Evil Tech Company

Recently I've been reminiscing about the good-old-days, a simpler time when things were clear - you might remember those times; Microsoft was Evil, Apple was rubbish, innovations seemed to occur month on month, and Google - who were they.

These days things are much more complex. In the wake of the News International phone hacking scandal, I've been trying to figure out which technology company is now the most evil - although I've kept this really simple.

Microsoft; do they still hold the crown?
Historically they tried to stifle the open source movement. Subsequently they've started to release a few open source projects themselves.

Apple;
Being judge and jury on apps released to users, seemingly preventing or delaying competitors from offering apps on Apple devices. There Mac OS is based on Linux, and whilst they have a few open source projects I think its fair to say people generally consider Apple to take much more than they give back.

Google;
Whilst compiling street view data, Google's vehicles recorded wifi traffic from homes and businesses as they passed by. Google appear to give-back to the open source community much more than Microsoft and Apple, but lets be fair here - Google use alot of free software, and whilst there contributions to some projects are large, in other projects they clearly aren't feeding back many contributions.

I think it's fair to say that there isn't a saint among these large companies - certainly things are much more complex than they used to be.

Google Plus - hang out, watch a movie

So I've been playing with Google Plus, and played with the hang-out feature a couple of times. What strikes me about this feature is that it enables the people in the hangout to all watch YouTube clips together. I thought this was a good idea, but stopped way to short - friends want to hangout and watch movies and other things together, not clips of people destroying the latest Apple gadget. So I thought I'd give it a whirl and it was much simpler than I thought...

Google+

So I've been on Google+ for a fair few days know, and I am kind-of liking it - although I am using it more like facebook currently. Whenever I go to "near me", those users are actually miles away. I like the fact that I've found it more reliable in this testing period than I find facebook most weeks - so I think its looking good.

Obviously it's only ever going to be as good as the number of users it can attract, and that currently is the ceiling I'm hitting - I'm inviting people and they join but barely use it, since they've got few friends on the service or because they don't want to use another social site. And there lies the challenge - and I'm not sure Google have done enough to attract the happy-with-facebook group...

It's taken Google a while to truly enter this race, and honestly the race has only just started - Google need to pull a game changing innovation out of a hat - here's hoping!

Yet another blog!

For years I've been starting and abandoning various personal websites and blogs, and having registered an account with Blogger some time ago I figure it's about time I actually blogged something. So here goes.... the latest in a long line of my blogs which will no doubt be abandoned at some point...