Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

https://secondbreakfast.co/google-blew-a-ten-year-lead

857 543 6 years ago

Analemma_• 6 years ago

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.

awinter-py3• 6 years ago

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

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

Ha!

Google as an oil emirate is not a bad mental model. Thanx!

darepublic2• 6 years ago

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

ativzzz• 6 years ago

Pretty sure this was a motivating factor in the re-organization from Google to Alphabet.

paulsutter• 6 years ago

A small focused team of diverse talented people from different backgrounds, can make the biggest-impact.

Focus=speed. Focus is what's missing at Google, and why they have such a sprawling staff and politics.

jcadam2• 6 years ago

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.

api2• 6 years ago

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.

staticassertion• 6 years ago

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.

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

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".

awinter-py3• 6 years ago

love the cross-outs section

youtube remains un-crossed, but it will be replaced by better offerings in core categories: vloggers, how-to / structured / lego, and music / covers

love that this person is privacy-conscious but is making 'purchase' decisions based on the fact that the products just suck now

jsf012• 6 years ago

Privacy conscious yet uses Zoom. Hmm

awinter-py3• 6 years ago

conscious just means conscious, doesn't address where you place your priorities

I wish people pushed back more, but 'conscious' better than 'unconscious'

bitcharmer• 6 years ago

Zoom is now offering e2e encryption for all users. What exactly do you have problem with?

johannes12343213• 6 years ago

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.

aphroz2• 6 years ago

They also lost the trust of their users. They didn't drop the "don't be evil" for nothing..

Kiro5• 6 years ago

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.

laichzeit03• 6 years ago

I've switched to Brave and duckduckgo. They are evil and I try avoid them at all costs. AMP is a good enough reason.

Loughla• 6 years ago

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.)

falcolas4• 6 years ago

My opinion: Yes, it's true.

- 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.

jlbnjmn2• 6 years ago

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).

hedora3• 6 years ago

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.

Crash0v3rid32• 6 years ago

Why does this still get posted?

They never dropped 'don't be evil', it's at the end of their code of conduct:

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

aphroz2• 6 years ago

Sorry for not checking regularly the code of conduct. It still appears that the importance of this motto has been reduced: https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

PhearTheCeal• 6 years ago

For Google Translate you should check out DeepL https://www.deepl.com/translator

It's absolutely insane, blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy.

laichzeit03• 6 years ago

It supports considerably less languages though.

derefr• 6 years ago

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.)

iforgotpassword• 6 years ago

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.

emp_• 6 years ago

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)

lakis• 6 years ago

  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.

markkanof• 6 years ago

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.

ebalit• 6 years ago

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?

snakeboy• 6 years ago

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.

benhurmarcel2• 6 years ago

I recommend WordReference for that case also. That website has been essential in my relationship (language divide also).

https://www.wordreference.com/

mister_hn• 6 years ago

Bing translator works really well honestly and using it as my standard translator

tjpnz• 6 years ago

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.

mda• 6 years ago

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.

blago• 6 years ago

It detected my Bulgarian (Cyrillic alphabet) test sentence as English:

https://www.deepl.com/translator#en/ru/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0...

amaccuish• 6 years ago

That's because DeepL doesn't support bulgarian yet.

puranjay2• 6 years ago

When I was in Russia, Yandex's image translation was miles better than Google's. Maps, too.

numbers2• 6 years ago

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.

kccqzy2• 6 years ago

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.

neop1x2• 6 years ago

Lack of languages, for example Czech. But definitely nice to see a viable competition to GT.

tengbretson4• 6 years ago

It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them.

They appear to me to have begun monetizing google maps. And it is awful.

jtbayly• 6 years ago

What are the four monopolies?

elwell• 6 years ago

Search, Email, Maps (they own Waze), YouTube

dgellow2• 6 years ago

I would say: Search, Map, Translate, Gmail.

Though technically they also have YouTube and do monetize it.

dfabulich• 6 years ago

Search, Maps, YouTube, Chrome. (They all have competitors, some more successful than others.)

A bunch of people have listed Gmail on their lists, but Gmail is not even close to a monopoly, even in consumer email. https://email-verify.my-addr.com/list-of-most-popular-email-...

ashconnor• 6 years ago

Search, browser, email and maps.

disease• 6 years ago

Search, the browser, email, non-streaming video are the only things that come to mind.

perlgeek• 6 years ago

search, maps, mail (gmail), video (youtube).

domkema• 6 years ago

If I had to guess what GP is referring to: search, maps, email, and browser.

While I'm sure we could disagree on if Google actually has a monopoly in these domains, I think it's obvious they have a _substantial_ foothold.

jcranmer• 6 years ago

I just want to say that I love how the response to this comment is several lists of 4, with search being the only one present in all of them.

lostmsu• 6 years ago

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.

dhdersch• 6 years ago

cloud computing is one of them /s

s3r3nity2• 6 years ago

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.

derwiki• 6 years ago

Same, and I often use Bing maps on desktop

moogleii• 6 years ago

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.

lazyjones• 6 years ago

Apple maps has the following drawbacks for me:

- no public transport routing where I live

- much worse satellite images

For all other uses, especially usability, it's superior to the extremely slow and cumbersome Google Maps. Both have odd UI bugs.

ebg13• 6 years ago

I want to use Apple maps, but I just can't stand that the review boxes shunt me to the app store to download the Yelp app.

three_seagrass3• 6 years ago

Probably because those are not really monopolies.

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.

RonanTheGrey2• 6 years ago

exclusive control of supply

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.

secondbreakfast5• 6 years ago

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.

flerchin• 6 years ago

Owning the software they build doesn't seem to scale.

_jal• 6 years ago

I find it interesting how much of that article talks about features, but is about fashion and brand identification.

justin66• 6 years ago

Microsoft has a new clear mission: The Cloud.

That's a clear mission?

shadowgovt• 6 years ago

Good question, but it's clear enough that it's also Google's mission.

kweinber• 6 years ago

No, it’s cloudy with an 80% chance of pain.

dsschnau• 6 years ago

Google has a clear mission and it's advertising, duh

maerF0x0• 6 years ago

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

whoisjuan2• 6 years ago

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.

Google didn't blew a ten-year lead on anything.

Godel_unicode2• 6 years ago

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?

whoisjuan2• 6 years ago

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.

importantbrian• 6 years ago

I wouldn't say that's entirely true. IMHO BigQuery is their best product. A lot of GCP is really good.

For consumer products I completely agree. I use DuckDuckGo as my default, but I still find myself hitting !g a lot to find what I'm looking for.

bragh• 6 years ago

falcolas4• 6 years ago

Not to mention their push for the newest content to be the highest rated. It's really hard to find old content these days.

benlivengood• 6 years ago

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.

randlet• 6 years ago

Google maps is still pretty amazing. Maps and search are the only two Google products I still struggle to move away from.

(I am a big fan of Play Music too but of course they killed it.)

mrep• 6 years ago

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.

vsareto• 6 years ago

I’m a long shareholder of Google. It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them.

Okay, but we don't want Google as a monopoly... or do we?

Breaking up the monopoly means throwing away the ten-year lead.

haberdasher• 6 years ago

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.

searchableguy5• 6 years ago

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.

ancarda3• 6 years ago

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.

searchableguy5• 6 years ago

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.

johannes12343213• 6 years ago

For a non-tech person using OSM is hard. openstreetmap.org isn't an end-user site, but aimed at contributors.

Other sites however incorporate osm (Facebook, Apple etc.) into their offerings.

I'd like if openstreetmap.org would be improved accordingly, but I myself don't do more than pointing at other volunteers.

benhurmarcel2• 6 years ago

I use it for hiking mostly. It's basically the default source for most hiking apps, and is quite good for it.

I wish I could use it for more but it lacks a good app like Google or Apple Maps.

Crash0v3rid32• 6 years ago

Same, always the same pattern here for any article about Google.

buboard2• 6 years ago

At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats
I started using HEY last week

refreshing to see a person who 's not suggestable and easily swayed by fads

lostlogin4• 6 years ago

My gauge is okaying up, is this sarcastic?

buboard2• 6 years ago

yes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNy_GNWwhQk

thoraway1010• 6 years ago

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).

monksy2• 6 years ago

Google doesn't have time to fix that. They've got top-level leetcode engineers to make a new chat app.

freehunter• 6 years ago

But first they have to make their own programming languages and frameworks.

moomin• 6 years ago

Let's not forget that had gtalk, which could have dominated easily. Over ten year lead wasted on that one.

s3r3nity2• 6 years ago

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.

novok• 6 years ago

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.

sergiotapia• 6 years ago

You can even get locked out of your google account by uploading old cartoons on youtube you thought were old enough to not care.

So tell me again why I would use google products when they are all so interlinked that one affects the other? No thanks

dleslie5• 6 years ago

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.

HenryBemis• 6 years ago

_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.

stickfigure• 6 years ago

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).

ip26• 6 years ago

Notice every G product with a decent level of ongoing support & development is in some form or another an ad platform.

ngold• 6 years ago

And the reason they probably want to stay an ad company is so they don't get stuck with IBM sized workforce.

Their lack of customer support is border line criminal.

jariel3• 6 years ago

"_open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same."

No, I think they wanted to make money from it directly via Enterprise sales.

MS Office is the #1 source of profit for MS for a long while.

In the 2000's it seemed 'everything was going cloud', naturally Google thought they could leapfrog MS into that space.

But it didn't work out.

armandhammer• 6 years ago

Google didn't create Docs, they bought it.

jayd16• 6 years ago

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.

bootlooped• 6 years ago

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.

jfengel• 6 years ago

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.

timw4mail• 6 years ago

Youtube is a slow boated Javascript mess.

amiga-workbench• 6 years ago

I've been using invidio.us and mpv for more and more of my Youtube consumption, especially after it started becoming terribly unstable under Firefox.

SahAssar3• 6 years ago

Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything?

Android / Chrome are providing what is primarily a platform, not a product. That's a very different mindset and way of working.

novaleaf• 6 years ago

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.

digitalsushi• 6 years ago

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.

haolez6• 6 years ago

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.

olcor• 6 years ago

I’m confused. Doesn’t Microsoft 365 include the desktop versions of the product and the ability to update them?

D13Fd• 6 years ago

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.

All told, it's pretty good.

Cactus2018• 6 years ago

You are in for a surprise.

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.

gamblor956• 6 years ago

If you need power features, you should be using the desktop version...

The web version is intended for basic/common use cases, not power user functions.

komali2• 6 years ago

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.

chasd00• 6 years ago

i think the point is engineers are spending too much time on Twitter and not doing enough actual engineering.

btmiller• 6 years ago

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.

akhilcacharya• 6 years ago

There are lots of people that protest for social change without the luxury of getting company paid days off!

LeanderK• 6 years ago

Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).

This is totally unnecessary. Striking is a serious matter and not just getting company paid days off for some lazy egineers.

jeffbee2• 6 years ago

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.

starkruzr• 6 years ago

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.

eagsalazar22• 6 years ago

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.

eagsalazar22• 6 years ago

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.

dandare• 6 years ago

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.

gota• 6 years ago

Yes - I find myself navigating Channel pages often, in hopes that the content creator took the time to create an applicable playlist

But then if I quit a video _that I played from a playlist_ and check my history _the playlist itself is listed, and not the actual video_

It is, indeed, a mess

jlarocco• 6 years ago

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.

dorkinspace• 6 years ago

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.

rrdharan• 6 years ago

In beta, but FYI you can grant calendar access: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/11/use-google-assi...

rnotaro• 6 years ago

I'm using it but the fact the the assitant can only respond for the active google account is driving me nuts.

The Google Calendar app from my Google Pixel merges all my accounts but yet, the assistant is linked to my Google Account instead of my device.

It's useless because I'm using multiple calandars on multiple accounts.

rubber_duck• 6 years ago

Android / Chrome are amazing

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.

orange3xchicken• 6 years ago

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.

cpeterso2• 6 years ago

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.

eitland2• 6 years ago

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.

gspr• 6 years ago

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!

ohgodplsno• 6 years ago

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.

- Well, speaking of lifecycle, here's the Fragment lolcycle: http://boloorian.free.fr/_Media/complete_android_fragment_l_...

- 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

barrkel• 6 years ago

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.

scarface746• 6 years ago

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.

lucasmullens• 6 years ago

Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything

They did. Sundar ran both Android and Chrome, and now he's CEO.

kinkrtyavimoodh2• 6 years ago

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.

edm0nd• 6 years ago

I still don't think you can even use G Suite domains with their voice assistant/home devices. It's beyond absurd.

Spooky233• 6 years ago

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.

tomaskafka• 6 years ago

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.

oarabbus_• 6 years ago

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.

laingc• 6 years ago

I agree entirely with your sentiment, but this

now word in the cloud kinda works!

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.

solvorn3• 6 years ago

You should write a know about this.

sandos• 6 years ago

Yeah, I eventually just created "proper" gmail accounts for the rest of my family that is on a free gsuite.

pjmlp• 6 years ago

Android amazing?!?

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.

marcusjt• 6 years ago

Strange, works fine for me, you can pick as many calendars as you want in Assistant Settings > Services > Calendar

chaosharmonic• 6 years ago

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"

Already__Taken• 6 years ago

The cross-integration docs should have by now and doesn't simply blows my mind.

Like why even doesn't sheets and docs have the exact same table cell formatting options?

Following that, why can't a sheet seamlessly embed to a google doc.

vinay_ys2• 6 years ago

Photoshop->Figma :D that's hilarious!

arcturus172• 6 years ago

Why? I guess it's because Figma has fewer features, but if OP used PS for web/app design, wouldn't this be fair?

chadlavi2• 6 years ago

esp because no one serious in our field has used photoshop for web design in almost a decade

vinay_ys2• 6 years ago

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.

eugenekolo• 6 years ago

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.

jaekash• 6 years ago

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.

MiddleEndian• 6 years ago

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.

mikkergp• 6 years ago

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.

MagnumOpus• 6 years ago

Google was the oppositive of boring:

- 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.

dalyons• 6 years ago

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.

johnghanks2• 6 years ago

If your “actual work” is designing documents for printing on dead tree paper, then sure

I would reckon 99+% of most people's use cases for something like Google Docs falls into this category.

bogwog3• 6 years ago

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.

charwalker3• 6 years ago

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.

jldugger6• 6 years ago

Perhaps I'm in a time warp -- wasn't Inbox basically integrated with gmail last year?

gumby3• 6 years ago

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.

actuator• 6 years ago

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.

centaphon• 6 years ago

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.

xnx• 6 years ago

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).

obulpathi• 6 years ago

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.

hedora3• 6 years ago

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.

Edit: I thought I just read it just got to 53% market share. It was at 18% and growing fast in 2018, so it’s plausible they have majority market share now: https://triplebyte.com/blog/editor-report-the-rise-of-visual...

smabie2• 6 years ago

It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend in a browser.

You mean like X? Which was created in 1984 and at the canonical version (11) in 1987?

0xCMP• 6 years ago

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.

mav3rick6• 6 years ago

Chrome OS has an entire Linux VM integrated natively on your machine.

listenallyall5• 6 years ago

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.

lostlogin4• 6 years ago

There are more Apple products listed. Maybe it’s a push to get beta OS users?

listenallyall5• 6 years ago

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"

rplnt• 6 years ago

Everyone knows Apple, I have never heard about HEY.

The article doesn't really say anything, so I can see how it being at the top would be suspicious.

secondbreakfast5• 6 years ago

(author here) i promise this is not an ad for Hey haha, have no affiliation with basecamp and wish i was that good at content marketing.

imprettycool• 6 years ago

It's kind of fishy this is the only comment OP responded to. And OP's other most recent comment was on a basecamp thread

rubysword• 6 years ago

I am extremely doubtful.

acdha• 6 years ago

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.

arkades3• 6 years ago

If mentioning it in a one-liner is a stealth ad, I assume this was also an ad for Notion, Zoom, Twitch, Apple, Instagram, and TikTok.

listenallyall5• 6 years ago

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."

dang• 6 years ago

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.

Plenty of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for anyone who wants it. Here's me saying the same thing 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986042.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619453, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619595

listenallyall5• 6 years ago

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.

rvz• 6 years ago

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.

nailer4• 6 years ago

Google hasn't had any major new products for 10 years.

tsak• 6 years ago

Stadia?

nailer4• 6 years ago

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.

shadowtree2• 6 years ago

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.

chadlavi2• 6 years ago

I am really looking forward to better touch-screen support in Figma.

joshmarinacci• 6 years ago

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?

shadowtree2• 6 years ago

Yes, on my main work machine. MBP13, 2018.

Once you don't use browsers for everything, the machine is cooler and more responsive.

Seriously feels as if I bought new hardware.

I close Safari when not using it, same for all other browsers (have Brave, Chrome, ...).

tengbretson4• 6 years ago

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.

bogwog3• 6 years ago

They can't be broken up fast enough.

alexpetralia• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_price

ciarannolan• 6 years ago

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.

qubex• 6 years ago

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.

tengbretson4• 6 years ago

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!

DesiLurker• 6 years ago

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.

eloisant3• 6 years ago

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.

missedthecue• 6 years ago

yes, we'd all be better off if we had to pay for our email accounts.

tengbretson4• 6 years ago

I don't know if this is sarcastic or not, but I believe this.

Supermancho• 6 years ago

I can use photoshop for free now, on the web. I do that. https://www.photopea.com/ - The world is very different.

My family can use office for free now, on the web. We do that. https://www.office.com/

Most of my family uses facebook.

We all use maps, youtube, google search, gmail (not me, although I have an account).

loughnane2• 6 years ago

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"

jurassic2• 6 years ago

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.

kikki2• 6 years ago

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.

hodgesrm4• 6 years ago

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.

deelowe• 6 years ago

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.

fireattack• 6 years ago

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).

MperorM2• 6 years ago

I don't really understand this sentiment, here's how my drive looks:

https://i.imgur.com/UUUboTd.png

does your drive look significantly different from this?

SenHeng3• 6 years ago

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.

gumby3• 6 years ago

One simple example: folders in Google Drive.

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.

lordgrenville• 6 years ago

a breath of fresh air to use {Drop,}box at this point

lern_too_spel• 6 years ago

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.

SenHeng3• 6 years ago

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.

agustamir• 6 years ago

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?

hinkley5• 6 years ago

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.

mostlysimilar2• 6 years ago

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.

laxatives• 6 years ago

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.

loughnane2• 6 years ago

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.

krtkush• 6 years ago

[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).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/

api2• 6 years ago

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.

burtonator• 6 years ago

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 ...

k__• 6 years ago

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.

abc_lisper2• 6 years ago

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

EthanHeilman• 6 years ago

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.

felixgallo• 6 years ago

I like the "Alexander bias" term -- is that yours, or are you quoting someone else?

jethro_tell• 6 years ago

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.

abc_lisper2• 6 years ago

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.

hinkley5• 6 years ago

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.

scarface746• 6 years ago

Yet Microsoft, Amazon and Apple continuously diversify. Google still gets most of its profit from ads.

scarface746• 6 years ago

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.

celim307• 6 years ago

I figure they thought they weren’t going to be always cheaper than AWS

milesward2• 6 years ago

Me!

jariel3• 6 years ago

So there are at least a few things here:

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.

mapgrep• 6 years ago

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.

jogjayr• 6 years ago

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.

Drew_2• 6 years ago

I think it just comes from the fact that solutions that come up in leetcode/HackerRank discussions are often unreadable gibberish.

wutbrodo5• 6 years ago

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.

cmrdporcupine4• 6 years ago

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.

hodgesrm4• 6 years ago

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.

In this case the devil really is in the details.

cocktailpeanuts• 6 years ago

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.

walljm• 6 years ago

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.

AndrewKemendo2• 6 years ago

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.

Angostura• 6 years ago

I only switch for maybe 5%

lhopki01• 6 years ago

I use Firefox with uBlockOrigin on my phone to avoid all the ads. It works great.

AndrewKemendo2• 6 years ago

I assume you're on Android. Is there a way to use uBO on iOS? Last I checked there wasn't.

RMPR2• 6 years ago

FWIW Searx is a really decent alternative for search, plus it's open source and can be self-hosted

mafia303• 6 years ago

You lost me at tiktok

peteyPete• 6 years ago

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.

franze4• 6 years ago

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.

Axsuul2• 6 years ago

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.

franze4• 6 years ago

yes, it's definitely anecdotal. so please see it this way.

jldugger6• 6 years ago

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?

franze4• 6 years ago

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.

wutbrodo5• 6 years ago

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.

TrackerFF• 6 years ago

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.

justinhj• 6 years ago

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.

yt-sdb2• 6 years ago

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.

hogFeast• 6 years ago

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).

three_seagrass3• 6 years ago

How do you know Duck Duck Go actually prioritizes privacy though?

People on HN have said that Duck Duck Go is a for profit corporation that doesn't open source or independently validate their privacy claims.

yt-sdb2• 6 years ago

(1) From a branding perspective, I don't know how much it matters. (2) e.g. If they're using my location data, they're terrible at it.

tokai• 6 years ago

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.

tidenly• 6 years ago

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?

kinkrtyavimoodh2• 6 years ago

Same here. It feels like a joke website.

franze4• 6 years ago

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.

The documentation was never updated ... https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/search-console...

My guess, there is no one responsible anymore, hey it just is a 200k people company ...

askjdlkasdjsd• 6 years ago

I am starting to think everything is an ad for Hey on hacker news these days.

t0mmyb0y• 6 years ago

This is google in a nutshell.

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.

aazaa• 6 years ago

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.

bogwog3• 6 years ago

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.

buttersbrian• 6 years ago

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.

zaphar• 6 years ago

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.

smellsdonkey• 6 years ago

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.

rkagerer• 6 years ago

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.

haolez6• 6 years ago

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.

marban• 6 years ago

To Quote SJ: "The only problem with Microsoft is, they just have no taste"

Repeat that for Google.

siddarthd2919• 6 years ago

The same article will fit well for Waymo as well.

jcims• 6 years ago

Google is an experiment in what happens when you give a bunch of smart people a 6-7 figure UBI (funded, of course, by search).

ogre_codes• 6 years ago

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.

mberning• 6 years ago

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.

bookmarkable• 6 years ago

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.

MR4D• 6 years ago

Someone once described the big tech companies this way:

Google is about solving tough/new engineering problems;

Microsoft is about building software;

Apple is about the consumer;

Facebook is about your attention span;

Amazon is about your wallet.

I thought that summed up their personalities pretty well so thought I’d share.

Axsuul2• 6 years ago

The Microsoft one is kind of vague. Maybe...

Microsoft is about trying to extract more value from their business customers.

CobrastanJorji• 6 years ago

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.

jorblumesea• 6 years ago

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.

DannyB2• 6 years ago

Google had (or still has) perverse incentives.

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.

mrbonner• 6 years ago

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.

dmitriid2• 6 years ago

Then, people would just focus on making stuff better

And yet, Netflix had autoplaying videos at full volume that didn't even show trailers, but some random snippet from the movie/show

nostromo• 6 years ago

I actually close Netflix because of this.

However, Netflix is full of smart people, so I have to assume that they've tested it and it increases engagement. Perhaps we're the outliers.

roland35• 6 years ago

I'm still upset they shuttered inbox and reader!

gnramires• 6 years ago

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).

julianeon• 6 years ago

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.

awinder• 6 years ago

“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.

jasonv3• 6 years ago

I use Safari for personal surfing, and separate Chrome accounts for my various business/work related surfing.

Keeps things separate and tidy, and I keep Chrome closed as much as I need it to be closed.

secondbreakfast5• 6 years ago

I like this idea a lot. I've been using Station to stay logged in to all my various work web apps, and then Chrome (now Safari) for personal.

thenoblesunfish• 6 years ago

"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 :(

Touche• 6 years ago

Then something happened at Google. I’m not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software.

What happened was they were printing money on the cloud software they already had. Classic innovators dilemma.

mcot2• 6 years ago

Not sure why he called it “TheFacebook”. That was an early name used way prior to even 2005. ChromeOS was released in 2010/2011.

petepete• 6 years ago

Figma was released in 2016. The author must be some kind of prophet.

poulsbohemian• 6 years ago

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.

jeffbee2• 6 years ago

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.

rushabh• 6 years ago

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.

Peteris• 6 years ago

The author is forgetting that Google is a search monopoly.

AI was (and continues to be) the biggest threat to their success in search so they invested heavily in that (it was called ML back then).

Clearly they are still doing well even with subpar cloud software, so this has proven out.

mark_l_watson• 6 years ago

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.

josefresco• 6 years ago

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.

numbers2• 6 years ago

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.

gokhan• 6 years ago

"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.

jbaker1• 6 years ago

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.

Ericson2314• 6 years ago

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?

A7med• 6 years ago

So because you started using other services that's mean Google is behind, what kind of logic is that

zarkov99• 6 years ago

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.

edw2• 6 years ago

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.

an_d_rew• 6 years ago

... SquirrelMail ...

Oh thank you for that trip down memory lane! Ran my own SquirrelMail servers for years...

edw2• 6 years ago

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.

karmakaze• 6 years ago

Yes, but why doesn't Google "run away with the show" themselves while in the lead?

kccqzy2• 6 years ago

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.

sireat2• 6 years ago

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.

jankiehodgpodge• 6 years ago

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.

sireat2• 6 years ago

Thank you! Chesterton's fence strikes again. There had to be a reason for this misfeature.

Then the question is why would schools use Google classroom at all then if they have their own MIS/SIS.

As I was teaching to adults I was puzzled on how to effectively use Google Classroom.

Siira• 6 years ago

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.

mrlatinos• 6 years ago

This feels like an ad for HEY more than anything else...

neixidbeksoxyd• 6 years ago

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.

OOPMan• 6 years ago

Thank goodness ChromeOS didn't take over.

I'd like for my computer to be more than a toy.

jedberg2• 6 years ago

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?

sub7• 6 years ago

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.

Androider• 6 years ago

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.

rement• 6 years ago

You can add filters to delete mail from specific senders. I have quite a few that ignore my requests to unsubscribe.

jedberg2• 6 years ago

When you open the Hey inbox, it only has the important stuff in it,

So does my gmail. It only shows things marked important.

Sometimes in GMail, no matter how many times I mark some thing as spam, the mail keeps on coming

That happens to me occasionally, but I just click on "filter messages like this" and then set it to never mark as important (or straight to spam).

eloisant3• 6 years ago

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??

raldi• 6 years ago

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.

sbmthakur• 6 years ago

I can relate a bit. I have been trying to 'degooglify' my life for sometime. Made these couple of shifts in the last two years:

* Chrome --> Firefox

* Google search --> DuckDuckGo

These are in pipeline:

* YouTube --> Newpipe (which is YouTube minus ads and tracking)

* Drive --> Mega.nz

* Gmail --> Protonmail

* Playstore --> F-droid (whenever possible)

At the same time, I have been using Google's Photos and Podcasts a tad more lately. Need to find good alternatives to these.

mmargerum• 6 years ago

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.

softwaredoug• 6 years ago

Still can’t copy a folder full of docs in google drive and it’s so frustrating.

tehjoker• 6 years ago

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.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/fi...

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.

the_black_hand• 6 years ago

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?

crazygringo• 6 years ago

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.

agentdrtran2• 6 years ago

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.

amohn9• 6 years ago

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

newshhh• 6 years ago

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.

addicted2• 6 years ago

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.

johnnydoe9• 6 years ago

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.

joshocar• 6 years ago

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.

uniqueid3• 6 years ago

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.

mav3rick6• 6 years ago

Yes, the entire world is raving about DDG results.

uniqueid3• 6 years ago

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.

uniqueid3• 6 years ago

...and by the way, have you not noticed that your Google search results are peppered with paid results, and search terms that went "missing"?

snird• 6 years ago

(This comment grew so much, I actually posted it too https://snir.dev/blog/google-10-years-lead )

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?

lwhi• 6 years ago

I don't understand how Notion can be used to replace a fully fledged word processor. Am I missing something?

machinehermit• 6 years ago

Not to mention they lucked out that DuckDuckGo is called DuckDuckGo.

I just can't believe such smart people could believe that is good branding.

What exactly were the brand names they rejected to go with DuckDuckGo?

inthewoods• 6 years ago

This article brings to mind the saying "A poor craftsman blames his tools".

luord• 6 years ago

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.

I'm most likely gonna start switching out too.

jaimex2• 6 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.

classics2• 6 years ago

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.

ksec• 6 years ago

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.

muddi900• 6 years ago

I ran a whole business for years with Google Sheets API and Python front end. I agree that sheets is slow and lumbering, but the API works perfectly.

I did a small layman's demo here recently[1].

[1]https://medium.com/@muddi900/use-google-sheets-as-a-database...

HeavyStorm• 6 years ago

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.

Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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