I wish Google would just hurry up and buy or copy dropbox.
I don't want to make online backups of my offline data, offline backups of my online data & all that mess. I just want my docs in my dropbox folder, edited with Google docs, Zoho, Word, OO or a hammer n chisel and still available to any of the others when I'm done. No uploading/downloading a mess of files and recording them on tape. If I want another backup, I just want to plug in Time Machine. That's how I do backups. Other people like to do them differently (why? Time Machine works great), they should be able to do their thing.
I don't want to upload/download files via the browser. I don't want files called G.Docs-old-new-good-partial.zip sitting around everywhere. I don't want to think about my files. I especially don't want to think about my files if some of them or on my machine, some of them or on Google, some of them some startup's servers. That last one is a real problem because I need to read Techrunch to hear about them going under in advance and transfer all the files to whatever new startup they're covering.
The cloud isn't replacing the desktop today. No one uses only Google docs or stores documents only in the cloud. People do both. They might always do both. I want a bridge.
The point is still a good one though. The market was fractured when they entered. It is still fractured & it doesn't seem to need Google to stay that way.
"Over-engineering is poison. It's not like doing extra work for extra credit. It's more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don't contradict it."
That's a great way of figuring out how the law is broken."Un-willful" patent infringement shouldn't be stopped. If a patent is likely to be violated without intention, that really means that the (social good) justification for the patent isn't very strong. The only reason it is even illegal is to stop companies from being willfully ignorant but still take advantage of the idea's prior existence.
I think this is a feature (or bug) of capitalism. Capitalism (or socialism for that matter) is a hard to use term. No one agrees on its real meaning. Free is definitely a premise. Honest, I'm not sure. I think many free marketers argue that honesty is one of the emergent qualities of markets.
There is a capitalist core though. I think that core says that the non-market system (governments, societies, etc.) need to make sure that things are free. Emergent order will take care of the rest. Incentives & feedbacks will make sure (via the mechanism described above) that transactions are profitable for all parties, that they are safe & that they are otherwise ethical. Honesty is usually included in this.
Again, when I say 'usually included,' it's hard to nail down what I mean. Most people have obviously never considered this particular aspect. They use think in more general terms. But the Capitalism-as-philosophy guys (Libertarians in the US, Austrian-schoolers or Liberals some other places), would consider honesty as something that emerges, part of capitalism.
I mean Keiretsu has an incentive to listen to as many applications as possible. Your right about startups having incentives too. However, Keiretsu have all the information. hey have an incentive to keep it that way.
Investors, on the other hand, play the game more regularly. It's impossible to keep the information from them long term. If they had to pay to come, they would need to be finding good investments. Startups don't have this feedback, at least not without things like public complaints.
That is where the problem comes in. Something like that needs to surface. If it is a huge bank, people would know. If it a little 'broker' people might not. What Jason is trying to do is bring this to the surface. He attempts to be part of the process by which 'people realised that no more loans were being given out" so that they stop applying for loans, except with investment.
I hope I am not being voted up because people think I'm saying nothing morally problematic is going on. I meant to offer support to the grandparent comment.
There is such a thing as an immoral yet free transaction.