Also a big proponent of Google and Gemini, but their stubbornness in artificially splitting their consumer and enterprise products is extremely annoying. It's pretty weird that I have access to more powerful tools when using my personal Google account compared to my corporate Google Workspace account.
It's literally the meme of the MS org chart pointing guns at each other.
The GCP team wants their slice, the other team wants some otjer slice, and so on. Everyone wants some crap for their promotion package.
It's no wonder Meta has shit the bed even worse.
It's also why Google still releases actually decent, useful models despite the product being such a hilarious mess. A lot of the time Gemini models have actually been better as production LLMs as part of LLM-based production applications than OpenAI and Anthropic models when it comes to the complete cost:quality:latency:adherence picture. And they still are. We have products in prod that use Gemini because they're better than any other model at the specific task. But we wouldn't dare use it for anything coding related, or even just as productivity tool to rely on, because as a consumer product it's a joke.
> The GCP team wants their slice, the other team wants some otjer slice, and so on. Everyone wants some crap for their promotion package.
I got a Google One plan for Gemini, but it came bundled with YT Premium lite, and that somehow made it impossible to renew YT Premium for 30 days. I suspect different teams stealing customers from each other.
Google also gave away 1 year Gemini plans with Pixel phones that either did not work at all for existing Google One users or messed up subscriptions by downgrading your account to worse plan, or making your existing paid time shorter if you been on cheaper plan or recently changee countries. Etc.
Like when you try to give Google money they try to squeeze you as much as possible.
At the same time you can get 5 time more limits for free just by registering 10 free Google accounts.
Exactly my experience. I'm building an AI document-extraction platform, so I had to benchmark a bunch of models — on the cost:quality:latency:adherence picture, flash wins hands down for structured extraction. (Caveat: I've only tested the three US labs and Mistral.). So like u said, totally viable in prod for a relatively static tool. Didn't build the tool suite with gemini, but if you use service mode it currently mainly runs on flash.
Haven't done any serious coding work with the flash models though — but I'm seeing more and more HN comments from people who seem to have picked it up for that in the last couple of months.
As someone who's been using Workspace as a personal email account for over a decade this has been such a struggle forever. Just lots of odd limitations to feature sets all over the place.
When they swapped Google Assistant for Gemini as the default voice provider in Android Auto it was so annoying. My wife's non-work space account can get Gemini to do the normal things like play music and what not, but my Workspace one can't do much of anything at all. I can talk about nearly any random topic with it, but getting it to change the playlist, nah, can't help you there.
It's no surprise to me to see them fumble actually supporting a lot of the consumer features of Gemini into Workspace.
I'm in the same situation. But I was shocked discovering it goes both ways: many new Gemini functionalities are only accessible using a consumer account instead of a Workspace account. Also, Gemini is now the only major AI assistant with no support for MCP connectors. Instead of adding this to the core product, like ChatGPT and Claude did, somebody at Google decided that it was smarter to add this fundamental feature to a new product instead: for enterprises this is Gemini Enterprise (which is a product completely different from the Gemini app); for consumers this the new Gemini Spark agent (meaning that you can use MCP within Spark but not within a "non-agentic" chat)... It's clear to me this a symptom of Google shipping their org chart, which is a disaster from a product perspective.
Similar here. I saw an email wanting the 20 bucks to continue and I outright laughed. There’s no planet on which that plan offers equivalent value to the OpenAI or Anthropic equivalents.
They might have success if they tried maybe a 12-15 dollar tier.
Microsoft’s Copilot products are a very similar situation where the enterprise and consumer (and GitHub) features only make sense if you think about the org chart. Both companies need stronger top down product thinking.
This drove me bonkers. You can enable play music (etc) in Android Auto for workspace accounts by enabling apps in Gemini. From memory (looking at the settings now, not 100% sure of the magic steps required), but go to admin.google.com, go to 'generative ai', 'gemini app', and 'apps settings', then turn on 'other Google apps'. This lets you play music (and other things) in Android Auto.
Ah, that could be it. I saw that "Other Google apps" and didn't think that would mean Spotify, but I guess its Android Auto or Google Assistant stuff. I'll give that a try, thanks for the tip.
Also have a workspace as a personal email and ended up getting a personal gmail just to try out the subscriptions before I gave up.
I have multiple anthropic and OpenAI max plans. For Gemini I just use my Cursor $200 a month plan (which also gives me the ability to try grok, conductor, etc)
Apparently you cannot turn off using your data as training data with gemini. This is in line with Google's general privacy policies and it's seeming need to create a stasi file on every human.
You can turn it off but it's an all or nothing switch, if you turn it off everything will basically become a temporary chat and all past chats are deleted
I'm afraid this is a form of reversion to the mean. Successful startups are made of exceptional people: the founders, the initial investors, the first employees, the first clients. But when they get acquired by much larger companies, they are necessarily diluted in pool of people that are more "normal", less exceptional. This includes the customer base that is more "normal" as well. Slowly but surely, the extraordinary product/service the startup has been developing reverts to the mean. This is quite sad, because it feels inevitable. I'd like to know how to avoid it.
To paraphrase a popular quote from IBM: “Executives and MBAs can never be held accountable: therefore executives and MBAs must not be allowed to make decisions.”
Slightly less flippant: The only way to stop this is to stop letting companies like MSFT gobble up smaller companies. That doesn’t seem likely in the near future, though. Once the Borg assimilate something, it’s just a matter of time before it’s digested and drained of value.
The process is necessary for both sides. Acquisition by large companies is the primary way that people get rewarded for building good things. If you take it away, there won't be many startups left - all new developments will come from the big companies that can afford them, and only the types of developments those companies' managers want to make.
It's only "necessary" if one accepts that the current way is the only way.
I'm not really sure what the point of encouraging new development is if the end result is "big company scoops it up and makes it shitty, but people get to enjoy it for a few brief moments before that happens."
That could be A problem, but to me THE problem is that the larger companies buy these smaller companies for resource extraction, not to make the product better.
In this frame you can see that making the product worse (paying less for its upkeep) and raising prices are just two sides of the same coin - extract more resources.
Almost no big company has any reason to shepherd a product in a way that's beneficial to its users because they have so much momentum that even changing their approach either costs too much money or those in power are too insulated from the outcomes (fix it for me or I will fire you while I continue to make bad choices and under fund the product).
It's not inevitable that the founders have to sell to big tech. They wanted money more than the excellence of the craft. They got the money, the company got to grow and made way more profit than when it was small scale but excellent. The wheel keeps turning.
I was referring to the case where the founders and investors sell the startup to larger company. Of course, if they don't sell, and the company stays founder-led, the outcome is often better. I didn't know Zoho never took (serious) VC money.
