Wow, this is a rip-snorting interview with @pluralistic - you, sir, have got great metaphors. Well done. This needs to be on very single NZ MP's listing list: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018985178/feature-interview-how-meta-and-x-will-eat-themselves

@lightweight @pluralistic thank you for sharing this. I find it particularly amusing that he was allowed to say “enshittification” on RNZ repeatedly.

@SimonCHulse @pluralistic I'm pretty sure that 'shit' is AOK on the air in Aotearoa. Seems pretty mild now, even. And, heck, 'enshittification' was given social license by being selected as word-of-the-year by both the US Dialectic Society and the Macquarie Dicionary in the past 2 years. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

@lightweight @pluralistic I know, but it’s still surreal, I grew up with dad working there, and he often talked about their rules including “no swearing.”

@SimonCHulse @lightweight @pluralistic

Sometimes I miss the prohibition on seven dirty words...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words

@dredmorbius @lightweight a Hotmail clone!

@pluralistic @dredmorbius which, in turn, was a 'RocketMail' clone.

@lightweight @pluralistic Mild quibble: Google did come up with Gmail on its own. Or at least through a 20% project (that is, it wasn't a management objective).

But other than that, novel product development has been quite poor.

@dredmorbius @pluralistic I didn't hear that bit - will have to re-listen. Back in the early days, when Google was 'engineering-led' they did some impressive stuff - most of us thought they might be the exception to the rules (set by MS, Apple, Oracle, IBM, etc.)... sadly, though, in the intervening years, we've been well-and-truly disabused of that optimism.

@lightweight Google definitely tweak the heck out of products. But in terms of either launching new game-changers, on the scale of Gmail, Maps (aquisition), Youtube (aquisition), Android (aquisition), or ... come to think of it, Chrome was also home-grown, no?, they've an awfully weak record.

(Gemini, Google Books, and Translate are some other successful launches, though they've had relatively limited reach. Gemini's still in early days, so it could prove a breakout yet.)

All the more so for revenue-generating products, of which Doubleclick / Adsense remains the sole cash machine.

List of products for those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products.

@pluralistic

@dredmorbius @lightweight chrome is built on webkit

@pluralistic @dredmorbius I believe they've now moved to the 'blink' rendering engine, which was a fork of webkit, apparently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)

@jmtd @pluralistic @dredmorbius yup. (mentioned that in another fork of this discussion: https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@lightweight/114425326169750480)