There are some "really hard problems" that could definitely use the brain power assembled but apparently are never pursued.
Are there effectively (company) political red lines at Google Inc. that preclude pursuit of solution to problems such as distributed, non-centralized, social networking, or, somehow the engineers unconsciously choose to [only] pursue solutions that fit with the corporations business model?
There are some "really hard problems" that could definitely use the brain power assembled but apparently are never pursued.
Like self-driving cars I guess.
Are there effectively (company) political red lines at Google Inc. that preclude pursuit of solution to problems such as distributed, non-centralized, social networking, or, somehow the engineers unconsciously choose to [only] pursue solutions that fit with the corporations business model?
Google had at least 3 goes at building decentralized social networking[1][2][3].
As an external observer the one time I've seen behaviour that could have been characterized as avoiding pursuing a solution because of Google's business model is that Chrome has decided not to implement the "Do not track" solution that Firefox has implemented[4]. Google does have some reasonable technical arguments on their side (arguments that are best made by Apple, which doesn't really have a lot of skin in the tracking game[5]). Still, if you want to look for political interference that's where I'd look, instead of expecting yet another tilting-at-windmill quest to build an decentralized social network.
[3] http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ (Ok, OpenSocial isn't decentralized. But it does allow application portability between social networks which certainly has the effect of decentralizing power)
Are there effectively (company) political red lines at Google Inc. that preclude pursuit of solution to problems such as distributed, non-centralized, social networking, or, somehow the engineers unconsciously choose to [only] pursue solutions that fit with the corporations business model?