info
Oops Sorry, I’ve broken the TelstraClear website again.
Google and Facebook grow comfortable and complacent
Nick Bilton thinks Facebook and Google are slow to get mobile — several meanings of ‘get’ intended — because the engineers and managers there are relatively sessile (go look it up):
Nick Bilton via NYTimes.com
I have a theory on why they both have been slow to capitalize on the shift to mobile.
It’s that working at these companies is like going to work on an all-inclusive cruise ship. The analogy is apt in terms of the luxury — and the isolation.
An employee’s day often begins with a comfy shuttle bus whisking him or her to work in Silicon Valley. The buses have Wi-Fi, so laptops are put to work before anyone arrives on the sprawling campuses.
Once there, dozens of free breakfast options await. Free buffet lunches break the monotony of the day. There is free dinner, too. There are free snacks for those peckish between meals. (The stuff that’s bad for you is on the hard-to-reach lower shelves.)
All of this is wonderful for the employees — and of course well deserved — but these perks could be stultifying. At some of these Silicon Valley businesses, there is no reason to leave the office.
There are on-campus gyms. Day care. Massages. Dry cleaning. Car rentals. (At the Google offices, some of the toilets even have heated seats.)
Sadly, this isn’t how the rest of the world works.
Most people actually have to leave their offices to get coffee. While wandering out into the real world, we unfortunates tend to do a lot with our mobile phones.
We look for new restaurants, check in with location-based apps, share short pithy updates about things we’ve seen in this outside world, and take pictures of food and sunsets.
I’m betting that the Googlers and Facebookers don’t see as much outside, since all these perks are meant to keep people working as long as possible.
Perhaps there is something even more powerful at work, here: the self-centered, self-important mindset that is engendered in these world-beater companies tends to encourage a strong tie to the period of time when the companies became successful, which is three to five years ago. These companies — like Microsoft and Yahoo before them — became mired in the past, like mammoths and saber-tooth tigers sinking in the La Brea tar pits.
The beginning of the end of Google was when it adopted all that fancy-schmancy Wall Street talk in the mid-2000s, putting a unique ‘Don’t be evil’ culture firmly into second place. As for Facebook, its acceptance now that bugs are normal (as Yahoo! once did, and as Google does today), as it tries, too, to become yet another firm playing the corporate game (in this case, becoming an advertising company).
Disappearing photo albums on Facebook Upload an album on to Facebook, caption every photo, nek minnit … album gone. It still appears in my journal, but goodness knows where Facebook puts them. Not the first time this has happened, either.
Missing Someone’s tinkering on Facebook again.
YouTube loves Tanya Roberts This is getting ridiculous. These Tanya Roberts videos are regularly in YouTube search results now, no matter what you search for. Then I remember YouTube is owned by Google, who are obviously not very good at this search thing.
Facebook errors—and that’s just the last five minutes I haven’t been able to “like” anything outside of Facebook for days, and yesterday, neither my colleague Simone Knol nor I could post a YouTube link. Tonight, in addition to the above problems, I can’t manually paste links in. Facebook comes up with a variety of excuses (above). Go on to Twitter, and I see netizens with Facebook problems of all sorts—in all manner of languages. The site is really conking out of late as they strive to make things worse and worse.
Google News has no news Google News is messing up again. After about a year of failing to deliver anything via email with source:Lucire, it’s no longer finding news for one of my personalized categories. Google, does nothing ever work as you say on the tin?
Dragged into the 2010s The last time I got a new computer (as opposed to the team) was 2009, so getting dragged into 64-bit land as 2012 dawned brought with it quite a big jump for me.
Here’s a wee list of things to note for others who might be upgrading, based on the things I had to do.
I managed to salvage my old hard drive, which made life a lot easier. I could shift files over to the new one, and use the old one for a dual-boot set-up.
Day 1
Get clips for the second (old) hard drive, which the retailer forgot to give to me.
Think about what to install. The scanner software was first, since it was a recent purchase and I remembered where the installation discs were.
I needed Firefox and McAfee on there quick-smart. Then I set about getting the rest in there. FontLab, WordPerfect, SFTP programs, other bits and pieces.
Delete the Arial family, or, at least, render it lost in the registry.
Get the printer drivers, which weren’t easy to find from the legit Epson site. I had to go to another country’s to find one for a 2003-era printer.
Install the Oracle VirtualBox as there are some programs I need from the 32-bit days.
Make sure the fonts from the old system are on the new one.
Whole bunch of Windows Updates. I let Internet Explorer 9 on, thinking the bug from March 2011 would be fixed. I was wrong (why do I continue to have faith in these people?). I remove Internet Explorer 9, and in the process it messes up Firefox. Firefox now has to run in Windows XP compatibility mode.
Day 2
Ubuntu 11 failed to install using Wubi. Reset the computer several times.
Downloaded Linux Mint 12 to see if that would work. It doesn’t.
Still making sure the fonts are the same on all systems.
Another trial of IE9, after reading some so-called fixes. None of the fixes work. IE9 just doesn’t display. Obviously Microsoft never tested it before launching it.
Watched the Windows 7 introductory videos. Clever. Learned a few more tricks. They are worth watching.
Day 3
Adobe Acrobat won’t print—I can’t install the old v. 7 that I had. This is a bug going back to 2008. So I had to get Tracker Software’s PDF viewer.
Word 97 might be useful for copying and pasting. They never made a better one after that. WordPerfect peaked decades ago, but it’s still more usable than Word.
I realized I was missing the drivers for the motherboard and downloaded the whole set. Make sure you have all the drivers.
Finally get the fonts the same on each computer at the office.
Amazed at the speed as I find I am waiting less for the computer to catch up with my moves.
Oh, that’s right. Tell Google Ads Preferences Manager to naff off. Then put in a whole bunch of cookies to block.
Tested an alpha for Firefox, just because I can.
Downloaded Ubuntu 10.
Day 4
Ubuntu 10 loads properly. Hooray! Lesson: never get the latest as it will be full of bugs. But it won’t pick up my screen resolution, so other than a brief play, it’s back into Windows-land.
Figure out where your Firefox bookmarks are on your old system, copy the file into the new directory, and rename it with today’s date. Then get Firefox to import them.
I am told of a fix for my Firefox 9 by one of the Mozilla techs after giving some v. 12 feedback, so I no longer need to run it in compatibility mode. Instant karma, within 24 hours.
Weekend now. I might just have to see how this computer performs for entertainment.
Timeline disintegrates Timeline used to be cool, till they let everyone else on it.
Three weeks ago, they introduced an extra friends’ box for no reason, cluttering up the design.
Around the same time, they stopped showing Tumblr and Friendfeed posts individually, and live, relegating them to an end-of-month position.
Then they stopped letting me use Limited Profile. I discover, through my own efforts, that Facebook lists no longer work if you add a fan page to it.
Then I could no longer move a photo to its designated spot in an earlier year: in fact, Facebook gets confused as to when I uploaded it.
Then I discover Facebook will no longer record my likes and display my Tweets, even though I have the Twitter app updated with Timeline.
Now I discover that all Facebook will show is the above. No more Timeline.
Sam has it worse And you guys thought I had it bad on Facebook. Who programs this stuff in to the site?
