I‘ll take it. Even offline backups would be an improvement.
For people worried about having not consented to other peoples backup. They could implement ephemeral-only chats, or backup-excluded chats where both parties have to agree to changes.
It‘s really a pity. Unfortunately the gaming market is so difficult to penetrate. It took MS decades and endless amounts of money. And it’s really shitty for cloud gaming prospects. Likely MS will take it all over the long term and there will be a lack of competition in the space.
Stadia was so far ahead technically. They just needed to invest 15 years and 100 billion in studios and a sub model. Gaming and cloud will be the future. And now they lost one them. I get that it’s really difficult to justify loss leaders for that long but you kind a have to in this case.
It’s funny that Google became so risk averse over the years while MS is just taking massive gambles and spending like they don’t have a care in the world. And MS seems to be doing the right things for them somehow.
I‘m not defending massive tech companies. But in this case it might be a bit different. Back when Larry Page still did interviews he mentioned a couple of times that the concept of cities needs to be rethought. Talking out of my ass I‘m pretty sure that he more or less told Doctoroff to go wild and handed him 100 million.
Alphabet can kind of do this stuff because so far their still growing steadily and a majority of voting shares are with the founders.
So if there is any company I kind of buy, that they didn‘t necessarily have profit as the first priority, it would be Sidewalk Labs. They can always figure that out later.
Worst case they spend a couple hundred millions and nothing came of it. Except many theoretical ideas about city building would have been known to work or not.
Maybe I‘m naive. But imagine you had a gazillion dollars and owned one of the most powerful entities ever. Wouldn‘t you want to try crazy shit that you thought of as a kid. Well Page/Brin can I guess.
I don‘t believe they don‘t care about users per say. It‘s more the fact that they are blessed and cursed with the single most profitable business model the world has ever seen. Nothing is going to beat the profit margins of their ad business. It‘s very hard to then go to other models where the margins are much slimmer.
I still say cloud is their best bet besides ads. They absolutely do have to diversify. Once regulation hits it‘s gonna be tough. So cloud needs to be profitable when ads aren‘t growing 20% yoy anymore.
I don’t know. Take YouTube. For all its faults, it has enabled countless people to make a living, or helped artists get noticed. I personally feel having the option for everyone to publish content without prohibitive cost or other barriers is a massive achievement.
Sure you could go back to selfhosting. But monetization and, more importantly, discovery will not work that way.
Or we go back to the days of yesteryear with vetted and sanitized gatekeepers (also beholden to advertisers) in place.
So yeah. Until there is a empathetic, nuanced AGI/ASI in charge of policing content there’s not gonna be a good solution. That might take longer than a while.
Ironically you are giving Google to much credit. There is no real way to improve enforcement. At this insane scale, and with the extreme level of sophistication from scammers, and the privacy expectation from users it‘s almost impossible to do more than they are. Someone else said it further up. They can‘t just let employees snoop around in personably identifying data. Nor would you want that, right?
The fact is, as bad as Google is sometimes about user privacy and „borg behavior“. Their adversaries (malvertising, spammers, clickfarms, bot-armies, state actors) are so committed to manipulating humans for money and/or influence, that they must be hindered wherever possible. It‘s the war for attention. And it‘s only going to get more intense.
For people worried about having not consented to other peoples backup. They could implement ephemeral-only chats, or backup-excluded chats where both parties have to agree to changes.