[roenxi]

One of the 'mysteries' of corporations is that they will either do nothing, or take an action that furthers their corporate interests. People don't seem to expect that of companies with a public face and seem surprised when they turn out to be just like any other corporate group.

It's a coordination thing - coordinating a large group of people is so challenging only simple messages like 'make a profit' get through on average. Simple things with clear metrics.

'Support the open web' has no metrics and is realistically not a comprehensive shared vision a company can rally around. The message that a Chrome-first strategy doesn't support the open web is (1) contestable (2) requires a lot of assumptions.

Anyone who believed or still believes that Google the Corporation is controlled by the engineers employed by Google is in for an eventual rude shock. Anyone who believes a corporation will support the open web for any reason other than it is in their interests to is likewise mistaken.

This is why focusing on capability is more important than focusing on intent, despite what human instinct generally suggests (humans overweight intent). Google is a scary company. They have more power over people than most companies, with the exception of the banks - and look at how the banks are regulated!

[cm2187]

If you own Google docs, ensuring it doesn’t break or show an incompatible banner on competing browsers is not an abstract or metric-less concept, it is very tangible and measurable. In fact that’s the sort of thing I would expect any of their engineer to do as part of the development, unless they have been told that releasing a website that only renders on Chrome is OK.

[blihp]

But likely few people, if anyone, in the organization have any serious incentives (i.e. bonus/promotion) to proactively prioritize that. On the other hand, they almost certainly have at least bonuses on the line to add X users to service/product Y or roll out feature Z (server or client side.) So people work toward what the company rewards[1] and everything else becomes a break/fix situation as it occurs and time permits.

[1] There are also almost certainly individuals/teams in the company who also try to take the path of least resistance and attempt to hobble the competition to help get there. These types exist in every company to varying degrees.

[cm2187]

I get your point but actually it should go the other way round. If the owner of Google Doc is really focused on own user base only, the incentive would be to make it the most browser compatible. By making it run on chrome only, google docs is potentially sacrificing its user base for a greater purpose.

[TeMPOraL]

Why? Remember that at this point, Google Docs is "sticky". Its audience is to some degree captive, and won't switch just because the document lags a bit on Firefox. What would they switch to? Office365, for which they have to pay? It wouldn't even solve their problem, as the document in question is a link they got from a friend, already in Google Docs. It's just easier to switch to Chrome.

Most of SaaS applications operate in this regime - they own user data, so they become "sticky" and non-substitutable very quickly. On the other hand, standardization of browser features makes browsers not very "sticky". This way, when a SaaS - any SaaS, not just Google's - works much better on Chrome than on Firefox, this drives adoption of Chrome by that much.

[frosted-flakes]

Online Office 365 is free and has more or less the same functionality as Google Docs.

[TeMPOraL]

Doesn't help you if someone else already made the document on Google Docs and asked you to collaborate on it.

[bluGill]

What is the incentives for the owner of google docs?

If it i make google docs great/dominate, then firefox, and safari are critical. You would ask hard questions and have deep discussions around dropping support for internet explorer. If someone suggested khtml (picking something old and poorly maintained) would work with just a little effort you would have a serious discussion around just how much effort that takes.

If the incentive is to make google great then things are different. Losing a few Firefox users might well be worth it if you can convert a few others from firefox to chrome. You might even go so far as to needlessly break firefox once in a while to drive your incentive.

I don't know how google is setup. I've seen companies setup both ways. There are downsides to both.

[pluma]

Google is not a product company. It shelves and sunsets too many apps for that angle to make sense.

Google is an advertising company. The goal of every Google product is to provide the company with more data, to make users give the company more of their data so that data can be mined for more data.

Controlling the browser or OS means having the ultimate access to the users the ads will be shown to. So if a Google app doesn't help harvesting data, it must be used to push the OS or browser. Google allows for a lot of indirection but ultimately if a product neither harvests interesting data nor helps push users to using Google products that do, there's no reason to keep it around.

[goalieca]

I don’t think this is true at all. From everything ive seen, large corporations favour shipping new products and new features. It seems rare to support existing customers unless there is a lot of money tied to it which is probably not the cases for Firefox users. This is doubly true since there is a known workaround to Firefox support: use chrome!

You can try and blame sales, you can try and blame “innovate or die” but also engineering always shares some blame too. Often it’s engineering who want to exploit shiny new tech or make new shiny thing and not do the inglorious work of maintenance and support.

[zwkrt]

Google of all companies should have cross-browser compatibility on all sites. They have the engineering know-how and employee base to automate testing even, I suspect. When Firefox is broken on a Google website it is hard not to feel some malicious intent.

[esrauch]

The thing that happens in practice is the site is expected to be rebuilt on short timelines and at the end you find that it isn't trivial to make it work on other browsers. And the engineers don't even have machines that can reach their development servers that can also run IE, and the version of Edge that can run automated tests is so old that it doesn't support flexbox.

So now some VP has to make a decision whether to launch the thing to 85% of the users that also are on the companies own browser and support other browsers in the future, or delay everything on that. It tends to go the way that locally makes sense.

[srouhaewaehy]

The engineer doesn't decide the schedule though. Usually their activity is controlled by having to do X tasks in time(X)-time(Y)=available_time, with Y being any set of reasons, political, financial, organisational that the engineers will accept as true.

Then as engineer what can you do? Either assume toxic Management (and switch Jobs) or do a subset of what you would usually do, and that means optimize for your own browser first and only work on bugs known to your management for the other browsers.

[zaphar]

Admittedly, when I was at Google, I only worked on three different products. However, while there I had no real deadlines. My work was done when it was done. Performance was measured in quality and impact. This was in fact a part of the culture that was communicated to my team on multiple occasions.

With that said, there is some indication from the outside that the culture is changing. It can be difficult to sustain culture over time, especially in the face of massive success.

[wolco]

I wish more companies came closer to this.

[walljm]

its not always possible to sustain that philosophy of work economically for all businesses. I'm not defending every case of it, just that there are legitimate reasons why speed is valued over quality in certain cases.

[josteink]

> unless they have been told that releasing a website that only renders on Chrome is a requirement.

Fixed that for you.

[TelmoMenezes]

> It's a coordination thing - coordinating a large group of people is so challenging only simple messages like 'make a profit' get through on average. Simple things with clear metrics.

No, it's a self-interest thing. Also known as greed, or selfishness. Do you honestly believe that if "being a decent human being" came with a simple metric like money, then companies would deviate one iota from pure profit motive?

Sometimes I wonder if people here are really this naive or if it's a case of "it's very hard to convince a man of something when his salary depends on him no believing it."

[TeMPOraL]

Self-interest is rarely an issue by itself. It's the coordination problems that make greed dangerous. Coordinating means recognizing longer-term win-win solutions - cases where sacrificing immediate personal gains leads to bigger personal gains in the future. When coordination fails, people tend to pursue their immediate interests, to the detriment of many (and sometimes all) of them.

[normalhuman]

I'm pretty sure that the executive that decided to break Firefox had that covered. They looked into the future, and realized that the extra money in their bank account would make their long term more pleasant, more than enough to offset any annoyances created by browser incompatibilities.

> cases where sacrificing immediate personal gains leads to bigger personal gains in the future

As Kaynes once said: "in the long run, we are all dead".

To go beyond this shallow level of morality requires an expansion of the concept of "self". Beware though: this sort of perspective shift might make you unemployable.

[astazangasta]

Coordination becomes difficult precisely because of self-interest, which leads to hierarchies of power. If your organization is built to disenfranchise your workers and empower execs, those execs will naturally have trouble hearing from, and thus talking to, those workers.

[Angostura]

> only simple messages like 'make a profit' get through on average.

That was always the power of 'Don't be evil'. It gave employees official permission, perhaps even requirement to challenge decisions that could at least be thought of as being evil in some way.

It was a shame it was deprecated.

[itronitron]

a colleague of mine pointed out many years ago that the slogan is not in fact 'Do be good' but rather just 'don't be evil'.

[tim333]

Be good is much more grey - all actions probably have some good but are not perfectly good. Whereas evil stuff is hopefully unusual.

[kibwen]

There's the fallacy, then: there's no law that says that evil actions are inherently notable or eyebrow-raising. It's perfectly possible, and indeed common, to do evil by doing nothing at all.

[QuercusMax]

It's still there in the Code of Conduct: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

Scroll all the way to the bottom. It's the closing thought, one of the key places to emphasize something.

[peex]

Corporations or any other business exist solely on one purpose: to make profit. If you're not making any profit you're not doing business, you're running a charity.

That's why you can't trust corporations when it comes to anything "open" and "free".

[kdtsh]

There is some nuance required here, since ‘corporation’ is such a vague term. Even Mozilla Corporation, which is wholly owned by the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, is a for-profit organisation (i.e. it aims to turn a profit and is taxed) which which reinvests its profit back into Mozilla’s projects and and other work which Mozilla considers to be in the public interest for a free and open Internet.

Everyone has to question the stated goals and desires of corporations, and ask things like e.g who is the corporation accountable to (shareholders? themselves?) and how open is the corporation about how it invests its profit. Attempting to turn a profit is in itself not necessarily an indication that everything they do is in the sole pursuit of profit for itself.

[dblohm7]

MoCo is for-profit in the legal sense, yes. But it doesn't "aim to turn a profit".

[kdtsh]

If it’s not supposed to make money, what do you think it does?

[asadotzler]

Mozilla plows all of the money it generates back into the products and services it develops. The goal is sustaining the Mozilla project and its work, not making/taking a profit.

[acdha]

This is too reductive a view: companies need to be financially viable to survive long-term but people absolutely found businesses with goals in addition to paying their bills and there's a spectrum of how profitable they need to be — Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Oracle are all Linux vendors but their approaches and degrees of aggressiveness about pursuing revenue vary considerably due to differences in corporate culture.

[amelius]

> It's a coordination thing - coordinating a large group of people is so challenging only simple messages like 'make a profit' get through on average.

How are NGOs and non-profit organizations coordinated then?

[nullc]

"Keep the organization going" (which is really the even simpler message under 'make a profit').

The fundamental purpose of any large organization is to preserve itself. Any organization that arises which doesn't have that purpose is eventually replaced by others that do.

[msla]

When Firefox killed RSS support, they mutilated my bookmarks to remove all of the RSS URLs.

Those bookmarks were mine, and Firefox destroyed them without even giving me a chance to opt-out.

I can't use Firefox if it's going to do stuff like that. I use qutebrowser, instead.

[jimmy1]

> they will either do nothing, or take an action that furthers their corporate interests.

> - and look at how the banks are regulated!

And you can view the US Government in a similar fashion, except exchange corporate profits for power. Power is the currency of the US Government, and they will either do nothing, or take an action that furthers their "corporate interest": the increase of power. Regulations serve that role very nicely.

And by the way I see this mistake made all the time, but my spouse is a regulator and here's the dirty secret (well, it's not so secret to astute observers): the bank shills might be going on CNBC or Money Talk radio and go on tropin' about regulations, but they love the regulations. They work with the US Government to create new regulations. Regulations are a wonderful barrier of entry for them. They already have their decades long established regulatory compliance structures in place that would cost billions for the small bank to try and replicate. It helps keep the competition out. It's now a symbiotic relationship. Airwaves are regulated for similar fashion: keep the small broadcasters out, keep the big entrenched players on air and control the message.

If you regulate Google, you will further entrench their position as monopolistic/oligopolistic. You'll create the same situation that you have in banks: only the big have the resources to lobby and comply with complex regulatory overreach.

> finance and banking, cable television, health care, pharmaceuticals, agro-business – are all instances in which the competitive, free market has been interfered with by the paternalistic and regulatory hand of the government. It is not the market that has “failed” in these corners of the economy, but rather it is the presence and pervasiveness of the interventionist state.

> this, too, is typical of market critics such as Professor Stiglitz. They deceptively call “market failures” instances not of competitive free markets but of “crony capitalism” under which special interests have successfully interacted with politicians and bureaucrats to rig the market for their own benefit at the expense of both consumers and potential competitors who are legally prevented or hindered from entering sectors of the economy where they would like to try to gain market share and earn profits by offering better and lower priced goods than their privileged rivals are offering to those consumers.

I feel it is too often we mistake crony capitalism (and address that issue) for "market failures" and then demand that the regulatory hand of the government intervene, which further worsens the situation.

Quotes from https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/governments-crea...

Making a broader point (not responding to something specifically you said but something I see often come up when discussing regulating Big Tech) -- I am not posting this article to say it is some dogma I 100% agree with, but it does offer a different vision than the leftist dogma that is often offered up by tech liberals as the solution to all their problems.

There are other ways out, and it involves freedom, which is neither easy to achieve nor free. It may hurt to get there, but you cannot complain about the surveillance state and government power and influence on our lives, and then be so willing to hand them more power the moment you feel threatened by the "big evil corp"

Sorry I brain dumped on your innocuous comment about a particular thing, Feel free to tell me "sir this is a Wendys"

[adamsea]

> And you can view the US Government in a similar fashion, except exchange corporate profits for power.

The difference is that however flawed or imperfect it might be our government does have a democratic and representative system intended to give us a degree of control over it, and was designed with a series of checks and balances intended to mitigate the potential for abuse of power.

There are no such equivalent mechanisms in private corporations.

[jimmy1]

> There are no such equivalent mechanisms in private corporations.

To the contrary, you can view the free market as a parallel system of checks and balances where the people have voice and opinion: your wallet. Yes you can actually "vote" with your wallet in a free market.

And unfortunately unlike the free market, where greed of money actually acts as a balancing factor, greed of power is terrible in a democracy, and we have seen the power grabs of our court systems in not only this current regime, but previous ones controlled by democrats as well. Why is the court system so important? Why are senators willing to risk shutting down the government and achieving actually nothing meaningful session after session? Because there is absolute power there. And there is absolute power now in our imperial presidency, started by Bush, continued on by Obama, and now the loaded gun was left for Trump. If we restore power back to congress like the founders intended (and further restore power back to the people by eliminating political gerrymandering) we may return to the situation you describe, but I'll take free markets over the current broken system we have today.

At the end of the day, people have the choice to stop using Google Search, Youtube and use adblock to block Google's Ad networks. Consumers can simply elect to take a different action.

[acdha]

> To the contrary, you can view the free market as a parallel system of checks and balances where the people have voice and opinion: your wallet. Yes you can actually "vote" with your wallet in a free market.

As we can see from the way Microsoft and Oracle failed after milking their customers too aggressively, not to mention the way AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc. are begging everyone to come back. Yes, you can no-true-Scotsman a claim about those not being free markets but then you're going to have to bring in the essential role of the government in keeping markets from being dominated by large players.

> At the end of the day, if we all stopped using Google Search, Youtube and everyone used adblock to block Google's Ad networks, Google would be toast. Consumers can simply elect to take a different action.

Don't forget giving up Gmail, Google Docs, etc. “if we all” is technically true but really leaves out the degree of effort that it would take to get any significant fraction of people to switch — consider how effective Microsoft and Yahoo! were at competing with Google in those areas and ask yourself what it would take that they lacked.