Instagram and WhatsApp were far from bets. Both were growing exponentially. Both were serious threats to Facebook's money machine.
Facebook used their lucky cash cow money to eliminate the threat, by offering way more than any reasonable market value. Absolutely crazy money. An offer they couldn't resist, especially the investors.
No bet, just an ice cold rational calculation. Anyone wealthy and crazy enough could have done the same. No skills needed, no risks involved. It's like betting tomorrow will be another day.
In a lot of use cases you only need to change the host name. https://dns0.eu/ or dns0.eu is not that difficult to remember.
The ip addresses are indeed not memorable, but users who change the settings of their routers won’t have too much trouble copy and pasting an IP address once or twice. Save it in a password manager and you’re done.
Bureaucracy has nothing to do with it, it’s a matter of resources.
I don’t trust Apple. Looking at the company’s modus operandi in China - and Hong Kong - tells me more than enough. And by extension, the treatment of Jon Stewart. And I write this in Safari on my iPad. So no, I don’t hate Apple.
I'm a bit surprised how many hardware are supported: https://iostindex.com/?filter0Availability=Available,DIY . It's like a whole new world of names: estim machine, rabbit, bra vibrator, twerking butt deluxe, night howler, kinikat ... Even the Microsoft Xbox controller made the list.
> I was itching for this announcement, not because I want to buy an iPhone, but because this will finally mean other manufacturers will start to make compact phones.
There are plenty of compact and competent phones. A Samsung A40 for example is barely larger than this new iPhone SE, but has a 5.9 inch display. A friend wanted a smallish smartphone and she's quiet happy with the form factor.
Google's main business is advertising, search is just one of the vehicles to deliver the ads. Google wants you to see, watch and click as many ads as possible. The top search results are all ads and look very similar - more than ever - to real search results. And than you have Youtube, a gorefest of ads and unfiltered comments, with creators begging for likes and subs.