I cant think of a better title for now, so please make do with it.
After my last post and a recent argument surrounding one of my random cribs on facebook, I realized that I have lost the luxury of neutrality in making statements about companies (particularly if they are my current/past employers or their competitors ever since I joined Microsoft last year). To save myself from any accusations of bias and such bullshit, here is a disclaimer : I don’t love/like any company above my own judgement. I am not brand ambassador of my employer and of course the usual jargon which effectively means I am too small a fish to be taken seriously. So if you feel agitated/hurt that I am running a campaign against your dearest firm please take a chill pill and let me be.
So basically, nearly 2 months have passed since I joined fb. I am done with the initial crash course that goes by the name bootcamp. I picked something to work on. Its new area for me and I am pretty enthusiastic about it. The office also moved to a new place Menlo Park from Palo Alto. It gives me mixed feelings because I grew up thinking Palo Alto is the place of elite intellectuals where all the major computer stuff gets done. Looks like the industry is out-growing the place.
My other learnings mostly on tech. are going on quite well. I wont write a thesis on the new stuff that I am learning. That is all in the textbooks. The changing views are what I intend to write about before it changes to something else. In my last post I noted how the social fabric (or the lack of it) here drove the innovation in products/automation. But of late, I am taking note of the role of marketing and PR in creating artificial demand for things. For instance, I have struggled to put the tablet I bought for any good use. Every task that I do on it seems better done on a computer or can also be done on a mobile. Reading is supposedly the major use case, but then I did not find it very exciting and in sunlight or bright conditions its a goner (its not kindle). Now, after the creating the market for this new stuff like docking stations etc. have come up to convert them to ape laptops at will. So if I stretch it too far, it is effectively this : a cool thing called iphone succeeded, they stitched some copies of it to make another device and told people that its awesome. People think it is, even if it did not seem to do anything more. Before people realize it, incremental stuff is added to make it sound like it is really indispensable. May be I will find good use of the tablet soon, but so far it seems a unnecessary device pushed by clever marketing.
Next, at least in the valley, I am surprised how people get emotional about tech. companies almost to the point of getting into fights. I had to take pains to explain to a colleague why I think Apple’s UX sucks. People cant take a statement as a matter of taste. Usually the extent of usage/adoption is used as ‘objective evidence’. This is the same as saying Windows is most kick-ass OS ever built. For services like search where we have no benchmarking this is worse. That reminds that my post on fb was about Google. While I will always love G$’s love of algorithms and geekiness, its been an awakening of late to see G+ promotion creeping into my mailbox, my search results getting messed up (for instance although some of my friends are less active on G+ their profile shows up as first result), my mail area getting more and more cluttered with ads and the umpteen number of accounts that are linked to the email address. I have never cared about this earlier because it does not cost me a penny. No company has ever provided so much cool stuff for free ever. But alas, a recent discussion with a researcher made me realize that attention(and time) is the new currency and I should protect it with all my life. So for what its worth, I decided to guard myself against any catastrophic changes in G$’s intentions / priorities. So I am making a few changes like reaching out to wikipedia directly for most searches (which is what I end up reading most of the time anyway .. apparently bing is getting a better but I doubt if I am going to make it an alternative anytime soon. ), using the ad-free zoho mail more and slowly rebasing my web accounts to another email account. Again I don’t think G$ is any worse or better than any modern corporate nor do I believe that they should do social-service instead of seeking profits. It just gives me a kick to delude myself that I am running away from the greedy companies. I know they will get me anyway, but the running part is enough fun to give it a shot.
Btw, if you have benefited from wikipedia please donate some of the spare money to them. The same goes for wikileaks who have come up with an awesome campaign here.
