Sometimes I call the numbers on missing dog posters and just bark into the phone. I learn from the mistakes of those who take my advice.

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Cake day: March 28th, 2024

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  • Because software monocultures are bad. The vast majority of browsers are Chromium based. Since Google de-facto decides what gets in Chromium, sooner or later the downstream forks are forced to adopt their changes. Manifest V3 is a great example of this. You can only backport for so long, especially when upstream is being adversarial to your changes. We need an unaffiliated engine that corrects the mistakes we made with KHTML/Webkit.





  • Nobody will buy the hardware if they can’t commit to supporting the software. In a previous role, I was responsible for advising purchasing decisions for my company’s laptop fleet. The Surface X (Arm edition) looked cool, but we weren’t willing to take the risk, because at the time Microsoft had far worse transitional support than they do now. It’s gotten better, but no one in their right mind is going to make the kind of volume purchases that actually drive adoption until they demonstrate they are in it for the long haul. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and Microsoft doesn’t care what hardware you are using, so long as it is running Windows or using (expensive) Windows services.








  • The KPIs are coming for their Ads Money too. I commented elsewhere about how Search is being bent to the will of Ads, and it’s Raghaven who’s being enabled by Sundar to do it. They’ve been hit with the problem that Ads isn’t growing as expected. Having worked with the new Google Ads dashboard, it’s no wonder why. It’s clunky, the mobile app is missing functionality, and the web app is broken on mobile. Throw on top the constant interruptions due to their AI flagging perfectly normal campaigns, and it’s enough to push people elsewhere. Sundar is the Ballmer of Google, and unless he’s deposed he will drive Google down the path the likes of IBM or Oracle.