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

reuters.com

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

#61

Post by reggieband »

I wondered if this was Google Express but ... nope, seems like that closed and morphed into something else [1]. I know a lot of people joke about Google shutting down projects or aggregating disparate projects poorly but I actually think it is comical at this point. It makes me think of other recent attempts to coalesce businesses like combining their music subscription services YouTube music premium, YouTube Red and Google Play Music.

It just feels like Google keeps squandering its brand. It's like they try to break into a market (e.g. Express for shopping, Hangouts for video chat) and fail to gain sufficient traction so they shut down the attempt only to spin it up again with a new brand.

It seems Google's ineptitude at creating successful brands is causing it to continual create bad products. Instead of just sticking with a brand and growing/improving it incrementally over time they throw it away. That leaves them back at square one trying to gain traction with a brand new product with its own set of issues.

1. 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

#62

Post by AnssiH »

vincentmarle wrote: post #44
aatharuv wrote: post #43

Wow, their UI... insists I lived in a city I used to live in years back. There's no way to even just change my city for one search. (I tried changing my address elsewhere, but it just doesn't pick up the change.)

I still can't use Google Wallet to this date because I haven't been able to update my country since 2010

Have you tried since 2017?

You can nowadays move payments profiles between Google accounts (add the other account as an admin on the profile, then remove the original account from the payments profile), or close payments profiles.

My Google Payments settings were incorrectly set as "business" for a long time, but in late 2017 I was able to move the incorrect profile to another Google account and make my main account "individual" (Google prompted to create a new payments profile when the previous one was no longer accessible to the account). Presumably closing the payments profile would have worked as well.

https://pay.google.com/gp/w/u/0/home/settings

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

#63

Post by tantalor »

freehunter wrote: post #16
sudo-i wrote: post #11

Google 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.

The worst part is depending on your search all the different options can be in different order or sometimes not even show up. My UI pet peeve is inconsistency and Google has it in spades.

It makes sense to change rank of the search mode options depending on your query. Some examples...

[supreme court] -> "News"

[make face mask at home] -> "Videos"

[ps4] -> "Shopping"

[cute cat] -> "Images"

Google and Bing have the exact same behavior for these queries.

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

#64

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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.

As an IT person, I am constantly shocked by the obscure Microsoft Office features users depend on to do their jobs and consider their job impossible without. Often features I personally have never heard of and find unholy and abhorrent by nature.

G Suite has none of those features. Docs has more in common with WordPad than Word. It's unsurprising offices that switch to it end up switching back as Microsoft has finally stepped up it's collaborative editing game.

And that's before we even get into things like Excel and Access which are basically automation for people who can't write JavaScript.

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

#65

Post by ximeng »

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…

Story of Amazon vs eBay told by Steve Yegge here: https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma-and-the-quest-...

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

#66

Post by snarf21 »

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…

Most people confuse a goal with a plan. Ideas are easy, execution is really hard.

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

#67

Post by ximeng »

acdha wrote: post #22
Icathian wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18948715 Also Excel not standing still. Google missing opportunities here.

They have made improvements though - Google sheets can now work on Excel format files without changing the format. However they have managed to break copy and paste, with trademark Google lack of service. (https://support.google.com/docs/thread/33960847?hl=en - and I see other problems with borders randomly appearing in pasted cells)

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

#69

Post by kentosi »

jmpman wrote: post #39
Icathian wrote: post #10

Earlier 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’d pay for Gmail, as all my important personal emails went there. However, I didn’t realize that Gmail was deleting my old emails. If they were more clear that if I didn’t pay, they were going to select, then I’d pay. Now I’m just pissed at Google. If they offered me to pay money to make my deleted emails available, and then lock me into a trivial monthly fee ($10?), I’d jump on it.

Do you have a source claiming that Gmail is deleting old emails?

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

#70

Post by tracker1 »

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.

That's just not the case here... o365+Teams is above and beyond a better experience than GDocs, even in Linux... Since January, they even fixed all the issues I had with Teams in Linux (unofficial and official apps).

I really wanted to like GDocs, it's just a really poor experience in general.

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