It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy. May be this is just a natural outcome of that. This is one of the most damaging things Google and the people it influenced did to programming profession. There is a generation of programmers now who can do very well on leetcode, but god help those who maintain that code after them - I know this from personal experience working on projects left behind by people who ended at Google
Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
101–110 of 576 posts
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#102For Google Translate you should check out DeepL https://www.deepl.com/translator It's absolutely insane, blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy.
Bing translator works really well honestly and using it as my standard translator
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#103No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily. The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely. I used…
I can only assume they don't want to make it work for some reason. The best practical answer is to just set up a normal gmail account and a lot of weird google bugs go away.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've switched to Brave and duckduckgo. They are evil and I try avoid them at all costs. AMP is a good enough reason.
Why would you switch to brave but not firefox? Genuinely curious given the amount of shenanigans they have pulled out and said oops. Most recent one - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027
Are Firefox still taking Google money? I’ve had a hunt but can’t find anything recent that is clear cut.
If they are, a purist might object to that.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#105Big Sur made me switch to Mail and Calendar (away from GMail and GCal in Safari). Oh my god is it fast and snappy. GChat within GMail kept me in the browser, but they ruined it. Now I use the standalone Chat "app", which is some webframe crap, but hey, corporate standard. Big Sur is like iPadOS and I always use native apps on iPadOS/iOS. Can't imagine what a truly native Figma, Slack, JIRA would be like.
You've switched to Big Sur because it's snappy? I just installed the beta and it's super buggy with periodic pauses for no reason. Are you using it every day now?
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#106The choice of "alternatives" mentioned in the article, like "Hey", "Notion", "AirTable", etc. actually does more harm to the credibility to the article than good, because I can't think of any normal person using all these startup products for important tasks.
Hell, I think the only demographic who would have switched all their workflow tools to these would be people who live in Silicon Valley, just helping each other out.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#107For Google Translate you should check out DeepL https://www.deepl.com/translator It's absolutely insane, blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy.
Translation to a single language back and forth seems to be really really good. Although quite impressive, it still suffers from the same problem that most other translator service have if you keep translating the same text between random languages. I translate the following text from English to various other languages (without going back to english) 6 times and then I went back to English. The original text is I won…
This could be considered a "feature" if used for comedic effect. Anyone who has young children that are into Disney movies should check out this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bVAoVlFYf0. This woman runs "Let It Go" from the movie Frozen through Google Translate a bunch of times and then sings the result.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#108The mobile Google results page is so cluttered that I switched my iPhone’s default search to DuckDuckGo. The results are a tad worse, but I’m never doing heavy-duty searches on the go. And now I don’t have to scroll past 6 ads to get the first result.
I use DDG as default search on my phone and it's measurably worse than google for the majority of searches I do and there are absolutely ads on ddg. I inevitably switch for at least half of my searches.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#109Google is only good at search. The only reason why I use everything else they create is because of their massive distribution, market penetration and inter-operability. Thankfully there are solid alternatives in certain areas like fore example using iPhone instead of Android. But for everything else I don't see a massive migration happening any time soon. Notion, Hey.com, DuckDuckGo are all niche products. My dad has…
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Not to mention their push for the newest content to be the highest rated. It's really hard to find old content these days.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#110I get the desire to abandon google services, and have done so myself for email and search, but there isn't much to this article. An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just starting a new email address. Airtable has some nice functionality, but I don't think it's head-and-shoulders above sheets and this article…
The article rings completely true to me. One simple example: folders in Google Drive.
* It's a constant struggle to keep documents in folders so that you can find them easily.
* Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist.
* Moreover, I can't ensure that important documents are reliably stored in folders where everyone else can find them easily as well.
I don't understand why Google does not get how important this is for business documents. It's a breath of fresh air to use Dropbox or Box at this point.