You lost me at tiktok
Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
111–120 of 576 posts
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#112No 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…
> The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. On the outset, you might think with such ridiculously high compensation there would be an expectation of quality, but I think that's an error. Google operates as an ad-company that happens to employ ridiculous amounts of exhorbitantly compensated individuals to engage in market and technological research, particularly to open or exp…
> _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same
Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data.
This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all.
Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating systems, then it's +1 for them and -1 for the competition.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#113Someday, Google will be a business school case study on the dangers of a) having all your money come from one cash cow and b) having too many self-directed engineers with no management vision. Google is a car with a 1,000 horsepower engine but which can't drive in a straight line.
> having too many self-directed engineers with no management vision I personally feel it's the opposite. I think management, and Google's internal incentives, lead to a lot of their issues. As one obvious example, the leveling system is totally flawed and creates incentives for their greatest issues, such as releasing many competing projects only to deprecate/ abandon all of them. That's on management, not the engine…
I think in the early days, Google Engineers just worked on whatever they felt like. This resulted in fantastically profitable cool technology, and vast holes in the products for things no one volunteered to work on.
Then things were turned around to today's "jump through these hoops and you'll get promoted" system.
I was there 2006-2009, and I think the turn happened in that era, though it's hard to tell from "the floor".
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#114Not sure I want everything to be rewritten to run on a browser. How unoptimized is that..
Not all comparisons are equal there. Like youtube vs twitch? Talking about livestreaming? replays? I don't go to twitch to look up peoples vlogs, how to's, etc. Apples / oranges even though you can livestream on both.
Gmail clogged? Unsubscribe to some stuff or adjust your filters. I've had my gmail account since gmail became available and I have no issues keeping a clean inbox. Spam folder is massive, but I guess its doing its job.
I get what you're saying.. But thats how the industry works. Giants can't move as quick when they have billions of users that rely on 100% uptime and backwards compatibility. You can't upend your stuff all the time. Startups are scrappy and can do crazy stuff. But notice how many crazy things don't last.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#115I had the "pleasure" to work with Ex-Googlers which had "Project Managers at G" in their resume. Honestly, I do not wonder anymore why Google nowadays s#ck as hard as they do.
They made great presentations and a grand plans using some project management saas tools. But both of them neither understood the basics of projectmanagement (Who does what when and what do they need when?) nor could react when challenged.
Both of them were lower to middle management, but sure as hell anything that you hand them would end in total mediocrity if not fail at all.
On the other hand one of the most capable front end engineers I knew joined Google for 2 years. Where he spent most of his time - with a whole team - working on .... fold in and fold out animations (for a single mobile product)
He quit. Google now is one of his customers. His work has gotten much more interesting.
Google / Alphabet - the organization - did not scale well. My bet: There will be a huge crisis soon. Lots of G-people will loose their jobs.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#116Credit where credit is due: I think Google colab is fantastic. I've used Repl.it for a coupe of years now, but for the past year it's been Colab pretty much 100% of the time.
Whenever I have to set up a new machine with dev. environment, I get a impending sense of doom. I get the "I really, really don't want to be doing this" feeling.
The fact that you can open up your browser, and start coding in just mere seconds, is just an incredible feeling.
In February I had to set up an older laptop with Python - I did this via Conda, which is usually a pretty smooth process. But I ended up spending 3 hours tracking down some persistent and conflicting DLL errors, which made numpy crash. Turns out some other applications on the computer caused this error.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#117I feel like sheets and docs not changing for years is a feature not problem. I don't like innovation in these kind of apps. It's far too common, historically, for people to add all kinds of useless crap like Mr Clippy and rearrange the toolbars and whatnot. Once you're familiar with the tools the interface is consistent across docs, sheets and slides as well as over time. The programmability is also really good. I actually built an app for a friend using just sheets and its automation features to implement a web form for their national poetry contest.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#118DuckDuckGo's rise feels like textbook "Innovator's Dilemma" stuff. By prioritizing privacy, something Google can't do because all the institutional values are misaligned with that goal, DDG were able to make headway into a niche market. Now they're established, and their results are getting better and better, even in the broader market. For example, I use DDG mostly because their results are visually easier to parse. It remains to be seen if they'll ever beat Google at their own search game, but Google certainly feels vulnerable for the first time in many years.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#119Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#120The 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…
I only switch for maybe 5%