On the other hand the Trump administration has successfully managed to make Chinese seem better than American, so there might not be that much of a pejorative context any more..
You're right, but the bias in the US certainly persists. "China = bad" is an assumption that many people still make without any self-reflection about the ways in which the US is now at least as bad.
Building the service is not usually the hard part, but building the ecosystem around it is. There were/are countless services similar to Facebook or Twitter, but only a few of them can be really successful because of herd mentality.
Is it possible that the feature is only used by enterprises because no one else can afford it? Why would anyone contribute to an open source project without compensation?
I can imagine that anyone using cheap VPS hosting at multiple locations for better reliability/accessibility/latency could have use for cross-datacenter replication.
"The hard part [...] is done in the analysis phase..." smells like big design up front that is usually more likely to fail than not, especially so for complex systems.
Big design up front would be a complete system replacement, not incremental replacement by component. An incremental replacement still requires definition of the components to be replaced with new implementation and the part to be essentially retained with only the changes necessary to interface with the new component.
It's sad how Google, Apple et al. have mostly abandoned the use of open standards in favor of locking users to their own closed, craptastic, proprietary services. Lack of interoperability severely limits the usability of cloud based services. Sadly these vendors seem unable to produce decent tools that work well together, so users are left with their data scattered across crappy services (e.g. Google Apps/Drive/Docs/Calendar etc.).
Lack of interoperability, vendor lock-in, poor usability of many web based apps and crappy touch based UIs makes me feel like we are living in the dark ages of the information society. It's almost as if people have forgotten how powerful tools we had 20 years ago compared to the current web app bloatware and how efficient keyboard + mouse is compared to most touch based UIs.
I have no love for Google, but I'm not sure how you somehow group "touch based UIs" into "proprietary services".
There are plenty of great apps on mobile devices that support open standards. The whole point of an open standard is that you have the freedom to choose how you consume the data - be it a terminal/shell client, a desktop GUI client, a mobile 'touch' client, a web client, whatever.
It's interesting how Microsoft is starting to feel like the lesser evil compared to Google. I wonder how many good services/companies have been killed by Google offering an inferior service for free, only to abandon the service later on.
Judging by your username I'd say that you've already thought about this and perhaps have a somewhat biased and possibly less than reasonable opinion on the subject...
Google dropped the "don't be evil" motto in 2009 and the Google "+" search operator in 2011... I think that is when Google stopped improving (on average) and even started to degrade services for business purposes (when viewed from a user's perspective). Since the user is the product, I guess it can make sense... but I don't like it.
reply