Development – Excited Pixels

Ars Technica:

It’s no secret that Hangouts was poorly supported inside Google, so will Allo be any different? I’ve heard that Google Hangouts was never given resources because Google felt it would never be a money-maker. In instant messaging, you talk to your friends and send pictures back and forth, and an ad-powered Google service is never involved. With Allo, that changes because the Assistant is a gateway to search. Every question to the Assistant is a Google Search, with in-app answers coming for questions and links to generic Web searches for everything else. With search comes the possibility for ads, both from the generic search links and in the carousels that answers often provide. I’ve yet to see an advertisement inside Allo, but since it seems possible for Allo to make money, maybe it will receive more support than Hangouts did.

Setting aside the basic privacy issues of Google having access to unencrypted, plaintext, chats you have with friends and colleagues, the fact that Google is apparently unwilling to support its own products if they can’t be used to empower Google advertising is just gross. Google has impressively wasted the skills and talents of a generation of developers: imagine what might exist, today, if people were empowered to write software absent the need to data mine everything that is said for advertising purposes?

preciousfragmentation on Nokia device fragmentation:

In the autumn, they announced the Lumia 800. It was beautiful, powerful, and unique looking, very European. Then, at CES this year, they announced the Lumia 900, essentially the same as the 800, but bigger, and with LTE functionality, built for North American hands. Now, there’s a rumour about…

The point that customers can ‘trust’ Apple because of the fairly predictable development and release cycle is key. It’s hard to develop an ‘aspirational’ brand if as soon as someone actually possesses one of your branded items they feel like they made a bad decision. In effect, you run the risk of becoming just another parts manufacturer, one that the consumer doesn’t want to trust with their emotional reserves.

They might still buy your products, they might talk about neat things about your products, but they won’t aspire to own or preach about your product or business. What’s worse, they won’t necessary be able to explicitly state why they have a grudge, but it will come through in the discussion with other prospective consumers.

The effect of these rapid ‘upgrade’ products? Word of mouth advertising is semi-poisoned from the get-go, which undermines your brand and your company’s most effective means of generating product awareness and interest.