The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 352 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ehrensvärd: Google experienced zero successful phishing attempts after deploying FIDO U2F
“And since Google deployed this for all staff and contractors, they had zero phishing attempts.”
Casado: Dedicated Security Chips Will Disrupt Server-Side Hardware Security
“Google has announced that they're doing this with a special purpose chip, and so to have something that's a few hundred bucks that, you know, is part of the same model, I think is probably a disruption on the server side.”
Costolo: Twitter partnered with Google to bypass Egypt's Arab Spring shutdown
“Egypt, you know, during the Arab Spring, we sort of started in Tunisia with people organizing protests on Twitter, and they were able to organize protests on Twitter because they were writing under pseudonyms and not, you know, their actual names, so people we…”
Provos: Google cannot offer mandatory hardware security key protection to billions
“Google rolled out this advanced protection program where you are forced to associate a security key with your account. That's the only way that you can get into your account. But that is not something that we can offer to billions of users.”
Evans: Tech companies pursue voice platforms due to smartphone platform envy
“The second thing is that anyone who isn't Apple or Google has major platform envy, and they want to find a way of going around that, not being, worrying about Apple or Google cutting them off at the platform level on the smartphone.”
Dixon: Most Big Tech talent moving into crypto builds on Ethereum
“At least what I'm seeing is lots of teams leaving GAFA companies, Google, Facebook, et cetera, and getting into this, and like really good teams. People with real, you know, strong engineering and product backgrounds. And I think for me, at least, it's the vas…”
Sinofsky: Bing's biggest barrier to fighting Google was crawling the internet fast
“It turns out that was what the barrier to entering the search market, even for Microsoft and Bing, Was like, sucking in the entire internet fast enough.”
O'Reilly: Native content shift undermines Google's core strategic advantage
“It seems to me to the extent that Google says, well, we're going to deliver this service directly with native content, with Google native content, versus bringing it from an ecosystem of outside providers, they're losing touch with one of their key strategic a…”
Evans: Face ID from Google or Facebook would have triggered privacy backlash
“If Google or Facebook had announced that, we'd be having a different, completely different conversation.”
O'Reilly: Corporations operate like artificial intelligence optimizing for share price
“Thinking of the corporation itself as a kind of artificial intelligence. And just as Google has an objective function, we've actually told our corporations that they should optimize for share price.”
Evans: One tech giant's core strategy is another's supporting tactic
“Generally the stuff that you know, any of the stuff that's a strategy for one company is tactics for other companies. So, you know, Apple's strategy is to have an operating system, and for Apple, Google, that's just a tactic. Google's strategy is to do search.…”
Sinofsky: Google operates like an enterprise company focused on search
“Google is, is not one organization. It's one type of culture around billions of scale, scale in the billions, super hard problems, but they really are like an enterprise company focused on search, you know, like that's built in there and they have a product cy…”
Eghbal: Tech giants have replaced academia in funding major software breakthroughs
“You still need people to think about, like, why are we building it this way, or what does the actual system look like? And that role is actually kind of being filled lately by companies like Google or Facebook that have the resources to make big strides the wa…”
Rogers: Oracle vs. Google Java lawsuit benefited Node.js
“That's been great for Node.js, though. It's just another reason not to use Java, I guess.”
Jensen Harris: Startups beat Google and Microsoft on tailored security policies
“A huge advantage that a startup has that some big company trying to do the same thing doesn't have, which is we can tailor our security policies, tailor the way that we handle the data, the way that we sanitize the data, and the way that we use the data in a v…”
Schuler: Google will eventually be disrupted in advertising
“From my perspective, their risk is, 80% of the revenue is generated by advertising. They are going to get disrupted in that at some point.”
Dixon: Google's VR demos rely on rival hardware, showing internal tension
“Everything they demo doesn't work on their own hardware, so like there's a, there's an internal conflict there.”
Unicode Voting Power Concentrated Among US Tech Giants, SAP, and Oman
“No, so of those 12, so of those 12, nine are U.S. Multinational tech companies. Oracle, IBM, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Facebook, Microsoft, and Symantec. Then of the other three full voting members, one is the German software company SAP, another is the Chinese te…”
Chen: Apple and Google have fundamentally opposing data monetization models
“Apple and Google couldn't be more different on this, and Apple wants to emphasize the difference, which is, Apple says, we make money when you buy iPhones, so we don't have to monetize you in any other ways. We don't have to look in your email. We don't have t…”
Evans: Apple views cloud as storage, Google views phones as dumb glass
“Apple thinks about the cloud as dumb storage and Google thinks about the phone as done of dumb glass.”
Evans: Google's Allo App Is Housekeeping, Not Strategy
“And so you look at the Google messaging app, Allo, it's like, okay, Hangouts was a bit of a mess. And it was a bit fragmented and didn't do anything that kind of modern messaging apps do. Okay. So let's just kind of reset that and we'll make a new app and we'l…”
Evans: Mobile innovation has permanently shattered the monolithic web browser paradigm
“We had 20 years of the web browser mouse keyboard, and that was like the monolith for how the internet worked. And now we've broken that apart, and we've got all these different shards all kind of floating around and landing in different places and being juggl…”
Evans: Smartphones act as non-neutral internet platforms unlike desktop Windows
“The smartphone itself is kind of, is a platform for the internet in a way that Windows was not. You targeted the browser, you didn't target Windows, but on the smartphone, you target the smartphone operating system, and it's not neutral. Apple and Google chang…”
Russell: Apple and Google have hundreds working on VR
“It's clear that they have hundreds of people working on these”
Paulus: Google, Volvo, and Mercedes accept self-driving liability
“Google Volvo and Mercedes have all said that for their cars, while they're in assault driving mode, they have the liability”
The Mobile Device Management market is broken due to OS vendors
“The answer for you is that MDM, at least in my estimation, is a pretty broken market today, and the reason it's broken is the vendors of the platforms that provide, you know, Google, Microsoft, Apple, really Apple is kind of the real, real offender here. They …”
Dickey: Top developers only work for Google or start companies
“The best developers want to work for a visionary inspiring company like Google, or they want to go start their own company.”
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook Won Initial Mobile and Messaging Wars
“The smartphone wars are now over, or at least the first smartphone war is over, and Apple and Google both won in different ways, and the kind of the first messaging app wars are now mostly over, and Facebook mostly won in sort of various ways”
Khan: UK Lacks Multi-Billion Exits Needed for Capital Recycling
“We haven't had those major hit after hit of multi-billion dollar exits, whether in the private market or in the public markets, such as the Googles or the Facebook. So that trickle-down effect hasn't happened, and it'll be a while till it happens.”
Markoff: Facebook and Google's growth is built on a Faustian bargain
“The Facebook and Google explosion has been based on this kind of Faustian bargain, where, you know, they give me these wonderful services, and what do I give them? Well, I give them behavioral information about my life.”
Markoff: Google acquired robotics startups to build an automated delivery network
“When Andy Rubin was going around the valley and buying and around the world and buying up, you know, the world's best roboticist, he was sketching out a vision which I would describe as a Google competing with Amazon. And you know, and if you can kind of see t…”
Evans: Startup failure costs $1M today versus $40M in 2000
“In 2000, if that failed, that was 50 to a hundred people, and 20, 30, forty million dollars gone. Today, exactly the same product. Is a hundred grand, 500 grand, a million dollars, three, four, five people who are out trying to get a good job at Google and Fac…”
Evans: Google is fundamentally a vast machine learning engine focused on reach
“The fundamental way to understand Google is as a vast machine learning engine and everything that they do is about reach. And they don't really care what the reach is as long as they've got more and more of it.”
Evans: Google could move to a web-only Chrome phone within five years
“It's entirely possible that in five years' time, Google's mobile story is a Chrome phone that only runs web apps.”
Jeff Jordan: Raising prices damaged eBay in the long run against Google
“A lot of, it's easy to raise prices when you have a network effect, but you know, I think that hurt eBay in the long run versus Google.”
McMaster: Google's Android Wear contains no open-source components whatsoever
“If you look at Android Wear today, that is incredibly close. There is no open source component to Android Wear whatsoever, right?”
Evans: Google Maps and Play Store are Google's only crucial Android services
“Very briefly, it seems like the Maps and the App Store are crucial. None of the other services matter very much.”
Dixon: VC regret comes from missing potential mega-outliers, not moderate successes
“If you pass on a company where, okay, that maybe they'll be successful. You don't stay up at night thinking about that. If you pass on the company that there's a one percent chance at the next Google and people are going to talk about this story for the next 3…”
Evans: iOS users spend four times more than Android users
“You have double the revenue on iOS for half the users, and so very roughly four times the spend.”
Evans: Android Auto won't take off fast due to car replacement cycles
“The challenge is, you know, ten-year replacement cycles, so it's not going to take off.”
Evans: Google Glass was an experimental product test that failed
“Google's been incredibly quiet on glass for years. And, you know, the thing is really, you know, it's gone nowhere. You know, just, you know, we don't know. Maybe there'll be something will happen. Maybe it won't. But it feels like it was out there. It was a t…”
Levine: Facebook and Google Outpace Cisco in Networking Sophistication
“Yeah it's very fair to say. I think they, Facebook and Google, have absolutely pushed the needle on back-end data center infrastructure”
Evans: Google sees hardware as dumb glass, Apple sees cloud as dumb storage
“For Google, all hardware is just kind of dumb glass that links back to their cloud. Whereas for Apple, the cloud is kind of dumb storage that supports their platform.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Google will eventually merge Chrome OS and Android
“Obviously, I think it's, you know, like, there's going to be some fusion of Chrome OS and Android now that they're both folding into the same person.”
Evans: Google's Motorola Acquisition Was Effectively a Patent Infringement Fine
“It was nine and a half with cash, and then they sold the cable business, but yeah, I mean, that was basically an enormous patent infringement fine as much as anything else.”
Active Android devices will reach 2-3B; iOS will reach 700-900M
“And, you know, as things play out with the current dynamics, which aren't really going to change in the next two or three years, we will end up with seven, eight, nine hundred million iOS devices in use on Earth. It's probably about 500 now. And we'll end up w…”