In fairness, it's one thing for an implementation like a building to be as over-enginereed as possible in its own right, but it's another when a standard has to ensure that multiple implementations can interoperate. I'm not saying FIPS-140 has only that kind of limitation (far from it), just that this isn't the best analogy.
Yeah, there's a ton of correctness testing involved. That's mostly at the algorithm, rather than the module level, so it'll fall under CAVP/ACVP rather than CMVP.
That's not for interop, that's for "are you actually doing the crypto you said you'd do". It's designed to prevent broken crypto, not to ensure coordination between parties.
Putting aside that several of these were acquisitions, these are all great examples of things where Google introduced something for free because it would make the money through advertising, both directly and through ecosystem effects. Even the paid enterprise versions of these services were a tiny % of Google's overall gross revenue.
Prior to the push into Cloud computing, Ad revenue was well over 90% of all Google gross income, and Cloud was the first big way they diversified. GCP is definitely a credible competitor these days, but it did not devour AWS. Other commercial Google services didn't even become credible competitors, e.g. Google Stadia was a technically exceptional platform that got nowhere with customers.
The question now is whether Google carves out an edge in AI that makes it profitable overall, directly or strategically. Like many companies, there seems to be a presumption of potentially infinite upside, which is what it would take to justify the astronomical costs.
Google’s main ability is to win by pure technical prowess. They hire a lot of bright engineers. Google Search won over Altavista by pure algorithms. Google Docs (and Writely) were way more feature complete than competitors.
You love a Google product because of its features but never actually because of the product itself. But you can’t win everything by engineering and sometimes Google struggles with the product side.
I'm not sure you can call Docs (Writely) and Android acquisitions though. Android was an OS for cameras and Writely was an experimental rich text editor, not a word processor.
It's not like Youtube where they legitimately bought their way to dominance. And I'd argue that even in the case of DoubleClick, google was already dominating the search advertising market when they bought DoubleClick to consolidate their dominance.
I had an Oura Ring 4 for a few weeks, and it's one of the only tech gadgets I have ever returned. Thankfully it didn't swell and trap my finger, but it hit some kind of internal deadlock that didn't go away until the battery fully depleted over several days. The repeated-knock gesture to hard reset didn't work either. Best part is, my wife hit the exact same bug just a week later. I don't see myself buying a smart ring ever again.
As someone who does not use Stage Manager, I don't find that the other ways macOS has become more like iOS were, to me, bad ways. The most notable changes I find were that the Settings app became far more organized and consistent, and the Control Center has tons of convenient shortcuts with a very high level of customization.
In fact, Control Center is currently less customizable than iOS because you've been able to fully rearrange the controls on iOS for an entire year now. If anything, it could stand to be more like iOS in that regard, though it's not a huge deal either way.
I don't particularly use widgets much either, but I never felt their inclusion was a net negative, they're just not as useful as other interfaces already available on macOS.
One thing I'll definitely cede though: having some "macOS" apps actually be iOS apps, like Home, is weird not just because the UI design is unusual but also because there's been no attempt to make standard desktop hotkeys work, not even Esc.
Good news, maybe: macOS 26's Control Center is much more like iOS in that way, and they've also added an API that will let third-party apps offer their own control center widgets.
Hello, I am the other person who liked Unity. Now that we have met, the prophecy is fulfilled.
Seriously though, the fact that macOS still doesn't have an option to fully extend the dock horizontally or vertically drives me nuts. If you auto hide the dock it loses half of its value, and if you don't hide the dock then you have dead gaps in the corners that serve no purpose.
Shout out to Michael Larabel for performing this much testing for every chip and distro, this close to their release, and with this thorough presentation every single time.
I honestly don't know how he does it. It seems like more testing than can fit in real time, even when running tests of different machines in parallel. His tooling and workflow must be dialed in to levels I can't imagine and YouTubers appear to have yet to reach.
Michael, you are a gift to the industry, thank you for doing all of this so well that we can take it for granted, and thank you for continuing to do it even though many do take it for granted.
The suckless.org initiative is a great example of this. Boasting about how certain software inherently sucks less because it has minimalist C code, rather than having defense-in-depth against security holes.
Newsflash, a few decades ago the majority of software was the minimalist C that they claim sucks less. There are many reasons we moved on from that world, security firmly among them.
