Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand • Hacker News Board

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#161

Post by cc439 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:05 PM UTC

annodomini2019 wrote: post #57

meddlepal wrote: post #35

Google's two (maybe three) core Google-branded products to non-tech people are Search, Gmail and maybe Chrome. I don't think non-techies could even tell you what some of the other products are or did. I would also wager most people outside of tech don't realize YouTube is owned by Google. Tech people pay a lot of attention to this stuff, but casual user's don't notice or don't care.

Probably Google Drive as well.

Good point. Funny enough, the Google Drive desktop application was killed and replaced with Drive File Stream which broke the offline usefulness of Google Drive.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#162

Post by criley2 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

Flockster wrote: post #115

criley2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I don't want a mail program is because 99.9% of my email is utter garbage, so the idea that I need to take up bandwidth and diskspace and processor time on my machine to basically download gigabytes of unwanted advertising, scams, phishing attempts, etc, is ridiculous.

My experience with Gmail is the complete opposite. It is far better at filtering spam/phishing - mails than all the other free mail services.

When you've had a gmail account for ~15 years, every advertiser, info reseller, marketer, phisher and spammer alive has my email at the top of their list.

Is what it is, but with Inbox I had 0 issue controlling all of it, and with gmail, all of this garbage is dropped directly into my HIGHLY IMPORTANT >> INBOX with zero filtering or analysis (even though I have, no kidding, over a hundred manual filters containing THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of email addresses all of them "Mark as promotion / Never mark important / Skip the inbox / Never star / Archive immediately" and yet, every week, dozens more appear, so I add yet-another filter to the piles of hundreds, yet another dozen email addresses into the piles of thousands.

And yet with all of this work, I know my inbox will be a useless disaster by next week.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#163

Post by beckler » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

iamgopal wrote: post #82

There are many many googlers from top are also here at hacker news, reading these very criticisms often, why nothing has changed in years and years ?

Google doesn't reward those who make things better, they reward those who launch new products.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#164

Post by linsomniac » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

throw_away wrote: post #95

jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

> you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately. I would love if they followed this strategy. Instead, you have products like reader and inbox with many passionate users, which demonstrate some wall stickiness, and they're killed rather than monetized. Monetize me. I recognize that the things I like cost money. Figure out how to make money off me! I would…

Google is in a unique position there: I often will avoid adding a new small service that I might like because I don't want to add another small payment I have to manage. With Google, I'm already paying them for storage and Youtube. I wouldn't think nearly as hard about adding a new Google service as I do others.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#165

Post by criley2 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

radarsat1 wrote: post #147

FreakyT wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inbox’s custom categories were created using simple filter rules. You can technically do that in GMail also, but only for folders, which are independent of the social/promotions/etc tabs. It seems to me that the ability to create custom tabs via filters would not be a particularly unreasonable feature.

That sounds a lot like what I do using 'labels'. Other than the position on the screen, what's the difference?

Inbox rollup: Set it up once, magically works forever

Gmail label: Create a filter for a label. It works only for that. New emails need to go in. Manually and annoyingly update the filter. Works only for that. New emails need to go in. Manually and annoyingly update...

You get the point. If I went and bought something from a new store and got it shipped, the receipt automatically appear in "purchases" in inbox. I didn't have to manually update a filter for this one new address. It just worked. Back on gmail, gmail treats that new email as if it has no idea what it is. So into the main box it goes until I manually create rules for this one specific case.

I shouldn't have to manually create a rule for every single email address that ever sends me an email. It's an astronomical amount of work. And now that we know that Google/Inbox was 100% capable of auto-filtering, the idea that we are being transported to the stone age of email is insanity.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#166

Post by linsomniac » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:10 PM UTC

PopePompus wrote: post #107

jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

It may be that GCP isn't going anywhere, but when our organization was choosing a cloud service, we chose Amazon over Google specifically because of Google's flakiness. Google could drop cloud services tomorrow, and it would not be out of character.

We are in the same boat. My boss came to me last week saying he had lunch with a friend that just moved their services all to GCP and got big savings. But we just recently were impacted by the sudden, unexpected Maps 14x price increase.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#167

Post by _ptgt » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:11 PM UTC

jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

In my experience at a different FANG, the same culture exists here. If I had to guess, I would say it probably applies to the others as well.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#168

Post by jfasi » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

PopePompus wrote: post #107

jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

It may be that GCP isn't going anywhere, but when our organization was choosing a cloud service, we chose Amazon over Google specifically because of Google's flakiness. Google could drop cloud services tomorrow, and it would not be out of character.

I can’t share with you how much GCP is making in revenue, but I can assure you it’s enough that it won’t get dropped, ever. I’ll put my money where my mouth is: I’m now preparing to expand my own team’s operations into GCP and away from AWS because of how good their ML offerings are.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#169

Post by OrgNet » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #77

My list of degooglifying actions (mostly from my older post [1]) * switch default search engine to DuckDuckGo (one can still use the !s bang when one wants to see what Google has) * use tracking blockers (uBlock origin, BlockBear on iOS) * use anonymous/private/porn mode browsing most of the time (except for sites I actually want to be logged in permanently) * use Zoho as a replacement for shared Google docs * use Yo…

Did you disable Google's Widevine plugin in Firefox? I just did on mine to see how many videos I won't be able to play anymore.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#170

Post by criley2 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

fixermark wrote: post #96

TeMPOraL wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see how the four categories would help with training spam filters. "Social" is half spam, half maybe not. "Promotions" is mostly spam, though Google would rather see it as ham. "Updates" and "Forums" are mostly not spam.

I believe the parent poster meant that the classifiers that train into the baked-in categories are trained like a spam filter and use cross-account global knowledge. In other words, it's a model that works if there's a small number of buckets and a huge dataset to train the bucket-targeting against and breaks down if every individual user has their own buckets with their own conflicting understanding of what those bu…

Ironically, the Inbox rollups worked absolutely beautifully and the gmail filters are really, really rough and don't work well. "Updates" are so incredibly nebulous that it's really a 50/50 crapshoot on whether or not google knows what should go in there. "Updates" and "Social" are commonly mixed up, and finance/purchases have zero place to go. Are they 'Updates' like when I get a 'Our ToS has been updated' email? Etc. The categories are too general to be useful.