Oh and did you forget about lootboxes? and their effects on children?
(Note I'm taking a somewhat exaggerated position here -- I don't think Valve is a terrible company as far as companies nowadays go. But the bar in this question seems intended to be absolute, not relative.)
GOG has been selling DRM free for a decade or so now, but I still choose Steam because their software is so much better (Galaxy is atrocious and has gotten worse recently).
And I don't really care about cosmetic lootboxes, I guess? I've bought some (too many) for Path of Exile. I'm glad they are a funding model that enables free to play. I find it less obnoxious than the paid DLC model, in-game advertising, etc. As for kids, well, shouldn't parents control their spending anyway?
Example: Team Fortress 2, the official servers for the game have been overrun by bots that aimbot, votekick, say slurs, spam illegal content, what are they doing about it? Nothing. https://save.tf
Example 2: CSGO/CS2, also full of cheaters and illegal gambling sites
https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/
And you have a skin that has sold for over $1 million now.
https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-sells-for-o...
but the one mark against them is that by pushing Steam, they normalized DRM in the video game space and killed physical media on PCs.
For another decade after that, they (through acquihire or in house development) revolutionized office suites, online mapping, aerial imagery, email, photo search, Android, web browsers... seemingly all at once.
It wasn't until the last 8-10 years that they seeming stopped innovating and entered "hang on to our profits at any cost" mode and really increased the advertising spam everywhere.
I'd say that 1990s, 2000s google was pretty cool, but it turned evil quite quickly.
And a lot of Java stuff was sold to us for a very nominal sum (probably just the cost of production).
With the caveat that you had to buy Solaris.
Since Schmidt was the CTO of Sun Google inherited some of its culture. But that faded away.
? The big one I know about was OpenSolaris under CDDL; what non-OSS licenses did they use?
Those monster backplane slots were full of delicate little pins that were easy to bend, but the pins themselves were actually made tough and hard to break so a fine touch could have a hope of straightening them.
They made all their docs available, and kept them up for a very long time. The PDFs of the service manuals were immensely valuable.
It made it clear that someone had really cared about the user it when it was designed.
But I guess it depends on what you mean by "respectable" or "decent". It may be helpful to remember that a lot of people hated Sun in the 1980s and 1990s too. DEC (Digital) was a particular rival in those times. Spurred by the successes of NFS and the Sun/AT&T Unix deal, DEC created the OSF to counter Sun. Later on, there was something similar with IBM and Sun over Java. IBM eventually did license Java, but there was a lot of conflict.
I think in both cases the issues were mostly about licensing and business terms. Maybe this was nothing more than corporate rivalry and competition, but it kind of felt more personal than that.
At a Sun reunion a few years ago, Scott McNealy said of Sun, "We kicked butt, had fun, and we didn't cheat." The "kick butt and have fun" had been McNealy's slogan for a long time, but the "didn't cheat" was relatively new. I believe it to be true. I don't think Sun ever defrauded anybody. (It made mistakes, and plenty of them, but didn't defraud anybody.) In a world that has Enron and Theranos and FTX, maybe this is an outlier. But there are probably also many other companies that don't make that news that are making an honest buck and aren't cheating.
imagine a company that purchases space shuttles and lights them on fire in a field because it's more profitable than launching them. as much as it makes sense using math it's heartbreaking to watch as an engineer
You mean like SLS throwing all of the remaining Shuttle engines into the ocean, and then making more of them for $100 million each, and then throwing THOSE into the ocean too?
Sun's stuff was more beige-boxy (with a few lilac accents), but the hardware was damned solid.
Linux probably had more to do with them dying off than anything else. Once you could run a nix on commodity Intel boxes, the race was over.
I experienced something similar to this maybe two times interacting with Redhat but I had to skip their support chain to do it and kernel developers would be curious and fix some odd bug usually NetApp related but it was not like Sun where this was a regular part of the support process. In fairness we paid for the highest level of support Sun offered whereas we only had a handful of customers individually with Redhat support. Still, I had never seen anything like Sun Microsystems since. Not even close.
Stripe for a good while was (at least at some point) very highly perceived, I think?
And just 9 days ago I saw people praising Logitech. [1] No idea what the broader sentiment is currently (no news is good news, maybe?), but it seemed to me people loved it for a long time at least in the past?
Mozilla for a long time seemed pretty respectable, regardless of how people feel about them now.
There are lots of small tech companies out there that simply have respectable businesses but that you don't know or immediately think of because you just don't use them.
Good tech companies are those that focus on their products or services, but almost inevitably they get taken over by 'business' people; private equity, MBAs, CFOs, etc, and then milked to death.
People are butthurt prices are creeping up in the post-Moores law price era, but that’s just kind of the economics of the product. Gpus are the most sensitive to silicon pricing, being the biggest piece of silicon consumers use on a daily basis and all. They’ve always been intimately tied to Moores law (which is in fact jensen’s original insight about the niche that led to the company in the first place).
A 4070 at $500 is actually less than an inflation-adjusted GTX 670 after all, $600 is barely an increase. If that’s your reason for hating probably the most innovative silicon company on the planet, well…
It’s also a situation like valve where they probably aren’t the most innovative they could possibly be under a more competitive market… but their competition is so bad they can’t help constantly shooting themselves in the head constantly. Like apple/metal is probably the only real serious alternative at this point.
Instead of building just the tools, these companies now have the means to pry into our data too, so that is what they do.
