Eagle Business Software is now Koble

[mike]

What exciting changes will this bring you, the customer?

None, because their pricing is high and their customer service is low. So I don't pay for their updates any more. In the past when I was on their subscription plan, basically what would happen with each release is they would fix some bugs and create new ones in the process.

I use a POS that's not that bad, and the customer service is great, but I've come to cringe a little when it's time for an update. There are almost always a few cool new features, some bug fixes, and some new bugs created.

[Neto]

Bugs-R-Us

[Ken]

You'd have thought that the name "Google" would have been sufficiently unspecific. Yet they changed it to "Alphabet" anyway.

I think they did that because they wanted to have a bigger company that did a lot of different things of which Google was just one division.

One of those new things was supposed to be self-driving cars and they called that division Waymo. But that seems to have washed out and they are laying people off.

[Josh]

A “kobold” is a sorcerer, generally an evil one.

[ken_sylvania]

New brand colors as well - forest and olive green, intended to highlight the human and organic nature of business...

[temporal1]

You'd have thought that the name "Google" would have been sufficiently unspecific. Yet they changed it to "Alphabet" anyway.

I thought that was a weird.

GEEKWIRE / Seattle founder who sold company to Google says tech giant has ‘slowly ceased to function’
https://www.geekwire.com/2023/seattle-f ... -function/

A former Google employee who just left the tech giant after three years says he witnessed a “gradual decay of a dominant empire” and said the company “has slowly ceased to function.”

Praveen Seshadri, who sold his Seattle startup AppSheet to Google Cloud in 2020, published a blog post Tuesday suggesting that Google needs an “intervention.”

“Google’s fundamental problems are along the culture axis and everything else is a reflection of it,” he wrote.

Seshadri called the current moment “fragile” for Google as it faces pressure from Open AI and Microsoft, which made headlines last week for its new Bing search engine. Alphabet recently saw its market capitalization drop by $100 billion amid fears that it is losing ground to Microsoft.

He pointed out four cultural problems within Google: No mission; no urgency; delusions of exceptionalism; and mismanagement.

“Does anyone at Google come into work actually thinking about ‘organizing the world’s information’? They have lost track of who they serve and why,” he wrote, adding, “overall, it is a soft peacetime culture where nothing is worth fighting for.”

Seshadri previously spent more than a decade at Microsoft and said he noticed a similar downfall of a tech behemoth.

“Yet, Google has a few strengths that Microsoft didn’t have as it tried to recover — it isn’t a culture of ego and fiefdoms, the environment values introspection, the stated core values of the company are rock solid, and there is still immense respect for Google in the external world,” he wrote. “There is hope for Google and for my friends who work there, but it will require an intervention.”

Seshadri said Google should take inspiration from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, suggesting that the company recommit to its mission, set aside “peacetime generals,” and decrease “the depth of the organizational hierarchy.”

Founded in 2014, AppSheet helped businesses develop their own data-based apps without requiring a team of developers. Seshadri launched AppSheet with Brian Sabino, a former student in his database systems class at Cornell University.

Read his full blog post here. ..

^^more weird?


T-shirts ..

[Szdfan]

A “kobold” is a sorcerer, generally an evil one.

I did some digging. "Koble" is the Norwegian verb for "to connect" or "to link." https://www.wordsense.eu/koble/ This is similar to the Ubuntu Linux operating system appropriating a Nguni Bantu word for its name. Kinda eye-rolly, but not really a negative thing.

A Kobold is a sprite, spirit or fairy in Germanic folklore.