Google is a consumer brand and people need to be comfortable. If we were just an advertising brand we wouldn't have the same concerns. We've always tried to promote transparency and choice among our users.
As a wheelchair user, I am utterly obsessed with toilets, and all my friends know it. A simple invitation to the pub is consistently followed by, 'Do you know if they have an accessible toilet?'
As users replace usage of the web with a mobile, app-centric ecosystem, the phone becomes the center of gravity. In this mobile world, Facebook is just one app on the phone.
A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
But with carefully chosen keyboard macros to activate it, Mass Copy is quick, convenient, and powerful. Most users who have mastered it depend heavily on it. That certainly includes me.
Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.
Dropbox looks really simple to the end user and is extremely magical and just works. But under the hood, the complexity of the technology is huge. The amount of work it requires to store, scale and move this data is pretty intense.
We have a huge tech following that do nothing but Digg tech stories, and then there's another pool of users that remove the tech section from their view of Digg, because you can go on and customize your own experience and remove sections you don't li...
Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose.
Skype is easy enough to use so that people don't need to be tech savvy - a lot of users just want to communicate with their friends and family, and they find this is the easiest, cheapest way. If you can use a Web browser, you can use Skype.
Things that we need to learn are the importance of establishing brand, establishing market presence. Technology-wise, it's things like ease of use, user interfaces; all of these things that tend to be less important in our other business segments are...
The true principle of taxation is the benefit principle - those who benefit from a government service should pay for it. It's also known as the 'user pay' principle. Every effort should be made to link the payment of taxes or fees to the cost associa...
Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpse...
A true architect is not an artist but an optimistic realist. They take a diverse number of stakeholders, extract needs, concerns, and dreams, then create a beautiful yet tangible solution that is loved by the users and the community at large. We crea...
I have never seen a game's graphics look so sharp and clean. The sound design for the game is also unique on the Xbox. The memory on this system allowed us to provide the user with 5.1 Dolby surround sound for home theatre owners.
The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users w...
I've always been really internally focused. I tend to focus on hiring - ensuring that every person we hire is both a really good fit and really good - and also that everything we put out to our users is very high-quality.
We're simple-minded, the team at Hulu, which is, we think if we can obsess over quality and build a better mousetrap, that good things will happen. Users will adopt the service, advertisers will see great value in it, and that's what we're seeing.
Phones were created as social tools. Smartphones are especially good at being social, integrating text, voice, video and images in an endless number of apps that can serve a user's needs, and all without the need for a web-based social network.
For the user, it doesn't matter whether he is getting access on Wi-Fi, 3G or 2G networks. What matters is good connectivity, and as a technology provider, our job is to hide the complexity of the technology.
Much of what's called 'public' is increasingly a private good paid for by users - ever-higher tolls on public highways and public bridges, higher tuitions at so-called public universities, higher admission fees at public parks and public museums.
