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In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

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Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#161
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need goodwill until you need it, and then it’s almost impossible to garner. How does that saying go? When you’re on top of the world you can do no wrong, when you’re down you can do no right? A lot of giant companies have to learn this the hard way, probably due to institutional inertia, apathy, lack of foresight, and the reality that today’s C-levels will probably be gone before that shit hits the fan.

If you are banking on B2C-related "goodwill" to save a company whose revenue model is basically all B2B , then you're already dead. Google fairly obviously is not doing that.

Once upon a time similar things have been said about other giants who fell upon hard times, or died, or had to become shells of their former selves. It’s not like Google has made good friends with the business world either. Besides, the core of their business is advertisements, and they should probably pay attention to the slow, but inexorable backlash against advertising. Given that only a minority block ads and protect their privacy today, it may seem like that’s a silly thing to say, it history suggests otherwise. A bit of goodwill earned while on top can make inevitable slides down the mountain less fatal.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#162
post #146
post #131

There is always so much vitriol on HN about these kinds of announcements. I've never understood why. Google presumably has lots of data and feedback from people using Inbox, and determined that it wasn't useful enough or widespread enough to justify ongoing investment. Why is this surprising or shocking? This happens all the time in commercial and open source software. The internet is great, but unfortunately has the…

In the case of open source project, * if the maintainer is no longer able to take the project further, the code is still there an can be used as is, maybe with a few bugfixes. (ala, thunderbird). The code does not disappear overnight. r. * All the associated data is still yours and available. So no information is lost. * If it is very critical, you can develop it yourself further I am not an user of Inbox, but I can…

The 'bundles' and pinned emails are not lost - they are all just 'labels' under the hood, and they can be found back in gmail as well (except for a couple, I think travel doesn't carry over)

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#163
post #146
post #131

There is always so much vitriol on HN about these kinds of announcements. I've never understood why. Google presumably has lots of data and feedback from people using Inbox, and determined that it wasn't useful enough or widespread enough to justify ongoing investment. Why is this surprising or shocking? This happens all the time in commercial and open source software. The internet is great, but unfortunately has the…

In the case of open source project, * if the maintainer is no longer able to take the project further, the code is still there an can be used as is, maybe with a few bugfixes. (ala, thunderbird). The code does not disappear overnight. r. * All the associated data is still yours and available. So no information is lost. * If it is very critical, you can develop it yourself further I am not an user of Inbox, but I can…

You bring up a good point, it seems as though the answer is to invest more into open source mail clients that can offer more since there truly is value in an improved mail UI.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#164
post #131

There is always so much vitriol on HN about these kinds of announcements. I've never understood why. Google presumably has lots of data and feedback from people using Inbox, and determined that it wasn't useful enough or widespread enough to justify ongoing investment. Why is this surprising or shocking? This happens all the time in commercial and open source software. The internet is great, but unfortunately has the…

Google seems more willing than most to shut down their offerings. While there's nothing wrong with that, it does give users less of a reason to use one of their services, because you never know when it might just go away.

If they're not making profits off something assume it can and will shut down.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#165

I don't think Google cares whether its users are "passionate" or not. They've reached market saturation, so further spread of their products through word-of-mouth (via passionate users and such) isn't a goal at this time. With regard to their Internet service products, their goal seem to be to monetize the user base effectively, while avoiding wasting funds on unnecessary developer time. To that end, many of their pr…

Google themselves has actually built very few successful products outside of search. Half of what they build internally they kill and the other half is acquisitions, many of which they also kill. Sometimes I even wonder about things like GSuite. When does the 2-year sunset period start?

$5/month per user is a pretty good return and it keeps those users/businesses from an expanded Microsoft footprint. I think (hope?) That G suite will be the exception.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! This is a huge deal. Searching for stuff in my business inbox is important . If you can't trust search, then you have to manually walk through those emails. And because Gmail 'clusters' threads together, it's often impossible to find something. This has disrupted me on a few occasions. If you can't trust your email ... Gmail team: make 'search' by default more inclusive. Err on the side of including stuff. It's…

Exactly. What google doesn't seem to 'get' is that email + searchable database = life. I email stuff to myself, or bcc: myself, all the time. If all emails were in a searchable database, perhaps with automatic clustering to group associations, all very fast -- that's killer sticky. The emails, plus stuff on gdocs, gdrive, etc, all fully searchable? Gold. (Yes, non-trivial privacy concern, but no personal data should…

> no personal data should reside un-encrypted in the cloud, and decryption should happen locally in the browse

How do you expect search to work?

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where should I post my video tutorials though? vimeo?

If you don’t care about organic discovery and are just using it for hosting, yes, Vimeo is awesome.

Youtube has the benefit of a huge audience, but organic discovery?! Come on. Unless you’re producing clickbait, appealing to tweens, crapping our memes, or pimping rage fuel, their algos will not put you up next. It’s almost comical how bad their recommendation engine is for discovery. Listen to a pop song? Doesn’t matter if it’s the only one you ever watched, now you’re being recmmmemded Ariana Grande until you die. At least that’s sort of comprehensible, but they also make weird connection too. Watch The Jimquisition, and because “games” you get gamergate and alt right trash. Watch a video on the moon landings, and because “moon” you get conspiracy theories.

The algorithmic purpose seems to be, “hey you like X, maybe you’d like an insane or hateful tangent to X? Would that keep you clicking?”

Organic my ass.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#168
post #8
post #4

I'd settle for them actually releasing new visual themes for Gmail. They've had the same cartoony themes for near 8 years now I think. Maybe longer. I liked them initially, but that was it. They don't even allow anyone to submit their own or anything like that....

I would be happy if the let me keep the classic gmail already. They are quite pushy about the UI switch lately, if you reverted back to the old look.

I think they're going to prevent opting-out past end of september

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google seems more willing than most to shut down their offerings. While there's nothing wrong with that, it does give users less of a reason to use one of their services, because you never know when it might just go away.

If they're not making profits off something assume it can and will shut down.

They had the opportunity to monetize google reader. What's more important than eyeballs. You made a wrapper around other people's website. They could have done _something_. But, no. The just shuttered it.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t care about organic discovery and are just using it for hosting, yes, Vimeo is awesome.

Youtube has the benefit of a huge audience, but organic discovery?! Come on. Unless you’re producing clickbait, appealing to tweens, crapping our memes, or pimping rage fuel, their algos will not put you up next. It’s almost comical how bad their recommendation engine is for discovery. Listen to a pop song? Doesn’t matter if it’s the only one you ever watched, now you’re being recmmmemded Ariana Grande until you die.…

You may find it terrible (I don’t think it’s great, but it’s usually at least mediocre for me), but Vimeo has virtually nothing. Also, Vimeo doesn’t seem to rank well in search engines either. So yes, even if YouTube was universally terrible as you claim for organic discovery (it isn’t), it’s still better than basically nothing.
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