What Would You Want Companies to Do/Change and Why?

[LAwLz]

As the title says, what would you want to see change from companies and why? It can be something small, something big, something unrealistic, something realistic, etc, and explain why. I'd prefer keeping things somewhat realistic and reasonable though. Preferably with some explanation of why and how as well, just to keep things interesting. Basically, let's throw out ideas on what we think different tech companies should do, why and how.

 

Here are some of mine.

 

Google:

Fix their messaging ecosystem. Right now, it's a mess. I think they have a good idea with RCS but clearly it is not working out and it's already starting to become fragmented. For example I believe end-to-end encryption does not work between different carriers/apps/etc. It would be great if Google had just bought WhatsApp and integrated that into Android, with an API where messaging apps could just make some simple calls and plug into the "Google Messaging Platform" or whatever it would be called. That way it would be competition in the client space, but interoperability instead of these very fragmented messaging platforms we got today.

 

Incentivize developers to develop for WearOS, Android Auto, Android TV and Android tablets. Outside of Android for phones, Google's ecosystems are kind of dead. I got Android Auto, and barely any apps work with it or worth using (although I love Google maps). I have an Android tablet and even though I was satisfied with how it worked, you could feel that not much attention was given to the tablet space. Most things had tablets either as an afterthought, or something that just happened to work decent/well. I have no idea how alive/dead WearOS is but it seems kind of dead to me.

What I think Google needs to do is make devices on their own, support them a lot, and then maybe do some developer outreach with monetary incentives to develop for those platforms. Pay developers to develop for those platforms until they get enough traction to sustain themselves.

 

Make a good Android TV SoC. So far Google has worked with MediaTek for this but honestly, I think they should work with Nvidia. Nvidia made the Shield TV over 5 years ago and not only is it still getting updates, it is still one of the highest end Android TV devices you can buy. There are new TVs being released this year, for thousands of dollars, that has worse SoCs than the Shield TV had 5 years ago, and both will probably stop getting updates at around the same time despite the Shield TV's 5 year head start.

Google should team up with Nvidia and make an Android TV SoC with high performance and long support, then incentivize TV makers to use that. Possibly even making a Google branded TV. If I am buying a TV for 2000 dollars today, why should it have the same specs as a 300 dollar phone had 4 years ago?

 

Fix Android's terrible camera system. A lot of apps on Android literally open the camera, and take a screenshot of the viewfinder. They do not even use the camera APIs to capture an image because it is so bad. Google tried to fix this with Camera2 API, but that wasn't even mandatory so a bunch of devices doesn't support it. It should be mandatory and all the low level optimizations done by OEMs for their camera hardware needs to be abstracted away through a HAL. No idea how hard this would be but surely there is a way to fix this horrible mess.

 

 

 

Samsung:

Stop dual sourcing SoCs for your flagship devices. I totally get that it is to put pressure on Qualcomm (which clearly hasn't worked because Qualcomm has jacked up their prices tremendously over the years) but please do that in the mid and low range instead. Splitting your devices like you have in the past only puts a bunch of unnecessary stress on your developers to develop for two platforms. We have already seen the issues this cause with things like the Exynos and Snapdragon variants have very different image processing, and them leap frogging each other in performance between updates. That's bad and realistically, it would be best to just focus all the attention to a single platform. Hopefully this will fix itself as Samsung moves over to stock ARM cores, and AMD for the GPU. Plus Qualcomm's patents becoming less and less relevant.

 

 

AOMedia:

Embrace AVIF as the next big image format. AVIF is basically PNG, GIF and JPEG all combined, but better in every single way. Smaller files, with higher quality, which could be faster to encode and decode, using less power, supporting more features while also being free as in freedom (open source) and free beer (no licensing fees).

Right now AOMedia are pushing AV1, their video format, a lot. But they seem to ignore their image format AVIF. I would like to see that change so that we can finally replace JPEG; which is a horrible, outdated standard.

 

 

Microsoft:

Stop shoving so many ads into Windows. Seriously, stop. I don't want to have to uninstall a bunch of things and disable various "suggestions" at like 10 different place in settings menus just to get rid of ads in a product I paid a lot of money for.

 

 

Buy Qt and make it free. So far Microsoft has done a great job with Github so it feels really weird to say this but, I want Microsoft to buy Qt and do what they did with Github. Make some more features free and improve the rest. Keep it open and friendly to the open source community. Qt is in need of cash and I think Microsoft could get a lot of good-will in the open source community if they bought it and proved themselves to be the good guys they say they are. They would probably get a ton of shit for buying Qt in the beginning, but if they proved themselves to be a new and friendly company then they could get a ton of respect in the long run.

 

Shift focus away from DirectX and onto Vulcan. Same reason as the Qt acquisition. Why do we even have two APIs like this when they aren't even competing? It's only a competition on Windows but as soon as you want to run on something that isn't Windows, you have to use Vulcan. Just unit all developers onto one set of APIs. It will be helpful to both GPU manufacturers and developers. It will also help platforms like GNU/Linux and Android, which Microsoft often want to talk about how much they support these days.

 

Make Windows more modular (like GNU/Linux). This is actually already happening but I thought I'd add it anyway. Historically, Windows has been kind of a mess. Internally, things in Windows hook into other things like crazy and the whole thing is spaghetti on top of spaghetti. Change one thing in one part of the OS and seemingly random things seem to break, because they are somehow connected in the back-end. A good user facing example of this used to be the proxy settings. Instead of just creating proxy settings inside Windows, Microsoft thought "we already need to implement proxy settings inside Internet Explorer, so let's just make that the system's proxy settings!". As a result, whenever some program wants to interact with proxy settings and they use the system's settings, that program interacts with Internet Explorer in the back-end. You can even see this for yourself if you install Chrome on Windows 7 and go into proxy settings. When you click that button, you will see that the Internet Explorer options dialog page will open. That's because Chrome makes a call to the system, which forwards that to IE. And this happens with a ton of other stuff inside Windows. That's why Microsoft had to make so many changes when they were forced to make IE an optional component of Windows, because a ton of other stuff relied on it.

Since then, Microsoft has fixed a lot of stuff. Proxy settings for example are now a proper system setting rather than reliant on IE. They are also decoupleing a lot of "Windows programs" like Paint, Notepad and so on and putting them into their own module. In the back-end they are also doing major rework with Windows so make it more modular. The end result will be a more stable and consistent Windows which can be adapted more to for example other form factors with ease, and it can help with updates. I just wish the process went faster (although it's understandable since they have to go through decades of spaghetti code) and that they hadn't been so stupid to design it this way from the start.

 

 

ARM:
Make a successor to the A55. The A55, which is a core that is found in virtually all Android phones, sucks balls. It's suppose to be the very energy efficient and low performance core used for smaller tasks where conserving battery life is important, but they were released over 3 years ago and that in and of itself was heavily based on the A53 which is 8 years old. I know that a successor to the A55 is going to be released like next year or the year after that, but it is quite frankly long overdue.

Just to put into perspective how terrible the A55 core is, the Thunder cores in the Apple A13 performs about 250% to 300% better, AND uses LESS THAN HALF the energy. Apple's energy efficiency cores are about 500% more efficient than ARMs energy efficiency cores. That's like if Intel had a 40 watt CPU that performs as well as AMD's 200 watt CPU. It's insane how far ahead Apple is with their small cores.

[TempestCatto]

Apple - nuff said.

[5x5]

Apple - not allow the design team to snort crack cocaine while laying out the PCB or choosing components 

[kelvinhall05]

Cherry - Give up, your switches are fucking terrible and they plague all major keyboard brands. Stop it.

 

Modern keyboard makers - Stop using Cherry switches, stop using cheap, lasered keycaps with fugly legends that get shiny after minutes of use and lose the legend far before the keyboard itself breaks (usually), stop building your boards like shit, stop prioritizing RGBullshit over good features, switches, keycaps, build, etc, and stop making garbage software that is borderline malware/keylogger just to program macros and RGB when my Focus from the 90s can program macros on the fly with the press of two buttons.

 

Laptop makers: Stop putting tiny batteries in your machines, stop removing features and IO, and make them at the very least easy to open and clean.

 

Phone makers: OLED should be standard, stop using notches and punch-outs, stop putting your own shitty skin on Android, and stop trying to make your phone only work with the ROM it came with.

 

Monitor makers: VESA compatibility should be standard, thin bezels are NOT a priority, DVI should still be on most monitors, and the OSD should actually be usable and easy to navigate.
 

 

EDIT: Game publishers: Stop putting garbage anti-cheat into the game that doesn't stop cheaters and just hinders the ability for everyone who isn't on the exact platform you designed the game for to play it.

[Lord Vile]

4 minutes ago, 5x5 said:

Apple - not allow the design team to snort crack cocaine while laying out the PCB or choosing components 

I would think their engineers a tad more qualified than you are.

[kelvinhall05]

3 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

I would think their engineers a tad more qualified than you are.

Yet the twats over there put a backlight VCC line right next to a CPU data line, so if a single tiny drop of water gets on that connector your machine is fucked.

[Lord Vile]

36 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Yet the twats over there put a backlight VCC line right next to a CPU data line, so if a single tiny drop of water gets on that connector your machine is fucked.

If water gets in that far it's fucked anyway. 

[kelvinhall05]

16 minutes ago, CircleTech said:

Engineers never make those dumb-ass choices

Snipped to save half a page of scrolling lol

 

I cannot find the meme I thought of when I read this, so I will reply with this Quora post I found while trying to find that meme:

 

Spoiler

 

While I do see both sides of this argument (the "engineers are dumb" side and the "investors are the engineers" side), I doubt some millionaire or billionaire knows the difference between VCC and a CPU data line enough to realize that by placing those two specific lines right next to each other on a random connector on the board will cause the machine to kill itself when the room gets humid. Knowing how Apple seems to design things for form over function, I bet that signal line has something to do with backlight control for the display, hence why it would, to someone who doesn't know what they're doing or thinking things through, seem like the best solution (backlight power right next to backlight level).

 

So I guess what I am trying to say is that while it might not be an engineer's fault, I would not assume that an investor told them to change that one specific thing to cause the machine to fail.

[kelvinhall05]

16 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

If water gets in that far it's fucked anyway. 

Disagree, it completely depends on the machine. With a Macbook it's probably fucked once it's out of the protective plastic that it is wrapped in when you buy it. Drown a Thinkpad in water and I bet that when you dry it off it will power on just fine. Hell, machines like Toughbooks or whatever are designed to be submurged in water and continue functioning even if water does get on the PCB.

[straight_stewie]

1 hour ago, 5x5 said:

snort crack cocaine

A little off topic, but crack generally isn't snorted. It's usually smoked. Snorting is usually saved for the "pure" white.

Crack cocaine is specifically named "crack" because of the crackling sound it makes when you smoke it. It's literally just cocaine, water, and other additives (traditionally baking soda, nowadays probably some Fentanyl too) boiled down to a solid.

Although I do agree that Apple has made some questionable decisions. Overall their products are pretty nice, and usually look good too. They just usually also lack common or important features and are not put into the appropriate price range.

[Lord Vile]

16 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Disagree, it completely depends on the machine. With a Macbook it's probably fucked once it's out of the protective plastic that it is wrapped in when you buy it. Drown a Thinkpad in water and I bet that when you dry it off it will power on just fine. Hell, machines like Toughbooks or whatever are designed to be submurged in water and continue functioning even if water does get on the PCB.

50/50 with the thinkpad and toughbooks are expensive as all hell for what they are, I mean if you think apple is expensive try 3.5 grand for a dual core rugged latitude 

 

In general MacBooks last longer than windows laptops funnily enough.  

[kelvinhall05]

22 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

In general MacBooks last longer than windows laptops funnily enough.  

Compare a $4000 Macbook to a $4000 Thinkpad, not to a $400 Dell, then we'll see which one lasts longer.

[5x5]

1 hour ago, Lord Vile said:

I would think their engineers a tad more qualified than you are.

Is that why the CPU gets 52 volts in a humid room? Or why the TB3 controller explodes? Or the T2 chip fails randomly? Or the cooling is barely enough to prevent thermal shutdown? Or the keyboard lawsuit? Or the bending phones and tablets? Or the rubber piece on top of the PCH to keep it making contact when the chip falls apart due to board warping because of excess heat? 

 

Please, don't even attempt to defend their engineering. Calling engineering is a disgrace

[divito]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Make a good Android TV SoC. So far Google has worked with MediaTek for this but honestly, I think they should work with Nvidia. Nvidia made the Shield TV over 5 years ago and not only is it still getting updates, it is still one of the highest end Android TV devices you can buy. There are new TVs being released this year, for thousands of dollars, that has worse SoCs than the Shield TV had 5 years ago, and both will probably stop getting updates at around the same time despite the Shield TV's 5 year head start.

Google should team up with Nvidia and make an Android TV SoC with high performance and long support, then incentivize TV makers to use that. Possibly even making a Google branded TV. If I am buying a TV for 2000 dollars today, why should it have the same specs as a 300 dollar phone had 4 years ago?

I'll have to re-visit this thread, but I second this. Android TV as a platform is miles ahead of Roku or anything else imo, and having better app support (though it's slowly getting there) and more hardware entering the scene would help it grow tremendously. 

I have a 3rd generation Mi Box and it's still completely solid. I have a TV for my daughter that has Android TV and it hasn't received updates in awhile, and you can tell it's far slower. My parents also replaced a dead TV with one that had Android TV and you can really tell that it's a bit sluggish compared to something like the Mi Box or Shield. Really would enjoy this being fixed.

[Lord Vile]

18 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Compare a $4000 Macbook to a $4000 Thinkpad, not to a $400 Dell, then we'll see which one lasts longer.

It would be the MacBook, Windows is a glorious thing. A glorious cockup cascade. Plus MacOS keeps things a lot tidier.

 

16 minutes ago, 5x5 said:

Is that why the CPU gets 52 volts in a humid room? Or why the TB3 controller explodes? Or the T2 chip fails randomly? Or the cooling is barely enough to prevent thermal shutdown? Or the keyboard lawsuit? Or the bending phones and tablets? Or the rubber piece on top of the PCH to keep it making contact when the chip falls apart due to board warping because of excess heat? 

 

Please, don't even attempt to defend their engineering. Calling engineering is a disgrace

Are you really going by reddit posts? Really? Because that's such a great source.

 

Literally the only thing that has any merit is the keyboard thing which personally I didn't have and was covered by an extended warranty.

 

As for bending:

 

[Curious Pineapple]

Here we go again.

[imreloadin]

Actually give a fuck about their employees?

[GDRRiley]

2 hours ago, CircleTech said:

Steve Jobs was an Engineer and a visionary, so he wanted to build things to last.

engineer no visionary who wanted quality yes.

 

2 hours ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Cherry - Give up, your switches are fucking terrible and they plague all major keyboard brands. Stop it.

 

Modern keyboard makers - Stop using Cherry switches, stop using cheap, lasered keycaps with fugly legends that get shiny after minutes of use and lose the legend far before the keyboard itself breaks (usually), stop building your boards like shit, stop prioritizing RGBullshit over good features, switches, keycaps, build, etc, and stop making garbage software that is borderline malware/keylogger just to program macros and RGB when my Focus from the 90s can program macros on the fly with the press of two buttons.

 

Laptop makers: Stop putting tiny batteries in your machines, stop removing features and IO, and make them at the very least easy to open and clean

 

Monitor makers: VESA compatibility should be standard, thin bezels are NOT a priority, DVI should still be on most monitors, and the OSD should actually be usable and easy to navigate.

they really aren't bad. I love my cherry keyboard over the dozens of different membrane and laptops I've used both windows and Mac.

 

Well then go away from the gaming brands to stuff like drop or ducky someone who just makes pure simple keyboards. I love my roosewell one. its basic with the only special thing being disable windows.

 

yeah we all want that

 

DVI is dying from GPUs. I want dual HDMI and dual Displayport with 1 via USB-C

 

37 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

It would be the MacBook, Windows is a glorious thing. A glorious cockup cascade. Plus MacOS keeps things a lot tidier.

we are talking hardware not software, windows specifically business machines last.

 

 

Canon

Put some dam work into firmware so you bring features that we know there is the hardware power for. Update your cine cameras more than every 4 years.

Stop acting like EF-M mount should exists any more

 

[kelvinhall05]

38 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

It would be the MacBook, Windows is a glorious thing. A glorious cockup cascade. Plus MacOS keeps things a lot tidier.

When did I ever say that Windows would stay on the Thinkpad? And from your comment and the previous conversation in this thread, it seems you were referring to hardware.

39 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Are you really going by reddit posts? Really? Because that's such a great source.

https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup

39 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Literally the only thing that has any merit is the keyboard thing which personally I didn't have and was covered by an extended warranty.

Disagree. Not only should it not have happened in the first place, but Apple's first action was to tell people to turn their laptop over and use compressed air on the keyboard.

40 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

As for bending:

 

[kelvinhall05]

1 minute ago, GDRRiley said:

they really aren't bad. I love my cherry keyboard over the dozens of different membrane and laptops I've used both windows and Mac.

To each their own. I also loved my MX Browns until I tried white Alps, green Alps, orange Alps, buckling springs, etc. I also have rubber dome boards that feel much better than any of the Cherry MX switches I've tried (my BTC 5139).

1 minute ago, GDRRiley said:

Well then go away from the gaming brands to stuff like drop or ducky someone who just makes pure simple keyboards.

Personally, I wouldn't consider Ducky a gaming brand nor a mainstream one.

3 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

DVI is dying from GPUs. I want dual HDMI and dual Displayport with 1 via USB-C

Eh, true, but still nice to at least have the option for it.

 

 

Also I forgot to include this on my original post, but monitors should also have built-in power supplies and use a standard power cable.

[GDRRiley]

1 minute ago, kelvinhall05 said:

To each their own. I also loved my MX Browns until I tried white Alps, green Alps, orange Alps, buckling springs, etc. I also have rubber dome boards that feel much better than any of the Cherry MX switches I've tried (my BTC 5139).

Personally, I wouldn't consider Ducky a gaming brand nor a mainstream one.

 

Also I forgot to include this on my original post, but monitors should also have built-in power supplies and use a standard power cable.

I'm weird I like really firm but smooth keyboards so I want a firmer version of blacks which are a firmer version of reds.

that was my point get away from corsair gaming or whatever go to those who make great boards

 

yeah external power bricks should be gone from basically everything.

[wall03]

GOOGLE:
 

Stop selling our info! No really! I don't want them selling my info!

 

TWITTER

 

Disappear or at least ban Trump. Self explanatory.

 

MICROSOFT:

 

Have GitHub make a Web CSS Standard. Everything would look clean and modern. At least the old ones with an outdated design.

 

Make Windows Open-Source. It would be a lot less buggy. Yes, it would be free but Microsoft won't have to pay as many devs.

 

Adobe:

 

Make Creative Cloud Free. Everyone would warship them! It could even be a snapshot at one point in time.

 

Apple:

 

Lower Your Prices: I know this 'strategy' where you raise prices and are a 'premium' brand, but I bet you would make much much more if you lowered your prices. No, really.

 

Make macOS free: More people would be more apt to use iCloud...

 

NVIDIA:

 

Just Lower Your Freaking Prices: You might actually be able to compete with AMD

[5x5]

3 hours ago, Lord Vile said:

It would be the MacBook, Windows is a glorious thing. A glorious cockup cascade. Plus MacOS keeps things a lot tidier.

 

Are you really going by reddit posts? Really? Because that's such a great source.

 

Literally the only thing that has any merit is the keyboard thing which personally I didn't have and was covered by an extended warranty.

 

As for bending:

 

I'm going by the experience my colleagues had including the one who actually caught fire mid presentation because the TB controller fucked up

[Lord Vile]

5 hours ago, 5x5 said:

I'm going by the experience my colleagues had including the one who actually caught fire mid presentation because the TB controller fucked up

Yeah I’m calling BS on that. Thunderbolt and USBC can catch fire but that’s because of faulty or cheap cables not the controller. 

[5x5]

22 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Yeah I’m calling BS on that. Thunderbolt and USBC can catch fire but that’s because of faulty or cheap cables not the controller. 

The scorch marks on the PCB say otherwise. Rossman has also showed at least two instances of TB3 controllers exploding