2k16 what's the worst enormous tech company?

cool thread!

was wondering what people think of this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/amazon-is-building-global-delivery-business-to-take-on-alibaba-ikfhpyes

feel like coming in last 3 years in a row should be enough to drop microsoft from the running

voting facebook yet again

feel like coming in last 3 years in a row should be enough to drop microsoft from the running

yea oracle is worse than microsoft imo

I want to stick w/ consumer facing companies

Strong competition, as always.

it's not necessarily evil or anything but im blown away by the number of places that still use oracle's peoplesoft w/ interfaces that haven't changed in 10 years

Facebook in being most annoying, but Google in having most potential for evil

I still feel like it's Amazon, although Dominique probably OTM about the most evil lurking under the surface of Google.

Uber is the most obviously assholish.

i feel like any company attached to so a project called Global Supply Chain deserves consideration:

A 2013 report to Amazon’s senior management team proposed an aggressive global expansion of the company’s Fulfillment By Amazon service, which provides storage, packing and shipping for independent merchants selling products on the company’s website. The report envisioned a global delivery network that controls the flow of goods from factories in China and India to customer doorsteps in Atlanta, New York and London. The project, called Dragon Boat, is proceeding, according to a person familiar with the initiative, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public.

...Amazon’s plan would culminate with the launch of a new venture called “Global Supply Chain by Amazon,” as soon as this year, the documents said. The new business will locate Amazon at the center of a logistics industry that involves not just shippers like FedEx and UPS but also legions of middlemen who handle cargo and paperwork associated with transnational trade. Amazon wants to bypass these brokers, amassing inventory from thousands of merchants around the world and then buying space on trucks, planes and ships at reduced rates. Merchants will be able to book cargo space online or via mobile devices, creating what Amazon described as a “one click-ship for seamless international trade and shipping.”

i kind of feel like it is the users that make facebook so shitty, and they are just giving the people what they want

amazon clearly most evil

as usual for me this is a choice between amazon's terrifyingly well-updated 19c-style vertically-integrated ghoulish capitalist totalitarianism in the service of getting you cheap stuff from anywhere by the end of the week even if you live in almost the exact middle of the pacific ocean, and facebook's idealistic innovation in the service of driving you to suicide

they're all bad, what's the point in ranking them

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not sure if this is the best thread for it, but this is an interesting conundrum:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/technology/apple-timothy-cook-fbi-san-bernardino.html

Apple said on Wednesday that it would oppose and challenge a federal court order to help the F.B.I. unlock an iPhone used by one of the two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December.

...The F.B.I. said that its experts had been unable to access data on Mr. Farook’s iPhone, and that only Apple could bypass its security features. F.B.I. experts have said they risk losing the data permanently after 10 failed attempts to enter the password because of the phone’s security features.

...Mr. Cook said the order would amount to creating a “back door” to bypass Apple’s strong encryption standards — “something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create.”

In 2014, Apple and Google — whose operating systems are used in 96 percent of smartphones worldwide — announced that they had re-engineered their software with “full disk” encryption, and could no longer unlock their own products as a result.

That set up a confrontation with police and prosecutors, who want the companies to build, in essence, a master key that can be used to get around the encryption. The technology companies say that creating such a key would have disastrous consequences for privacy.

@mims
Employers can now get alerts when their female employees stop filling their birth control prescriptions http://www.wsj.com/articles/bosses-harness-big-data-to-predict-which-workers-might-get-sick-1455664940

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CbxZMZlXIAAJaPR.jpg

facebook's plan for the next 10 years

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/570d2caa52bcd01a008bc210-997-419/screen%20shot%202016-04-12%20at%201.10.45%20pm.png

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-f8-ten-year-roadmap-2016-4

cant' wait for FB lasers

by what metric are people casting amazon as the worst tech co?

for me it's been facebook for a long time

zuckerberg wants to pull a wechat-style monopoly on the western world/english speaking market

fb/messenger will be the "one app to rule them all"

some dude was operating a drone outside my house last night

should have FP'd him

if you want a picture of the future, imagine amazon.com stopwatching your frantic retrieval of consumer goods from airless warehouses, forever

i'm not putting a vr headset on until i don't have to take it off

It's not just the western world Facebook is after, the whole controversy around Free Basics in India has been interesting. Essentially offering the Internet for free to tens or hundreds of millions of people but acting as a gatekeeper for that free content:

http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/india-says-no-to-facebook-founder-mark-zuckerbergs-free-basics-initiative

smart move, india

the smile.amazon.com thing seems kind of cool, i don't really know how it works but apparently when i buy stuff they donate to NARAL now

Trending:
"Facebook Trending: Leaked Documents Show Guidelines for Maintenance of Facebook Feature"

Write-in vote for Comcast. Fuck you, Comcast.

So I moved recently. At the old place I had AT&T internet but I heard the new place is a Comcast building. I call them on 6/22 to set up service and opt for the self-install.

Kit shows up with my name completely mis-spelled. Need I mention I was a customer less than 3 years ago, and had been several times over the past decade. Need I mention I spelled my name out letter-by-letter when I set up service, and that they somehow have my correct name for my email account. FFS.

Anyways I spend 2 days (w customer service on the phone) trying to get it to work. At the end of the second day they say "it looks like the problem is w the building. We're going to need to schedule a technician to come out". I say okay, great, we pick out Saturday July 3, and in the meantime I start working from Starbucks.

Saturday comes and I got a bill in the mail, with my name mis-spelled of course, due on July 18th. I am waiting for my technician and nobody shows up. About an hour and a half into the technician's window I call them up to ask what is taking so long, and what do you know, there isn't any appointment at all! So right now I am pissed. I am going from manager to manager asking them to put someone on who can send somebody out. They can't do it. It's a holiday weekend. "Would you liked to schedule an appointment?" Fuck lot of good that did the first time!

Eventually I calm down and schedule an appointment. It is for July 19th. Nearly one month after I signed up for service, a day after my first bill is due, they are going to send someone to TRY and get it working. FFS.

When I mention that I have a bill and am not going to pay for service that I have been denied, they tell me I CAN APPLY FOR CREDIT. FFS.

Luckily I found another company to go with, turns out AT&T could do it after all. They set up an appointment 3 days from when I called. I actually got txts on my phone about the upcoming appointment. It was incredible, the concept of customer service having something to do with common courtesy, with valuing my time and investment in their service. Comcast's customer service was DISMAL.

Comcast has been valiantly rebranding as Xfinity, because the very name Comcast now stirs such deep hatred among tens of millions of people who have dealt with them over the decades that mobs of peasants bearing torches and pitchforks spontaneously gather whenever the name "Comcast" is spoken aloud.

Last year, in a fit of pique while recording a payment check to Comcast in our check register, under the name of the check recipient I wrote the notation "Bloodsuckers!" A week later while I was writing another entry in the register I noticed my wife had added the notation "Too right!"

lol nice

http://m.globallegalpost.com/corporate-counsel/hyperloop-one-faces-colossal-lawsuit-from-co-founder-37202632/

Not the worst tech company but it's interesting and idk where to put this:

It's paywalled but the gist is that one of Germany's big success stories in online travel bookings, Unister, which apparently had revenues in the hundreds of millions of Euro, got into financial trouble and the founder started moving money between subsidiaries to avoid creditors and insolvency proceedings. As a last ditch effort to save the company, he agreed to get a €10m loan from an "Israeli diamond dealer" on the understanding that he'd offer €1.5m to cover fees and insurance. The €1.5m was handed over but the first tranche of the loan, which was paid in a hotel lobby in cash, turned out to be made up almost entirely of counterfeit notes. Having discovered this, he chartered a small plane to fly back from Venice to Germany - which crashed in Slovenia, killing everyone on board.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e47a376e-5f04-11e6-ae3f-77baadeb1c93.html#axzz4HNqGAtB3

Not enormous but there was just a story in the news about Instacart -- it basically decided to start keeping its shoppers' tips as a "service fee" or something, but then there was so much outcry they backed down.

It's so obvious that their business model makes no fucking sense whatsoever -- paying a personal shopper even a minimal wage to pick up and deliver your groceries on demand is always going to be too expensive to be anything but a niche service, and it's never going to scale to the point of something like Uber. There's already this thing called Fresh Direct which is hugely more efficient and sells groceries at competitive prices, only difference being you need to have your shit together enough to order like 1 day in advance. Latest attempt to take more money out of workers' pockets seems like probably evidence of that.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe-voco-photoshop-for-audio-speech-editing/

Adobe has demonstrated tech that lets you edit recorded speech so that you can alter what that person said or create an entirely new sentence from their voice. It seems inevitable that it will eventually be referred to as "photoshop but for audio."

want

adobe is the pits

from the pinboard guy: http://idlewords.com/talks/robot_armies.htm

We're now several generations in to this technology, and soldiers now have smaller, portable UAVs they can throw like a paper airplane. You launch them in the field, and they buzz around and give you a safe way to do reconaissance.

The topic in general is pretty depressing to me (like a lot of news these days I guess) but I really do want to play with one of these. Some of that stuff is really headed to the uncanny valley. The guy just goes on and on tho. Bullet points, dude.

Funny how much weirder some of this stuff is than the fictional universe of say Westworld.

"Nothing gives you peace of mind like connecting something inside your body to the outside of your clothing."

gallows lol @ Chad and Brad. Move fast, Chad! Break things, Brad! Ship it ship it ship it now!

http://i.imgur.com/aKPPKki.jpg

Google omits to say that trusting such a machine requires one to trust the experts who constructed it, hold it in their custody, and would be able to alter it without us non-experts understanding what they did or how they did it.

xp only if it looks like that sexy ex machina machine amirite

dirupted machine learning

After I read that Gizmodo article I unplugged my Echo Dot and put it in a drawer

it's still listening tho

its in a drawer in a BAG ok

it can still hear your bag

*hoos receives push notification*

"customers who stuffed their echo dot in this bag also bought:
--128-pack wolf brand chili (no beans)
--good housekeeping (12-month subscription)
--amazon ginsu knife (neck-sized)

"Alexa, what does a hoos bag sound like?"

"shamone"

Genuinely do not know why any of you nutbags voluntarily PAY to have a big tech company spy device in yr homes

http://gsb.haifa.ac.il/~sheizaf/ecommerce/timemagazine/intro.jpg

this was a good read. about things that are awful. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook

reposting from the Weinstein thread, h/t Simon H for catching this: https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valley-s-worst-apologies-of-2017-1821064631

I think the Best Buy one doesn't qualify (they're brick & mortar retail, their corporate hq is in the minneapolis burbs, and they committed a regrettable human error and said so) but there are some really good ones in there. key graf, imo:

As I mentioned earlier, tech companies love to point fingers at machines behaving badly. They spend a lot of time exalting their beloved algorithms as a solution to many of life’s grand problems, but they will not skip a beat before throwing them under the bus for the latest fuck-up. There is a hypocrisy in trying to boost one’s image using the same tools you’re exploiting as a scapegoat.

Was it a resentful AI bot that wrote that

This feels true to me as someone who uses the internet every day, but I also know it’s true because when The Verge partnered with Reticle Research to conduct a representative survey of Americans’ attitudes towards tech’s biggest power players, 15.4 percent of Facebook users said they “greatly” or “somewhat” disliked using the product, while 17 percent of Twitter users said the same. That made them the most disliked of the six companies in question, which also included Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. More than 10 percent of respondents described Facebook’s effect on society as “very negative,” and 10.5 percent said the same about Twitter — in both cases a higher number than the other four companies combined.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16795090/internet-community-2017-post-mortem-tumblr-amino-drip-tinyletter

wow Amino looks like an amazing mess that's so great

cash isn’t a problem for Amino, which raised $1.65 million in Series A funding last year.

most people have no idea of the reach of Google or they'd hate it worse than Facebook

google has useful products though (search engine, mail, drive, docs)

wave

orkut

google has one useful product

then bought another useful product

I thought they developed maps, mail, docs, drive themselves?

o i forgot abt maps

thats true, but i feel like apple maps is better imo

the rest i feel are not that great, like gmail steals all yr info and sells it while something like hotmail/microsoft weirdly enough feels safer

Apple maps is not better.

Apple maps is horrible.

gmail, the useless product used by more than 1 billion people

the way google has insinuated itself into so many enterprise situations should be causing people to scream holy hell

i do scream holy hell maura rly i do

google docs is a great free platform imo, use sheets quite a lot too - better than excel by now, imo

I've no idea why hotmail, which is terrible to use, would be "safer" than gmail, tbh unless you only send encrypted mails (or only send emails to people using encrypted email servers) I don't see the difference (apart from gmail basically being faster and better than outlook

drive also my goto, prefer it to dropbox, great syncing and indexing

I would never use any other maps service than google maps

the way google has insinuated itself into so many enterprise situations should be causing people to scream holy hell

otm

but somehow i know that i won't literally scream holy hell until one of these companies (google, amazon, facebook, apple, microsoft) merges with another.

Android also much better than iOS imo, at least I can do anything faster on an Android device and really enjoy that it's customizable

I hate every google product and do my best not to use any of them

so yeah, the hegemony of google is bad, but their products are simply the best atm imo (unlike FB which is horrible, they're leading the market by chance/being there first)

if only Google paid taxes and didn't have their servers in USA where apparently NSA has a claim to look into any data transfer

why is apple maps bad? i kno they got bad press w the australians who almost went off a cliff or whatever but google maps takes me into dangerous ways all the time in the city

apple takes me through major roadways and it feels easier to drive on those streets

wasnt gmail hacked before? i dont remember hotmail ever being hacked

why is apple maps bad, I dunno, cause it's clumsier, slower and just not as powerful as gmaps, kinda like why is Libre Office not as good as Microsoft Office

Here is a great link why Apple Maps is way behind Google Map:

https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps

all i see there is google overoptimizing probably to gather more data for whatever evil way they want to take over the usa then the world

Google is gathering data at a significantly faster rate than Apple is with regards to Maps. Their machine learning capabilities are significantly above Apple's, which means that Google's is not only gathering more data but able to do more with it.

specifically, more able to sell advertisements against your behavior patterns

are they able to do more w it though? how many people actually use all those little functionalities? its the same w all their failed products

https://www.computerworlduk.com/galleries/it-vendors/google-graveyard-3508070/

machine learning is a fake idea

that google has an absurdly ubiquitous reach or that they have an insatiable thirst for data isn't what's evil about them -- it's their abdication of responsibility of using that power explicitly for the public good. if anything, they should get more data and beef up their ability to analyze such data.

some real fuckin challops itt atm

xp so what's evil about Google is that they are a for-profit corporation and not the state?

they're a de-facto public utility with a duty of care that people looking up cures for tummy aches and global warming don't end up at flat-earth homeopathy sites

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/18/facebook-to-restrict-australian-users-sharing-news-content"> https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/18/facebook-to-restrict-australian-users-sharing-news-content

I think I’ve learned some valuable lessons today about posting on a phone while walking in the city

Does Facebook expect a critical mass of late Xers and Boomers to riot because they can’t see news links on Facebook?

i think they expect news sites will see a drop in traffic

I don’t know if this is just starry-eyed Utopianism but if feels that this move coooould really turn public opinion (here) against the Zuck - which given FBs seeming impregnability thus far is actually an exciting prospect