Cory Watilo

I spend a lot of time ranting about businesses that treat customers poorly. I have a rule on Yelp that I have to post more positive reviews than negative, and while this isn't Yelp, I figured it was time to highlight someone doing something right.

So I was in Jersey City, NJ - just across the water from Manhattan, with the French Bulldog in tow. Since I didn't exactly want to leave her for more than a few hours, I looked up doggy daycares in the area. Turns out, there was a highly-rated place not too far from where I was staying, so I took her in to check the place out. (It's rare you see a place with 5 stars on Yelp, but this is one of the few.)

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TL;DR: Did you know you can't plug a Pixel phone into a TV to mirror your screen? Google purposely left this feature out because they want you to buy a Chromecast and have decided that wireless is the future, and to not build for the thousands of edge cases in the meantime.

Silicon Valley decides how we use technology. Since they make the products we all use, they have the ultimate say about how we will use our devices. Overall, we benefit from the decisions they make for us - in how we are forced to embrace technological advances that they deem necessary.

Adobe Flash is a great example of something that Apple and Google collectively decided to force out of the market, due to security concerns, battery life issues, and more (if not also for competitive reasons). While I don't know anyone who firmly believes Flash should still be around, it's a marquee example of how Silicon Valley businesses altered how we use technology because they decided it was in our best interest.

But where is the line between what's "good" for us, and what they say is good for us?

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When companies produce redesigns, the intention is usually to make things easier to use, make features more discoverable, and often to provide a visual refresh. As we all know, people don’t like change, so usually their is some level of revolt. This revolt usually subsides over the course of weeks or months and everyone moves on. But not always...