Nestle is a truly horrible company[1], this hook-up has really re-enforced the notion in my eyes that Google is now just another big multi-national corp in the same vein as the rest. It's sad, because I used to think they could show the world that a big corp didn't have to do things that way. I'm not sure if they changed or if I was just naive.
No, I arrived at that conclusion because KitKat and Google have both publicly announced the tie-up, and Google doesn't seem to understand, or more likely doesn't care, what it means to actively promote a company like Nestle. There are plently of other "K" foods they could choose if they wanted to.
To be fair, it's not just this incident that helped me reach the conclusion, its been festering at the back of my mind for a while.
You would be surprised at what you can achieve with a little effort and using mainly smaller companies with an ethical bent (certainly ethical clothing and bicycles are available).
Nevertheless, I agree it is hard, and I'll likely be using some of Googles services for a while yet. My main point is how my view of them has changed, and that will make me seek out alternatives when possible.
But it's a co-branding strategy with a company that is widely condemned as having some horrible (and illegal) practices.
It's trivially easy to find these. I cannot believe that anyone at the largest search engine company in history failed to find or read criticism of Nestle before announcing the co branding.
The only conclusion to draw is that Google knew about, and did not care about, the criticism of Nestle.
Why not go the easy route and find a less obviously evil company?
Another possible conclusion is that they selected a few possibilities, including other K-desserts (Kakao? no, too Cocoa; Kremlin Cake? too sovietic; Kaki jam? Weird, too Chinese; etc) and decided the less bad one was Kitkat.
I'd say the problem is to be too systematic. Same with Ubuntu Zoomy Zoo and Apple iSeries. Would a writer submit himself to such a gimmick for his book's names?
However, my main grip again Kitkat would be that it is the same as all other "chocolate" bar: it is industrial junk-food, making us all obese, and it do not contain chocolate.
Cal Murphy (by Jack Patterson) uses Cross in the title - "Cross Hairs", "Cross the Line", "Triple Cross". (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jack-Patterson/e/B0098F2E48/ref=ntt_...) (This last one feels odd - the author name is close to James Paterson, and the series titling uses a word ('cross') that happens to be the name of the James Paterson protagonist.
Google could not have adopted marketing like this without Nestlé's approval. Nestlé are truly vile and "do no evil™" are in some form of partnership with them, at the very least it is cross-promotion.
Nestle have given press releases describing their 'collaboration', and even set up this website. Its inconceivable that Google did not demand payment; Google could have called it something generic like all their previous versions.
Google of course probably approached Nestle. They created a new revenue generating angle on creating an OS.
Debian ought to go get money from other brands through similar version naming.
Seriously, why isn't the next Ubuntu called "Head&Shoulders"?
Right. Why does Google need to paid for this? Any dollar figure would be insignificant, not scaleable and not part of their core business. Selling naming rights to their SDKs?! Are these baseball stadiums?
Yes. Next time I upgrade, I've got my eye on fairphone.com, for what it's worth.
Not quite sure what that argument has to do with my preposition though. I had no such illusions about my phone manufacturer (Samsung). Google set out on a different path ("Do No Evil"), but turns out they're not much different to Samsung et. al. now, and that was my argument. Many still see them as working in a different way, but they don't.
Those associations, while not by any means ideal, are somewhat necessary. As inferred by the argument it's hard to find ethical phone companies at that scale.
There is absolutely no need (at least technologically) for this link up. Its purely brand marketing, and they picked the wrong brand.
Yikes, and also probably your computer, and possibly your car. And I was having such a nice morning.
Now I feel like I need to work out how much money I need to give to an effective charity or something to offset the bad that I'm doing when I buy my next phone or computer.
Keep in mind that as long as you're driving the economy (by production or consumption), you're enabling whatever pre-existing incentive-structures the economy supports. $5 of vegan bread gives the grocery store five more dollars, which it will then use to pay that loss-leader butchery that brings in the saturday shoppers, etc. Putting $1.50 in a vending machine to buy a Nestle-competitor's product, results in the vending machine company renewing Nestle's contract either way (because they're the draw), that competitor paying Nestle $0.40 for pre-processed milk-chocolate product, and Nestle spending $0.40 more not to market their products to you (they assume you a lost cause), but rather to your children directly.
...Or, in micro-econ terms, if you pay me $5 for vegan bread, I'll spend that $5 on several kit-kats (I am, after all, craving them now), and put some away to save up for a new phone. You've effectively multiplied the harm you're doing!
It's the same general argument as "a portion of every tax dollar goes to killing brown people", but escaping the economy entirely is actually harder than plain-old tax evasion. Basically, voting with your wallet only sways sole proprietors; anything larger may be externally capitalist, but is internally more socialist/syndicalist, driven by long-term contracts, quotas, "consumer confidence" ratings, futures, government certifications, and insurance-risk-purchases more than hard revenue. All that is opaque to you as a consumer, so there's really no way to influence any entrenched player by purposefully tugging on money-strings. They've purchased entire portfolios to hedge against precisely that effect!
Those are good points, but I disagree that individuals cannot influence entrenched players by changing their purchasing decisions. Here's how it can happen:
1. A large chunk of people buy the Fairphone. Let's pretend it's 500,000.
2. Samsung notices this. Of course they don't care about that tiny amount of competition, but they do care about competing with Apple.
3. Samsung commissions a study. They find that of the respondents, 0.5% answer "yes" to "Have you bought, or do you plan to buy a Fairphone or other specialty phone which uses conflict-free materials". When asked "If not, which of the following reasons describes why?", 25% answer "I don't want to take a chance with an unknown manufacturer."
4. From this, they conclude that they can expect to sell roughly 20 million additional phones if they (and they alone among major manufacturers) if they switch to conflict-free materials. That is NSFPMS/HB = 20 million, where
NS = non-Samsung marketshare ~= 75%
FF = Fairphone sales = 500,000
MS = % who would buy a mainstream conflict-free phone = 25%
HB = % who have already bought/will buy a Fairphone = 0.5%
5. Every other major manufacturer does the same calculation, and suddenly conflict-free materials are a standard feature.
Now obviously this is an oversimplification. The numbers are made up, Samsung would also add in some uncertainty about customers doing what they say they will do, I haven't taken into account the cost difference for the materials, those survey questions are atrociously designed, etc. But you get the point.
And that's certainly bad, but Nestle have carried out about 10 other known immoral practises in their history, including the use of child slave labour, so they pretty much 'win' that one hands down.
Its the infant formula marketing one for me that still trumps them all. Knowingly allowing babies to die is pretty much a sure way to get to the top of my "that's a company I don't like" list.
Rather than "truly horrible", it's fairer to say that it's controversial in the UK. For example, on one hand there has been a long standing boycott at university Student Unions, on the other about everybody has a Nescafé tin at home.
I for one don't have any Nescafé tins at home and refuse to purchase any of their chocolate or breakfast cereals, too. I realise you said "about", and I'm only one person, but I think you overestimate their reach; I know others who adopt the same stance. I'd go so far as to say that Nestlé are up there alongside The Sun (british newspaper) and Sky TV when it comes to 'most boycotted' here in the UK. Only time will tell whether Google has made a minor PR error here (granted, it will only be minor because Google is SO pervasive).
The name Nestlé is a byword for baby murder for a significant number of people I know. I was surprised to see Google deliberately associating themselves with them.
I think, if anyone was still labouring under the intention that Google was somehow morally 'above' other companies, this is pretty much the death-knell. If I'm being very optimistic / fair to Google, I'd hope that it was a Google US decision and they don't fully comprehend the feeling towards Nestle in the UK. Maybe this leaves a void for a 'good' technology company to spring up.
He's the former CEO (still chairman), and thst's not a fair summary of what he says in that video, about recognizing that water can have a price/cost like food.
Of course not, understanding nuanced statements is hard, let's just hear whatever we want to hear when somebody who we don't like is making a complex point! Down with The Man!
Pretty. But do there exist web browsers that display these scroll-to-animate sites correctly? Using either mousewheel or dragging the scrollbar (or worse still, dragging on an iPad), it's never anything but choppy choppiness and I miss important bits of text as they scroll past entirely between the little click stops on my mouse wheel.
Surely it must be possible to actually view these sites, as evidenced by the fact that people keep building them. Is there some web-designer-and-executive-approver-specific build of Chrome that's built specifically for this effect?
It works great on basically any browser on a system with the Apple's Magic Mouse.
I'm still wondering why there's no some sort of smoothing polyfill in wide use.
Agh, this should definitely be a design anti-pattern. Don't change my browsers functionality. If I wanted smooth scrolling I would find a way to turn it on.
The Mac doesn't use smooth scrooling, but naturalistic scrolling: It scrolls exactly as you move your fingers. Smooth scrolling is more of a scroll wheel feature.
It's also magical, its operating system is compatible with all forms of beverages, and if Steve jobs were around the magic mouse would of become the magic handjob.
It's working great on my admittedly beefy Win 7 Laptop on Chrome with my mouse wheel or dragging the scroll bar. The mouse scroll is a little choppy in that it jumps in tiny increments rather than elegantly transitions.
It would be nice if they supported the keyboard too though.
Recent version of all browsers have roughly the same performance. But you need relatively new hardware. Old p4 and on-board graphics card won't handle it.
I'm on a six month old maxed out Thinkpad W520. I don't think they have much in the way of newer hardware than that, so I suspect it's more likely that there's a "smooth scrolling" setting somewhere that one could presumably turn on to see this effect.
Somebody else mentioned that it's on by default on Macs, thus confirming my theory about the "web-designer-only" build of Chrome (the same one that renders those extra blurry fonts that designers like to use on their blogs correctly). Chances are nobody with a Windows box ever saw this in action before they pushed it live.
I'm using the latest Firefox on windows 7 and don't seem to have a problem with it.
Mind you it's a desktop and I'm using a mouse not a touch-pad to scroll.
The slight choppiness i see is because of how scroll works not the website's fault.
When you scroll there's a minimum increment that gets detected and the equivalent on the website for that is quite large.
But reducing that would make you scroll a lot more and would probably be annoying.
If you want the smoothness of a magic mouse use the down arrow on the scroll bar or your keyboard.
Smooth is one part of the problem, the other is getting stuck between two "frames" after scrolling: http://imgur.com/gtJGtsT.png
Scrolling gives you no visual feedback for "content units" like margins around paragraphs or headers. You cannot be sure if a "frame" has all its animation loaded until you scroll down - up - down a little bit. Imho that's not a pleasant experience.
No money, maybe. Free cross-product advertising, definitely.
I'm not sure whether the fact that (allegedly) no money changed hands makes this whole thing any better. I've never been a fan of Android or Google because I'm allergic to advertising and that's basically Google's business model, but blatantly signing cross-promotions deals like this so not one but two companies can leverage a new phone OS release to spam the internet with free advertising doesn't make me feel any more positive about Google and Android. But I guess I'm a lost cause for them anyway...
Their implementation is horrible and completely unnecessary. Pretty as it was, it's one of the worst UX I've seen all year.
It's possible, easy even, to achieve the same page scroll results (and even deep-linking fragments if that's a requirement) without taking over the browser history.
You should read the text. It's full of cloud and tech references, because KitKat and Google are promoting the next Android Version (Android 4.4 will be named KitKat).
Also you can win some Google Gadgets with KitKat (at the bottom).
It is preferably referred to as parallax scrolling, which is very common with single page designs these days. Unless otherwise used with the right intention and for the right purpose parallax scrolling technique is becoming the new carousel or from the olden days "skip intro".
This was trending on HN earlier today. I think the reason it's on the front page is because of the parody on Android's new version being named Kit Kat.
Looks to me like this was a joint marketing campaign by Google and Nestle. Seems successful.
Off topic, but did they get an engineer to write the content? "Thanks to its world-renowned, tri-core, wafer thin CPU with full chocolate coverage." If this is intentional sarcasm it is tasteless (pun intended)
So kitkat bought the new android OS release name for themselves, and released a coordinated marketing campaign. Is there any insider story on how that happened somewhere?. Maybe is a bit too early for that.
True, though so far it was less obvious, as in they're non "processed" snacks and deserts, and not brand names (as far as I can tell, maybe for North Americans it is more obvious?)
Android releases are named after some sweet, and going alphabetically. They just reached letter K. I'm not sure I can think of some other sweet starting with K?
Ugh, read the small print section. Horrible, designed by committee to attempt to sound like their audience. I sometimes find these quite revealing, although irritating. It shows how they perceive the people they are targeting with a product. In this case we are flighty, feckless, caught up in a culture full of meaningless catch phrases. They have mistaken the irreverence and playfulness of the y,z gen for low brow incoherence.
I just read it and I actually found it funny. Come to think of it, I like the whole idea of the site. Slightly nerdy and, that's the important part, not taking itself too seriously.
There's definitely worse examples of trying to adhere to this new lifestyle/fun-centric culture thing (I hope you know what I mean by that, since I don't know a better word for it)
I thoroughly enjoyed it. So maybe I'm the target audience? Although honestly how anyone could not already be in love with the peanut butter Kit Kat chunky is frankly beyond my ability to comprehend.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9#Controversy_and_cri...