151–160 of 182 posts
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People can smell when a product isn't earnest. From the beginning, Allo smelled like a directive by a Google VP to "get messaging market share."
Not that I’m defending Allo, but I don’t know how useful your distinction is. What is an earnest product then? Any product released by a company that has bills to pay is released to “get market share”.
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From an Xoogler's perspective, the launches are all about the promos. Eg, just think about all those engineers who would not have gotten a promotion because then they would not have had a product launch in their promo packet.
But there should be some VP which will be accountable for spent budget on dead product..
And you have to be very conservative with what you consider a violation of that threshold.
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The lead of Maps spends a large proportion of his time listening to user feedback (some of it even here on HN!). I suspect that's a big part of the reason for the higher quality product.
Maps is just so much closer to the ad business than all those glorified ICQ clones and B2C experiments. The traditional web ad isn't terribly attractive for local businesses, but with Google maps effectively filling the role that yellow pages directories used to have, small businesses seem almost desperate to throw their money to Google. And Google carefully keeping maps from becoming a cacophony of virtual billboard…
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>Now explain it to me Google - what's your vision It's a bunch of very talented, bored engineers who realize that launching a product, even if it fails, is better for their career and resume than doing grunge work that might be better for google's bottom line Basically resume driven development and Google hasn't done anything to prevent it. They probably don't care, they'd rather have them wasting money at Google tha…
This is exactly correct (former Googler; still in touch with many). This is one of the reasons for the endless usability-destroying redesigns on their successful products -- people need listable accomplishments in order to advance, either internally or externally. Google has destroyed, or at least nullified, a generation of engineering talent with their unambitious, checkbox-resume based advancement scheme. We should…
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Literally everything I see has Hangouts branding. And, not just for me or my events...I was invited to a meeting with someone from another company yesterday, and everything about it was branded with "Hangouts" and not "Meet", too. Also, the Google Meet website is laughably useless. It has literally no content, not even a description of what it is.
> Also, the Google Meet website is laughably useless. It has literally no content, not even a description of what it is. “Video meetings for your business. Connect with your team from anywhere. With easy-to-join video calls, you can meet face to face without the added cost of travel.” https://gsuite.google.com/products/meet/ EDIT: I just realized there is a separate “Google Meet” page which has no SERP summary and ju…
It's not a good web page. Clicking the "Learn more" link takes me to a help page telling how to join a meeting...but, not much about what Meet is. It can be inferred, but it's also not a good introduction to Meet. I have now figured out what Meet is, but not why I would prefer it over Hangouts. It appears to be the same thing, only "for business" (and with a price tag, but no promise that Google will stop surveilling my every action online...which is really the one feature I'd absolutely be willing to pay for).
I'll just reiterate that Google is bad at branding and marketing.
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People use Hangouts. No one I know has ever used Allo. It hasn't even come up in conversation, even when they were marketing it. Hangouts, on the other hand, I get meeting requests all the time that include a Hangouts link. It's a quite popular technology...in my, admittedly limited, experience, it is a leading option, if not the leading option, in the "let's schedule an online meeting" sort of way. So, I have no ide…
I was happy with hangouts. When they took away merged SMS...that showed someone seems to be whiteanting the product or just wasn't the right person to make decisions about a messaging app. Then they pivoted to a business focused product, that was the death bell ringing IMO. I think hangouts was their way to a decent messaging platform at some point. Now I think they'd be better off supporting signal or buying Faceboo…
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Who else remembers Google Wave?
Wave was at least trying to be innovative, even if the execution was fatally flawed. Allo just never had any reason to exist.
Google feels like a company that's run by a bunch of engineers/product managers instead of a product leader with a cohesive vision. Anyone with an iPhone would understand what iMessages is and what FaceTime is. What is what and what you can do with each. Now explain it to me Google - what's your vision? (Or is it "target end state" in engineering speak?) As customers we want (at most) one chat application and one vid…
Their worst update was with Google Finance. It was a fully functional product with great features before they updated it. Now, you cannot compare the returns of more than two stock, cannot compare across different custom time periods, no way to get annualized financial results, the portfolio feature is gone. It is a mess.