2 Code OR NOT TO Code is the big question!!

The world is at war, its not about oil, nuclear weapons or power, its about whether or not one should code. Jeff Atwood on his legendary blog Coding Horror argues that coding is not an essential life skill. He seems to have been pissed off initially by an NYC Mayor, and hence these reactions. The article has made all the buzz in the world, and the world has been thrown into a flame war.

His post has seen some real criticism. The all time great Zed Shaw (in)famous for his essays/rants, has his words against Mr. Atwood here. A google employee has brought up that a jury member hearing  the google vs oracle litigation, knew coding hence he could make better and well informed decision, thus making a point why everyone should learn coding. Another story that has crept up is that of a man telling how he used his programming skills for the first time, to write macro instead of manually putting file names in an excel spreadsheet and argues that programming should be learnt by all, as it might save time for even non software professionals.  Well, another major story is of a french designer who designed codeyear, he seems to have got offended since Jeff used his design, and the designer is out there to defend himself.

First lets answer two basic questions.

Q1. What is the purpose of programming?
The purpose of programming is to create a set of instructions that computers use to perform specific operations or to exhibit desired behaviors.

Q2. What is involved in the process of Programming?
The process of writing source code often requires expertise in many different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms and formal logic.

(all the above from wikipedia)


Lets talk a little about Mr. Atwood's post. His post reflects the anguish when he sees *every tom, dick and harry* indulging into programming when its unrelated to their domain, and he is correct.
The whole software world has revolved around the pragmatic unix philosophy "Do one thing and do it well". This would seem very useful if we extend it to our lives as well. I don't see Barack Obama, or for that matter Michael Schumacher having any gains when they learn programming. I am sure they don't, its not related to their domain.

Saying the above i don't intend to mean, none should learn programming. If it interests WHY NOT? All the great programmers were once driven by this charm. As mentioned in answer to Q2, programming involves expertise and the application skills, which not everyone can have unless and until they invest time, building the required skill sets.

I seriously don't see a Mayor getting any gains by learning any programming. Will he sit down to write chunks of code that will help generate statistical data which will help him perform better in next elections? Will the mayor try and do NLP of the comments and reactions of the voters in some locality? What will the mayor do with his skills required in programming, Mr. Atwood has mentioned it:

10. I AM THE MAYOR
20. GOTO 10 

If he wants these extra things done, he will outsource it to people who can generate analytics fast for him and interpret the results. There is a developer fraternity, bunch of UI designers, there are open source communities which work selflessly, toiling day and night to make internet a better place, enrich user experience, to help you get out the max of your computer/smartphone, to make your life easy and fun with apps, games and services.

If you follow the general notion that learning to code would make help you understand the new technologies better, i don't see a point learning to code in C and understanding why Pinterest is good for your business or why Amazon Web Services is doing better than Google App Engine or what do i do with Instagram?

Bottom line is, one should learn programming if one is ready to invest chunks of time building expertise and applying that expertise to make things easier, else there are many more interesting things in the world, to learn. Deep within i believe hackers are like painters(Read this great essay), for hacking is like painting, would you want every one to be a painter? If not why everyone a programmer? Why learn to code? Programming or Painting is not mathematics nor reading writing skills, i can live happily without learning how to paint and how to write codes. Coding is NOT an essential life skill, there are many who have been living without and will continue to live. I won't learn programming because i don't require it. 

Reflections on a senior Google employee switching to MS and little more...

I don't have any intention to comment/critice/analyse any professional decision from a senior executive. This post refers to a much hyped switch of a senior Google Executive working on G+ to MS. In his keynote at PyCon and later in an essay Paul Graham mentions: MS:Google :: Google:Facebook. Following is what i feel: 


 Why is Former Google exec Mr. X - now at Microsoft wrong? What happened? Mr. X claims an increased focus on ad dollars as well as a delayed effort to compete against Facebook, caused him to lose his passion. It is interesting that a middle aged man suffering from a lack of passion identifies directed advertising as one of its causes. This sort of existential malaise that affects many men as they reach Mr. X’s age was formerly attributed to a dowdy wife, hormone imbalances or a plateau in one’s career. 


 I suppose it’s a testament to the growing power of social media that it has acquired these aphrodisiac properties? Putting aside Mr. X’s state of mind, I will address his critique of Google’s strategic choices. 


 Firstly, advertising. It’s clear that Mr. X might have an impoverished understanding of Advertising’s importance beyond its fiscal effects. Google’s principle focus has never been technology. It‘s initial focus was and remains information NOT advertising (it being a side effect). Google of course was not the first to recognize the growing importance of information. They have however, demonstrated an unequaled ability to aggregate, organize and leverage information. Modern society has been profoundly affected by advertising. It has been the principal driver of information and the technology that Mr. X so cherishes. 


  Advertising is social media! What we refer to as social media originated in advertisings ability to shape, inform, and connect disparate groups through an interactive dialogue. Facebook represents an evolution of this dialogue. 


  Google is quite right in remaining agnostic about modalities and in refusing to miss the forest for the trees. Rather than seeing Google Plus as a feeble effort to emulate Facebook, it should instead be viewed as the beginning of the aggregation of the various modalities represented by Google’s products. When online, people are for the most part, either interested in consuming, producing or exchanging information. In 2012 what are the principal modalities of this exchange? Are they search, email and video? I wonder who the dominant player in this tripartite is? 


  I’m happy for Mr. X that he has rediscovered his mojo at MS. I however will put my money on Google. Rather than a blast of fresh air providing an insider’s view of a stumbling tech giant, Mr. X’s comments should be viewed for what they are, a personal memoir so should this post be. 


 This perceived shift of focus happens at every company when you go from being an idealistic student to becoming an adult that has to pay the bills. When you reach such a large scale with so much at stake, it is easy to stop innovating. It is easy to get a mix of people who don't share the same vision when you have to hire on a lot of staff. Stock prices put an emphasis on perpetual monetization. Let's keep in mind that Facebook only recently IPO'd and in the debate for personal privacy, all the players are potentially "evil" and none of them are being held to account by any public policy.

  The shutdown of Google Labs was a sad day. Later the shutdown of Google Health I thought was also sad as it was an example of a free service already in existence, akin to what Ontario has wasted over $1 billion on for E-Health. Surely these closures are a sign that the intellectual capital in the founders has been exhausted. They took their core competencies to the maximum level quickly, which means all the organic growth in those areas is mostly already realized. There needs to be some torch passing or greater empowerment in the lower ranks when things like this happen. Take a look at RIM. Take a look at many other workplaces. It isn't an isolated incident. There are constantly pressures between where you think your business should go, where investors tell you to go, and where the industry itself is actually headed. This guy is apparently very troubled that his name is attached to G+ development and he is trying to distance himself from his own failure. Probably the absence of Google Labs puts a particular emphasis on the failure of G+ as one of the only new service projects to be delivered recently.

  After so much time any company realizes that new ideas can only really come with new people or from outside influences. As an attempt to grow their business services via advertising, the idea that they needed to compete with Facebook to continue to grow wasn't entirely wrong. It was just poorly executed, too late, and at the expense of potentially focusing their efforts on doing something else under Google Labs that would have been more known as from them (Android was an acquisition, not organically grown internally). There is no revolution yet, because Facebook and Google have not replaced any of each others services with a better alternative.

MS India Store Hacked

There is some delight in the air for the people who do NOT like MicroSoft, the MS store India got hacked by Chinese hackers. They pushed a file evil.html which says unsafe system will be baptized,  screenshot[1] taken from google cache shows it.

Incidentally, last week, i happened to attend a talk by Richard Stallman, where in he went to the extent of saying that MS made malwares. There is a deep hatred and anguish the way the OS giant from Redmond has been operating since its inception, making evil moves for sheer selfish reasons. Ironically as a penance the founder runs a charity capitalizing on the life long savings from Mr. Warren Buffet.

The present act is one of its kind where chinese in this case, expressed their rage.
The Microsoft India Store  website till the time of writing, is down. There has been no reaction from the official MS guys, but few insider claim that MS is not at fault, since the website was maintained by one of their vendors Quasar for sales. Quasar Media under the mothership of MS should not have made such silly error to save the user credentials in a plane text file[2].

The analogy of a healthy mom having a kid suffering from malnutrition suits the case, which leads one to the conclusion that MS and security are oxymorons. A deeper look at the domain registrar, tells MS owns it, hence the responsibility of the security rests in the hands of MS. When they aren't bothered about the security of their own products how much will they care about the security of the users. It speaks much of the way they have been conducting themselves and one mishap has leaked et. al.

Let me take this opportunity to mention it to people, they should consider throwing out their windows system and install any GNU(read gnu not G N U)/Linux kernel. The windows software has backdoors which shall be feared of, you are not the incharge of your computer but MS is. Despite the claim that they offer best firewalls and most secure system, still they are and will remain evil and windows is an evil OS.

References:

[1] Google Cache showing evil.html at the microsoft store website.

[2] The list of emails and passwords which were taken out. 

Iran has intranet

From a few hours, Iran has almost completely blocked the free internet access to all residents in the Islamic Republic.

According to some reports that leaked from the capital Tehran and major cities across the country many sites that use the protocol "https" are inaccessible. Gmail, Google and all the various associated services are unusable as Yahoo, WolframAlpha, Twitter, Facebook and Skype.

Something like 35 million Iranians have so far evaded the censorship applied to the network from Tehran through special software that allowed, illegally, access to most sites obscured by the government. But yesterday it seems that all major Internet provider in the country have applied the stricter restrictions to block permanently usage.

Some rumors speak of a kind of first test launch of a controversial "national internet", a sort of giant office network which would limit access to only national provider of fact and that the Iranians will cut off from the rest of the world by replacing the World Wide Web with a surrogate national government controlled.

According to inside sources, such a restrictive measure would be necessary to protect public morals and prevent the spread of pornography or inappropriate forbidden by Islamic law.

In recent months many bloggers and activists in the country were arrested and sentenced to heavy prison for discussing topics on their sites are poorly tolerated by the regime in Tehran or just to have circumvented the censorship controls.

As reported by The Washington Post and other publications online, Saeed Malekpour, a developer of thirty-six Iranian-Canadian origins, arrested by the regime in 2008, is awaiting the death sentence for distributing pornographic material that would offend, according to the indictment, the morality of Islam.
The concerns of Tehran, which would justify the darkening of the network, not only involves the religious aspect. According to official strength of cyber crime in the country, some western companies such as Google, Twitter and Microsoft would work secretly with the U.S. authorities to spy on the emails that circulate in the country, the online behavior of the Iranians in search and social networks.
 
With a population of over 76 million people and an Internet penetration rate of 44%, now 35 million Iranians are in a state of complete news blackout, and analysts said the situation in the coming days, it will mention to improve.

Apple defies gravity

    "I can not understand how there are so many people so dumb they buy Apple products." And one of the many messages that circulate on Twitter a few hours after Apple announced its results for Q1 2012 (October to December 2011).


    Yes, you can not understand and believe. Given the numbers, perhaps they would not have dreamed of it.  Revenues for the quarter totaled $ 45.66 billion (almost double last year's $ 26.74 billion) with a net margin of 13.6 billion dollars. Apple sold only in the reference quarter, 37.04 million of the iPhone, iPad 15.4 million and 5.3 million Macs with an increase of 128%, 111% and 26% over the previous year. 


    "We are extremely excited about our exceptional results and record sales of the iPhone, iPad and Mac," said CEO of the company, Tim Cook, adding "we have some incredible new products in the pipeline." And the reference to "new products" and took it to trigger a series of speculations on what may be the news that Apple will introduce in the market in the coming months, starting from the iPad 3 (almost certainly will be launched in March) up to iTV to chat more, but for which there is still no official confirmation.


    Despite the invasion of competing products in various market niches, Apple continues to churn profits like no other. The reason for this success undoubtedly lies in attention to the manic quality (albeit with some slip in the past) and details. Not so much as those who do not want to repeat just resign themselves to this evidence, the perception that users of these products.


    "It 's all marketing without substance," says someone. Maybe. But you too, detractors of the products of the apple, do not be so obtuse to confine every success of Apple by pure fashion "apple fan boy." Because in the end, for one reason or another, what matters for companies and states that the success of a product are mere sales. Everything else is petty philosophy.


"Newton could not have discovered the law of gravitation, had apple been there in his times." #QOTD

Google Easter Eggs

This post is by no means any expression of analysis or reflection. Its a mere collection of some cool easter eggs (not all)from google. 


If you type any of these key words and press the i am feeling lucky button, you might be amazed with what you see. As of now you can click any of these links to directly see the egg.


Askew : google gets askewed
Do a barrel roll : rolling on the browser searching 
Google Sphere : spherical images
Epic Google : it keeps getting bigger
Google Gravity : it does not suck always
Google Loco : loco poco
Google Pacman : play pacman
Google Guitar : play guitar
Google Pirate : Searrch smarterrrLanguage tools · Who be this Google?
Google Rainbow : numbers of colors in a rainbow are seven. 
Google Chuck Norris : he found you. 
Google l33t : l33t t3xt
Google Doodles : collection of all doodles
Google Cheese : go to moon
Google Gizoogle : search anything, and you wont find it
Recursion : Did you mean Recursion
Let it Snow : the latest, freeze your search. 
Zerg Rush : The Rush!


last but not the least
Best Easter Egg : Yes the best Easter Egg :) 

PS: Contributions are welcome. 

The Hindu : Sport News : Kumar Sangakkara's speech at Lord's

The Hindu : Sport News : Kumar Sangakkara's speech at Lord's

He takes us through the journey of cricket in Srilanka, his vision and the spirit of Srilanka as a whole, the tough times they had an hour long, its worth the time!!!

Why NOT Axis Bank I-Touch

With your job comes responsibility and with it salary in your salary account. In my case it was Axis Bank seems to have a good name in the market. After the first salary in the account i was on an idle night playing with the features the account had or could offer me. After fiddling for couple of minutes around i found "NETSECURE with I-touch" in good hope that it would add to the security of my account. I placed an order for it and the device was shipped with a tolerable delay of 1 week.

Once the device comes to you it has a serial number and then you need to type in the serial number followed by some sequence of digits generated by the device and activate it. Post activation you need to power your device and keep typing every time those digits that appear on the screen. So far so good, the trouble starts here. If you have JAVA runtime update 22 or greater installed on your system you have invited trouble, and mind you, they never come alone.

Trouble in sequence:

• After you login and put those numbers, you will get an error message: service temporarily disabled.
• Somewhere down below on the page it says if you get the error service temporarily disabled, you need to check your JAVA runtime update version, it should be 21 or below. Please uninstall it from your machine and install a version from here.
• You go to the link and get this error: The system cannot find the file specified.
• From some other URL listed on the same page you are instructed to download the file and install it. You do the same, to find the error : Loading Java failed. Please make sure you had installed Sun Java Runtime Environment (JRE).
• The browser alongside says: Install Missing Plugin.

You then mail the Axis Bank Guys, and they respond three days later. They don't have an active twitter profile as well where you could publicly curse them.

Moral of the Story:
0. As you would never buy a book looking at its cover, never buy a product judging on the leading "i" attached.
1. adding an "i" at the beginning of your product does not make it awesome.
2. what works for others(that fruit company, selling i-devices) may not necessarily work for you.
3. Please give I-touch from AxisBank a try.
4. Not having a twitter profile avoids you trouble of being cursed by users in public.

PS: I had applied for a credit card from the same bank, was told it would be delivered in 15 days. Its been 4 weeks i have got some 10 calls from Axis Bank asking me the same details again and again, meanwhile the wait is still on for the card. Make sure you do not apply for one.

My last note on FaceBook

Dear World,

I am not some psychotic f*** or pathetic loser trying to end my miserable, piece of shit existence. Nor am I one of these pu****s using social-suicide as a cry for help. I am not protesting anything, not mad at the world, and I am not any of the other stupid reasons people delete their facebook profiles.

I have some good reasons:

I am no more interested in subscribing to XYZ celebrities, I am no more interested in writing arbit Happy Birthdays when i do not mean them, I am no more interested in broadcasting that i am a grad student or that i cook my own food or that i am doing a great job at some great place, I am no more interested in letting every Tom Dick ad Joe all my check-ins, pics and where abouts. I am no more interested in copy pasting quotes or ghazals, I am no more interested in pissing others off, I have had enough of all of it. I am no more interested in organising my lists or circles at two odd different places, I am not going to be a victim of Social Crusades between giants, I am no more interested in being a mere-product, I am no more interested in being a part of strategically targetted audience group.


I am no more interested in knowing whats on your mind, which links you like, I am no more interested in knowing which girl you poke often, I am no more interested in knowing if you want to be a fb dev, I am no more interested in knowing if your friend brings playing-cards to the office, I am no more interested in knowing if you did not bribe a policeman and felt king at heart following post Anna-movement, I am no more interested in knowing if you played with your shit at Connecticut, I am no more interested in knowing if you are getting engaged or married hypothetically in this flat world, I am no more interested in knowing if MArk comes to your home after you sing a song, I am no more interested in knowing which book are you reading, I am no more interested in knowing the gift you bought for your girl-friend, I am no more interested in knowing you had a great time at CCD.

There comes a time in every person's life when god calls upon them to ritualistically delete their own facebook profile. For me, that time is at hand. And I, am not a blasphemer. Nor am I disillusioned about the consequences of fulfilling god's edict. So, let this be my last testament. Let it be known that while my journey with facebook ends in a week, the rest of me is in a better place.

So, in a week's time I delete myself as king of the world. Literally, things cannot get better. I have reached the pinnacle of life, and not just my life, but the zenith of existence itself. Bliss, Nirvana, Utopia. I am at the top of the mountain pissing down on the rest of you. Unfortunately, the days ahead of me will never be as good as tonight. So I have nothing to look forward to.

It is truly the best September that could and will ever be, which is why my facebook profile must end this Sept. I will for sure Wake Up When September Ends.

It was good to be me.

Sorry, for pissing you with my stinging comments.

Rejoice!! Do not mourn nor question nor comment.

KTTL (kudos to the lord)

developer.google.com

At a distance of just over two months since the launch of Google +, Google has now made ​​available to developers the first set of APIs for developing third party applications that leverage the social network as a platform of Mountain View.

This first release is focused exclusively on features that allow you to manage and manipulate the data only public (not private ones) that users of Google + share. No chance instead, at least for the moment, to "write" data from outside applications or through access to information of users of Circles.

Applications developed using the platform must be properly registered before they can make requests of each type + Google API, whose calls are made through simple methods that return the output in JSON format easily reusable code.

Simultaneously with the launch of the API, Google published the site developers.google.com / + that allows access to the documentation available on how to use the Google API + and participate in discussions with users to ask questions and find answers to your questions .

After the introduction of +1 and button-based games on the platform Google+, Google tries to recover the lost ground compared to Facebook in the field of social networks and aims to release a short additional set of APIs that, in Mountain View are well aware, have contributed significantly to the success of social networks Zukerberg.

Facebook is no longer the only big "social" web, and given the massive counter-offensive of Google and the growing popularity of Google +, is perhaps the case that someone in Palo Alto decides to innovate a social network that now, too long, is too true to itself and can not afford to sit back hoping that his record remains intact forever.

Twitter Web Analytics

Twitter announced on its official blog for developers, the introduction of Twitter Web Analytics, a reporting tool that allows webmasters with an account on Twitter to measure, in detail, the traffic on their sites by popular platform microblogging.

The announcement comes after a couple of months from the acquisition of BackType in July last year and, according to the reported post-show, the new product allows users you to measure not only the traffic from Twitter, but also, in detail, what are the shared content from other users on social network users and the effectiveness of the integration of Tweet Button on the pages of Web sites.

The service, which will be launched in the coming days, will initially be restricted to a limited number of partners and all other users will have to wait another few weeks to use it.

Twitter Web Analytics shortly before the extension of advertising on the timeline of all users that Twitter is planning to introduce short Promoted through the tweets and probably will soon be built also for the reporting of advertising campaigns conducted on the social network of users.

After a long period in which was the basis for the free users from creating an ecosystem of third-party applications that have contributed significantly to its popularity, Twitter seems to have now decided to develop its products to expand the capabilities of the platform , starting with those that have been most successful in the "Twittersphere".

After integration with Photobucket for the photo sharing feature, Twitter now points to the statistics and it is expected that the announcement of something like Twitter Web Analytics to user accounts will not be long in coming.

After the decline in popularity of photo sharing services like Twitpic, one wonders if the same fate will also touch other products that offer services similar to Twitter TwitterCounter Web Analytics as if this change and, ultimately, it will mark the 'Beginning of the End of the "Twittersphere" as we know it.

The new Google Android "Ice Cream Sandwich" is coming in late October

Eric Schmidt, Google chairman, has confirmed that a new version of Android, the operating system to mobile devices for Mountain View, will be released between October and November, as reported by Forbes.

The new Android, code-named "Ice Cream Sandwich", will serve to reduce the current fragmentation at the operating system present in the various devices that support Google's OS and compete in a "unified" with the new IOS to 5 Apple will be launched around the same time.

In fact, unlike what happens with IOS, the current version of Android targeted at tablet (code-named "Honeycomb") is substantially different than that of smartphones (known as "Gingerbread") which will make it harder for developers create applications for both platforms.

Already in recent months had been rumors that Google was preparing for the launch of the new system operational by the end of the year and Schmidt's comment seems to confirm the initial speculation by restricting the release date to a period more precisely. The first smartphone with "Ice Cream Sandwich" could be presented together with the launch of the new operating system, first of all the Nexus Top partenrship product with Samsung.

Despite the prevalence of Android that has passed in recent months as the number of IOS devices that support it, the Android Market still difficult to take off the most popular and profitable than Apple's App Store. With the introduction of the new Google Android will also attempt to significantly reduce this gap, to steal market share to Apple's global mobile ecosystem that currently remain firmly in the hands of the Cupertino company.

Promoting Tweets

After one month from the date of Promoted tweets, Twitter is ready to widen the target of the advertisements, which are present on the timeline of users, all accounts of the popular micro-blogging platform.

Until now, Promoted Tweets were visible, so exclusive, only to those who followed the publisher who had published the advertisement. Within a month, however, things will change and Promoted tweets will be visible in the timeline of those who do not follow the specific account that posted them.

A system will automatically determine whether a certain ad is considered of interest to a user or not and, if so, will show a Promoted tweet among the most recent displayed on its own timeline.

Twitter seems to be very cautious in the release of this feature for the fear that users can perceive how this kind of unwelcome advertisements could turn into a resounding flop that, at the moment, seems to be the most profitable way to monetize social activity network that is struggling to find a sustainable business model.

Forecasts estimate that, with ads, Twitter could reach 100 million dollars in revenues at the end of this year but do not constitute a significant figure in front of more than 8.4 billion valuation.

Promoted tweets will gradually become visible to all accounts during the month of September.

A nightmare or is it.

extJS and GWT(the step-brothers) are amongst the most irritating frameworks i have ever come across. Every use-case seems to have its own unique method, which reduces the hard-coded stuff to great extent, but getting that right is very difficult as of now for me. I guess both the frameworks have been inspired by regex(Apparently you write the least, and scream the most) to a great extent. It has been tricky, finding folders where to place the file in a particular format, making custom folders called m,v c and s even though it can be done without it, they might talk of scalability, but who cares when max allowed is 5mb and not 5TB. 

notesListView: new NotesApp.views.NotesListView({ notesStore: NotesApp.stores.notesStore }),

9	noteEditorView: new NotesApp.views.NoteEditorView() in the above lines i neither find the simplicity of C/C++(the background to which i belong) nor the standard OOPiness of JAVA(of what i had little practise)

but wait, this is the beginning, you need to put these HTML and CSS in folders with PhoneGap, and change the android manifest.xml file to launch as an android application in one of the world's heaviest IDE Eclipse. If this is the standard method of development, I guess that is why developers prefer working at night, to escape from the nightmares. 

 These were just the random thoughts that spurred out of the code not running.

Facebook Comments just got new.

After the video calls available to users in early July, Facebook continues to add new features to its platform, and this time it is improving the management arrangements within the social network of conversations.

The creature Zuckerberg has in fact just released a new feature that allows users to embed videos, photos and previews of websites in the comments with the aim of making them more participatory conversations between users, thus enriching multimedia beyond the simple text as it was until today.

The system works the same status updates. Just enter the URL you want to quote in the comment, and a preview will be shown, whether it's photos, video or website, within the comment. The preview can also be removed if the user wants to publish exclusively on the link with the text.

According to rumors circulating on the network, Facebook has plans to release additional new features in the coming weeks there are those who dare to say that by the end of the year could be a new version of the site with a significant redesign of the pages to improve the user experience for users.

With over 750 million users, and an estimated $ 70 billion, Facebook is the first social network worldwide and dominates the market for several years now. But the advent of Google +, which now boasts 18 million users and is enjoying increasing success, perhaps something in the corridors of Palo Alto, has moved.

Shutters down for Google (garage) labs

With a post on its official blog, Google has just announced the permanent closure of Google Labs, which for years has been a sort of incubator used by the Mountain View giant to test new product ideas and features for the services offered.

According to the press, the decision is a clear change in strategy than in the past, through which Google aims to focus exclusively on specific business projects rather than launching as a public experiments done so far by Labs.

Many products promoted from Google Labs that are currently for Android applications will still be available on the Android Market, while all others will be practically the beginning of the end.

With the arrival of Larry Page in his chair as CEO of Google, the decision to suspend Labs is not surprising and is part of a change in the general view that has already borne fruit with the success of Google + baby.

The choice is primarily explained by the fact that the company does not want to afford embarrassing flop, as happened in the past with products launched prematurely through Google Labs, which proved a failure as Answers, Orkut, Google Lively and the then anticipated and rumored Wave.

In some cases the loss of image for Mountin View was embarrassing. Google has a startup time is no longer for "experiments" on campus. It is a solid business that can not afford blunders and missteps.

The new products will no longer be testing to the public. Are finished products ready for market, in some cases may be improvable, but certainly products of the company will focus all since their launch.

Tech Crunch new design.

I just opened TechCrunch. I was disoriented for a few seconds when the homepage has materialized before my eyes. I checked the address bar of my browser and was convinced they had done something wrong. Yet I was sure it was the right one. To be sure I typed it again and nothing to do. The page that appears on Chrome was the same that I had opened a few seconds before. Then I realized. And the first thing I thought was: "But what have they done?"

I used many years to the now familiar interface of the site. Little or nothing had changed over time. A makeover was needed for sure. But it is not.

TechCrunch's new site is an ugly, anonymous, awkward design that recalls both the web at the beginning of the millennium. It is an unlikely leap into the past that for a blog of this caliber, one does not expect. The attempt of the graphs to give the new layout is shipwrecked in a minimalist style manifest inability to make something original typical of those who have a few ideas. The "classic" logo "TechCrunch", green and gray, we were accustomed to was replaced by two huge initials "TC" with an 8-bit graphics style typical of the old game of last century that left speechless. The more I browse through its pages and more I have the general impression of a huge mess that makes reading anything but pleasant.

For goodness sake, TechCrunch is a sacred monster of the Web by Michael Arrington was founded in 2005 and acquired by AOL in September of last year, is one of the most respected tech blogs on the network. Beyond appearance, are certainly content to make a difference. This is a fact and nobody says anything.

But precisely for this reason, a giant of the genre, backed by a publishing giant like AOL, something more original, beautiful and pleasant, perhaps we would have expected him to.