I worked as a crab fishermanin Alaska and we fished for other things sometimes in the off season such as cod or halibut. On time the company we worked for decided to try fishing for octopus using similar methods to how we harvested other fisheries. After about a week or two we all pretty much mutinied and refused to do it anymore. Don't get me wrong we were cold blodded killers of much marine life, I'm sure we massacred millions of fish and such in our time, but there was something about Ocupus we just couldn't do it. It didn't help that the money was shit for octopus at the time, but it didn't matter really for some reason most of us were deeply affected and uncomfortable with killing octupus in exchange for money.
I feel like Steam, although the practice is successful for them, is pushing all consumerism in this direction. I defer all my gaming purchases until they come on sale on Steam. I can't help it, by this point I have been trained to act this way. So much so, that is almost Pavlonian.
This is the Frankenstein problem these type of apps have. You see it in stuff like SharePoint or G+, the horror stems from trying to do much, no matter how well you do the core things, the amalgamation is horrific to behold, unfocused, a sprawling tapestry of decay. People forget that Dr. Frankenstein selected the most beautiful parts to create the monster, it wasn't meant to be a horror it was meant to be a Promethean.
" How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! -- Great God! ... I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart..."
An interesting anecdote about the Google Search Appliance, a bunch of companies complained about them in the beginning because they conflated "search intranet" with "search file shares" and of course Page Rank is not as effective on file shares as it is on web based systems.
Everyone is talking about the value of WhatsApp's social network to advertisers, but I thought one of the key points of WhatsApp was that it was a paid service and they collect no data on you specifically because they aren't interested in selling ads. [http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/06/why-we-dont-sell-...] Should people who bought into the idea that they were not the product be looking for a new paid WhatsApp like product?
But don't they have to collect the data about you because law? (to use the newly allowed English construct ;)).
Also, in the blog post they didn't explicitly stated that they don't collect data; they wrote that they just don't care about it much when thinking about product development.
Watching the things the ASP.NET team has accomplished inside such a politically poisoned organization as Microsoft over the last few years has been inspiring. I don't know how they managed to get things like "out of band" updates, open sourcing MVC, and so on accomplished in that environment. Makes me think there is hope for getting some similar changes through in my current "enterprise" environment.
Developing on the ASP.NET stack is nothing like it was in 2001, or even 2011. I used to loathe ASP.NET, but what MS has done has really emboldened the dev community to contribute some really great OSS solutions.
