David Pierce is The Verge’s Editor-at-Large. In previous lives he worked at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. He owns all the phones. Want to get in touch? You can email [email protected], or send a message to @davidpierce.xyz on Bluesky or davidpierce.11 on Signal.
First, Sundar Pichai used Google Plus to explain how the best product usually wins — as an example of a time Google lost. “I think I’m comfortable saying it wasn’t the best product out on the market,” he said. And laughed! A few minutes later, an FTC case against Google’s other terrible social network, Google Buzz, came up as an example of Google being bad for user privacy. Yet another tough day in Google social networking.
Google’s CEO has talked on the stand about Chrome and Chromium, and shouted out RCS and web standards, but he’s also said over and over that if Google is forced to share its search index, search data, and even search results with competitors, it might kill the value of Google Search.
“It makes it unviable to invest in R&D the way we have for the last two decades on Google Search... I think it will have many unintended consequences.”
In the Google Search remedies trial, the government is done arguing its case and now Google is getting started. Today’s first witness: CEO Sundar Pichai, who also led the Chrome team at the very beginning. I suspect we’re about to hear a lot about why Chrome exists, why it matters to Google — and why Pichai wants it to stay part of Google.
15 years ago today, Steve Jobs published “Thoughts on Flash,” railing on Adobe’s platform for being bad for batteries, apps, and the web. Still a good read!
If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
Also, don’t miss our friend Walt Mossberg grilling Jobs about Flash at the D8 Conference.
[Archive.org]
