No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily.
The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy.
They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely.
I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom.
We were making the move to docs and sheets, but it's basically stuck. Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs. For those of us who are older this is totally incredible - Office was so anti-linux / cloud it was incredible, and now word in the cloud kinda works!
And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.
Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything? Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).
> The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy.
On the outset, you might think with such ridiculously high compensation there would be an expectation of quality, but I think that's an error.
Google operates as an ad-company that happens to employ ridiculous amounts of exhorbitantly compensated individuals to engage in market and technological research, particularly to open or expand markets for their ads.
They didn't create mail, docs, drive et al in order to create productivity apps, they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same. They don't really care what content is in the browser so long as it is browser-based content the user consumes and not native apps. The more browser time spent, the higher the likelihood of being served Google ads, or providing Google with data, and similar.
mail, docs, drive et al ... they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising
This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite as a paid service, and "everyone uses the same service at home that they do at work" has clear advantages, whether or not there is advertising in your gmail. Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite (or "google apps for domains", as they called it then - horrible).
Completely accurate. The ads were even touted as somewhat of a feature. Something along the lines of "Gmail has ads, just like the other services, but our ads will be relevant to your interests."
It’s accurate and inaccurate. Ads were there but many users saw none for a long time.
IMO ads were a distraction to enable the data harvesting, which drove Adsense targeting. Even today, the ads I see on GMail are pretty low quality. Some lovelorn guy used my email address unintentionally to sign up for a 55+ dating site 3 years ago. The most targeted ads I get are for similar sites.
When using GSuite it is used in a browser, and this is key to the Google strategy. The goal is to get more users spending more time in their browsers, in order to funnel them to Google Ads and to serve Google their browsing data.
GSuite exists, at least in part, to break down the model of the walled corporate intranet. There are just too many people behind the corporate veil to ignore; and as a bonus, the browsing and cloud app usage habits they develop at work will tend to translate to their usage habits at home.
Also, as noted by another responder, GMail has had ads since launch. I was a beta user from day 1, and I recall the ads.
Edit: worth noting the historical difficulty of getting open source software into the business environment because corporate purchasers were wary of anything that was "free"; putting a price on something makes it more palatable to corporate adoption.
I can’t imagine that being true. Gmail had “relevant” ads based off their other ad tech from the get go. That was a point vs other majors having banner ads.
Gmail very quickly introduced advertising in your mailbox. There was a huge outcry because they would scan your mails to provide contextual advertising.
This was before other GSuite components even existed.
> _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same
Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data.
This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all.
Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating systems, then it's +1 for them and -1 for the competition.
> And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data.
I am a vocal Google critic, but I have yet to see any evidence of them selling my data. Unlike a number of other companies and organizations Google serms to have realized long ago that they are totally dependent on user trust.
I'm not saying they are smart (judging by the ads they have sent me the last 13 years, the killing off of Reader, the nymwars and then killing off Google+ after it turned out to be nice) or nice (the way they keep trying to crush the open web, the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model of pushing Chrome relentlessly until they almost have monopoly, then try to remove the possibility to run adblockers etc etc)
I guess throwing away your key asset is not in the interest of Google or Facebook. I presume Cambridge Analytica only got so far with Facebook because Facebook didn't realize the potential value of its user data till then. Now they'll engage in the same act themselves.
StarOffice was developed by a company that was trying to sell it the old fashioned way but became Open Source because Sun was trying to keep its Unix workstations viable (no way we'd see "Office for SPARC") and also challenging Microsoft with Java.
Oracle bought Sun. Oracle kept Sun products alive because they know one reason people $$$ for Oracle is support.
Once it got renamed and spun out of Oracle, LibreOffice has been kept alive by various stakeholders such as companies that have big fleets of heavily hacked instances, Eurocrats who wish they could break the hold of American software monopolies, linux distros who want another piece of shovelware to list on the box, etc.
A typical end user might not perceive that leaving an issue on GitHub is not good customer service, even if some people enjoy the liberty of fixing things for themselves.
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More seriously, Libreoffice is software you run on a computer you control (e.g. your desktop, a cloud server, whatever, ...) Since you are paying for the computer, you don't have conflicts about how generously to provision hardware.
Libreoffice is a ship in a bottle. 1000 years from now somebody might dig up an optical disk from a landfill and boot Libreoffice, but it is hard to believe Google Docs will last that long.
Originally this product knwn as StarOffice ws not free. It only became so after Sun aquired it and reeased it as OpenOffice. This was basically a loss-leader not just fr sun but for other companies as well to break Microsoft's capture of the Knowledege Worker productivity which they leveraged into other areas.
So the idea was you were the product, "sold" to the non-MS-Windows/Intel companies in te hopes of you being retained or transferred to a non-MS stack.
LibreOffice is post Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but the idea is still the same.
Nobody called them “knowledge workers” outside of Page Mill Dr. when StarOffice was made and Sun didn’t compete in that space as much though Microsoft was starting to eat their lunch in other areas, like academia, government, military, and high end computation.
I worked on a Sun at NOAA in the 90s in Hawaii and the computer we used for bathymetry imaging was a Sun and the ships used Suns.
Most of that equipment was replaced with a little Linux and Windows Servers.
Same experience, maybe few years earlier . We all had the Sun pizzaboxes that had replaced Lisp Machines, and 2 years later we all had Mac's and later PC's.
Latex still had it's place in academia, and would continue to dominate academic publishing for quite some time, but for 'ordinary' daily productivity needs first MacWrite and MacDraw, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and later Word and Excel were becoming the staples.
With both software being ported to the PC/Mac platforms, and Linux starting to make inroads into the Unix compute workloads, Sun needed an answer fast to stop the bleeding.
Their inability to transform their high tough / high margin business model would do them in eventually as the commodity / thin margin model of the PC ecosystem grinded them into dust. But before that, they would try several things one of which was an attempt to 'complete' the offering of a single box solution which would have to include an 'office' package so as to keep the Mac / PC of the desks.
It's a rule of thumb. No, not every costless product is monetizing your use of it. FOSS is especially counter to this rule.
In the case of web-based tools that are owned and operated by big advertising companies, I think it's a fairly safe bet. As always, think critically about each instance and consider the implications of the software and products you use.
For open source, you kind of are in a weird way. Open source projects need contributions, for example in the form of bug reports, feature requests, proof reading and (in the rare case) source code. Many ousers provide these benefits to open source projects, which make them thrive.
On the other hand, looking at the coin from the other side you could also argue you’re paying with your time and effort and not your money.
You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free.
The quote is pithy but assumes some context - the [something] is being provided below the marginal cost to produce and therefore being provided with an expectation of benefit for the provider.
Acquiring LibreOffice is not $0 marginal cost but they have a big "DONATE" button top-right corner of the website and The Document Foundation turns a small profit from donations.
There is free as in Freedom as well as free as in beer. The quote seems to apply to things that are free as in beer but not free as in freedom. It'd be valid given that distinction.
For using Gmail, Drive and Docs you will have a Google account and you'll be logged in often or all the time. Quite useful for targeting you outside those tools.
Everything searchable is indexed. Everything indexed and associated with a user is used to profile that user in order to provide superior search results.
They aggregate what they learn about each user across all their properties. (Their hope was the plus would make this easier). So while I seriously doubt they tell advertisers, “joshuamorton writes about JavaScript, metallurgy and anime”, whatever they learn from the enormous number of places they are collecting info increases the probability that you might see an ad on gmail relating to anime.
And they are quite public about scanning documents written using the free drive service, as they are proud that they take down documents with content they or the government consider inappropriate, as discussed on HN recently.
So your contention is that because they check hashes of documents stored on drive for unlawful material, we'll say, that this proves that Google is lying about how it uses data from docs and drive?
Or are you saying they don't actually share any data learned from docs and drive
What does checking hashes of documents mean? Isn’t stuff either encrypted or not?
This might not be a good look for me to be confused by this as a web dev/programmer, but I does that mean they are securely or otherwise hashing everything they store on all users? Drive, Gmail and other Google services have tons of data. After THats they are also still only checking hashes?
This is ~super common with things like copyright violations and child porn. You store a database of hashes of copyrighted or pornographic data. And specifically you can use visual-similarity hashing to detect even somewhat perturbed documents.
Well, obviously, if Google was going to have to take an actual phone call from somebody when things went pear-shaped, that was never going to work out.
And that even though MSFT started creating Office Online much later and also had to basically create a whole new product. And yet they now have the by far superior product.
Chrome has been deteriorating in performance and power usage - on OSX at least, I recently switched back to Firefox because it was that bad (Safari is a step too far as I want to work on non-Apple platforms). Firefox has slipped from the mainstream and it's very obvious - so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) - the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.
And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation. Implementation is ridiculously inconsistent across OS versions and HW vendors - I was trying to create a WiFi management API for some industrial application that would connect to controller specific networks - Android has 2 layers of terrible and depricated API with documentation that was misleading at best, a new API that only worked on 10+ without backcompat, and the actual implementation was inconsistent across four Android devices we tested. We gave up on the project as the Matrix of features missing and hacks needed for every platform we could find was just not practical to maintain.
> the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.
I've been preaching this for a while:
- Chrome is dominant line IE was.
- Chrome - like IE - doesn't care about the standards because they know developers will adapt to them.
- Chrome - like IE - is starting to fail.
Unfortunately, meanwhile Mozilla has been busy tearing apart a number of the things that made Firefox shine, especially the extension API. They've also been busy trying to destroy the massive trust many of us had in them by doing stupid things like injecting a silly ad extension and lying (IIRC) about the Pocket thing (nothing against Pocket, they just shouldn't have lied about it, many of us are looking for ways to fund FF development.)
Edit: I still use and recommend Firefox. For me it is still the best browser out there in more than one way, I just feel it could have been so much better.
Brave is basically just Chrome with an adblocker, just like edge is chrome with a reskin. Obviously that's a bit of an exaggeration, but they are all chromium at heart.
> And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation.
Ho ho ho. You haven't even touched the worst that Android has to offer.
- The bluetooth stack. My god the bluetooth stack. A mix of absolutely awful APIs trying to disguise state machines, APIs trying to simplify GATT (but awfully failing at it), the Android lifecycle making you tear your hair out when you want any kind of long lived connection.
- Camera. Thankfully, CameraX from the AndroidX team makes it much easier. But a few years back? I'll just let Google's very own Camera2BasicFragment speak for itself. https://github.com/googlearchive/android-Camera2Basic/blob/m... . 1100 lines of basicness.
- The java.io.File API is basically gone. The reasons themselves are "good". The replacement, SAF is a horrible, slow, inconvenient API that breaks pretty much every file manager.
- Looking at the bug tracker is a whole other level of sadness. What's that, You'd need your testing library to ba able to instantiate a Fragment in an arbitrary Activity ? radio silence since 2019
> many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF)
You can report sites that are broken in Firefox at https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla engineers will debug the broken site and try to contact the site's developers. Firefox also ships some site-specific workarounds (such as spoofing Chrome's User-Agent string or tweaking some CSS). You can see the current list of site workarounds in Firefox's about:compat page.
> so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF
I find this really interesting, and would like to hear more. I've been a Firefox ESR user for almost a decade, and apart from some breakage on some videoconferencing sites, and sometimes having to disable uBlock Origin, I've not faced an unusable site. And this is on ESR!
I also use FF on daily basis and I don't remember having such problems. Some webapps like Skype were blocking FF user-agent on purpose (changing User-Agent made it work). Maybe I use different sites than the one complaining but it may also be worth checking addons and considering starting FF in Safe Mode (which disables addons temporarily). Sometimes addons can mess up sites in unexpected ways.
Chrome has recently (within the last year) been repeatedly making me frustrated with its pdf issues. It feels like 40% of the time I open a pdf in chrome, I instead get an error message like "the plugin has crashed" or some bs. The only solution is to restart the browser entirely. Switched back to FF for this reason.
Android feels just as janky as Windows did for years. Everything about the ecosystem shows a lack of leadership. Microsoft did better with dealing with its OEMs in 1995 with WinHEC than Google does today.
I have to say, as a FF user who's never gotten on board the Chrome train other than as a target for dev work (because it doesn't have tree-style tabs), I do not see the problems you're reporting.
> The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily.
This drove me nuts with my Nest Minis until I tried out Apple's Homepod.
People hate on Apple for moving slow in the "connected home" space, but my Homepod sounds great, can distinguish between my wife and I, and can handle BOTH personal and work calendars for the two of us. I'll take the polish over my actual use cases, rather than rough edges around a wider set of uses, most of which I never will use.
And neither of us use iCloud for email! It blows my mind that a Google can offer email/calendars for both personal and work use can tie both to you as an individual, but _somehow_ can't make your "smart" speaker do the same.
I'm fairly frustrated with siri's voice recognition in general myself as a multi-year homepod user. The amazon echos I had before the homepod were more consistent and google's general voice transcription & knowledge base is still way ahead of siri.
I mostly chose the homepod because of privacy and better sound. If the privacy story was the same on google or amazon, I'd probably be using that right now instead.
> Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs
You are in for a surprise. Office 365 (at least Excel and Word) looks like a toy compared to the desktop versions. I'm not talking about niche features or VBA, I'm talking about things like naming a table, which is explicitly only supported in the desktop version. Ah, of course! You need the table's name to use it in their Power Automate platform. Microsoft 365 is a mess right now. I hope it improves.
And yet, for the typical office user, it supports most or all of the stuff they are going to do. It's also fast, reliable, it renders Office files correctly, and the UI matches what people are familiar with.
Here's another Office 365 Web surprise. Last week we had 5 team members working in a shared Word document with track-changes; A) There is no "view final markup" option, and B) after a while the web-app crawled to a halt.
We've had some bugs with loss of recent modifications to some spreadsheets when several users modify it collaboratively (Google Sheets-style). It sucks, unfortunately.
Gsuite/GAFYD domain users (which are a tiny fraction of all Google accounts, for what it is worth) have a special pain with all Google consumer products. Many products and features simply do not work with Gsuite accounts. Why? Gsuite accounts have a different terms of service, and getting legal, privacy, compliance, etc to sign off on launching your feature is a pain in the neck. Also it's possible that some features and products really aren't compatible with the Gsuite TOS. So as an engineer you can choose to just not launch your feature to Gsuite, or you can go through a lot of work to launch it all the way, for which you will gain no marginal users and will receive no recognition or compensation.
> They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there...
I mostly use YouTube to watch series - PBS Space Time, World War Two, Crash Course etc. YouTube is absolutely horrible at navigating through these series - it is difficult to find where you left, it is difficult to find the next episode, there is absolutely no user comfort.
> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).
That is a really strange false equivalency. Not even the slightest bit relevant, yet it reads as if you believe that protesting for social change is a bad thing.
Chrome? Try Edge. On mac, it's day and night, Edge does actually stop the pages you aren't viewing, bringing battery life and CPU use much closer to battery.
It's like this was a low hanging fruit of finally cleaning up some old mess in Chromium, Google ignored it for years, and MS team just did it.
Google Assistant is a product that relies on cross-learning from large amounts of user data. GSuite is a product that is contractually obligated to NOT doing this. The silos between GSuite and the rest of Google are intentional.
I don't work at Google these days so I can't offer the exact reasons why, but it shouldn't be surprising then that the two don't play well.
Amazon, on the other hand is not contractually obligated to create this silo. For it, your GSuite account is just another third party account, no different from your GMail account.
Yes this is an undesirable outcome, but when business users choose to buy GSuite services with the assurance that the data won't be available to Google for general purpose learning, this is the price they pay for that privacy.
Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run.
It's like they develop products just enough to get people using them so they can squeeze out some more meta-data and connect the dots back to a Google account, and then they stop development because it's not going to add more revenue.
And if they can't figure out how to push advertising with it, they drop it.
> Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run.
Absolutely. Just look at Google Maps these days. Google Maps used to be the only map app I'd use for everything. Now it is so littered with ads once you zoom in that I find it useless for anything other than directions.
This is not a new trend for Google, the advertising company that occasionally builds things.
There's also a big problem with accuracy in GMaps. From what I can tell they put some effort in within the US, but in the two countries I've lived in, GMaps is sufficiently inaccurate that I have to use other maps.
For example: About a third of the streets that show on GMaps for my previous town don't actually exist - they're paddocks. Every other map is correct: HERE, Apple Maps, OSM, TomTom, etc. As Google notoriously has no support, there's no way to get it fixed, so I simply had to instruct everyone coming to visit me that they needed to download and use a different map software in order to find me.
O365 live collaborative document editing has been an absolute broken nightmare for us. We abandoned it in favor of Google Docs and everything has gotten a LOT easier.
Our general sense is that whatever MS is using for autoscaling the Sharepoint instances that run the service doesn't work. During busy work days Word loses its connection to the service constantly.
While agree with you that google has been dropping the ball, you've got to use the online version of Office 365, it is awful. Like shockingly terrible. Gsuite is 10x better, no exaggeration. Apple's online office stuff is equally a joke. Google blew a 10 year lead but lucky for them, the other possible large competitors are doing even worse.
Although they haven't evolved much in recent years, I still find most Gsuite apps to actually be quite good. What is terrible is Drive itself. File management is just a joke with Drive.
It uses a pseudo-compatible Java 8 subset, with no official roadmap to ever move beyond that, everyone is supposed to move to Kotlin, while they keep fixing the slower developer experience and broken tooling introduced by adding Kotlin support.
NDK requires a great resistance to pain with a development experience that occasionally still makes me miss Carbide/Symbian C++. It took them 10 years to introduce any kind of packaging support for NDK dependencies, there are still no tools to improve the developer experience calling Android APIs, one has to manually write JNI wrappers, or use their unsafe C bindings to APIs that are actually written in somehow safer C++.
I lost count how many stuff introduced as one year amazing IO stuff, is already deprecated the following year. Latest example, all the GUI layout editing tools still being worked on, which will be eventually deprecated when JetPack Composer hits stable.
Critical libraries like Oboe, that are just dumped into Github, instead of having first class support on the SDK and project templates.
Team that puts critical information everywhere on the Internet except on Android's official documentation.
Very small rant, 10 years have a lot of stuff to rant on, so amazing? Not really.
is the overstatement of the century. I am stuck with this horrendous product, with its unbelievably bad live collaboration which constantly overwrites what other people are doing, its terrible SSO implementation, its penchant for presenting the least navigable UI I have ever had the misfortune to experience...
Google Docs has stagnated, I agree, Office is light years away from having its seamless sync.
>And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.
Glad you brought this one up. I had an issue with an enterprise account where I was attempting to access work and code I had contained in a doc I created for the client. I was the owner and creator of the doc, but somehow I got stuck in a loop where I had to request permission from myself.
Google "Support" was basically nonexistent - I had to ask our company adminstrator, who told me only they could get access to speak with a human, and even that wouldn't be able to be done immediately.
I ended up redoing all the work. AWS and Microsoft, in comparison, have had excellent enterprise support.
I do find that failure baffling -- especially since it used to work. I don't use voice commands much, but setting reminders while I'm doing something else used to be very helpful. Suddenly last August, it's just "not available for g suite users". (https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/11607814?hl=en)
I get it for free, but g suite is valuable enough to me that I'd pay for it. The thread implies that paying for it wouldn't help.
I'm also an early gsuite user and have the same complaints about assistant integration - but I am 85% sure that I tried to create a new google for business account to verify that it would at least work if I was paying, and it didn't.
Which led me to experimenting with migrating off my legacy gsuite, and with the API rate limiting, it seems it would take upwards of 30 days. I can download that data in 10 minutes if it's unhindered.
MS Office online collaboration still hasn’t caught up with Google, even with Google’s neglect.
Personally, I think web based office is something Microsoft wants to drive subscription revenue, but isn’t something customers want. Office is probably the best and most complex fat client app in the world, why sacrifice that?
IMO, Office will embrace add on supplementation and value add to the Office apps.
Same issue here. They have features like "okay google dial into my next meeting," however it doesn't work since my phone's primary account is my personal account. Assistant doesn't work with my secondary work account.
> They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely.
Namely, the things that directly contribute to the ads business.
> I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom.
The Hangouts move is still one of the most infuriating things I've seen in tech anytime in the last decade. Remember how Google was actively contributing to an open and interoperable spec for chat, and then just proceeded to go full Ayn Rand about it?
There's a pretty strong argument to be made that if any major players were still backing XMPP as a standard, we wouldn't all have a bunch of people in our lives who have said some variation of "I would quit Facebook right now if I didn't need Messenger"
I can only assume they don't want to make it work for some reason. The best practical answer is to just set up a normal gmail account and a lot of weird google bugs go away.
I have a normal Gmail account, and the last time I checked Google Home could only access my primary calendar. So my imported-from-Outlook work calendar and any other custom calendars are invisible to it. It just just frustrating to look at calendar.google.com and say "there they are, my appointments!" and Google Home cannot read them unless they are on the default calendar.
> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).
What's that got to do with it? Are you suggesting this is the reason things aren't shipping? I saw the "strikes" as another symptom of a company that is now deaf. Employees can't get their voices heard as individuals anymore.
Gtalk was brilliant! When they launched it my appreciation for Google grew tenfold. It was so un-enterprisey and it just worked! Shortly thereafter they fixed their offering by launching the very Enterprise-friendly Wave.
Mmmmmm, Wave. (drooling dead-eyes Homer impression).
At this point I don't even know what's their main chat/video product. Meet? Hangouts? Duo? I have all three on my phone for some reason but still end up using Zoom and Whatsapp
I get the desire to abandon google services, and have done so myself for email and search, but there isn't much to this article.
An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just starting a new email address.
Airtable has some nice functionality, but I don't think it's head-and-shoulders above sheets and this article doesn't give me any reason to change my mind.
Same things goes for Meet vs Zoom.
Honestly, despite Google's history of trashing projects I'd put my money on gmail/docs outliving hey/notion and so he might just be planting the seeds of a painful switch later. When I switched my email I did it with a domain I own so that I can avoid the same fate.
That's not to say google doesn't have problems. Privacy aside, ads as a primary source of revenue can have a negative effect on usability of their products (like search), but I wouldn't call that "squandering a 10-year lead", it's more like "failure to find a second golden goose"
The article rings completely true to me. One simple example: folders in Google Drive.
* It's a constant struggle to keep documents in folders so that you can find them easily.
* Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist.
* Moreover, I can't ensure that important documents are reliably stored in folders where everyone else can find them easily as well.
I don't understand why Google does not get how important this is for business documents. It's a breath of fresh air to use Dropbox or Box at this point.
> Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist.
To illustrate this point more. I used to work in a company where everyone had to submit their timesheet via docs. And if you did not keep a link or copy or whatever they call it of your own sheet, it's essentially impossible to search for it, because now there are 1000s of identically named documents.
It also happens when legal tries to share a generically named file with you and you lose the link, so you search for it and find a file that looks like it, only to realise that is HR's own special copy.
We have service agreements that go through revisions. We copy the whole directory when there's a new release to ensure we don't lose old templates. At that point search on service agreements brings up a bunch of identically named documents in a listing that does not distinguish the directory location. It's actually caused us to send the wrong doc on several occasions.
Google if you are listening please fix this. Just do what everyone else does. You don't have to be creative.
Arguably then, the documentation needs improvement. Most people learned the ropes on MS Word, and never bothered to unlearn habits/explore whatever else docs has to offer. So whenever docs has a feature that isn't present in word, I wouldn't expect people to know it's there
I wouldn't call this an issue w/ google docs, just pick a consistent naming scheme like timesheet_john_smith_august_2015. Or even better, just make it so only John Smith can see John Smith's timesheets through sharing preferences.
That sounds more like a process issue than a technology issue. The tools to manage this exist in the tech but mixing access, not restricting access, and other issues that persist in file shares, shared email boxes, mirroring AD access for new users, etc are the same issues as an old gmail that gets 1000 spam emails a day; it's a mess that needs to be audited and overhauled which is easiest by jumping to a new system/platform when able.
Can you elaborate more? I have no issues to put files or Google Docs in whatever folders I want in Google Drive, and they stay where they are (after all, Google Drive has local sync. It would be unusable if they don't).
The issue is when there's more than one team that needs access. There are multiple ways to share a document and the links to the original are all different (based on how it was shared: via a shared drive or via a shared folder or via a shared document link). And finding that shared document (if you don't remember how it was shared in the first place) can be a nightmare.
Sometimes you don't have a choice - we are a small team, and we're pretty good about using a shared drive and a shared folder. But sometimes you have to share a document with an external collaborator (or someone in another firm shares a document with you). And if you forgot how that document was shared, then google makes it practically impossible to find the original.
The only problem I see here is that either you guys are not using a file structure that makes sense to everyone or you're sharing links for random things and the people receiving those links are losing/ignoring them. Neither of these things sound like problems with Google Drive to me.
Tell me about it! The local Scout troop uses google docs for routine stuff like flyers, sign up sheets etc. I continue to routinely see unrelated material there: kids’ homework, doctor’s patient records, once a marketing plan for $BIG_SV_COMPANY etc. It’s not like there are one or two clueless souls: several documents a week show ip from all sorts of different people.
You're not the only one. Organizing documents in Google Drive is a huge pain. When I create a folder, I often want to put multiple existing documents in it. I find the documents by searching, and each time, the "Move to Folder" modal makes me navigate the directory hierarchy to find my new folder instead of having it available as a recently-accessed folder like Gnome does.
Seen that one too. The fact you can't do quick batch operations across many documents makes me crazy.
Google Docs has so much potential. Google should just spin it off into a separate company and let it find its own way. Making it conform to Google notions of search has crippled the design.
I'm confused. Doesn't shared drives solve this problem? You can set up a group, created a shared drive for that group, and then everyone has access to what's stored within it.
Shared Drives are a disaster, because the files in them are removed from your personal drive which makes them less discoverable for you.
They work when highly managed (e.g., our training team for sales org) but not for product development teams in my experience.
The expanding symlink functionality makes everything worse, because people think they're moving folders, but they're not, and permissions don't get rationalized. Ugh.
Mine does. I agree wholeheartedly with the parent commenter.
My personal G Drive looks similar to yours. It looks like your Drive is mostly used by you, and not many (if any) other collaborators. The problem is that my work G Drive is an utter clusterfuck because of the numerous different ways that documents can be shared between people/teams. There are shared folders, shared drives, individually shared documents, and probably more. And each one of them shows up in a completely different place than the others.
If you're working with one specific team, you can likely get that entire team to conform to one way of doing things (everyone puts documents in this shared folder). But once you start involving 10s/100s of teams, thousands of individuals, etc... some teams use "Shared drives" (which show up on the left panel under "Shared drives"), some teams use shared folders (which show up in your folders list), some teams use individually shared documents (which show up in any number of random places, with the only reliable way of getting back to it is to find the email where they shared it with you). Some teams use shared drives internally within their team, but because they don't want to share the entire drive with an outside collaborator, they will share only a specific folder/file. The entire sharing mechanism becomes a mess and impossible to track and keep organized.
G drive is nice in many aspects, but the sharing is one in which IMO it allows far too much flexibility. The nice thing about file systems of yesteryear like Sharepoint (ugh, ew) is that they at least said "this is the folder tree. use it, because you don't have any choice" which at least encouraged some modicum of structure. G Drive instead says "here's a sandbox, do what you want" which sounds nice in theory, but in practical use is a mess when you have 1000+ people building their own personal sandcastle.
I think it's great for small teams and small organizations who will likely naturally come to a standardized way of doing things. I think it also can be great for larger organizations as long as that organization has a decent way to encourage (and ideally enforce) a standard way of organizing file shares. It's definitely a challenge once you start losing that structure, though.
Yeah, I think that if there are strong norms or rules on organization and structure then it can work really well for any size team. But as soon as 1 person or project starts to deviate (no matter how good the intentions) it can quickly drop into a mess like any free for all file share. My team at work technically owns this one file server that is open to most of the company and has been an easy duping ground. Like, project X needs a share, stick it on [Server] vs the effort to set up a new share on an appropriate server (there are many others including department specific).
We have a project slated for late this year or early next to audit the file server and shares then permission to begin migrating shares my team doesn't own to other servers. I'm so ready for that.
I have the same problem, but I suspect the true cause is sharing a folder structure with other people, without defining/enforcing any conventions on organization.
Sure, I've got the same buttons ... but I've got >150,000 files in my Drive managed by >2,000 colleagues assembled over 6+ years, including files inherited from colleagues/reports who have left with their own approaches to file management, which turns it all into a massive disaster.
> An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just starting a new email address.
Hey's screener feature shows there's a lot of room to innovate on giving users control of their attention beyond the filters and labels that Gmail has deemed sufficient for more than a decade now. Setting up forwarding to use Hey as a read client for my incoming gmail email has shown me that my address being old and public is not the problem.
Inbox had bundling that was a promising direction, but that seems to have been scrapped when they shut that client down. I'm not a tinfoil hat person and don't really mind being tracked, but it doesn't surprise me that a company that makes its living off monetizing attention would never lead on giving control of it back to users.
I watched the HEY video and I don't get it - the screener feature is not innovation - it's a block list with a different name. Gmail has this. The way Jason hyped up every feature and then you realise it's something that already exists with a special "product name" (Imbox, really?). I can see why people buy into the marketing speak but look a little deeper.
Gmail does not have this. Hey inverts the default behavior to one that is consent-based, and things can only reach your inbox if you thumbs up the first time they send something to you. This is not some minor technical point, it is at the core of Hey's value proposition. In Gmail, the default is that everything gets to you and it's up to you to play whackamole with filters and unsubscribes, requiring several clicks each time.
In addition to the simple whitelist behavior, on the initial Hey screening you can (with a single click) route second-tier messages into Feed and Paper Trail, which is a much better UX than what you can build in gmail by creating a filter for every sender that labels + autoarchives.
Look a little deeper. Your "screener" section is an inbox. You can either whitelist or blacklist messages that come into here. In your Gmail inbox, you can also block addresses and never see them again. It is the same interaction - no matter what marketing spin you put on it.
If that's HEY's value proposition, then they're in for a rude awakening. Personally, I think the proposition is simply using something other than Gmail, which is a fine enough reason without needing to put any marketing spin on it. $99 for an alternative though is a difficult ask.
The entire point is that it's separated, that you have two separate inboxes. The underlying mechanism is the same, but the user experience is quite different. In my opinion it's similar to Roam in that the framing leads to a different workflow, even though neither has any truly revolutionary "technical feature".
If you think this is just "marketing spin", I think you're simply not part of the target demographic, which is people that have currently have issues with e-mail.
I'm using hey right now as my main email, forwarding from gmail and using the full trial to decide before I buy.
There are a lot of features I like, but I don't really get all the fuss about the screener. You're still getting those emails, they're not getting in your "imbox" but you still have to review them.
In practice it doesn't seem to make a big difference with gmail "mark as spam".
>You're still getting those emails, they're not getting in your "imbox" but you still have to review them.
Sure, but the point is that you can do this only occasionally (e.g. once a day), whereas with gmail they take up space and attention in your inbox until you get to them.
Last spring I sat down to binge re-watch a TV series and just went back through my inbox looking for every mailing list I was on, unsubscribe, and then delete all previous messages. Probably took 8 hours total, but I deleted thousands of messages and now I get about 6 messages a day in my inbox, most of them from humans or services I just recently used. It’s worth my time to look at it again.
I do this every few months and it feels amazing each time. Even if I'm intentional about unchecking the marketing email boxes, somehow I still end up on dozens of mailing lists.
I've recently been bothered because I hate all my email clients (except Outlook, weirdly enough, but I don't want to use Outlook with my Gmail accounts, because tag support isn't awesome...) and realized, of course, half my problem is I'm trying to manage too many emails I have no interest in reading.
There are a lot of newsletters I like, though.. for things related to fitness and outdooring, that are wholly in the "sign up for this virtual version of the event you were interested in!" and I've simply resigned myself to unsubscribing from all of them. I'll figure all this out later, but so much email feels like the parts of the web and RSS I work hard to avoid.
So, unsubscribe it is...
(That said, I've been trying HEY, and I don't like it [Such. Big. Fonts.] but I do like their "bundle" feature, and I wish I could set tags in Gmail to auto-delete after //n// days... that would make some things nicer to live with.)
I have separate folders for these 'someday' mailing lists. It's like your attic. If you really needed the stuff it would be downstairs, but until you run out of space you can't convince yourself to get rid of any of it.
We recently switched from Meet back to Zoom, because Zoom lets you use your speakers while Meet requires everyone to use a headset.
Zoom does some kind of active noise-cancelling where it will avoid picking up whatever the person on the other end just said, preventing the echo effect. Meet doesn't, it picks up everything. So if you use a speaker, everything the other person says gets repeated back at them.
When Meet recently announced noise-cancelling, we got really excited, only to be disappointed when they were referring to cancelling of background noises and not of participants.
> Zoom lets you use your speakers while Meet requires everyone to use a headset
Really? Is that restriction on desktop or mobile? I've been using speaker mode on meet(mobile) for a while now. Or is it implicitly imposed by you due to lack of noise cancelling features?
No this is definitely not correct for mobile or web platforms. You 100% do not need a headset, although you should use one because Meet's echo cancellation is pretty aggressive and causes all kinds of problems without a headset.
How did you transition your email address? I've wanted to get off, but I can't do that without wiping all of my previous conversations or losing contact with many people.
I still have the old emails in gmail, I just moved to protonmail for new things and put up a vacation autoresponder. letting people know I don't use it anymore.
I might migrate, but honestly I don't go through old emails almost ever, so I'll prob just export an .mbox and deal with importing it sometime in the future if I ever need it.
It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy. May be this is just a natural outcome of that. This is one of the most damaging things Google and the people it influenced did to programming profession. There is a generation of programmers now who can do very well on leetcode, but god help those who maintain that code after them - I know this from personal experience working on projects left behind by people who ended at Google
All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always hard.
This may be true, but there have been articles in public since 2010s if not longer, that show general contempt for having clean code and code maintenance, like having clean code is what lesser engineers worry about. I’m saying that thinking seeped into universities where smart kids, who generally imitate the smart professionals in their profession first. Google may not be the only company guilty of it, there are places like Uber where backend code is held by so much duct tape , 3m shares rose up as a result.
That doesn't match my experience at all. If anything, Google suffers from the opposite problem: engineering teams spend enormous resources on migrations and rewrites that make their systems cleaner/simpler/more general, but have little or no business value. There are tons of teams that could be making incremental user-facing improvements, but are instead spending their cycles on projects that are mostly about internal development velocity.
I think it's changed, dramatically. I was there from 09-14 and then just rejoined last week. In 09-10 there was a huge problem of "launch and run" - people would launch, they'd get promoted, then they'd be reassigned to other higher-priority projects to get them launched too, and their previous project would get shut down rather than maintained. Nowadays there seems to be a lot more emphasis on stability and long-term code-health, people are getting rewarded for internal cleanups rather than launches, and many people have multi-year tenures on the same team rather than lots of single-quarter launches.
I've seen a bunch of successful promo packets for work on code health, system reliability, etc. - including promos to L6.
The "trick" to successful L5 and L6 promos (and above) for this sort of work is to have credible estimates of the actual impact of your work. Way too many engineers spend quarters or years refactoring or rewriting systems, and then go for promo with a case that's basically: "System X was kludgy, crufty, and engineers complained about it. I designed and lead implementation of a clean-up effort, and now people say it's nicer."
That's generally not going to cut it. You might get lucky, or you might get bailed out by a peer reviewer that provides solid data about the impact of your work, but you can't count on this, and you should be doing the legwork yourself.
You need impact estimates. That generally means you need some measurements, although the measurements don't have to be perfect. What metrics measure the pain that the existing system is causing? Some examples might be:
- Average # of hours required to push a release
- Average SWE-days/SWE-quarters/etc. required to develop a representative feature change
- Average monthly user-reported bugs
Spend some time actually measuring this stuff. Write some queries, run an internal survey of the developers on affected teams, etc. Take it seriously. Ideally, do all this before you've actually started work on the cleanup you want to do. Write a proposal doc, get it reviewed by others, and make sure they find your estimates credible. If the numbers are smaller than you expected, reconsider whether the clean-up is worth the time you're considering investing in it.
After you've completed your project, measure again. If your project is amenable to an experiment-style launch, that's ideal, but pre- and post- measurements are fine too. Share the stats - advertise your team's success! Package them up in a nice doc you can link to in your promo case.
"How am I supposed to find the time to do this while I'm doing my normal job?" This is your normal job. The opportunity cost of your time is $XXXk/quarter. The opportunity cost of your team's time is $X million-$XX million/quarter. The single most important thing you can do is make sure that time is being invested in a high value way. In your personal life, you would look for a lot of data before you invested that kind of money - you should be doing the same at work.
In general, as you move up you should expect to spend a higher percentage of your time figuring out what problems you're going to work on. As a result, the fraction of your time that you spend actually designing and implementing the solutions to those problems will decrease, but it's still a net win because you and your team will be focused on tackling the really important problems.
In summary, it's possible to be really successful and quickly move up the ladder by doing "sustaining work". The catch is that you have to be rigorous about choosing the specific "sustaining work" to spend your time on.
Another ex-Googler here. This seems like a viable strategy, but it seems rather inefficient for the organization, don't you think? E.g.
> Write some queries, run an internal survey
> Write a proposal doc, get it reviewed by others
Even if one could convincingly claim a causal effect on those noisy metrics, that sounds like quite a bit of overhead. IMO the majority of cleanup or bug fixing work shouldn't require any sort of formal planning or justification. At other companies, we would just go ahead and do the work. Then if an IC's work shows a pattern of code quality improvements, the manager should take notice and make sure it's considered in any promotion decisions.
Moreover, the strategy you mention requires a concerted effort to improve the quality of a particular component in a short period of time. Ideally one should evaluate bugs and quality issues as they arise, and most of them should be fixed promptly. But if a Googler is optimizing for promotions, it seems better to let code rot for months or years, then fix many issues in a short sprint to create a nice dip in the metrics.
Sounds like a different symptom of the same illness.
The team rushes at the problem, has a honeymoon period where things look nice and progress is fast but... it all then goes to shit. If your reaction is to blame technologies or the previous generation of staff, dump the code and repeat the cycle, you end up in the same place.
I love the arm chair analysis of every external person here. Code quality is extremely important at Google. That doesn't mean people don't write any features.
You don't know anything about Google's engineers or internals. If anything, people complain more about an anal attitude towards cleanliness. Talk to Xooglers at FB about code quality vs Google.
One of my employers was spun out twice, after having been acquired years ago. It was sort of a joke to tell people who the owners were. It made no goddamned sense. Sure, we had customers in common, but so do Xerox and people who lease out coffee machines. The toner-flavored coffee jokes practically write themselves.
They just got onto a growth tear and bought a bunch of things they shouldn’t, and eventually rounded up all of the vaguely similar ones and divested.
I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough. Not every idea has to be a billion dollar idea, and a one time cash infusion to five $200M ideas would be a pretty small opportunity cost for them.
The fact that such ideas are not a direct competitor also achieves another goal of overly large employee pools, which is to choke off the supply of talent to upstarts.
> I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough.
"It is reported that King Alexander the Great, hearing Anaxarchus the philosopher discoursing and maintaining this position: That there were worlds innumerable: fell a-weeping: and when his friends and familiars about him asked what he ailed. Have I not (quoth he) good cause to weep, that being as there are an infinite number of worlds, I am not yet the lord of one?"
How does this apply to all the chat apps? Google chat was great, wouldn't redoing the tech and making apps for all platforms have captured more territory than changing every couple years? When you have network effect, it's just crazy to try to rebuild that network every couple years if the point is to grow.
It's not about capturing marketshare for the company, it's about capturing bullet points for your resume. Working on new stuff is valued much more highly than fixing old stuff, and you naturally move much faster with more impressive sounding accomplishments in the early days of a product.
I think the premise is that the culture/behaviors/tactics that allowed Google to capture new territory early on are hanging on past their usefulness, not the actual capturing of territory itself. Growing existing products wasn't the important thing before, so _now_ the incentive structure at Google is mis-aligned with capturing territory in that way.
I was listening to an interview from a manager at GCP on the “Screaming in the Cloud” podcast. He had written a great cost calculator that would show how much money that someone could save over AWS.
But because he couldn’t convince corporate to adopt it and when it became a feature it fell under the reliability guidelines, they canned it even though customers liked it.
1) A 'cost calculator' will be a hugely sensitive product, that is absolutely in the domain of sales, it has nothing to do with dev. So many sales issues around that - this will be the primary issue with such a product.
2) Just because some people like it doesn't mean it's worth maintaining. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. Paradoxically, because it was such a marketing/sales focused product, it's possible the Eng. driven culture didn't really understand it's value and thought it was maybe to simple of a product. Arguably, it's hardly a product, more of a marketing feature.
I suspect if sales was pushing hard for it it would have happened.
If you are trying to get enterprise customers, do you really want to be known as the company that drops features at the drop of dime?
AWS has a number of services that have been deprecated for years but it still supports like SimpleDB and running an EC2 instance outside of a VPC. Heck they still support transferring files from S3 over BitTorrent in older regions.
> 1) A 'cost calculator' will be a hugely sensitive product, that is absolutely in the domain of sales, it has nothing to do with dev. So many sales issues around that - this will be the primary issue with such a product.
I can't tell what you're alluding to with "hugely sensitive", and "many sales issues around it". Could you clarify a concrete example these fuzzy expressions describe?
Very few products and services in this world are commodities to the point wherein you just 'add up the cost'.
In fact, I can hardly think of a serious product or service quite like this. Not even cars are like this. You have maintenance, resale, insurance and financing to consider.
This idea of an easy, objective way to 'calculate costs' is never really quite possible.
There are usually going to be some degree of Apples-to-Oranges comparisons, situations wherein small issues make a big difference. You want a sales person to be there to make sure that your potential customer is aware of the options.
In addition, there is of course the 'Total Cost of Ownership' - meaning that much of the 'cost' of something is not apparent in the calculation. Training, support, etc.. On the far end of that spectrum you have the strategic issues such as vendor lock-in etc..
So, even just trying to establish a fairly objective 'true cost' calculation will be hard.
Next, you have the fact that most enterprise sales are not 'off-the-shelf' - pricing is subject to negotiation, which can vary a lot. This makes it difficult to set price.
Then, you have communications issues around a sale - these are complicated products, the last thing you ever want is for customers inputting some information, and getting the wrong numbers back, or the wrong impression. If there is any money involved, it's worth the time to talk to a sales person to smooth over issues.
Finally, is of course the sales organisations ability to pitch, sell and spin. Of course this includes the shifty areas wherein the team will want to sell a service even when they know they are not the best option.
So a 'raw cost calculator' is possibly just a big, risky bit of possible misinformation and lost opportunity to make a sale.
The 'technical' aspect of making a 'cost calculator' is completely mundane to the point of being irrelevant. In fact, Google Engineers might be too overqualified to even do such a thing.
I see a 'cost calculator' has having two completely different roles:
1) As a 'sales lead' - something new customers can input information into, which is going to almost assuredly give them a good perspective, but wherein the true and only purpose of the calculator is to generate a lead, so that a sales person can chime in.
2) A customer-centric calculator, for established customers that is tuned to their account status and discounts and let's the IT manager or business lead do projections on the service.
For an anecdotal counter-example, the habits of code maintenance I picked up at Google are 10x better than anywhere else I've worked at. I've worked at small and medium-sized companies (and my current company is research-focused enough that a lot of people don't have a strong engineering background), but this is also what I hear from my Xoogler friends at (eg) Uber and Airbnb.
I'd be surprised if this tendency had anything to do with Google exporting its culture.
I haven't moved beyond Google yet (I want to, though, who is hiring... :-) ), but yes, to be honest, better code cleanliness, testing, style conformity, and good code review ability are the major things I've learned in the 8 years I've been there. Most other skills one picks up at Google are not transferrable outside of Google.
My company (Amazon) is hiring fast right now. Somehow I feel like you aren’t going to consider us because you think we are inherently inferior engineers though!
Personally, I have no reason to believe Amazon engineers are inferior, but I've been hearing bad things about how they're treated for almost a decade now. That isn't to say I absolutely wouldn't consider Amazon without trying to look into it more, but I definitely know people who, for that reason, don't consider Amazon when planning a move to a bigco.
Exactly. And some of the company's recent moves re: labour practices etc. have also been questionable, or up for debate at least.
What I also hear about Amazon is that the experience varies wildly from group to group. That's not a gamble I'd be willing to take. Google is not nearly so balkanized; there are fairly consistent expectations across the company in terms of what is acceptable manager behaviour.
I am not happy at Google. But if I were to jump ship it would be to a small or medium sized company that is more agile and internally cohesive and where things move quickly, not to another BigCo with all the excessive bureaucracy and politics that goes with that.
I miss the teams I worked on where there were less than 30 or so engineers in the company.
Exactly. And some of the company's recent moves re: labour practices etc. have also been questionable, or up for debate at least.
The only reason that you don’t hear as much about labor practices with the other tech companies is because they outsource all of the low skill employees that make their products to China. Google has a lot fewer physical products but the people who make their few hardware products are treated worse than any Amazon employee. Yes the same applies to Apple.
I’m not making a value judgement. Just calling a spade a spade.
You’re really just implying that if the experience is worse and we are treated badly (aka no company paid off sites to Hawaii or seasons working remotely in Tahoe) the only people at Amazon are there because they aren’t capable of getting better offers.
That I doubt very much. They're there because they're motivated by different things. I wouldn't last at Amazon, from what I have read. But some people thrive with different motivations. The most satisfied Amazon engineers I've spoken to spoke with pride about the pace and intensity of development. Goes for Apple, too. Those people would not be happy at Google. Things move slow there, and most people have little control over tech stack or many design choices at all, TBH. I hear that's better at Amazon.
The era of Hawaii offsites at Google is long over.
>It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy
I'm not so sure that's the case. It seems like historically certain products are starved of feautures and resources while other products are made a priority, and it also seems like these priorities can shift pretty rapidly.
In the Google+ era for example there was the concept of "more wood behind fewer arrows" and a ton of money and resources went into plus to the detriment of other products (some of which were outright cancelled) and now obviously plus is no longer a priority.
Hangouts was developed (iirc) for plus to attract users for a social network then eventually became Meets which seems to be attached to Google Apps as a business offering to attract paying subscribers. Which on some level makes sense but from the vantage of the actual product leads to some wasted effort and changes that seem arbitrary to users. There doesn't seem to have been a clear incentive to put features into Hangouts/Meet; instead the incentive seems to have been to grow the distinct platforms the product was attached to as a feature of those platforms. (Hence Duo as a separate product, it is attached to yet another platform, Android). Meanwhile Zoom, by staying focused on just the actual product of videoconferencing software, left Google's offering in the dust.
Are there as many people working on features at say Blogger as there were 10 years ago? I doubt it. I'm not even saying that's wrong just that it contradicts the idea that Google can be said to incentivize features in the arbitrary case. I think it's clearly only for blessed products and that set of products that are blessed will change over time.
I don't understand this "leetcoders produce bad code" meme. Is there something about being good at whiteboard interviews that makes you bad at writing clean code?
Outside Google, I've seen plenty of terrible code by people who would fail FizzBuzz.
Within Google, I've seen way more attention paid to code quality and system design than at any other place I've worked at.
The "new features" ethos is really harmful in business apps.
Business users want focused things like accurate budget vs. actuals reports where you can flag and fix deviations quickly. There's an overall design--of course--but great enterprise software is the result of attention to very granular features related to specific work practices.
It boggles my mind to imagine how many verticals in the technology space have been kneecapped because of google. There could be so many companies that could offer amazing services but they just can't compete with a half-assed "free" service made by Google, which is just a temporary cost center for all the ad revenue they don't know what to do with.
>A limit price (or limit pricing) is a price, or pricing strategy, where products are sold by a supplier at a price low enough to make it unprofitable for other players to enter the market.
>It is used by monopolists to discourage entry into a market, and is illegal in many countries.[1] The quantity produced by the incumbent firm to act as a deterrent to entry is usually larger than would be optimal for a monopolist, but might still produce higher economic profits than would be earned under perfect competition.
wasnt this the main issue with small startups and Microsoft 'embracing' them with half-assed projects back in the day. some would even say that this was the main cause of dot-com bubble. thats when VCs realized that Microsoft cant touch these web based companies so now they can finally invest in these emerging businesses, thereby triggering a goldrush.
as always govt has failed everyone by failing to prosecute these big behemoths where the only 'innovation' they do is centralize and capitalize on an already emerging solution from the rise of internet and computing.
what we need is a philanthropic fund that funds startups like craigslist & does it completely open sourced from the getgo.
Yes, there was this "but what if Microsoft releases a competing product?" typical VC question in the 90's that became "but what if Google releases a competing product?" in the 2000's and early 10's.
You’ve just made the core argument of anti-trust legislation, which is far broader in scope than discussion of monopolies and far subtler. At root, monopolies are easy to detect, and it follows fairly uncontroversially from basic economics that’s been agreed-upon for centuries that if there are no (potential) competitors than there is no competition, rent-seeking/profit-gouging behaviour ensures by the incumbent, and capitalism basically dies. Anti-trust, however, it a great deal less clearly defined.
Let’s imagine a firm, and let’s call it Adobe. Adobe makes Photoshop. Photoshop has a full set of features and is sold for a high price to a market segment comprised of professional users who need the features provided by Photoshop, and are happy to pay the price since it enables them to make a decent living even once the cost of the tool is deducted. Adobe gets a decent revenue that allows it to cover expenses, capital costs, and develop future versions.
On the other side of the spectrum, you have Microsoft. Microsoft ships Paint for free. Paint has very few features, but it covers some (mainly ironic) usage cases, and it gets used by those who wish to manipulate images but have no need for the complex features of Photoshop. Sure, some people who wish to do high-level image manipulation but cannot afford Adobe’s asking price for Photoshop are not well-served by this arrangement, but hardly anybody would argue that Microsoft’s inclusion of Paint would be anti-competitive towards Adobe: it’s not worth adding all the features of Photoshop to Paint only to give it away for free (and the argument that you would give it away for free only long enough to bankrupt Adobe and then start charging for Mega-Paint might be profitable, but it’s uncertain and depends on costs of capital and expected rates or return, plus the costs of an almost certain lawsuit).
Nor can Adobe be anti-competitive against Microsoft: dropping the price of Photoshop to zero just to stop people from using Microsoft’s own free product would be... pointless as it would zero their revenue.
These are two extreme cases, and it’s easy to just think in these dualistic terms and come to the wrong conclusion (or wonder what I’m getting at with this bizarre and apparently off-topic rant).
Now to tie it all together, introduce a middle-ground player such as Affinity. Affinity makes Photo, a product that is midway between Paint and Photoshop both in terms of price and features. People who need the full features of Photoshop (including those not present in Photo) will still choose Photoshop, which might slightly dip Adobe’s revenue. Microsoft’s will however remain stationary at zero. Affinity has captured the market of those who are defined by Paint being unsuitable but who do not wish to pay Photoshop’s full price (because Photos contains all the features they need).
Now, finally, the final step: say Adobe turns a blind eye to piracy of Photoshop. It still gets paid by its professional customers so it’s revenue remains unchanged. However, people who found Paint to be frustrating are now faced with an interesting choice: steal Photoshop (which has all the functions they could possibly want, and is free) or buy Photos (which has all the functions they want, albeit a subset of those offered by Photoshop, but does so for a higher price).
This is one obvious case that comes under the broad rubric of ‘dumping’ (selling at prices that damage one’s own short-term interest in order to damage one’s competitor and increase one’s net long-term advantage) but there’s plenty others where that came from. The tech industry is rife with them. Mainly, lack of successful prosecution is probably due to regulatory capture by way of lobbying.
This is a great summary! The thing I see Google doing that I believe is even worse is that they swoop in early on in an innovative space and get their subsidized free offering on the market first or early. This seems to prevent these tiers from forming entirely, since even if a competitor can beat "free" they have to constantly be looking over their shoulder to make sure Google doesn't give away their killer features, so no one ends up even playing!
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is? Perhaps you don't owe it better, but you owe the community better—we should all be posting in a way that protects the container for future discussion. It's fragile, and it's under more pressure than ever these days.
A better way to respond to that one might be by saying something about all the people who can't afford to pay for email, who benefit from the free services we're talking about.
Not that I necessarily agree with the GP commenter, but this doesn't address his point. Things "used to" be this way during a time period with a billion less Internet users, who've come largely from the poorer parts of the developing world. The claim is that a high-quality free email service doesn't matter as much to someone with lots of disposable income in the first world as it does to people who aren't as fortunate.
I don't know what to say. I don't claim to be an expert on what life is like in the developing world, so I'll have to defer to people like missedthecue and yourself to tell me what it's like there.
There was some point in the past year I read a comment here about the problem with Google is that when people wants to get promoted at Google to a senior or Staff (PE?) position they need to invent those big changes or projects. It results in adding bloat into existing software or abandon one.
I am having that feeling at this point in my career. Without a moonshot project I wouldn’t expect to get pass an assessment committee. It’s sad.
One of my colleagues working for Netflix tells me that they don’t have any fancy titles except senior SDE there. They pay you more if you’re that worthy, though. I can’t stop wondering what if tech companies follow this practice. Then, people would just focus on making stuff better instead of chasing the carrots waved in front of them.
Netflix is well-known as a very data-driven company, so you can assume almost any change is backed by data. But solely data-driven decisions can be a bit myopic—You're likely to end up in a local maximum.
For example, Netflix selects the "optimal" categories to display on your home screen. For several years, "My List" and "Continue Watching" were part of those categories, meaning they would change position and sometimes not show up at all, with no way to access them. It drove me crazy that I specifically chose shows I wanted to watch and Netflix would sometimes choose not to show me them.
That's the key: engagement. Which is basically "how many times a user interacts with objects on screen". This says nothing about whether a product is good or bad. In case of Netflix, no doubt, engagement was through the roof as users scrambled to mute, pause, or move to the next screen.
> blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy.
For general vocabulary, very likely. I believe Google Translate's competitive edge comes in the form of figuring out translations for jargon, slang, etc. from equivalent-corpus context.
I like to think of Google Translate as a keyword extractor on steroids. It doesn't necessarily give you the right prose, but it does better than anything I know of at giving you the right bag-of-words for indexing a foreign-language document in English.
(I hypothesize this to be Google Translate's real driving purpose, and the reason it still sees regular updates after all these years: it's used to index foreign-language web pages, books, and videos so that there can be a single TF-IDF token in Google's backend for each language-neutral conceptual category rather than distinct token for each language-specific word.)
Don't know about slang, but I recently translated some technical documentation from German to English. I was surprised how many specific terms deepl knew, and even if it failed at that the grammar surrounding the offending term was still mostly correct. It was night and day compared to Google. Bag of words describes it well.
I just pasted a few conversations from whatsapp in portuguese and at least for that language google translate was 10x more accurate on the meaning of the very colloquial words used, mixed with English etc.
Edit: thanks for the link though, I'm saving it and trying from time to time, we use translation a ton in my household (everyone is learning English after moving abroad)
I immediately checked it, it has good translation for some languages (specificaly German), but definitely does not blow GT out of water, it is on par at best for a few languages for translation quality. Besides,
- It has only a handful of languages
- No OCR / photo support
- No speech / conversation support.
IMO, as is, it is way inferior to GT. But it is good to have competition in this area as there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Being in a relationship with a English/French language divide, DeepL was a total game-changer. I can't attest to its abilities in other languages, but it is obviously superior to google translate on correctness and "natural" translations for our use-case.
For Japanese Deepl leaves GT in the dust and I've found myself using it more over the last few months.
I've often seen GT get the basics dead wrong - for example formal greetings Japanese people have been using in formal correspondence for hundreds of years. When it gets things right it's often fleeting, a week later it gives you something different.
I'm curious to see how many of my friends will stop using Google Translate on their phones and just go with Apple's new translation app coming in iOS 14.
It probably will be like Maps where the first year or two were just a joke and then Maps became faster, easier to use, and just as good as Google Maps.
I was recently translating a French tweet to English that happens to mention the title of a French book. I was very surprised to find that DeepL kept the book title in its original French instead of translating it. It suggests to me that DeepL seems to have more "understanding" of the text, if deep learning algorithms can be said to have any understanding at all.
Translation to a single language back and forth seems to be really really good.
Although quite impressive, it still suffers from the same problem that most other translator service have if you keep translating the same text between random languages.
I translate the following text from English to various other languages (without going back to english) 6 times and then I went back to English.
The original text is
I wonder if the test you gave me was biased. My belief is that because I'm an elf, some questions are inherently biased. Water dwarfs would not have a problem answering the question: Are unicorns wet? But elves do.
The final English text is
I wonder if the test they gave me was biased? I guess being an elf, there is a bias in the question. I'm sure the water gnomes would have no problem answering the question of whether the unicorn is wet. ? But the elves.
Notice how drarfs became gnomes. The last sentence is not a sentence. Various other problems like a "?" by itself etc.
Translation to a single language back and forth seems to be really really good.
This could be considered a "feature" if used for comedic effect. Anyone who has young children that are into Disney movies should check out this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bVAoVlFYf0. This woman runs "Let It Go" from the movie Frozen through Google Translate a bunch of times and then sings the result.
You might also be testing the inherent difficulty of lossless translation between many languages.
It would be interesting to see the same tasks with professional translators. I'm guessing some of the errors might still be there at the end, like the gnome one, whereas the last sentence would probably be folded in the previous sentences.
Do you remember which 6 languages you went through before going back to English?
The author mentions switching to hey for email. Given all the press it's gotten recently, I decided to check it out.
I don't get the hype. This is how my gmail already works. I use priority inbox. New senders get high priority until I mark them as low priority, and then they don't. Gmail already has a snooze button so I can reply later (and also I have a reply-later tag that's easy to do with keyboard shortcuts).
You can do this search in gmail to replicate their sorted inbox: [is:updates in:inbox -l:important]. I just have a bookmark for that.
Finding attachments is easy. You just do [has:attachment]. I don't want all the attachments without their emails. The email provides context. Also, I can usually find it faster because I usually know who sent it or at least some words that were in the email.
What am I missing about hey.com? Why do people love it so much?
When you open the Hey inbox, it only has the important stuff in it, not the messages of whoever decided to reach out to you today. It's a subtle difference but I love it.
Then when you have a moment, it's also very satisfying to just go through the screener list in bulk and click thumbs down/up and knowing you'll never see that sender again. Sometimes in GMail, no matter how many times I mark some thing as spam, the mail keeps on coming. Hey is the nuclear option to Gmail's fly swatter.
Setting aside the privacy and wanting to distance from Big Tech, the fundamental difference is:
- Gmail is a very versatile tool, you can configure it to suit your needs and replicate most of the features of Hey. But they're basically hacks, like your bookmark of a search.
- Hey is a workflow and experience that the authors believe is the best, and it works in a clean way.
Another thing I like about Hey is how clean, light and fast it is. I don't need hangout, google meet, task and links to every Google product (but the Contacts page could be more accessible that buried between Photos and Drive!)
And I certainly need a friggin splash screen while my webmail takes 10 seconds to load. What were they thinking? Did they forget what made Gmail so good to start with??
Everyone knows google is "better" software. Just like employees are promoted to one level above their potential, companies always push the envelope one step too far when pushing for growth/monetization. Google has been pushing way too much, way too often.
At this point, something that doesn't read my emails, give any bullshit law enforcement request a master key, and doesn't try and abuse the spirit of antitrust laws at every step is worth trying out, even if it's just only workable.
Google's been improving G Suite a ton, but just not "innovating" in the way the author wants.
What Google hasn't been doing is blowing up how word processors and spreadsheets work, like a "Google Wave" re-envisioning or something of them. Why? Because people understand how Word and Excel and Docs and Sheets work and don't want change.
What Google has been doing over the past ten years centers around 1) interoperability, 2) business needs, 3) intelligence and 4) performance.
For example, interoperability: you can use Google Drive File Stream to access your Drive files like a local filesystem. Or being able to comment in PDF's, or edit Office files directly without first making a copy in Docs or Sheets.
Or business needs: Google Classroom lets you use Docs with your students. Or things like document diffs and approvals. These things don't seem "innovative"... but they're necessary.
Intelligence? Look at how Sheets will automatically analyze your data to try to produce meaningful graphs. Or how Docs now fixes your spelling mistakes as you type, vastly better than e.g. autocorrect on iOS.
And performance is mainly with Sheets -- it's much better at handling large amounts of data than it used to be.
But yes, Google's been focused on giving users the features they actually need, rather than capital-I "Innovation". Because that's what users actually want.
I don't want Google trying to reimagine word processing and shoving it in my face or something.
90% of the time, Sheets's recommended graph is exactly what I wanted, and is in general a much cleaner and enjoyable experience than Excel. Pivot tables too are much more obvious and usable to non-power users in Sheets than Excel
I'm not asking Google to throw away how docs or slides work and I like the simplicity of G Suite, but look at the quarterly reports for G Suite customers and Docs will get one or two things. It's still missing tons of basic features (mixed page orientation!). Sheet's "explore" mode has been useless for me, as most AI features are. Drive File Stream is cool but the transition process was a disaster and accessing cloud files on a local machine is not exactly amazing. I would love if Google didn't try to "innovate" and focused on making improvements to what they have.
Most of the stuff in the article is not really central to Google's business, in my view. Google's business is dirt-cheap high-performance computing. They are well ahead of everyone in this line of endeavor. They use their ads revenues to fund R&D in hardware and software and build out capacity so they can opportunistically enter new lines of business. Usually these are businesses that nobody else could profitably execute, like YouTube. Or they are businesses that are technically unique, like Cloud Spanner, to which I see no competitors.
So when I look at Google's health I look at the research they are doing to see if they seem to be staying on the cutting edge. Stuff like Snap/Pony or TPUs makes me think they are. It's possible that the capabilities Google is developing won't lead to any new profitable businesses, but their success in geospatial data and other computationally-expensive products like machine vision and translation are examples of their abilities. The latent ability to just jump into a new line of business is a strength of Google's, and products they developed more than a decade ago, like Docs and Sheets, aren't really that important to their future.
I'm sure these alternatives work for some, but I really don't find "Hey" a suitable alternatives to Gmail, nor "Notion" to Google Docs.
I think the innovation and updating in those Google products has stagnated a lot, but they're still better for actual work and business than the new hip things.
I don't know the name for it, but this seems like a "the market leader doesn't know what it's doing" fallacy. While I will concede that Google is not the market leader in many of these areas, It's Microsoft, not Airtable that's leading the way.
To me, Google has always been a relatively "boring" company, it's just that boring in the early to mid 2000s was a welcome change of pace. There innovations were almost entirely in back-end technology and simplicity, not innovative user experiences. Google docs was meant to be as boring as Microsoft word, because it turns out that most people know exactly what Microsoft Word does and like the single-purposeness of it. I love Notion, but I think the idea that Notion will every be as popular as word or docs is nuts. The vast majority of the market doesn't know what a Kanban board is much less want to embed one in their docs.
Making the argument that Google isn't as innovative as smaller startups is easy. Google is trying to appeal to the masses, not a niche. Saying they blew a ten-year lead is a stretch.
- GMail with "unlimited" (never-seen-before 1GB) of storage when everyone had 10MB quotas was a "holy shit" moment, and fast web mail was a fresh breath of air
- Google Maps, yet another "holy shit" experience when you used Mapquest before
- Google Translate, so much better than everything that came before
- Google search - OK that's late 1990s but I remember the "aha" moment of trying the Google beta after needing to become a power user of lycos/altavista/askjeeves
You notice that all of these were more than a decade ago before their IPO. Larry and Sergei have gotten old and lazy, and so have their CxOs and VPs. No goals, no focus, no discipline because who cares if all the execs already have their private jets.
You touch on something I have thought about a lot.... why don’t we launch companies with the intent of winding them down once we have achieved what we set out to? It’s rhetorical as I know the answer is money But I yearn to live in a society where that would be the norm.
I don't know enough about Hey to judge that, but to me comparing Notion to Google Docs is like comparing Slack to Gmail. I mean sure, both Slack and Gmail are communication tools, but they solve for different use cases so they're not really interchangeable. I can imagine that if your use cases are all things that Slack is better at you might think "Wow, Gmail is so outdated and horrible why isn't it like Slack?" But personally I like having both because I have use cases that email is better for and I'm skeptical that one generalist tool that tried to be useful for all use cases would be particularly good for any of them.
Getting back to Notion and Google Docs, I'd rather use Notion for internal documentation and I'd really, really rather use Google Docs for redlining contracts, which is most often what I'm doing when I'm dealing with .doc/.docx files. In Microsoft's suite I think Notion is an alternative to OneNote, not to Word. So I would agree with the author if the implication was that Google should have a Notion-like tool in addition to Google Docs, but suggesting that Google Docs is bad because it's not Notion-like doesn't make any more sense to me than saying that Gmail is bad because it's not Slack.
> but I really don't find "Hey" a suitable alternatives to Gmail
I don't get why people need an alternative to Gmail. Email is already decentralized. Just buy a custom domain for a few dollars per year, and then use any email provider you want. You'll own your email address forever.
I currently host my email on Protonmail, but if I ever decide to switch providers, I can do it without having to give people a new email address. I could even go back to Gmail. Worst-case scenario is that I lose the old messages in my inbox that I failed to back up, but that's no big deal.
A coworker asked me last night about a cloud but controlled email option and protonmail was my first thought, though I don't know the current competition. Own a domain, put some cash aside for paying for the service, and go from there.
I still use gmail for my mail server but I use Windows Mail for my PC mail client nowadays. Not that Windows Mail is great but Google is determined to make Gmail progressively worse. All they had to do was nothing.
If your “actual work” is designing documents for printing on dead tree paper, then sure. If your work is modern digital-first collaboration there are way more effective choices these days.
I highly doubt this. It might be, might be, a majority. But there are lots of academic, personal, and even business cases that are digital only or digital mostly.
I agree with this. I have had Hey for more than a week now. The UI is nice and feels fresh but that's about it. There are some features which won't work well if you keep an address for long enough.
- Screener: This works well at start but it won't scale well. I still have to see every address for the first time. Google is smart to send spam to spam. I almost never have to check it. I have used other email services and no one comes even close to recognizing and flagging spam well.
- Categorization : Algos work well mostly in Gmail. Auto Categorization works reall well, sure it sometimes mislabels and sends email to a different category. But it is accurate most of the times. I don't have to spend time on these rules.
I think Google is screwing up massively with letting these things rot on the vine, but I still prefer google docs/drive to sharepoint/office365 even - word on desktop is okay but the web based version is utter crap compared to Google Docs.
According to my gf, a rabid Inbox fan, many important feature didn’t make he transition. She said a lot of her colleagues were pissed off about it too...and she was working at google at the time (not on Inbox/Gmail of course).
Scuttlebutt I heard (not via her) was it was the usual Google story: internal political fight unrelated to features or technical issues.
I had the "pleasure" to work with Ex-Googlers which had "Project Managers at G" in their resume. Honestly, I do not wonder anymore why Google nowadays s#ck as hard as they do.
They made great presentations and a grand plans using some project management saas tools. But both of them neither understood the basics of projectmanagement (Who does what when and what do they need when?) nor could react when challenged.
Both of them were lower to middle management, but sure as hell anything that you hand them would end in total mediocrity if not fail at all.
On the other hand one of the most capable front end engineers I knew joined Google for 2 years. Where he spent most of his time - with a whole team - working on .... fold in and fold out animations (for a single mobile product)
He quit. Google now is one of his customers. His work has gotten much more interesting.
Google / Alphabet - the organization - did not scale well. My bet: There will be a huge crisis soon. Lots of G-people will loose their jobs.
You tell a nice story with the data, but I cannot dismiss the potential selection bias: perhaps these PMs were not up to Google's standards and were invited to leave?
yes, i am aware of it.
on the other hand which PR-ides itself with one of the hardest hiring selection process on the market it might be a statement about this process.
I don't know if it's a "nowadays" thing. I joined Google 10 years ago and was there for a while, and I remember getting the distinct impression both internally and from looking at our products that we had world-class engineers and incredibly bad PMs, compared to the competition.
Interesting how you are basing your assumptions on two ex-employees who no longer work there probably because of what you experienced, not to mention the small sample size.
This is why I've switched to Apple Maps for like 98% of my navigation needs.
I might be biased, because I live in one of the cities with the updated maps data, sure, but I find that it handles most of my use cases just as well as Google Maps.
I find the Apple Maps navigation to be far more polished and human. Whenever they added "After the stop sign, at the next light turn right" made it my goto nav app.
The search is still not great compared to Google Maps, though.
People like to conflate being popular (having large marketshare) with being a monopoly (exclusive control of supply). Being popular in those markets is likely because they do not monetize it directly.
Is not the only, nor even the most useful, definition of a monopoly. And there's also not a magic moment where one second you're not a monopoly, and the next second you are when user X+1 signs up. It's a gradual process and that's why it is such a huge area of law.
You might want to reflect on why you want anti-trust law to only apply to the strict definition of a monopoly. That's why it's called "anti-trust" not "anti-monopoly".
Chrome is arguably a monopoly if you segment desktop web traffic, but iOS Safari is such a large percentage that Safari can't be ignored.
People will disagree with email - but I challenge you to go look at email threads you're on and see what % of the emails are @gmail.com - not to mention G Suite addresses you don't know are Gmail. Outside of enterprise, there's no alternative.
Not bad either that Android and Chrome are duopolies at this point.
- that seems to be worldwide (I see for example swiss and french providers in the list), which isn't necessarily relevant. Gmail can be a monopoly in the US for example, while not being one worldwide.
Unfortunately I cannot find better numbers, if someone does that would be interesting to discuss.
I actually don't think Gmail (as other comments here claim) is nearly as much "monopoly" as YouTube. There are many email providers, people use whatever.
What do you find awful about the monetizing on Maps? So far I've found it not very intrusive, and it seems much more clear on Maps than on Search when something is an ad.
My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning," whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the show. Chrome was the same thing, though the competitor was Microsoft. Google Docs? Same thing, Microsoft again.
Google is good at building things 90% as good as they could be. For Gmail that 90% was leaps and bounds better than the web mail alternatives of 2004 which included…SquirrelMail.
Does Google care that you're switching to Hey or Safari or whatever has replaced Google Sheets? No. Are they going to buckle down at finish the last 10% of all of these products? No. Is that an opportunity for all of us reading this story? Yes.
One way to think of Google's products as the equivalent of Microsoft Write — or Apple's iWork. Google's platform is not Windows or Mac OS or iOS: it is the Internet. Google's products come free in the shrink-wrapped box when you drive to Egghead Software pick a copy of "Internet" up off the shelf.
Me too! It was bundled with OS X server, which I was running on the G4 Cube that got relegated to utility box status when I went all-in on laptop life.
It's a free product. They can spend more money and more engineering resources on a project to improve it, but with little financial results to show. Google has only been very slowly figuring out how to make money from anything other than ads.
I am getting tired of these google articles. I know how this will go, users will pat themselves for using duckduckgo, open street maps, firefox and fastmail anytime now.
I've never met anyone who uses OSM. I have just shy of 500 edits on OSM because I kept going to use it, finding it didn't have what I was looking for, and making improvements.
It would be nice if there was a viable alternative to Google Maps. Apple Maps is apparently not too bad, but I'm using Android and Linux these days.
well, I use osmodroid. I am sure you can find many here. I do want to contribute more after I have other things sorted. Wish you didn't have to worry about being poor.
I agree with you that HN is a bubble which is what I meant by my comment. We need to do something to take it mainstream than patting ourselves here over and over again. Talk about how ways we can do that. I don't like google articles because we waste time giving them feedback rather than to all the cool open source projects that deserve it.
No. you are wildly misunderstanding me. I mean I can't devote more time to contributing to open street maps or other open source projects because of the worry.
Oh I see, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope things will improve for you soon.
It's understandable you would be focused on more important things. Lately I have been wondering if more people would get into open source if they didn't have bigger things to worry about like poverty and climate change.
I suppose I am privileged enough to do OSM contributions in my spare time. I'm not sure how to feel about that...
Google is only good at search. The only reason why I use everything else they create is because of their massive distribution, market penetration and inter-operability.
Thankfully there are solid alternatives in certain areas like fore example using iPhone instead of Android.
But for everything else I don't see a massive migration happening any time soon. Notion, Hey.com, DuckDuckGo are all niche products. My dad has Gmail and I can assure that's going to be the case for ever. He is never going to find out what Hey.com is. Even if he does he is not even going to consider it.
Disclaimer: used to work there, but not in security/domains.
The other thing I find Google to be good at is account/login security. A gaccount with 2fa is unlikely to be stolen by anything less than a targeted zeroday against the 2fa device; social engineering just doesn't work to the extent that there's a trope of people who have permanently lost access to their accounts because they changed phones, phone numbers, lost recovery codes, etc. Combine that with Domains and I think it's pretty unlikely to lose a domain name registered with them.
Sounds like they're also good at interoperability, market penetration, and distribution. Do you not think they're good at video streaming, security research, email, or cloud hosting?
I think you missed my point. Of course saying that they are only good at search is a catch-all statement. They are probably good at many things but their relevance is tied exclusively to their search product. Products like YouTube are what they are because of Google's search expertise.
Also let's not forget that AdWords either subsidizes or leverages everything that Google builds. So I would add that they are also great at selling ads.
I understood your point, I just think it's incorrect. For instance, I don't think search is even close to the hardest problem YouTube is solving. I would say that magically streaming a crazy volume of video at the best possible resolution is a pretty tough technical problem, and totally unrelated to search. Ditto security research for the most part, modulo some of the work TAG does on finding 0days in the wild.
This is a common trope about Google; they're only a search company, only an ad company. It's simply not the case.
Edit: if you wanted to make a broad sweeping statement, I would say that they're only good at hard technical challenges. That's why they succeeded at e.g. search and YouTube, and failed at chat and social.
Yeah, I love google maps. It has saved me a ton of hours routing me around what I assume were multi-lane car crashes. Also, I really like exploring cities with their 3d maps and I've heard google earth VR is amazing which I want to try sometime.
The adage "If you aren't paying for it, then you are the product" is a bit trite and worn out, but it in Google's case "If you aren't paying for it, you aren't the customer" is entirely accurate. While individual Google engineers are almost certainly motivated to do great things for end users, the company as a whole has little incentive to make a great consumer experience.
Google feels like it's in a very awkward "You can't get there from here" position. I think they'd like to move more towards having a direct financial relationship (Google Pixel, YouTube's ad-free service, are good examples) with their customers but can't quite figure out how to get there. Pivoting a free product like Docs into a for-fee product often creates a ton of bad feelings for a company.
DuckDuckGo's rise feels like textbook "Innovator's Dilemma" stuff. By prioritizing privacy, something Google can't do because all the institutional values are misaligned with that goal, DDG were able to make headway into a niche market. Now they're established, and their results are getting better and better, even in the broader market. For example, I use DDG mostly because their results are visually easier to parse. It remains to be seen if they'll ever beat Google at their own search game, but Google certainly feels vulnerable for the first time in many years.
The visually easier part also relates to how Google "innovated".
At some point Google seems to have realised that all they needed to do to grow, was just stuff more ads above the fold, and remove all non-Google content (i.e. when you search for travel, you get Google's OTA...when you search for finance news, you get Google's clickjacked articles, etc.). It is far easier to hit earnings that way (and btw, this was the intention...they rolled this out slowly so could they could control the numbers they reported).
In my personal opinion, Google also optimises for hiring bureaucrats. Something has gone wrong with hiring when you are hiring a bunch of "smart" people and your strategy is this weak. Either you are hiring a bunch of people you don't need or you are hiring a bunch of people with the wrong skills (in this case, it is probably both). Google jobs seem like a sinecure...lots of people busily doing nothing...just imo.
It is classic Innovator's Dilemma though (that book is amazing).
Would it be petty of me to say I just hate DuckDuckGo's name? I know that's a stupid thing to pick your search on over privacy but when I use it I can feel myself internally screaming at how lame the branding is - I can't be the only one right?
Saw a billboard for ddg, at a bus stop, in the suburbs of a larger Scandinavian city the other day. It struck me as a weird place for a tech add. Guess they are really working hard to break into the mainstream.
Imagine being a VC and hearing the pitch by Elasticsearch that you were going to make massive inroads in search (when they were early of course). I imagine most laughed at them like "How are you going to beat Google" ...
Imagine if they answered "we expect Google to just completely abdicate their role in search."
Google right now has a few wins but most of their projects fall flat. AWS is crushing it ...
Google is famous for half-assing and then abandoning promising projects. (insert comparison vs other tech companies).
One example of a half forgotten project is something called Google Classrooms - for teachers and students.
It is missing so many basic features.
For example there is no way to automatically take attendance when students log in.
You can hack around it but for a project aimed at teachers it shouldn't be so painful.
While I am ranting: I am still thankful(/s) to Google for abandoning Google Hangouts integration with Youtube live streaming.
This forced me onto OBS full time and is actually a good thing.
EDIT: I speculate that this frequent failure of integrating between various Google properties must be because there is a strong silo effect by now at Google just like any other big corporation.
You can't take attendance in Google classroom because schools use MIS/SIS software to track attendance/assessment data etc. Without links back to the schools MIS data it gets held in a Google silo where it's not useful to anyone.
Is that actually true though? I've seen more and more regular people outside tech circles dismiss Facebook but Google? Not so much. In fact, outside of HN I haven't seen many complaints at all.
- Canceling accounts, leaving people with the "Post it to HN and pray" customer support option.
- Focusing more on growth than long-term support. See the original article for examples of this.
- Taking their originally fast, svelte, and compliant web browser and injecting more and more features that are virtually required by Google domains, memory/CPU bloat, and privacy hostile tracking/telemetry features.
- People don't trust in any Google product which didn't exist 10 years ago, for fear that it's going to be canceled.
People are noticing. The migration is slow (largely due to the smartphone duopoly), but it's happening.
You're still talking about users within tech circles, which I'm not doubting has lost trust in Google. However, my mom or my siblings wouldn't understand what any of those points even mean.
They're hearing about notable accounts being closed in Google. Don't underestimate the exposure provided by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and a dozen other small sites who are also covering many of these "my account was lost/stolen/closed" stories.
They know (often better than I) when a service is relegated to Google's graveyard.
They wonder why their crappy 5-year old Lenovo laptop struggles with Chrome but not Firefox (which I installed for them too).
They notice Google's suite of apps popping and freezing and "just not working" and gripe to me with comparisons to Word and Excel.
Not being tech savvy doesn't mean they're idiots - they recognize when something isn't working well, or when something has become stale, just as well as we do.
It's funny because I usually use the same argument but for the opposite case: people are not idiots and know very well about the implications of giving up their data to Big Tech but they simply don't care and think it's worth it. As a response to the common trope that we all we need to do is inform users and they will stop doing it.
Anecdote: the majority of non-tech business owners I know passionately hate Google. These are guys in their 40s and 50s. The reasons may differ, but the hatred does not.
For them, the reasons are more about manipulating search results to control public opinion.
For me, it's things like hiding organic search queries from Google analytics and saying they broke it for "privacy reasons". Even though I can still see search queries for paid traffic. And the terrible quality of search results now. Oh, and the completely selective enforcement of rules (looking at you "unfair advantage" policy).
Business owners and techies are still a minority of users. I'm not taking a stance here, just trying to realistically evaluate the "users have lost trust in Google" statement but it seems that we want to stay oblivious and glutton in Google's presumed downfall instead.
Well I'm the "computer expert" in the family. So every mom, dad, aunt, sister brother and family friend gets Brave and Duckduckgo as their default search when I need to help them with anything on their computers. That's exactly how it happened back in the day when Chrome was released and those users "outside tech" were converted from Internet Explorer. Once a tech company loses the goodwill of the geeks, they're as good as done.
People also increasingly care about privacy, which goes after Google’s core revenue stream. Google is also easier to switch away from than Facebook. None of their services have strong network effects. (Except chat...)
Most places I’ve worked switch cloud office suites every few years. Quip seems to be the new hotness at the current job. Its documents feature is fine, and the spreadsheet is good enough 99% of the time.
It's anecdotal at best, but the 'regular people' in middle america that I know who have switched from Google have only done so because the right-wing political commentators on the radio told them to do it.
My very disconnected from technology father uses Duck-Duck-Go now because of that. (subsequently, he 'dropped using facebook' because they track you across the web. His solution to beat their tracking is to use DDG to look up facebook.com and log-in through the link it presents. Not sure of the logic there.)
The mobile Google results page is so cluttered that I switched my iPhone’s default search to DuckDuckGo. The results are a tad worse, but I’m never doing heavy-duty searches on the go. And now I don’t have to scroll past 6 ads to get the first result.
I use DDG as default search on my phone and it's measurably worse than google for the majority of searches I do and there are absolutely ads on ddg. I inevitably switch for at least half of my searches.
They actually pushed ChromeOS and web services (GMail, Inbox, Docs, Sheets, ... ) pretty hard and realized that its not the way to go forward. While for lightweight tasks (like emailing and docs) it works pretty well, for heavy tasks (like video editing) and most importantly, as a development platform, chrome os din't do well.
So they pivoted to Fuchsia OS. A new OS to provide seamless experience across several devices (in home or in vehicle while commuting. Some of the resource can be living in cloud). Its a sort of networked OS. Streaming music to your Google Home, let me fetch that music form the Fuchsia Desktop's cache and stream it to Google Home, rather than fetching it all the way from Cloud.
With out applications, OS is not much of use. Here comes Flutter. Let the developers make apps for Android and iOS in Flutter (currently over 50k apps on Google Play store) and have them run the same app on Fuchsia OS. I believe it will take probably another year or two for Google to bring in Fuchsia to Pixelbook. Let's hope so! I would like an OS as open as Linux, with macOS like user experience.
> and most importantly, as a development platform, chrome os din't do well
Microsoft completely lapped the industry on this with VS Code. It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend in a browser.
It seems like they're experimenting with it, but claim it's just for exploring stuff and is not the "future" yet. I've read on HN that it's much slower than Linux thanks to it's micro-kernel design.
That said, I've been very excited for Fuchsia for a long time.
"Then something happened at Google. I’m not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software."
Google desperately iterates on multiple side-projects to find an additional revenue stream comparable to ads, that's all. Whenever the new toy can't deliver enough it gets nixed, we all know the practice.
I believe they know how vulnerable they are. An unexpected virus may shutter their ads business, this quarter results may be first of a kind in their history. They don't have the iron grip on marketplace on Android as tight as Apple. They know that cloud business will most likely be a Coke vs Pepsi market. I believe their monopoly on browser market feeds the status quo in ads, but what if Edge steals enough market share and comes default with ad blocking? What if the new the new Apple chip shifts desktops and laptops to Apple more and they need to seek permission of a hostile Safari to show ads?
Ads, their main source of income, is not something the end user wants. That's Google's problem.
Big Sur made me switch to Mail and Calendar (away from GMail and GCal in Safari).
Oh my god is it fast and snappy.
GChat within GMail kept me in the browser, but they ruined it. Now I use the standalone Chat "app", which is some webframe crap, but hey, corporate standard.
Big Sur is like iPadOS and I always use native apps on iPadOS/iOS.
Can't imagine what a truly native Figma, Slack, JIRA would be like.
You've switched to Big Sur because it's snappy? I just installed the beta and it's super buggy with periodic pauses for no reason. Are you using it every day now?
Yeah, I'm not sure why the author was so excited about web apps. I have a 12 core Ryzen 3900x and all web apps are slow pieces of shit. I want native apps for everything and no, electron doesn't count.
It's crazy how people all the time say on HN that performance doesn't matter and how optimizing code is a waste of time while I'm simultaneously frustrated about how slow the majority of software I use is.
One of the problems with Google is that it’s hard to evangelize their products anymore.
I used to evangelize Macs with my friends and family, since the mid 2000s (before the iPhone revolution) and it served me and the people I pushed it to well. At least until a few years ago with the whole new MBP fiasco with the touchbar and butterfly keyboard and no ports and a minimum price in the mid 2000s. But it’s hardware and people can continue using what they already own for the most part till Apple fixed a lot of those issues.
But with Google I have been burnt. A lot. I got my family on Picasa to share photos, and Google stopped supporting it. Personally, Google Reader always stings. And whatever google did with GChat and Hangouts, which I pushed on all my friends, was embarrassing.
At least I gave up on recommending Google products before Allo and Duo. My friends who did that turn red when they are mentioned to this day.
And then there’s GSuite. A clients company switched wholesale on my recommendation right at the beginning. They’ve been using it for almost its entire existence (right from the days when it was Google Apps? and the first 10 users were free). They’ve been spending a ton of money on it for so long, but they couldn’t get a Google rep to offer them a discount on 5 accounts (basically they wanted tiered access and did not want to bring everyone onto the most expensive plans because a few users were not full time employees and using it for very basic purposes). It was a matter of a few hundred dollars a year, but between the fact that they could hardly get a rep to talk to them, and when they did the reps had absolutely no flexibility, MS reps swooped in, offered tiered access, discounts, and a full time rep and within a couple of months they were a complete O365 shop.
They still miss their email search, but overall it’s been completely worth it.
It’s still mind boggling to me how Google’s managed to screw this up.
Google has an Engineer-driven gene that is a double-edge sword. This enabled them to utilize worlds' most brilliant minds to solve some of the most technically challenging problems. But at the same time, the best engineers lose their interests and quickly move away from "plain and easy" problems, which in fact the consumers face everyday. And the straight-forward logical engineering mindset is often naive in understanding and solving deep human and societal problems. This is why Google has been notoriously good at solving technical problems like search and massive distributed systems, but bad at designing and improving consumer and social products. On the contrary, Apple has been relentless about improving even the tiniest thing in the user experience like a round corner on an icon. Google's lack of drive on delivering the best user experience will eventually bite them hard.
Credit where credit is due: I think Google colab is fantastic. I've used Repl.it for a coupe of years now, but for the past year it's been Colab pretty much 100% of the time.
Whenever I have to set up a new machine with dev. environment, I get a impending sense of doom. I get the "I really, really don't want to be doing this" feeling.
The fact that you can open up your browser, and start coding in just mere seconds, is just an incredible feeling.
In February I had to set up an older laptop with Python - I did this via Conda, which is usually a pretty smooth process. But I ended up spending 3 hours tracking down some persistent and conflicting DLL errors, which made numpy crash. Turns out some other applications on the computer caused this error.
They were too busy grinding leetcode and focusing on "playing the game" and not growing or hiring innovators. The Max Howell incident is a perfect example. Creates legitimately useful software that everyone loves, can't invert a binary tree (because we do this all day right? this question is highly relevant to the job /s) so you can't work here.
Maybe at one point edit distance questions were useful in identifying the 2% of CS grads that actually paid attention in class, but now it just produces code bots.
Google gamified the interview, and in the process, became beholden and captured by its own madness.
[Shameless plug] For anyone who uses DuckDuckGo but finds themselves using !g too and is curious how much their DDG vs !g search distribution is - I have made a small FOSS add-on for Firefox called DDG Stats[1].
I am planning on a Chrome port too (though, I would always recommend Firefox over chrome).
I believe it's their corporate culture. Google just hires problem solvers, good engineers. It's a sort of dual of Apple, that prioritizes design and marketing.
The result is you get things that Just work (and nothing else). While Apple gets you things that Just works.
I don't see real vision in their products those days.
None of them have real vision (Apple is too design centric and afraid to try new things, Google lacks creativity).
Google has reached the mature phase of the corporate lifecycle. They have economic dominance and are putting the screws in to extract more money. The writing was on the wall when they got an ex-Goldman Sachs CFO, but it has become more and more externally obvious over the past few years.
The mature phase can last a long time so long as they keep buying the competition or use their position to shut others out. Or they can screw up and start to lose their grip to another company or group of companies that slice off their market share one service at a time.
In any case, Google was never actually trying to help the world, their marketing was extremely good though. Hopefully the advertising economy collapses as people realize the ads don't work and we have to find a model (such as public funding of essential services) that actually works.
This article comes off as woefully naive towards the average user and frankly quite elitist.
You're forgetting that Google does not optimize for power users like yourself. Instead, they are just interested in adding the most amount of people into their ecosystem. Free, easy-to-use, and familiar products like Docs and Sheets will no doubt garner the most amount of users.
I went through most of the comment and something I thought hasn't been mentioned yet.
May be those product should not have been built with Javascript in the first place?
I remember when Chrome OS was launched, people like the blog post author were all over it. It was the future!. And I was surprised he was an Apple user. I thought Apple users cared way more, and way beyond some high level abstraction convenience at the expense of quality.
I have been working with dozens if not hundreds of companies, and none of them use Google Sheet for anything serious. It is on Excel, and if it is on the web the trend is now Excel 365.
If you demand quality, there isn't even a single App built with Web Technology that is A Class. This may change when WASM is a thing. But for now there is simply no replacement.
Lots of educations were initially switching to ChromeOS and Google. They later switched back to iPad. Why is that? There is something about Google and ChromeOS's quality that is not up to standard. And the users knows it, they just couldn't explain it. But it was crap, at least compare it to their iPad. And it has performance hit on its user. Because they were not satisfied.
This isn't to say ChromeOS cant be Good. But Google, generally speaking has absolutely no taste on quality. They are even worst than Microsoft. In Microsoft you could still see a glimpse of product person fighting with ( sorry HN ) idiotic geeks solution and then came out with a compromise. And MS Product person isn't anywhere as good as Apple's in the first place. But you see ZERO User product design in Google. It is as if a product is designed by geeks, built by geeks, marketed by geeks, and feed into their own echo chamber how great it is.
And Android now is no different to Windows in the 90s.
I never took a serious look into Google's financial, but I am surprised they are a trillion dollar company while Apple is only worst 50% more.
Not sure I want everything to be rewritten to run on a browser. How unoptimized is that..
Not all comparisons are equal there. Like youtube vs twitch? Talking about livestreaming? replays? I don't go to twitch to look up peoples vlogs, how to's, etc. Apples / oranges even though you can livestream on both.
Gmail clogged? Unsubscribe to some stuff or adjust your filters. I've had my gmail account since gmail became available and I have no issues keeping a clean inbox. Spam folder is massive, but I guess its doing its job.
I get what you're saying.. But thats how the industry works. Giants can't move as quick when they have billions of users that rely on 100% uptime and backwards compatibility. You can't upend your stuff all the time. Startups are scrappy and can do crazy stuff. But notice how many crazy things don't last.
The biggest problem with Google is that they became so successful in search and ads. It confuses the hell out of the company who their real customer is.
What if instead of monetizing via ads, they had gone with premium accounts with personal search history and enterprise search products? That would have forced them to innovate on their core expertise and kept them empathetic to the end user. Right now, all they care is about usage stats.
Also Google never had a good design ethic right from the beginning. Early products like Chat, Groups were badly designed and very inconsistent. They cared more about scale and performance at that point.
The Google we see today is probably because of those early decisions made on the backs of runaway ad revenue. I hope the management has a change of heart, because I can see other companies chipping away at Google otherwise.
This article doesn't say anything worth hearing. It can be summarized as, "Google has not done visibly big consumer innovation." Which is not that true either. Their "cluttered" search is adding a lot of value. Their main innovation has also been in AI, mobile and the cloud.
Google never had a ten year lead, that's pretty naive. Google had a ten year _lag_. Microsoft already had office when Google appeared, and while fans have numerous reasons to like Google docs & friends, they were never better or bigger than Office.
Chrome OS has a tremendous lag on windows and Mac.
It's really hard to innovate once you start to be compared to a established brand. Go ask Bing.
Unless duck duck go becomes larger than Google, they never blew any lead, only were defeated in places opponents were stronger.
> I’m a long shareholder of Google. It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them. I’m confident they have a bright future ahead.
What? Name me a company to make a comeback on the R&D-is-dead-slowly-killing-bussines front?[1]. Clearly Google (and Intel) are on the IBM train now, with only a lack of anti-trust possibly keeping them barely sentient in a few years. [I say "sentient" because they could continue to rent-seek into their feeding tube way after.]
And clearly this person is letting their investment guide their thinking rather than vice-versa. You almost get it, just a bit more!
[1]: Don't say MS, yet, they have embraced tons of web-era trappings and culture, but are they actually pushing the envelope or still assimilating?
Google's main liability is that they can never, under any circumstances, prioritize user privacy.
The reason the products listed by the author have rough corners is that those products don't contribute much to the bottom line.
Google is an advertising company that happens to use technology. The problem is that too many people view it as a technology company that happens to be into advertising.
As browsers adopt ad-blockers by default, Chrome will be the lone holdout. As smaller companies and startups realize that you can "monetize" products by charging a price and adopting stringent privacy policies, Google will be stuck with its "free" business model.
Nothing Google will try to do in the years ahead will change the basic equation.
Google has the best software development tooling in the business internally. Their problems are not around technology. Their problems are product focus, commitment and follow through. Google is in fact primarily a technology company. They struggle with being a "product" company.
The internet runs on ads and unless every site becomes membership driven ads are a natural revenue stream. And I personally don't see memberships becoming a preferred method of subsidizing much of the internet for most people.
So ads it is, and ads it will likely be.
With that said, Google doesn't have to a bad actor to survive with regards to advertisements, as it is relatively safe revenue stream for the foreseeable future.
> Nothing Google will try to do in the years ahead will change the basic equation.
If Google splits up their various products into separate companies forced to survive on their own without Google's monopoly money to fall back on, we might actually see some quality products and services out of Google for the first time in a long, long time.
Of course, the leadership will have to pull their heads out of their gilded asses for something like that to ever happen.
Google has minimal interest in "apps" (which many companies can do an OK job at) and much more interested in planet-scale data/machine-learning/AI (which is much much harder and something that Google is still very far ahead of everyone at).
Another micro example of how bad Google is nowadays:
The sitemap.xml API is deliberately broken for 1 1/2 years by now. The response does no longer deliver an indexed value back other than 0 or a frozen number form years ago. After I found out about it a few months later there was a tweet and blogpost about it.
I feel like sheets and docs not changing for years is a feature not problem. I don't like innovation in these kind of apps. It's far too common, historically, for people to add all kinds of useless crap like Mr Clippy and rearrange the toolbars and whatnot. Once you're familiar with the tools the interface is consistent across docs, sheets and slides as well as over time. The programmability is also really good. I actually built an app for a friend using just sheets and its automation features to implement a web form for their national poetry contest.
The new office online surprisingly works really great. Funny enough, office 365 works better online than desktop. I do thing Web OS is the future. User's are now spending 90% of their time in the browser. Basically browser === os. Apps like electron, react are proving that point. Chrome OS was maybe a start (I've never personally used it because I've never really felt the need to make such a huge OS transition), but at the present business incentives were weak. Why would someone pay (not monetary, but by opportunity cost) for just a browser?
I lived near google for many years and knew many employees and this drives them crazy. In order to have innovation and support for a particular product, google allows engineers to do what they want until nobody wants to touch the bloated pos and everyone walks away.
Gmail has thousands of hidden functions. To get gmail built they allowed each engineer to add what they wanted...and most of it was for them personally. Remember the gmail2 thteat from a number of years ago? They couldn't figure out how to force every user into a new platform.
I'm surprised the author doesn't spend more time discussing Google's search engine.
I've been using DDG as my primary search for a while, because Google Search has been returning increasingly bad results already for quite some months.
For the past couple days I've tried Google's Search again, and, oh wow!, it is hilariously bad now, just laughable! It now entirely ignores search terms, and the AI and ad-based results work against me, not for me.
Google didn't blow a ten year lead, they blew a 20 year lead. AltaVista was better than this.
Let's revisit the topic three months from now. The change to which I refer probably occurred less than a month ago. Not that Google results hadn't already been going downhill for months prior, but it became dramatically worse at some point over the past month.
I've personally backed way off when it comes to putting everything in the cloud. I know some people love the convenience and I get that, but I spend a lot of time and energy creating what I create and I want to actually have some control over it. I also don't trust cloud companies at all when it comes to either privacy or continuity.
For similar reasons I've started data hoarding again. When I find an interesting video or podcast I tend to mirror and stash it on a NAS. Things disappear from the cloud quite regularly.
Google Docs/Sheets is pretty crappy compared LibreOffice. But its collaboration features are really good and everyone has a Google account, so working together remote works like a charm.
This is exactly right. You see the flashes of brilliance and the incredible untapped value in GDocs. But its slow, disorganized and stagnant. Google could be making its money the honest way, by providing genuine value, making people more productive and and collaborative. Its heartbreaking to see them instead massively profiting through spying and manipulating their users. They destroyed their brand and surely they are no longer an appealing place to work for those who can afford to have a conscience.
> In 2010, I predicted that by 2020 Chrome OS would be the most popular desktop OS in the world. It was fast, lightweight, and $0.
Sounds like your crystal ball malfunctioned on that forecast. I'll recalibrate it for you but will forecast it for this decade:
In 2020, I predict that by 2030, Fuchsia OS would be one of the most popular desktop and mobile OSes in the world and will replace Chrome OS and Android. It was fast, lightweight, and $0.
There you go. That makes much more sense according to my crystal ball.
The choice of "alternatives" mentioned in the article, like "Hey", "Notion", "AirTable", etc. actually does more harm to the credibility to the article than good, because I can't think of any normal person using all these startup products for important tasks.
Hell, I think the only demographic who would have switched all their workflow tools to these would be people who live in Silicon Valley, just helping each other out.
My team (I am the director of software at my company) switched to Notion from Google Docs a little more than a year ago and I'm very happy with the change.
Google Docs addresses a slightly different use case than Notion. Notion is one document for a lot of people, owned by the organization. Google Docs are docs owned by many people, often duplicated. Notion is much better for building documentation and for storing institutional knowledge.
We still use Google docs for things that we don't need to share widely and don't need to be referenceable to a large number of people.
This post is a summary of how I feel about a lot of google products as well. Especially email, yes google has amazing AI to figure out spam but the UX of gmail just feels like I'm still in 2012 or 2015 with email. I've been using Hey for about a week as well and wow, checking and responding to email feels less of a burden and having the Feed, Paper Trail, and Imbox is actually a good way to separate types of emails sent nowadays.
“At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats for macOS Big Sur. It reminded me how much Chrome makes my machine go WHURRRRRR. Yesterday, I made Safari my default browser again.”
I talk to developer friends in my circles and I’m pretty sure I’m on a crazy list for running safari, but I really do think it’s the best Mac browser. Chrome is just an absolute hog and until there’s some Camino-like renaissance for Firefox/Mozilla on Mac it’s not going to work for me.
Seems to be their modus operandi to me, there have been some talks ranging from light ribbing to full on bashing regarding the new iOS update cause they have added features that have existed in Android for decades now. But what have they done with widgets in all this while other than letting it rot? Even Google services themselves don't bother with making a good widget and now Apple will do the same, possibly better.
Google is a classic case of "show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome". Google's performance reviews and promotions are based on building shiny complex things, not on simple but grungy work that solves real problems. So they constantly come up with things nobody uses or cancel products that many use but aren't shiny enough to get a bunch of people promoted so no leaders want to own them.
I have a Chromebook and I'm really found of it, but the Android and Linux parts seem half-baked and a depart from the Chromebook's initial proposition.
I really like this setup where my computer is just a thin client to my infrastructure. In the case of ChromeOS, this is all a closed/proprietary environment managed by Google, but nothing prevents challengers from implementing this setup based on open standards and user freedom.
Here's a free idea for Google that would make my life better... you know these voice assistant thingys? I would love if they could tell me when things happen instead of having to ask them if something is currently happening. For example, "Hey Google, tell me when XXX announces a concert in town." or "tell me when YYY is on sale" etc.
Having to look these things up all the time really sucks.
I had an early Chromebook (from I/O) and was never very impressed. I always felt the lackluster support for local storage would hold it back from ever seriously competing with my PC.
I saw its value as more of a dedicated device for people who do limited things on their laptop (e.g. sales team using only a handful of web apps), and even in that niche it had to compete with iPads, etc.
And yet the stock is at $1400+ this morning. I wonder if you did a survey and described Google without using the name Google, IE: single line of business responsible for 90%+ of revenue, limited switching costs for consumers, regularly kills products consumers like, would anyone think this is a stock worth holding? What weird times we live in.
Couldn't happen to nicer company. I've been disentangling my personal stuff and company's I host for from the google hive for less woke options. Hit em where it hurts.
When the people you pay start threatening to walk out because they don't like what you are working on you know you have a systemic problem.
No incentive to do the boring work of maintaining and improving existing products.
Lots of incentive to create new things -- even if they overlap functionality of existing things -- which then must be phased out to make room for the awkward new things. Even if everyone preferred the old things.
I can't totally agree with this. It may be true that Google Docs and Sheets get updated slowly, but they are functional and as long as they are maintained properly, I am a happy consumer.
Also, on Chromebooks having Microsoft Office 365 available as web apps provides higher level tools when you need them.
Someday, Google will be a business school case study on the dangers of a) having all your money come from one cash cow and b) having too many self-directed engineers with no management vision. Google is a car with a 1,000 horsepower engine but which can't drive in a straight line.
this study exists! it's called the resource curse, it's about (I think) weird inflation effects that happen when all your wealth comes from a natural resource like oil
> having too many self-directed engineers with no management vision
I personally feel it's the opposite. I think management, and Google's internal incentives, lead to a lot of their issues.
As one obvious example, the leveling system is totally flawed and creates incentives for their greatest issues, such as releasing many competing projects only to deprecate/ abandon all of them.
That's on management, not the engineers who are explicitly being told "To get a promotion we need you to do this type of work, we don't really care what happens after that".
A little more control for engineers might mean that passion projects can be taken further, can go in directions that management maybe can't see the immediate "promotable" value from. You wouldn't be incentivized to compete as much, but maybe to collaborate - because you wouldn't need to lead a project to get a promotion, just add value and do good work.
If you look at Google's earlier years I think this is evidence. They used to feel a lot more moonshotty, a lot less managery, and perhaps a bit more culty due to the engineering driven culture. There were flops, but it didn't feel quite as ridiculous.
Just my observations though, as an outsider with some colleagues there.
I think in the early days, Google Engineers just worked on whatever they felt like. This resulted in fantastically profitable cool technology, and vast holes in the products for things no one volunteered to work on.
Then things were turned around to today's "jump through these hoops and you'll get promoted" system.
I was there 2006-2009, and I think the turn happened in that era, though it's hard to tell from "the floor".
And for the future it will be tough to change without losing ability to create new things. If they switch their internal incentive structure to maintenance they lose the new ideas.
Seems like it is easier for a smaller group of capable people to make a big change than a giant org of diverse talented people from different backgrounds
I'm starting to think Google (probably Facebook too) scoops up top talent simply to deprive potential competitors (e.g., startups) of the resources they would need to challenge them. Actually having something for them to do is secondary.
I have believed this for a very long time. Both Google and Facebook are well known for hiring top talent at top dollar and then putting them on projects that are far below their ability level. It takes that talent off the market.
Yea, hard to believe great engineers would be happy that way. They apparently can't even have side/personal projects to scratch that creative itch if the day job isn't providing enough challenge. But leaving or doing a startup would result in a big drop in pay (at least initially). Easy to see how burn-out happens under those conditions.
I've always cared about the privacy issues regarding Google's applications way less than I should, probably, but he definitely makes a good point regarding how increasingly outdated they're feeling.
The future does not belong to Google and Facebook. Data privacy is too important to allow massive grow in ads, and they are not companies organized around selling software. As the article points out, we can live without both. It isn’t 2009.
"Then something happened at Google. I’m not sure what."
Occam's Razor would say that what happened is that they couldn't figure out how to make much money from these tools, and therefore directed fewer resources to them :(
I agree with you for Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but I disagree about Amazon and Facebook.
Amazon's not about your wallet. They're frequently more expensive than other sites; they're about convenience and lock-in. If you need a Sprocket, you type sprocket into the search bar, click buy on the Amazon button, and you're done. The result will probably be a pretty good sprocket for an unobjectionable price. You don't need to worry about little details like who sold it to you or whether it's likely to show up functional. It'll probably work, and if it doesn't, you can return it. No need to do research, no need to drive to a store.
Facebook doesn't care about your attention; it just needs your eyes. That sounds like the same thing, but it's very different. If you're just scrolling through without really reading anything, that's absolutely fine with Facebook so long as you keep doing it.
There's a strange cognitive dissonance in how Google is both the most prestigious company that can employ you, and a maker of crappy, second-rate software. It seems like they can't both be simultaneously true.
I'm still annoyed that they screwed up the release of Google Wave. The mistake was to make it a separate service instead of building it into Gmail and making it another "type of email" you can send.
I think OC's point is that they're breaking up their own monopoly with a complete lack of product vision.
Google Wallet/Pay/Android Pay could have become Stripe, Venmo. Google Hangouts/Meet/Chat could have become Zoom, Slack, Teams, iMessage, etc. Google Finance could have become Robinhood, Mint.
Google is dying under the pressure to make everything they do connect to and be dominated by their ad sales. Google is what happens when you let he accounts start running the ship.
I can't believe it's whatever year this is and Google Sheets can't remember that I just told it a particular sort range has a header row, or just figure it out by itself.
Also in that timeframe the privacy landscape and people’s sensitivity to it have changed a great deal. It’s a much bigger concern amongst normies than it was 10-15 years ago.
And it all coincides with Larry and Sergei stepping down. Google is very much just a cash cow being milked, zero innovation - just products rusting away.
> youtube remains un-crossed, but it will be replaced by better offerings in core categories: vloggers, how-to / structured / lego, and music / covers
For streaming it already has tough competition by twitch. If twitch manages to improve their stream archive and then take their user base into YouTube's core domain YT might see plausible competition.
- running a secret local server on client machines (which incidentally led to several vulnerabilities including the one that enabled attackers to gain webcam and audio access, as well as login credentials)
- lying about e2e encryption (or if you give them the benefit of the doubt, at the very least being disingenuous about it)
- routing all calls through servers in China
- not being explicit about the many conditions that disabled encryption (such as having a participant call in from a phone, recording the session, etc)
- widespread data collection for targeting purposes
- sharing said data with Facebook
- automatically reinstalling the client after you have tried to delete it
- a shady installer that uses preinstall scripts to install the app without the user ever having to click “install”
- gaining root access in their installer
- overriding the password prompt message to make it seem like the system is requesting admin rights and not Zoom itself
Many of these have been patched, to Zoom’s credit, and others have been explained away. But you can’t look at a company with a history like that and say that Zoom would knowingly be the app of choice for a privacy conscious user.
This article was weird. I started about ChromeOS and I was expecting a deep dive or interesting viewpoint on the OS market. Then it veered into "alternatives to Google" land, with a side promotion of HEY (of all things). It left me wanting, for an article about Google's OS strategy.
Stadia is a cloud gaming platform. Like Nvidia Shield, Microsoft xCloud, Sony PS Now, OnLive, and the rest.
Gmail, maps, page-rank based search, and other pre-2010 Google tech were category makers. Every competitor has to massively step their game up to make something as good.
Stadia is not a category maker. There's no massive competitive advantage or leading position for anyone else to catch up to. It's nowhere near the pre-2010 Google products.
I was making some last minute changes while you were replying to clarify my thoughts, but you can see my edits about why Stadia isn't like old Google products.
I've never spoken to you before and goalposts have always been. You just think every product is major. No, Spanner is not equivalent to Google Maps or Search.
Initially, I thought this is because Google targets only big business customers, competing with Microsoft 365. Other product innovations do not scare them, they still offer a package with mail, video conferencing, docs, sheets, drive, etc' etc'. Great for big business collaboration tools. They just don't care for things like Notion or HEY. It's not their target and they don't make money from it.
But then I thought, this is an example targeted against Microsoft with a similar offering. What about Google Cloud? What about Android? They are both innovative. What happened there?
Then I saw it. Google consistently follows the market preventing its competitors from achieving market control. And in Google's case, "the market" is Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook.
We'll start with Microsoft since they were the first. And beating them down took place ~10 years ago, that's why it seems like the tech from back then never progressed much. Because the hit already strike.
Microsoft dominated the corporate world with its mail software Outlook, and with its Office suite, Word, Excel, etc'. Google is native to the web and they leveraged their position to slowly hit Microsoft in this spot. Gmail first, then Google Drive, and then Chrome to kill IE as a final strike. And it was successful.
Amazon got big into the tech business through AWS. Google went out to a fight through Google Cloud. Not only the offering is cheaper, it also provided technologies you can't explain any other way than just to hit AWS. Kubernetes as an open platform is against any business textbook to lock in customers. But it will allow for an easy way out of AWS in the long run, preferably to GCP but it can be any other cloud provider that provides Kubernetes service as well. It is strategically more of a hit to the front runner, Amazon, then a benefit to GCP.
These priorities order of first hit the front runner, then everything else is also seen with the Apple case. Android came after the iPhone. It has a much larger market share, and yet, it generates far less revenue to Google then the iPhone is to Apple. That's because the main goal is to prevent Apple from winning the market. And in that, it is successful.
Google Buzz. Ouch. Google Plus. Double ouch. Google spent so much effort into hitting Facebook as hard as they can. They were not successful here, but from the history of things it is obvious how Google try to hit Facebook. They did not try to create a new social platform, no. Otherwise they would come up with something that is not.. well, exactly like Facebook.
Google home initially released at 2016. Amazon Alexa in 2014.
I have so many more examples that comes to mind as I write, but the point is already clear.
On a final note, I'll say, Google is not only trying to bend down competitors. Google Glass is one new product market they tried to create. The self-driving cars initiative is another example the comes to mind. They do innovate.
They just have so much money, blocking out other big tech companies is a strategy they are not willing to give up. And when this is the strategy, well, Google sheets already took a huge chunk from Microsoft, what more does it need?
To be clear, this is a stealth ad for Hey email service wrapped in a rant against Google. #1 on HN 20 minutes after posting. It's quite impressive, actually.
You're underestimating the appeal of a "rant against Google". That's all that Occam needs in this case. I looked at the votes and they seem organic to me.
I'm afraid your comment breaks the HN guideline against insinuation of astroturfing/shilling/etc. without evidence. It's extremely common (well over 99% of these cases) for people to see something they find incongruent, massively overinterpret it, and jump into the internet to accuse others. We don't allow that here, because it poisons discussion and community. That doesn't mean real astroturfing doesn't exist (I blasted someone for it yesterday [1]). It means that we have to have something objective to go on—and if you have that, you should be letting us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate.
Dang, I've just explained my reasoning in more detail below, in response to a comment earlier than yours.
To be very clear, my comment was intended to be complimentary, not negative. I stated it was impressive. The author's opinion about Google is totally valid and widely shared -- and that's what makes the article such a clever vehicle in which to insert a call to action on behalf of Hey. <-- no direct evidence, just my opinion, of course.
The fact that Hey can on day one offer so much over a Gmail experience which hasn’t improved since the Bush administration is less an ad than underscoring how bad Google’s management are.
Only one of these services is brand new and just starting to build mindshare. Only one has no free tier. Only one currently has few enough users that securing a highly desirable username is still wide open: "My new email is billy@hey.com. I love it so far."
Excising "no free tier" (because we damn well know "free" products ain't free either - that's not an indicator of marketing), your argument boils down to "one of those services is new, therefore, content marketing."
"All internet discussions of new products are content marketing" seems way overboard for me.
No, that's not correct, it's far more specific. This article advertises the fact that Hey (which is asking you to pay $99 for a service most people currently get for free) has one very significant benefit, a short email address, which might be gone if you don't take immediate action. And the author does this ingeniously, by offering social proof after bonding via attacking a common enemy. As I said earlier, I'm impressed.
There's no urgency in switching to DDG or Safari or anything Apple. There definitely IS urgency to sign up for Hey if you want an email address as simple as "billy@hey.com", instead of "william.s.1993@hey.com"
I have a really minimal/desirable gmail address and it's been only annoying. I constantly get emails from people by accident. I made my Hey address longer to avoid this.
Because photoshop is primarily a complex software for professional raster image editing/designing. Those who use it for that purpose will not think of Figma as its replacement. Figma is a SVG based UX design tool and those who do UX design in 2020 most likely (hopefully) aren't using a heavy/complex raster graphics tool like photoshop.
No, I understand and agree with all of that, I sometimes design UIs and I wouldn’t touch PS with a laser pointer for that purpose.
But the article talks about software from 10 years ago to now. I remember even as Sketch had been rising for a while, something like 52% of UI designers still used PS. Pretty sure that wasn’t even close to 10 years ago!
So I guess that’s why I thought PS->Figma was a reasonable jump in that context. Even if they used Sketch in the interim or whatever.
exactly this. The only reason the other services exist is to feed more data into the advertising (search?) machinations. Because the company is so myopically focused on Advertising dollars and everything else as loss leaders(or under monetized), they are unable to see a potential reversal of roles where the other products become ends unto themselves
The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy.
They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely.
I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom.
We were making the move to docs and sheets, but it's basically stuck. Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs. For those of us who are older this is totally incredible - Office was so anti-linux / cloud it was incredible, and now word in the cloud kinda works!
And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.
Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything? Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).