TelCo call centers are universally useless. Google could have a phone number you call and a robot on the other end that informs you of service disruptions and tells you to turn it off and turn it on again, and they would have better service than most ISPs.

> This move might be good for Google, but I find it somewhat alarming as a consumer. Those who control or curate content (Google, NBC/Comcast, Facebook) should not control infrastructure.

I don't know about you, but I'll take Google over Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, etc. any day of the week, regardless of their conflicts of interest. Google has a proven track record of doing things in my favor.

Yes! This is what happened in Japan. The telcos dragged their feet. Dial up Internet was pay per minute and adsl was $60-$90 a month. Yahoo Japan came in and offered adsl 1mbit speed for $20 a month unlimited. That is the moment Internet usage took off In Japan.

The telcos lowered their prices to match. Yahoo doubled the speed for the same price. That continued up to at least 8mbit speed for $20 month

Similar things need to happen here

Be careful what you wish for. I'm dubious of getting any kind of service from a company known for not having any kind of customer service whatsoever.

I really cannot emphasize enough how the intersection of these two fields is a) extraordinarily rare, b) extraordinarily capable of producing directly attributable, measurable improvements across an entire business and as a direct consequence c) very, very richly valued by the market right now.

> The big logo-y thing at the top of your blog page? Yes, the one that currently links to your blog? Right, that one. It shouldn't link to your damned blog! Link it to your product's home page instead.

Every time I have to manually cut the /blog/ out of the location bar I wonder how many users were lost by requiring that little bit of extra effort.

The biggest problem I see is: who the heck would expect a .12 release to break compatibility in an ancient and solid piece of software?

This move might be good for Google, but I find it somewhat alarming as a consumer. Those who control or curate content (Google, NBC/Comcast, Facebook) should not control infrastructure. This was less of a concern when Google was acting as a conduit of information, but as Google moves to treat personal (if aggregate) data as property and profits from user-generated data like YouTube or Google+, the lines become significantly blurred.

There may be nothing wrong intrinsically with controlling content and infrastructure, but it seems to be bad for consumers generally, as exhibited by Comcast[0]. And while a high-speed competitor to local cable monopolies is exciting, I worry about trading one dictator for another just because there's some competition in the transition period from the old guard to the new.

Is there some safeguard in place Kansas City and other fiber recipients have arranged to prevent Google from having the power to exert cable-esque control? Not rhetorical, genuinely curious.

EDIT: I'd like to make it clear that I'm not anti-Google, I don't think they're evil, or abuse consumer data, or are actively trying to become the next Comcast. I am, however, expressing concern over the position of power they will find themselves in if Fiber takes off. So far I've seen a lot of comments suggesting Google is not evil, to which I agree, but I haven't seen any indicating that there are adequate checks in place to (relatively easily) prevent the abuse of power.

[0]http://scrawford.net/blog/comcastnbcu-will-raise-costs-for-c...

I'm actually somewhat content with my broadband options. No, I'm not ecstatic and am glad this is happening but PLEASE someone disrupt the damn cell phone business. My ISP doesn't install software on my computer, doesn't hit me with mystery fees, and doesn't tell MS or Apple what to do, but cell carriers do all these things and more.

>and endless efforts to further "monetize" me through harassing phone calls trying to sell me more stuff,

Never happened to me, but all carriers text subscribers "deals" and other marketing garbage.

> intrusive DNS systems that redirect me to their crappy web sites, etc.

Never noticed and if I did its trivial to change DNS.

Cell phones on the other hand do all these things. I mean, Verizon just told google that its Wallet NFC stuff simply isn't allowed. Imagine if Comcast said "You can't install LibreOffice on your computer because we're thinking of entering the office game." I won't even go into uninstallable carrier apps, commercial spying, mystery charges, and billing fraud.

Maybe Google Fiber will the the backend for a future wireless roll out. One can hope.

It's hard for me not to compare the likes of Mark Pincus, who has been 'taking money off the table' from Zynga since before the IPO, to old-fashioned owner-CEOs like Warren Buffett, who has never sold a single share of his company, Berkshire Hathaway.[1]

[1] See http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/news/dec2799.html . Buffett is donating almost all his shares in annual chunks to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the remainder to a few, much smaller charitable foundations, so he will never personally cash out.

Your thought process is precisely how vendors like Apple are arriving at this conclusion. The problem with it is that you are assuming that your users are blithering idiots without any actual work to do.

The oh-so-quaint folder metaphor directly correlates to how humans do things in the physical world. I put my winter coat in a closet. My winter scarf, boots, hat and gloves are also in the closet, but in a box on a shelf.

My system may not be the same as yours, but it works for me. Dumping my winter stuff with all of my clothing on a pile, and affixing a blue tag on it to represent "winter stuff" isn't improving things. Installing a database-backed clothing management system like you would find at a dry cleaner in my house solves my organizational problem, but introduces alot of complexity and overhead.

Let's be real here. The reason that Apple is doing this is that have had success in delivering a dumbed-down API that makes their life much easier on phones, and prevents pesky third party software developers from doing dangerous things like allowing applications to talk to each other. They've decided to bring this innovation to the general purpose computer.

This all boils down to several salient points:

1) Nobody, not even 90-year-old computer newbies, has trouble understanding hierarchical folders. There could not be a more natural concept of organization. It corresponds to a box inside a storage box inside a closet inside a room inside a house inside a neighborhood, etc. It's just every level is called a folder. Saying that "x" group of people "can't understand" that is just insulting to them, frankly.

2) People who use a flat directory to save 1000's of invoices on a computer which is only used for that, who do not understand folders -- that's fine. This doesn't prove folders are non-intuitive. They just don't need to understand folders, because the job doesn't require folders. The moment their job does, someone can explain it to them, and they will get it, the same way they get that paperclips go in the box on the shelf in the closet.

3) The original Mac OS (say, up to System 6) did a great job of making folders understandable. They were physical icons, physical window locations, they were easy to use. The Open/Save dialogs could be a bit confusing, and still are -- there's definitely room for improvement there.

4) Modern OS's do a terrible job at making folders understandable, because there are drive directories, often hidden, and then multiple user folders, and their Documents directories, and then things outside their Documents directories (like Desktop, Downloads, etc.), and fake folders that show the content of multiple other folders, etc.

5) So people are rightly claiming that folders are a mess and confusing. Yes they are, on modern OS's. But the problem is not with the concept of folders, it's with their back-assward modern implementations. So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and claim that folders are bad. Instead, the solution is:

6) Modern OS's and apps: stop trying to organize our damned files for us! Stop auto-creating "Downloads" and "My Pictures" and "My Skype Photos" and "My Virtual Machines" directories. Just stop it! Instead, give each user their own home directory, have it be empty on a new computer, have every application open/save things in it by default (including downloads), and let the user organize things gradually as they see fit. And don't let anyone but a power user ever get outside of this directory.

(And ideally, stop allowing users to put documents on their desktop -- it just confuses things and nobody has ever come up with an intuitive way to integrate that with the concept of user folders (my desktop is inside my user folder, what?). Documents on a desktop is an outgrown metaphor that just nobody seems to have the courage to jettison.)

IPS has been around for a long, long time. Pricing might be a reflection of many things. Bad or questionable panels are one potential example. Another might be an EOL panel or monitor (End Of Life). Translation: They are not made or supported any more. It can also be an old model.

I spent some time in the LCD OEM business. The simplest way I can put it is that the major LCD module providers defecate all over LCD monitor manufacturers. Their defecate takes the form or panels that sometimes are good and other times are bad. Sometimes the bad is obvious (remember the purple aluminum Apple Cinema Displays?). Sometimes it isn't (reliability issues, pixel issues, etc.

The panel makers also pull stuff like discontinuing panels seemingly overnight and changing specifications on you without notice. We saw a case where the manufacturer changed the logic power supply specification for a panel from 12V to 5V and didn't bother to tell anyone. They shipped us new panels. Monitors started to blow-up during testing. I mean, smoke coming out of them. It wasn't until we burned-up the equivalent of a small BMW (or two) of OEM LCD panels that we came to the realization that the manufacturer had caused this issue. All we got was a new data-sheet out of them.

It's a rough business to be in. Ugly as can be. The sheer size of the providers and sole-source nature of the products create a situation where, for the most part, these companies are above the law (don't ask me how I know this) and can fuck with you --the monitor manufacturer-- to no end. The only companies that don't get screwed with as much are the large players like the HP, Dell and Apple's of the industry.

IPS panels of very high resolution have been around for quite some time. Probably the most famous of these was the IBM-originated quad-HD 3840 x 2160 22 inch panel. Memory fails but I'll say that this panel goes back at least fifteen years. OEM cost started out around $20K and dropped to about $6K with time.

My concern with these 27 inch monitors would be about the unknowns. They could be just fine. But they could also not be OK in a million ways. Did they, for example, not make it to US and European shores because they did not pass safety tests? I don't know. No amount of money will compel me to, quite literally, play with fire. Do they have system-level premature failure modes such as questionable power supplies or the like? Don't know. Or how about panel-level issues, such as high failure rates or deterioration with time, temperature, etc.

Buy them if you must, but be very aware of what you are not buying. I, as an example, would not leave these things plugged in and unattended. I'd plug them all into a power strip and switch them off every time I leave the room for more than thirty minutes. While I am not saying that a fire is the unavoidable consequence of paying so little for them I am proposing that, sometimes, when thing are too good to be true there's a reason for that.

I'm pulling my video editor Shave (http://shavevideo.com) out of the Mac App Store for these reasons, though most specifically the lack of paid upgrades. For a $10 video editor that, quite frankly, beats the pants off a lot of crap out there for day to day editing tasks, I can't afford to devote the time and resources it requires to maintain it without it having a baseline level of income. Not having an upgrade path to a major version number bump is ridiculous.

Also, the lack of direct contact with customers is obnoxious at best, crippling at worst. But the sandboxing entitlements kill the best bits of functionality, so I have not much choice but to say "fuck it" and move on.

I doubt Apple will miss me, though I'm the only other worthwhile editor on there other than iMovie and Final Cut in terms of actual editing functionality. The video category is a giant pile of shit save a few select pieces, mine included.