Comment by observationist
1 year ago
Google is a megacorp - Hanlon's razor doesn't apply.
Just because there's no one person twirling their mustache and mwahahaha-ing doesn't mean this isn't malicious and hostile behavior by Google. It doesn't matter even if there's no individual human at Google that intended this.
What does matter is that the leadership at Google clearly doesn't do what is necessary in preventing hostile behavior as a consequence of negligence. They know that if they don't put in the effort to ensure compatibility, side effects will degrade competitor performance. It's an inevitable consequence; they've done, and been forced to do, the right thing, and provide quality assurance and compatibility review in complex systems. There are people that know the consequences of not being proactive. Hell, they probably have lawyers that know the exact numbers - they probably make some tens of millions of dollars more revenue by "slacking off" and not being proactive about compatibility.
> Google is a megacorp - Hanlon's razor doesn't apply.
On the contrary, i think it applies more. The larger the group, the more stupid stuff it does.
I bet this falls into a gray area though. Maybe they’re not exactly trying to kill Firefox, they just don’t mind too much if it dies. Some programmer makes a mistake that affects Firefox and they don’t instantly revert the change because someone higher sees that the mistake is not necessarily bad for Google. Similarly testing is more lax for Firefox. If it had been Chrome, the managers would have paged 50 people to fix it ASAP, and there would be retrospectives about how their testing failed to prevent a future occurrence.
It’s like saying evolution has no purpose, it’s just random mutations, but then there is a selection process that picks non harmful and beneficial mutations, so it does go in a predictable direction.
This this this.
Megacorporations aren't more competent,they're able to get away with more incompetence and tell whoever complains to shove it.
But knowing you can repeatedly get away with incompetence is malice. Hanlon's razor is used as an excuse for moral culpability, as if who is merely incompetent isn't evil; but, once you point out how that level of incompetence is hurting others, if they choose to not merely prevent such incompetence going forward, but recognize when they make mistakes and take steps to make it right--yes: after the fact; not merely fixing a bug, for example, and not merely apologizing for their incompetence, but making some kind of reparation to those harmed--that must be understood as malicious behavior.
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