> Imagine building an entire business that ceases to be profitable as soon as you can't spy on users.
>I wish we could do the same thing to Google.
You’re assuming Google’s core business would not exist without spying on users and I disagree. You can run a search business and still protect privacy, this is DuckDuckGo’s whole model. This is a fundamental difference between a search product and a social product.
VisiCalc was conceived in 1978, before the internet and all the data that comes with it. Excel has had to catch up with these developments and is finally doing a good job with it.
This is a great idea but the list seems incomplete. For example, where are the email marketing tools? Mailchimp / Intuit, Convetkit, SendFox, and so many more. There are many other markets / verticals not covered here.
> Excel may be the most influential software ever built.
I believe this to be true in business. Other tech may be more widely used eg “email” but the software is created by a variety of different companies (Google, Microsoft).
I signed up for a Codeblog! The Captcha making me pick photos of traffic lights and cross walks to verify my humanity feels like the antithesis of what this article and product is trying to do.
One use case where this does not work: when attempting to learn if someone understood you properly. I find myself asking short, direct questions, often in a managerial capacity, to confirm that other people have the correct understanding. Making a statement and then asking an individual “do you understand?” does not suffice to confirm if someone has the correct understanding.
I feel like a more appropriate name would be “write first, then build”. “Documentation” reminds the product managers and engineers of corporate-y documents like release notes. The “documentation” described is more of a fluid collection of ideas than what we would consider “documentation”. I have found this to be true - “Writing is a way of finding out”.
Google is a large, horizontal platform. My intuition is the next Google killers will be specific to verticals, health comes up on HN a lot. All that to say, if I were yep I would focus on search that avoids big, corporate, SEO stuff and connects users with thoughtful, small creators. I would not focus on commerce eg film, as it’s a crowded vertical full of Google, Shopify, Etsy, and other large e-commerce players.
> We believe the best way to protect user data is to not have it in the first place
I like the exchange of value that comes from paying money for a service. With free products from companies like Google you do not pay for the service and there is no exchange of value. This results in the myriad of HN threads discussing how Google Docs did them wrong (locked out, privacy violation, etc.)
Thank you, very helpful answer. I was not trying to be antagonistic, I had never heard a critique of calendly and wanted to understand how an open source project would improve the situation. I agree, very important to understand how your data is used.
What is your methodology to collect the tech stack data? Some things seem easy to identify, eg Google Analytics, and others much harder, eg back office like Microsoft Excel.
Spreadsheets are one of the most ubiquitous business tools in the world. Similar to email, another ubiquitous business tool, there are good uses and bad uses of the tool. Users need to know when to use them, when to not use them, and when to move onto something more robust.
> So they’re at their best when you have a foundation to build on — a decent number of fixed assumptions atop which you want to see the effect over time or scale of a limited number of variables. See the myriad permutations proliferate from a small number of questions.
In reading this article on finance my mind drifts to the refrain on HN that search (Google) is broken and ready to be disrupted. Can consensus mechanisms on distributed systems help create a less spammy, more equitable search engine?
> a consensus mechanism can be considered as a shared system of standards and steps that allows a distributed system (a group of individuals or computers) to accurately, precisely, and reliably coordinate on shared problems.
> Consensus mechanisms (also known as consensus protocols or consensus algorithms) allow distributed systems (networks of computers) to work together and stay secure.