Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales • Hacker News Board

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#51

Post by hangonhn » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

justicezyx wrote: post #27

mlazos wrote: post #12

Google 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 wi…

Someone who used to be a Googler once told me: "A group of great engineers lead by a terrible manager will never succeed but a team of mediocre engineers lead by a great manager just might." I don't think anyone doubts Google has great engineers but I don't think it's enough for them to win. All you'll end up with is a lot of great products with no futures. I found myself in a similar situation in my previous job: a bunch of ex-Googlers and a weak leadership team. In the end, we ended up making a lot of components that went nowhere because no one would pay for them.

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#52

Post by pubutil » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #29

acdha wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Part of the necessity of Office at the company I work is that they use macros in Excel to help with certain tasks. Looking at it now, GSheets has macros but I’m not sure that they’re as functional as a VBA macro.

GDocs has found a nice spot in one of our departments as a scheduling tool, though.

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#53

Post by jfim » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #21

MattGaiser wrote: post #15

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.

Same, which is kind of hilarious since they've actually shut that down about ten months ago [0].

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/11/google-express-to-close-in...

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#54

Post by mywittyname » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

Goronmon wrote: post #35

judge2020 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My admittedly limited experience with Google's offerings for Docs, Sheets, etc was they were noticeably inferior and limited compared to Microsoft's. In my opinion, its more likely that professionals who heavily use those tools are going to favor MS offerings over Google's compared to people who only need to occasionally created simple word documents or spreadsheets with a handful of columns.

The more I use G Suite, the more I hate it. There are so many edge cases that I encounter in professional use that I never did when using these tools for personal stuff.

I miss Excel the most.

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#55

Post by anoraca » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

bearbin wrote: post #3

This is a good move but several years too late. Google has already squandered it's lead in shopping when they replaced an excellent shopping search engine with a crippled advertising board that neither shows the cheapest prices nor a wide variety of products to buy. This has been compounded by introducing absolutely no substantitive improvements to the product over the past few years. Meanwhile, because nobody used t…

Target and Walmart are making progress. Amazon Pay and Apple Pay are making progress.

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#56

Post by dub » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

toohotatopic wrote: post #23

mlazos wrote: post #12

Google 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.

Did XMPP support seamless conversation history and avoiding duplicate notifications across all of your devices?

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#57

Post by mywittyname » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #42

awa wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has multiple products apart from search with >1B users (Gdrive, android, photos, maps, youtube).

Which of them is profitable?

YouTube is the only product there that can stand on its own. The others are complimentary services that may not generate much revenue independently, but they add tremendous value to an ecosystem of complimentary products.

Example, Android allows for traffic data to be sampled in real time, which is then sent to Maps.

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#58

Post by nemothekid » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 7:15 PM UTC

toohotatopic wrote: post #23

mlazos wrote: post #12

Google 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.

Which engineer would shut down an open protocol to fight a competitor instead of offering the better product

Probably any engineer that wanted to implement cross device message syncing or end to end encryption without dealing with the politics of 1000s of other companies.

Not saying what Google did, but I'm tired of hearing about this XMPP (and/or IRC) pancea when both had non-trivial UX issues.

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#59

Post by alephnan » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

gen220 wrote: post #31

bearbin wrote: post #3

This is a good move but several years too late. Google has already squandered it's lead in shopping when they replaced an excellent shopping search engine with a crippled advertising board that neither shows the cheapest prices nor a wide variety of products to buy. This has been compounded by introducing absolutely no substantitive improvements to the product over the past few years. Meanwhile, because nobody used t…

This behavior is explained by the fact that these departments within Google are looking at their “rivals” for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure). Nobody will remember it, but in eBay’s early days of success, Amazon spent a nontrivial amount of engineering effort into building an auction style marketplace. They actually bui…

> within Google are looking at their “rivals” for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure).

Most of my cloud experience has been with GCP, but I tried Azure this weekend. I'm not sure how good specific cloud services / products are, but Azure has a much better story on a cloud-first development.

In Azure, I used Visual Studio Online (VScode in the browser). This ran in a VM with command line access. It's integrated with Github, and I imagine other Azure web services will come next, such as a one click deploy button. Microsoft's acquisitions and open-sourcing (Monaco editor, TypeScript) has been so strategic and well-integrated. Amazon acquired Cloud9 but not sure where that went. GCP had a lead with a more feature filled web console which has all the right pieces (SSH emulator/shell), but it seems they squandered the opportunity to make it fully integrated development solution with a Web IDE.

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#60

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #34

it's kind of crazy how much of a one-trick pony Google is. If it weren't for search, which admittedly is very successful I don't know what the company would be worth. Amazon's reach, on the other hand, is pretty astonishing. Cloud, Logistics, e-commerce, and even the media business is huge these days.

Maybe Amazon should hire Google to redesign their search interface and product database so it's useable.

Maybe Google should hire Amazon to redesign the shopping search so it's not a waste of space for a significant amount of time for billions of people daily.