How many people were not even aware/were barely aware that Google had a shopping service? I wasn't.
I thought it meant Express since the last time I used Google's shopping service was probably two presidents ago.
Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales
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Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically all of googles products produce significantly worse value for the consumer so that google can squeeze out extra profits. It’s only a matter of time before they start losing market share
I would argue that GSuite, Google Drive, and Gmail (the only things I currently pay Google for) all offer pretty excellent value, even at the free tier (for those which have one).
I used to think that but G Suite hasn't notably improved in years and I don't think everyone bailing to Office 365 / Teams is doing so out of blind loyalty to Microsoft. Google needs to take the user experience seriously — things which aren't a Real Engineer's Favorite Problems™ are often just as important.
Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales
#23Google has always been a fascinating company to me. A lot of my friends still work there and love it and my impression of their internal developer experience is that it’s top notch. This shows me though that despite them being an engineer-first company (or used to be) they really haven’t created another dominant business since ads and consumer gsuite. Basically when I was a new grad I thought if your company had tech…
Are they an engineering-first company though? E.g. the entire XMPP fiasco wouldn't have happened if engineers had made the decision. Which engineer would shut down an open protocol to fight a competitor instead of offering the better product? In the end, they lost the space to Facebook and now Zoom anyway.
Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales
#24Google dot com UI is growing ever closer to following in the footsteps of iTunes. It’s just becoming a cluttered mess and more confusing to users... I didn’t even know you could shop directly from the site.
My mom has gotten stuck in the purchasing interface before and she was confused whether she was buying from google or from best buy, and then all of a sudden she lands up in a different retail experience to check out. She couldn't tell the difference between legit websites and scams (though amazon has this problem too)
In an attempt to create a unifying shopping experience, they instead created something that feels fragmented and destroys trust
Disclaimer: I am a former AWS and Alexa employees
Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales
#25How many people were not even aware/were barely aware that Google had a shopping service? I wasn't.
Not me, that's for sure. Then again, I've been avoiding anything that smells like Google for the past 5 years or so.
Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales
#26Why it seems that google is always behind one step ? Last time it was ahead of the curve was buying android. And, it doesn't seems like it but google search quality is degrading at alarming rate, for e.g. even when I have allowed tracking my search visited pages, it failed to give me correct results for exact same queries.
Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales
#27Google has always been a fascinating company to me. A lot of my friends still work there and love it and my impression of their internal developer experience is that it’s top notch. This shows me though that despite them being an engineer-first company (or used to be) they really haven’t created another dominant business since ads and consumer gsuite. Basically when I was a new grad I thought if your company had tech…
The engineering-focused mindset is hilariously short-sighted in hindsight.
When I was AWS 2012-2013, the sense that the Cloud is going to be huge got more and more evidences from customer feedback.
When I joined Google in 2013, the sentiment was that Google can easily beat AWS. But, for all those talks, they have not mentioned any significant understanding on what customers expect from GCP, and why and how GCP can win. The idea was simply that Google's tech (and a self-complacent idea that Google engineers is somehow superior) is just better, therefore it will win. The vast majority of hard work in between was never discussed.
Even later in 2016, I was pitching my Director to build a Cloud service that exposes Borg's experience (I worked at BorgMaster team then); the experience would be close to AWS Fargate (or Cloud Run). And the reply was that its technical complexity would be too high. Once again, there is no thought given to whether or not customers would be loving to use such services. Granted that, I did not have the PM expertise or connections to build a stronger proposal, but the focus on technical thinking is evident.
Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales
#28How many people were not even aware/were barely aware that Google had a shopping service? I wasn't.
They do? I thought they have a "Shopping" search results tab that aggregates store listings. Are they skimming a fee on top of ad revenue for showing those listings?
Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that GSuite, Google Drive, and Gmail (the only things I currently pay Google for) all offer pretty excellent value, even at the free tier (for those which have one).
I used to think that but G Suite hasn't notably improved in years and I don't think everyone bailing to Office 365 / Teams is doing so out of blind loyalty to Microsoft. Google needs to take the user experience seriously — things which aren't a Real Engineer's Favorite Problems™ are often just as important.
In my opinion, the Office 365 trend still stems from Microsoft's desktop monopoly and everyone being trained/taught on Microsoft Office. GSuite is doing just fine but I know of startups and "hip" medium-sized companies choosing it over Office 365 since so many people don't want to change from using MS Office; having to retrain your employees to use Docs, Sheets, and Drive might be too big of a cost.
Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales
#30Why it seems that google is always behind one step ? Last time it was ahead of the curve was buying android. And, it doesn't seems like it but google search quality is degrading at alarming rate, for e.g. even when I have allowed tracking my search visited pages, it failed to give me correct results for exact same queries.
Have you seen the first Android prototypes that looked like knock off Blackberries the year before the iPhone was introduced? Android was definitely not ahead of the curve.