Google is simply bored while making so much money so comfortably, with an absolutely dominant market position in search. So every few months they need to do these copycat things simply to entertain themselves ;-).
I've always loved the book, I recently gave it to a co-worker with somewhat Feynman-like qualities. He reciprocated with 'The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century', Salsburg.
Yeah, right, I know, your comment was hilarious! I was adding joke to joke, but I guess I failed, someone else even downvoted my bad joke. Did my smiley make it feel snarky?
At its base, it's an exploration of how a conscious mind can arise from unconscious matter. For anyone who's attempted to read the thing and never quite gotten what Hofstadter's on about, the central theme is encapsulated in the dialogue ... Ant Fugue, with the emergence of the character Aunt Hillary from her component ants, who don't directly participate in "her" consciousness. Literally everything else is a long explanation -- from various angles -- of how, given sufficient complexity, the rules don't adequately describe the system, and the system need not be aware of the rules that give it rise. The mathematics, computer science, music, art and "spirituality" are all frames of reference for exploring and (to a limited extent) proving the central thesis: consciousness is an emergent phenomenon.
Just like how google's predecessors were not keen on search relevance so that users didn't find what they were searching for quickly - leading to them spending more time on the website and increasing ad revenue. We know where that logic led those companies to ;-)
IKEA, on the other hand, designed their stores specifically to keep customers inside as long as possible. If you don't know the shortcuts (or don't notice them), you have to wander through the whole showroom & marketplace. And just about everyone leaves with more than what they initially planned.
Pretty standard in my opinion. Depending on your negotiability, you're going to get diluted 10-40% in every round. Do that a few times, and you can see where one ends up :)
Kinda pathetic though, isn't it? A group of people devote their lives to a product, working round-the-clock for years, and then reap (relatively) tiny rewards compared to the money man.
What money man are you referring to exactly? Most of the actual money in these situations comes from massive institutional funds where there is no individual man.
We have been using Amplitude at 12 Labs (getapplause.com) after having tried several analytics platforms, and it's an amazing platform. Large free tier, really intuitive interface, and the tracking is really accurate (we did rigorous testing to verify that).
