Yes, but he seems to be saying he wants the wide distribution that comes from being on the dominant browser without being in the "walled garden" of the Chrome store, since the other browsers have vanishing market share.
Another. Plenty of things aren't great about SF and the Bay Area, but on balance I really love it and am raising my family here. For all those people making comparisons to NYC in the 80s or 90s, it sounds like you just weren't living there then, or you would know the differences.
Agreed - I grew up near NYC, and now live in the Bay Area. IMO, the quality of life is much better in the Bay Area, although I don't like the fake niceness you see around sometimes. Around NYC I have to be a lot more vigilant for people acting like tough guys, and I saw/experience & heard of a lot more racism there. Just a few years ago visiting NYC, I almost got run over in Manhattan despite having very clearly the right of way with the would-be assailant yelling "Run you the fuck over" right as he drove behind turning.
Not to say the Bay Area is perfect, but I don't have to be continually fighting issues of life and death as much here compared to some other places in the country. My main gripe is the cost of living, but basically nowhere else in the country marks as many checkboxes for me as the Bay Area (and even cost of living is muted by my drastically increased income compared to anywhere else).
"The bay area has forever lost it's ability to produce cost effective housing."
Strong statement, if slightly ungrammatical. I think this is a challenge to visionary thinkers and leaders to change the game. Engineering is one part, as is regulatory capture and regressive real estate laws and norms, weak state government in the state, and highly atrophied political participation. What could change that? I can think of one thing, and one thing only, that would "shake up" the status quo.
Ya, as a current renter I've wondered what a giant earthquake would do to housing prices.
On the one hand, lots of people lose their investments and are forced to sell their land or take out loans to rebuild. You might be able to buy land or a damaged property for a good deal. Contractors would all be completely overbooked and the price to rebuild would likely be quite high for some time. Some who have never experienced earthquakes might get scared out of the region altogether.
On the other hand the houses that survive are now part of a much smaller pool of available, livable houses and there's still a lot of money in the region so I could see prices for these houses shoot through the roof.
Pretty simple: they pay a gazillion dollars to host everyone's pictures and old resume versions, they get half a gazillion from enterprise customers storing work documents. They reduced a lot of costs by building their own data centers and getting off AWS.
For example BackBlaze sells storage at $0.005/GB [1]. I picked them as an example, because I'm fairly confident their business model is based on making money with this. Based on this I would assume that at Dropbox scale you could do storage at least for the same price, maybe even cheaper. With those prices the free user storage would cost like max 1 cent/month. There's of course some users with more than 2GB, but there's also many who use less and all the de-duplication and shared folders pushing down the per free-user cost.
I pay $10/mo for the storage bump. Not sure how many there are like me, but I suspect a non-trivial amount of their revenue comes from non-enterprise customers.
I am sorry, but you are misunderstanding or deliberately distorting history. I admired a number of things about Malcom X and his movement, but he was always a marginal figure across the whole society. MLK "won" because he and his allies got the federal government, the establishment media and many liberal Republicans (the convention then) in Congress on his side. Bannon and his ilk want nothing more than for violent left wing people to act like it's 1968 in Paris. They will be branded as terrorists and the real destruction of our democratic institutions will follow. We need to attack this clown cult by voting and the courts when, as he is trying to do now, Trump goes after the census, voting rights, and the rule of law.
Quite possibly, I only remember stuff I read a while back and don't know the details.
> he was always a marginal figure across the whole society
I don't disagree that he wasn't marginal, he was. But he wasn't unknown. He advocated violence for self defense. Read "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech
He doesn't say that people should go and commit indiscriminate violence but there is warning that violence might happen if violence against blacks continues. He mentions someone throwing a Molotov cocktail and how unheard of it was for black people to do that. The implication is, this stuff will start spreading fast and quick if the current course continues. There is also an interesting parallel made how the US Army was defeated by guerrilla fighters in Asia, that was a very pertinent remark and appeals to what was on many people's minds at that time.
I think those who were in power certainly knew and were aware of Black Nationalism, Black Panthers, them buying and training to use firearms.
> MLK "won" because he and his allies got the federal government, the establishment media and many liberal Republicans (the convention then) in Congress on his side.
I posit that it happened because there was threat of something like Malcom X was saying happening. I am probably wrong as am only am amateur, you seem to know a bit more about it. So I'd like to hear more on this if you have time or patience.
I'm sorry but in most areas of online life the system monopolies of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are crushing our freedom and choice in tons of ways. You DO have to use Google Docs(for your PTA, your kids soccer team, your communication with your accountant or your church), because everyone else does. Most people won't be running their own mail server or Diaspora. There are many many examples of this by now, and this technolibertarian babble among many of my colleagues in Tech is getting pretty old.
I'm no libertarian; I'm just pointing out the difference between legal force and social pressure. You do not have to use Google Docs. You may really really need to, but there's no literal threat of imprisonment hanging over your head if you don't.
Again, by all means, protest Google/Amazon/Facebook. I'd love to see the state of affairs change too. Just don't pretend like missing your church bulletin is equivalent to actual imprisonment.
The main difference is not amenities or marketing but the fact that a large percentage of WeWork's customers (my company included) are paying rent with VC money. Up to 90% of their customers will go out of business. Not a super stable customer base.
The companies will keep coming and going. As long as there is a steady stream of startups being funded in SV, WeWork should do fine. In fact, they make it much easier for the startups to bootstrap and focus on their business problem, rather than worrying about the logistics.
Ready to have your mind blown? SV is not the only place where businesses exist. WeWork has 14 locations in the SF area and 44 locations in NYC. I work in one in NYC, and I bet only a handful of the businesses in the building are VC funded. They'll do just fine because tech isn't their only source of income.
