The competitive advantage was supposed to be open, nonprofit, and good of humanity.

I can tell you something scarier.

My specialisation was databases there.

...

Do not worry, I do not work with databases in professional life as my main aspect. But I was not given a comprehensive education, and not even once there was a focus on anything more in depth. I came out without even knowing how databases work inside.

Naturally, I know what I could do - read a good book or go through open source projects, like Sqlite. But that knowledge was not was my uni gave me...

I am jealous of American/Canadian unis in this aspect.

Remember when AOL bought Time Warner?

I do think it's proven useful, much like the internet had in the nineties.

Doesn’t hold a candle to ATT burning $60B+ on it less than a decade ago. Or $30B+ on DirecTV.

2010s ATT leadership was something else.

This will surely maximize quarterly profits until the next cloud or AI bust.

Diversification is resilience.

Putting consumer on hold makes some sense. An exit? This will be written about in business books.

The differentiation should be open source, nonprofit, and ethical.

As a shady for-profit, there is none. That's the problem with this particular fraud.

Why is profit bad? You can be open source, ethical, and for-profit.

If you start out as a non-profit, and pull a bunch of shady shenanigans in order to convert to a for-profit, claiming to be ethical after that is a bit of a hard sell.

I think one issue is time.

We're a few years in. It takes time to figure things out and see returns.

The web and dot com boom and bust still led to several trillion dollar companies, eventually.

AI will transform my industry, but not overnight. My employer is within that 95%... but won't be forever.

If AI improved as quickly as hardware used to do then most of these efforts would succeed, since what would have been on the horizon of plausibility one year would be very easy to do a year or two later.

But that improvement didn't come, the technology plateaued so most of these efforts failed.

Mobile phones was what changed society, not the web or the dot com era.

Almost everyone had a computer in their home before we had smartphones, those computers did shape society in a massive way. You didn't see them on the streets like you do phones but the effects were still just as massive.

'Almost everyone' was a very select group even in the 2000s. Look at reddit discourse post cheap postpaid internet phones versus before.

The internet connected computer in the home was a productivity tool. Even just gaming required gamers to become pretty PC/OS/tech savvy. Cheap postpaid internet phones are bread and circuses. They two have different effects on society.

At the time I had to read slashdot on my work computer because I had no intenet or a new computer able to connect to it.

Not even all geeks had it.

Almost everyone, not everyone, majority of households in USA had a computer already by year 2000, and that is counting old people without kids who didn't keep up with trends.

So by the time smart phones hit almost everyone had a computer at home. If you are talking about the 90s that isn't relevant, the relevant part is how smart phones changed things, and at that time internet was already available to a large majority at home, smart phones just made it portable.

I just looked it up. In the 2000:

50% households in US had computer at home. 36% had internet access.

I love when people reply wuth shit they have no fucking idea.

The fork is better for normal people. There is no drama or controversy here.

Grant built a brilliant tool for himself. He's not interested in doing the work to make it useful to others, or even allow PRs to do so. He's glad to have others do that in their own fork.

The community edition does all the stuff needed to make this useful to anyone who isn't Grant. Everyone, Grant included, seems to appreciate that.

Grant's version has poor documentation, bugs, quirks, etc. Unless you're Grant, get CE.

Grant did the hard work of inventing this thing. That's harder than it sounds; many tried before and failed.

CE did the boring work of making it usable for others.

Which are where you learn.

Depending on the subject and the person, but agreed in the general case.

Agarwal said that in public. Behind closed doors, he was completely cynical about impact. His primary goal was financial (for himself).

What happened was primarily due to personalities and misaligned incentives.

Well if that was the case, I'd call him full of shit masquerading as educator.

eInk.

I hate blinking lights in a bedroom.