Mozilla “sold their soul to Google”? What did I miss?

Your iPad sounds pretty broken, that’s not normal.

The “Internet” and many foundations of networking originated in the US, but the Web, which is what I’d wager many think of when you say “the Internet”, was invented in Switzerland by a British man.

Holy shit go touch some grass. Jesus Christ

So you’re talking about SaaS / business tooling then? Again though, that’s just one of many segments of software, which was my point.

Also, even in that market it’s just not true to say that there’s no incentive for it to work well. If some new business tool gets deployed and the workforce has problems with it to the point of measurable inefficiency, of course that can lead to a different tool being chosen. It’s even pretty common practice for large companies to reach out to previous users of a given product through consultancy networks or whatever to assess viability before committing to anything.

Then we’re very far away from the 21st century though.

I don’t really get this point. Of course there’s a financial motive for a lot of software to work well. There are many niches of software that are competitive, so there’s a very clear incentive to make your product work better than the competition.

Of course there are cases in which there’s a de-facto monopoly or customers are locked in to a particular offering for whatever reason, but it’s not like that applies to all software.

I gotta say mRNA vaccines. It’s not technically a 21st century invention, but much of the work to make them viable started in the early 2000s. The speed at which the COVID vaccine got developed and widely deployed was honestly incredible and a massive W for humanity. I remember thinking a vaccine would be years away.

There’s no reason your clients can’t have public, world routeable IPs as well as security.

There are a lot of valid reasons, other than security, for why you wouldn’t want that though. You don’t necessarily want to allow any client’s activity to be traceable on an individual level, nor do you want to allow people to do things like count the number of clients at a particular location. Information like that is just unnecessary to expose, even if hiding it doesn’t make anything more secure per se.

I do think it’s a problem when 100% of people seeing “made with AI” will assume the entire thing is AI-generated, even if all you did was use AI for a minor touch-up. If it’s really that trigger happy right now, I think it’d make sense for it to be dialled down a bit.

They sell AirTag location data? I honestly find that hard to believe. What’s your source on this other than big tech bad?

Oof, that quote is the exact brand of nerd bullshit that makes my blood boil. “Sure, it may be horribly designed, complicated, hard to understand, unnecessarily dangerous and / or extremely misleading, but you have nOT rEAd ThE dOCUmeNtATiON, therefore it’s your fault and I’m immune to your criticism”. Except this instance is even worse than that, because the documentation for that command sounds just as innocent as the command itself. But I guess obviously something called “tmpfiles” is responsible for your home folder, how couldn’t you know that?

They won’t go to jail, period. No company owners never go to jail, kinda ever.

That’s absolutely not true. Sure, there are lots of cases where individuals have limited personal liability under their company, but this doesn’t mean no-one goes to jail for illegal business activity. In fact it happens all the time.

You’re of course right with the exclusivity argument — that’s a very real possibility, and yet Microsoft has tried it with Call of Duty, one of the most popular franchises ever, and saw very little success with it, resulting in them putting it back on Steam years later. If I were to guess why attempts like this have failed in the past, I would say that Steam is so dominant over the PC gaming market today that not even large franchises going exclusive attract enough of a user base to offset the loss of customers that aren’t buying games only because they’re not on Steam. Add to this the additional overhead of developing and maintaining a competing store front, and the cost-benefit analysis leans clearly towards just being on Steam and accepting their cut of sales. The exclusivity tactic clearly failed even for big titles like CoD, so it definitely won’t work for smaller ones. And we’re not even talking about cutting into the indie game market, which would require making very attractive exclusivity offers to many smaller studios, all for acquiring exclusivity on titles in the hope that they’ll be the next big hit — a very high risk strategy that likely results in a lot of sunken cost short-term.

Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they’ll be selling customer data at a profit

When we talk about “selling customer data”, I think we need to look in more detail into what this would actually mean in practice. It’s very unlikely that any online storefront could legally literally “sell your personal data” like address etc. that you would enter presumably as part of the payment process to third parties. That’s just illegal almost everywhere in the world, and certainly in the largest PC gaming markets. It wouldn’t lead to significant revenue either, because raw data like that just isn’t very valuable. Instead, I suppose what people mean when they say this (in the context of companies like Google or Facebook) is just the practice of selling advertising services that use the data they have on people to advertisers, who can then target their ads at highly specific segments, improving their return on ad spend. The actual private data though stays with the entity that collected it — because it’s what actually gives them the edge on the market; it allows them to offer better ad targeting than competitors.

How would this apply to Steam or a potential competing storefront? Barely. I assume no-one is arguing that a steam competitor could launch a generic advertising network that could stand against Google or Facebook, so we’re probably talking about advertising within the storefront itself. Steam today already collects information on your interests and customizes the store based on that, plus presumably your location, age group etc. — so they’re pretty much already using your “personal information” to the extent possible in this context. How else could a competitor realistically monetize personal information?

It’s a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition.

I wouldn’t say that this is the case when we’re talking about trying to eat into the market share of a dominant entity like Steam. Sure, potential competitors can make short-term plays that cut away some market share, but such strategies are expensive, risky, and alone likely don’t lead towards a significantly improved position long-term (exhibit A, again: COD being exclusive to Battle.net).

For better or worse (usually worse), toppling a near-monopoly like Steam is extremely hard for players with big cash, and practically impossible for independent competitors. This is especially true for products that are inherently sticky, like Steam, where people have curated large libraries over decades. The only reason Steam’s dominant position is not hurting the consumer is because their product works well and is in many ways very pro-consumer.

I’ve read that, IIRC. It was about getting featured organically though. Steam runs promotions for certain game series or even publisher catalogues frequently, with large custom graphics and usually a sale. Obviously I have no way to know for sure, but I can’t imagine that Valve doesn’t get itself paid for those.

This doesn’t make any sense. The reason Valve hasn’t been acquired is because it’s privately owned and not up for sale, not because it doesn’t have “enough profit”. In fact it’s extremely profitable, for all we know.

Sure, another company could come along and build a competitor. It’s happened already multiple times, and Steam is doing just fine despite some major titles these days being exclusive to other platforms. Unless Steam drops the ball on something big time, it’s unlikely that people will move to another platform en masse, especially one that is less focussed on consumer interests. No-one can just come in and “take capital away” from Steam, whatever that means, by building a competitor that sells advertising space and “monetizes user data” — they need users first.

… And then there’s the fact that Steam is already “selling advertiser space” today. Games don’t just get featured on their storefront because Gabe likes them. They make deals with publishers for this.

Apparently 50%+ of the company belongs to Gabe himself, presumably he would pass it on to some very trusted. That makes a hostile takeover pretty unlikely.

Please explain how Google would get my location if I don’t run a phone with Google location services and / or don’t allow Google services and apps to access my location. Sure, they may know where you are roughly based on your IP, but that’s just within a very broad region, and can easily be obfuscated by a VPN. Google siphons a shitton of information from everywhere they can, but it’s not like they’ve secretly implanted everyone with a tracking chip either… And neither can they get around any device’s OS-level location permission system.

Vast majority of people do, and on iOS and Android these days turning it “off” really just keeps it from connecting to peripherals. It’s still scanning even when “off”.

You totally are getting closeups of faces though in all of these games. In cutscenes, but still.