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Out of curiosity, did you happen to pay for any of those things you are complaining about?

Edit: To folks down voting... That is totally fair, this was a useless negative comment on my part.

Regardless, it seems unnecessary to avoid using a product that it might get changed.



Actually, yes. I paid for Sketchup and for extra storage space on gmail / drive. I also paid for Google Apps for Business for two of my startups. My disgruntlement isn't because I'm upset that I didn't get what I paid for, but because Google's practices have become primarily damaging to themselves: I don't think it is helping them win eyeballs.

Personally, I date this to the announcement that they would be putting "more wood behind fewer arrows".[1] Prior to that, Google's product offerings had been comprehensive but scattershot -- but most of their individual products were lean, elegant, and very effective at what they did. By putting "more wood" into those products, they've somehow fallen into a very old-world fallacy of software development: the idea that quality scales with manpower. But overloading a team with software engineers doesn't produce better software -- just bloated software. As somebody who is generally an admirer of Google's, I find this unfortunate.

1: http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fe...


When you sign up to use a "free service" it doesn't mean you waive the right to complain about the quality of that service. This is especially true when you come to depend on that service, based on the provider's advertised claims of how awesome that service is.

Google of course promotes its services as awesome and excellent. That's fine, but nobody should be surprised when users evaluate those claims against their own real experiences and everyday usage of those services.




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