content on their systems instead of a lovely algorithm

The Management posted:

that article had some good points but I think the best one is about the stock. I don't think people realize how much a rising stock is important for employee retention. why would your best employees work for you when they could be working at a place where their RSUs appreciate while vesting? that's the real brain drain issue.

poty posted:

can someone get a google plus mod out of the ballpool to look at the flagged reviews https://plus.google.com/u/0/105900044828587807365/about?hl=en&gl=ch

this is assuming they employ humans to look after the content on their systems instead of a lovely algorithm

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

if you do a five year investigation and come out guns blazing, yeah, there must really be some good anti-trust dirt under there

but

the worst-case scenario is a slap on the wrist. google is not going to be devastated by having to pay a fine and un-bundle some businesses in the eu.

poty posted:

no, ban cremnob

The Management posted:

I don't believe the euros have the strength to do anything other than impose a tax on google for being successful and some limp wristed action that will accomplish nothing. the U.S. knows that once they get a taste for protectionistantitrust action against successful American companies they will find a way to go after all of the big ones, and should be making it clear that anyone from Airbus to Volkswagen could find themselves in front of an American antitrust panel if this continues

Nintendo Kid posted:

remember Windows N? the version of Windows that you can technically buy but noone uses because it costs the same as regular Windows but makes you download media player seperately?

that's the absolute most google will be subjected to in europe. probably implemented as a "click here european" link on the google homepage that noone uses after they notice it's harder to access Maps through it.

Nintendo Kid posted:

remember Windows N? the version of Windows that you can technically buy but noone uses because it costs the same as regular Windows but makes you download media player seperately?

that's the absolute most google will be subjected to in europe. probably implemented as a "click here european" link on the google homepage that noone uses after they notice it's harder to access Maps through it.

Nintendo Kid posted:

remember Windows N? the version of Windows that you can technically buy but noone uses because it costs the same as regular Windows but makes you download media player seperately?

that's the absolute most google will be subjected to in europe. probably implemented as a "click here european" link on the google homepage that noone uses after they notice it's harder to access Maps through it.

rjmccall posted:

they could be forced to negotiate differently with european oems

i'm sure there's a novelty state-supported oem with a 3% market share in portugal which will happily benefit from this

Nintendo Kid posted:

all those oems shipping the google.com website

quote:

I agree with many of the sentiments of this thread that Google does not culturally instill a need to develop a market (online SEM, SEO content, viral techniques, social seeding of "influencers", PR, etc...).

Many ex-Googlers believe that technology is the driving force in the initial success of a startup. This is usually wrong and especially wrong in the world of genuinely social products (Facebook, Twitter, Quora, FriendFeed, Blippy, Path.io, etc...) which are some of the most important things happening on the web today.

I think there is another way to phrase this which is primarily a more general observation of the same thing. Most Googlers joined the company long after the product/market fit was achieved and Google's end-user PMF didn't significantly change over time as the revenue model was discovered.

Other companies like PayPal had lots of early employees before something which was the eventual business was really "working". As such, they built a culture that was involved in the navigation to get to PMF and were exposed to a lot of important learnings in the process.

Facebook had great PMF from the start, but the product has navigated so quickly that the core/important parts of the initial product might be necessary foundationally, but not as directly linked to the eventual way FB really builds a scalable (read massive multi-billion dollar) revenue model.

quote:

I'd suggest that a lot of ex-Googlers, especially product managers, have too much faith in "product" and not enough experience, trust, or even value the art and science of marketing. At Google, they never had to think about marketing problems - the user would just come, and if the user didn't come (SearchWiki, Google Answers, Wave, Orkut ex-{Google, Brazil, India}, Base, Lively), they could just chalk it up as "an experiment", and move onward. Product Marketing Managers at Google are largely limited to supporting Product Managers, who really do rule the roost and are the "stars", for better or worse.

One could contend this is simply a part of Google's DNA and is part of what's made them so successful - which might be true. But I think that there is a general lack of insight into marketing problems in the early idea-brainstorming phase of a startup. A PM will rush into creating a (potentially wonderful and well-designed) product like FriendFeed or Aardvark without adequately thinking deeply about branding, user acquisition, messaging, relationship marketing, etc. It's mostly a result of ignorance into what marketing is really about at a high-level, not a lack of ability.

I predict in the longer-term, you'll see more startups come out of Google's cache of product marketeers.

quote:

Alex's answer is a good start, but there are some additional key distinctions:

a) The number 1 reason consumer Internet startups fail is lack of customer adoption. Normal Americans are busy, with families, jobs and other obligations and they are already bombarded by 3,000 commercial messages per day. The skill to cut through this clutter and become a site that the average American uses on a frequent basis is very rare. (Best estimates are that a normal user uses only 7 sites frequently.) Almost nobody hired at Google after 2000 has any demonstrated ability in this discipline.

b) In addition, after Google became successful, the type of candidate who applied and was hired shifted from the entrepreneurial to the smart yet homogeneous type. (Shift was pronounced by 2005.) As I have observed previously, only disruptive people create disruptive companies. (Stated differently, great entrepreneurs do not tolerate rules and constraints very well). Google has screened out personalities of this sort since at least 2004 and maybe since 2002.

c) Insofar as there are successful startups from this pool, it is fascinating that all of them were founded by corporate development and sales ops folks, not the engineers or product managers which attract so much attention and money.

quote:

It's 95% related to hiring. Google's formula puts a high value on people that have excelled in institutionalized environments, whether that's school or other prominent corporations. This practice has worked for generations at financial services companies and large global companies but it's a recipe for failure in innovation. Google now pays a huge premium to acquire or acqui-hire companies that don't follow these practices but then they have a hard time retaining those employees once the financial incentive is gone. In all, Google needs to blow up their hiring process, get rid of resumes and be much more tenacious about finding innovative thinkers if they want to innovate from within.

quote:

Google fundamentally believes that product is everything and that humans don't really matter. (Part of the reason they keep screwing up social.)

In order to get consumer adoption in today's environment, it has to be baked into the product from the beginning. You need to give marketing thought to what will get people to come back, what will get people to share, etc. Google has a strong and artificial distinction between product management and product marketing.

If you're talking about increasing users, increasing usage, etc, which are the fundamental goals of product marketing, that needs to be tied into product development.

Google employees have been fooled by their success to some extent. Google can launch a product, put out a blog post and get worldwide coverage and hit all of the blogs. But once you step outside Google the entity, the product you launch won't get nearly that kind of attention.* (Ex-Googlers will be able to get more attention than most due to pedigree.)

* While Google has been able to get a ton of attention, many of these hyped things like Wave, Google Squared, go nowhere because the adoption mechanisms weren't thought through.

cremnob posted:

art and science of marketing

cremnob posted:

google is institutionally not capable of real innovation because they dont actually know how to make successful products/businesses. their entire history as a company has been hitching services to their one successful product in search (and even that was a mega fail for google+). its obvious that larry/sergei/eric decided early on that engineers were more important than anything else which is why they are incapable of ever executing with any product they make. i can just imagine the typical technology company nerd meme against marketing or MBAs and google has made that a core part of their culture lmao

HAIL eSATA-n posted:

marketing is a legitimate thing
it's advertising that's shameful and wrong

Wild EEPROM posted:

b
a
n

c
r
e
m
n
o
b

cremnob posted:

Wild EEPROM posted:

b
a
n

c
r
e
m
n
o
b

cremnob posted:

the fines are not even the important part. the important part is changing business practices. busting up the MADA agreements so google cant include google search, youtube, etc on every phone would destroy the entire purpose of android as a defense cause then microsoft can bid to be the default search engine or outlook to be default email (or any other startup competing with any google service). making it so google cant just decide to enter into any vertical like flight search or local listings and promote their own product to the top/penalize competitors directly affects their bottom line. its also cool and good cause google wants to get into insurance as well

vestager is owning so far and shes doing all the right things. she's limited the initial complaint to product search where they probably have the strongest evidence and is easy to understand and argues there is consumer harm (even though in europe antitrust laws are about ensuring competition). shes on a tour in washington DC about the case to get in front of the criticisms that this is "anti-american" (which is really funny cause apparently 1/3 of the complainants are american tech firms)

Progressive JPEG posted:

Forgot about blippy lol

Nintendo Kid posted:

lol you're going to kill yourself when the case wraps in 10 years with a slap on the wrist