Well, I think this is a great way to get them interested in computers, analytical thinking and spending time with you. It's like going out fishing with you son.
I think unity is reasonably simple to start with. Seen 11 year old use it
Ballmer made bets on the windows phone, Zune, Bing (ads) etc in a bid to strengthen the moat around windows/Office. Most of these bets didn't pay, the strategy to build stuff to protect your core business does stymie company growth. I think Google has gotten itself into a similar position that Microsoft was in circa 2012.
Ballmer focused more on short term growth - pushing Windows, Office and related tools. The board was happy because revenues were up. They shouldn't have been happy. Tech companies have two choices: innovate or become irrelevant.
How is Google in a Microsoft position? Ballmer made wasteful acquisitions like Skype and Nokia, and wasted 3 years trying to compete with the iOS by building 2 separate ARM operating system (Windows RT, Windows Phone) only to kill them both and revert focus to the x86 Surface line.
Google hasn't done antything like that. Their product discontinuations have mostly been for niche applications.
Yeah the app looked like it was delegating to another service and needed a bearer token for that. The app logs should have showed this straight away. Furthermore, I’ve been burned enough to know that if I have a service that’s dependent on other services then I setup tasks in my service to ping the health of those services periodically and log warnings/errors if they’re unreachable. This allows me to divert blame as quickly as possible if alerted in the middle of the night.
I'm not so sure I would equate these layoffs as an end of an era. This is just exaggerated reporting by wapo.
In my opinion, these are corrections to the excessive hiring done in 2020. If you take each of the companies, the layoffs cane from bets which didn't make money. I don't think this marks as an end of an era.
