While Safari’s desktop market share is minimal and it really only competes with Chrome directly on Macs. No one is going to use Chrome only features that don’t work on iPhones.
> No one is going to use Chrome only features that don’t work on iPhones.
Mostly facetious, but who except Americans cares about iOS anymore? Total iPhone market share is down to ~15% of smart phones worldwide. Android has the big lead now and doesn't look like it will relinquish it soon. Chrome only feature, works on ~85% of smart phones today? "Ship it," says the bottom line.
That feeds the point about market share though, at what point is iOS too much of a luxury brand that doesn't support the effort to get over that hump of "works in Chrome, ship it"?
"I don't care if the Maserati owner can't buy these wiper blades, because look how many more GMs and Fords there are on the road every day. I bet the Maserati owner flogs themselves if they accidentally even drive in the rain, how often do you think they replace their wipers?"
iOS market share, and it's luxury brand demeanor, leaves it at great risk. I don't know where that line is, myself, but pinning hopes on iOS preventing a browser monoculture seems increasingly desperate looking at current world figures.
No one is marketing “worldwide” with the same website. In the US, Europe, Japan, etc if you want to reach the middle class - you have to care about iOS.
You’re not talking about reaching people that can afford Maseratis versus Fords. More like the people who can afford a car vs people who can barely afford a bicycle.
If I was trying to reach poor people in developing countries the equation may be different.
Why? Apple has been playing the game of vendor lock-in for quite some time now. How does it make the situation any better? Heck, they have changed - and set a nasty precedent - their hardware for this exact purpose.
Large companies usually don’t act with a single voice. The iPhone is what stopped IE’s ability to dictate what the web would work like — not entirely without help but it’s what forced companies to treat support for other browsers as mandatory rather than nice-to-have – and WebKit was a huge win for open source, eventually including Chrome.
That doesn’t mean that things like Lightning connectors don’t also happen but in the context of the web Apple has generally been helpful for fighting monoculture since it used to be a huge threat to their continued existence.
Saudi Arabia invested 45% of the 100B. It’s rare for a state to make such risky investments.
Either they have a lot of available capital, and the 45B is nothing but a line item, or they’re trying to dig themselves out of a hole and they need to take on big, risky investments to do that.
I don't know if $45B is a line item to them, but to give you a sense of scale of how much money the Saudis have, Aramco had a net income of about $34B in the first half of 2017 [0].
$34B is a lot in company scales but not a lot when it is the vast majority of a government budget used to sustain a very plush lifestyle for millions of people.
Saudi has been running huge deficits and have had to dig into their reserves to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to sustain their spending.
In the first five months of '15 they had to draw $65B from reserves just to meet costs[0]
They've introduced a new VAT, excise on fuel, cut health and education spending etc. to prevent the house of cards from collapsing[1].
Further to that point, Saudi Arabia's population is expanding very rapidly, putting immense strain on those limited resources (which have to be used to continually pacify the population).
Unlike (almost) every other business on earth where you have to do work and compete with peers to make a profit on your efforts, all the value of oil is sitting in the ground underneath them. Oil wealth is just luck of being born on top of the right geology.
And being part of an extremist tribe who were useful to the Brits/Americans versus the Ottomans in World War 1, who then continued to provide a “stable source” of oil. Stable because they stamped out any sort of democracy or society with freedoms that would allow anyone to object to their arrangements with the West, in exchange for one family of the tribe to become extremely wealthy.
You’re not the only one! I unsubscribed from mostly everything and now my inbox gets anywhere from 1 to 2 new spam messages per week. Still annoying when it does happen, but a big improvement from before when I was getting 40+ emails per day, in which most were newsletters I never opened or just spam
> That would only work for a while for me. 6 months later new stuff has crept in and I would have to go through another round of unsubscribing.
OK, but why wait for 6 months?
Be proactive - you see something you don't want the either use unsubscribe or filter them out (if it comes from the same sender, but most of the time they give you unsubscribe link which just works…).
One annoying thing with unsubscribing is that often they require you to go throu a couple of steps (including providing the e-mail itself) and confirming it so sometimes only clicking on unsubscribe doesn't work with one click.
And to make e-mail a nice tool tune what you receive - if you get gazzilion of notifications that you don't read then just unsubscribe…
>Be proactive - you see something you don't want the either use unsubscribe or filter them out (if it comes from the same sender, but most of the time they give you unsubscribe link which just works…).
2. Be proactive in unsubscribing. If you buy something from someone online, be proactive at the time you buy in finding the box which says you will not receive pointless emails from them (not all vendors will have that option). Ditto if you or an app you want to run requires your email address.
My question to you: If I go the proactive route, what do I gain compared to the whitelist approach? Yes, I could be proactive and actively unsubscribe. That is time lost - even if it's not too much time for some people - what is gained by doing it?
>And to make e-mail a nice tool tune what you receive - if you get gazzilion of notifications that you don't read then just unsubscribe…
I think the difference between me and many of the commenters is this: I want my inbox (and my email usage in general) to be for personal correspondence. A few exceptions are OK, but I want the majority of the emails in my inbox to be personal emails. So it's not about a gazillion notifications. I probably get less than one personal email per day. If I get more than one non-personal email/notification/confirmation receipt etc, then my inbox is more noise than value.
So - instead of doing a little work on your part you are forcing others (in most cases people that you DO WANT to communicate with) to jump through the hoops so they can communicate with your? In most likely event they will give up on the attempt and marketoids will simply find a way to circumvent the protection.
Again - you make it seem like it's gigantic work to keep your inbox tidy. Last time I had to click unsubscribe was months ago and it happens like 1-2 times a year - is that too much work?
I've addressed your points in more detail in other comments. A summary:
1. If someone can't be bothered to spend a minute in their whole life to be able to communicate with me, it's a pretty strong signal. I've had plenty of people who imply they want to communicate with me, but then are very poor responders to my emails. A hoop filters those people out.
2. No one has complained. If anyone is annoyed, they just ignore it and I'll whitelist them anyway when I see their email.
3. Marketers will not invent a way to circumvent it, because it's too much trouble for them to. I'm not that important.
4. Keep in mind the system has been working for over a year. This isn't a proof of concept or something in my imagination. Furthermore, if you read the other comments, people are paying money to have this feature.
5. Just because you don't get annoying emails doesn't mean others don't. Roughly half of them are unsolicited (I did not request to be on those lists). I think more likely is that the automated emails you do receive are ones you want. Whereas I don't want any in my Inbox.
My final point: Given where I am now, what possible reason would I have for switching to your workflow? Your stance comes from one who has a "default" position: the status quo. Look at it from my side - my system is working, and is very low maintenance.
If you unsubscribe every time you see a new e-mail that you’re not interested in it’ll
help keep it in check.
For spammers who don’t respect unsubscribes and you’re using Gmail, you can create a filter which immediately trashes the message based on the “from” address
>If you unsubscribe every time you see a new e-mail that you’re not interested in it’ll help keep it in check.
That statement gets to the crux of the whole situation.
Why should I spend time tending an inbox, continually scanning for the unsubscribe link in any new email I receive? The sender put in almost no effort to send me that email, whereas I the recipient have to expend time getting off their list. I don't want to do that for the rest of my life. I'd rather just remove that email from my whitelist (one keystroke).
>For spammers who don’t respect unsubscribes and you’re using Gmail, you can create a filter which immediately trashes the message based on the “from” address
Same problem as above. I tried it and in the end found maintaining a blacklist (which is what you're essentially suggesting) burdensome. It's continual work for the rest of my life adding people to a blacklist. I inverted the whole thing. Let the sender work to get on my whitelist.
Makes sense. But I’m not sure inverting is really what you’re doing. It seems to me that the people most effected by this will be people who actually want to reach you - Friends, family, work associates. They’ll have to jump through an extra hoop until they’re on your whitelist. On the other hand the spammers don’t really care if their message hits your particular inbox or not, as you’re just one of very many people they’re sending to. Still a cool solution though, and kudos to you for devising a system that works for you.
>It seems to me that the people most effected by this will be people who actually want to reach you - Friends, family, work associates. They’ll have to jump through an extra hoop until they’re on your whitelist.
Fair point. In practice it has not been a problem. If I really want to get emails from them, I can always add them myself if they do not want to go through the trouble. On the flip side, If someone I know isn't willing to spend a minute once in their life to get access to me, it does send a strong signal on how much they value knowing me.
Exactly this. My facebook newsfeed is full of worthless content, which, though once fun and interesting is now a commodity (cat videos, for example)
As someone in my mid twenties, I spend far more time on instagram and snapchat than on facebook. If facebook was to disappear tomorrow, it'd probably be okay with me. Imagine for a second if Facebook hadn't acquired Instagram. Attention shifts very quickly in the digital world, quicker than a lot of people think.
If your Facebook feed is worthless, it's your fault. Either you have nobody you care about or you like worthless stuff. I'm connected with family and friends, I'm following interesting people and liked interesting pages. My newsfeed is full of great content, from people I care about or page with content I want to read/watch.
