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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#121

Post by freehunter »

monksy wrote: post #52
thoraway1010 wrote: post #25

No 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…

Google doesn't have time to fix that. They've got top-level leetcode engineers to make a new chat app.

But first they have to make their own programming languages and frameworks.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#122

Post by MagnumOpus »

mikkergp wrote: post #79
eugenekolo wrote: post #49

I'm sure these alternatives work for some, but I really don't find "Hey" a suitable alternatives to Gmail, nor "Notion" to Google Docs. I think the innovation and updating in those Google products has stagnated a lot, but they're still better for actual work and business than the new hip things.

I don't know the name for it, but this seems like a "the market leader doesn't know what it's doing" fallacy. While I will concede that Google is not the market leader in many of these areas, It's Microsoft, not Airtable that's leading the way. To me, Google has always been a relatively "boring" company, it's just that boring in the early to mid 2000s was a welcome change of pace. There innovations were almost entire…

Google was the oppositive of boring:

- GMail with "unlimited" (never-seen-before 1GB) of storage when everyone had 10MB quotas was a "holy shit" moment, and fast web mail was a fresh breath of air

- Google Maps, yet another "holy shit" experience when you used Mapquest before

- Google Translate, so much better than everything that came before

- Google search - OK that's late 1990s but I remember the "aha" moment of trying the Google beta after needing to become a power user of lycos/altavista/askjeeves

You notice that all of these were more than a decade ago before their IPO. Larry and Sergei have gotten old and lazy, and so have their CxOs and VPs. No goals, no focus, no discipline because who cares if all the execs already have their private jets.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#123

Post by hedora »

obulpathi wrote: post #54

They actually pushed ChromeOS and web services (GMail, Inbox, Docs, Sheets, ... ) pretty hard and realized that its not the way to go forward. While for lightweight tasks (like emailing and docs) it works pretty well, for heavy tasks (like video editing) and most importantly, as a development platform, chrome os din't do well. So they pivoted to Fuchsia OS. A new OS to provide seamless experience across several devic…

> and most importantly, as a development platform, chrome os din't do well

Microsoft completely lapped the industry on this with VS Code. It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend in a browser.

Edit: I thought I just read it just got to 53% market share. It was at 18% and growing fast in 2018, so it’s plausible they have majority market share now: https://triplebyte.com/blog/editor-report-the-rise-of-visual...

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#124

Post by jfengel »

thoraway1010 wrote: post #25

No 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 do find that failure baffling -- especially since it used to work. I don't use voice commands much, but setting reminders while I'm doing something else used to be very helpful. Suddenly last August, it's just "not available for g suite users". (https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/11607814?hl=en)

I get it for free, but g suite is valuable enough to me that I'd pay for it. The thread implies that paying for it wouldn't help.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#125

Post by jlbnjmn »

Kiro wrote: post #19
aphroz wrote: post #5

They also lost the trust of their users. They didn't drop the "don't be evil" for nothing..

Is that actually true though? I've seen more and more regular people outside tech circles dismiss Facebook but Google? Not so much. In fact, outside of HN I haven't seen many complaints at all.

Anecdote: the majority of non-tech business owners I know passionately hate Google. These are guys in their 40s and 50s. The reasons may differ, but the hatred does not.

For them, the reasons are more about manipulating search results to control public opinion.

For me, it's things like hiding organic search queries from Google analytics and saying they broke it for "privacy reasons". Even though I can still see search queries for paid traffic. And the terrible quality of search results now. Oh, and the completely selective enforcement of rules (looking at you "unfair advantage" policy).

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#126

Post by EthanHeilman »

abc_lisper wrote: post #101

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 t…

All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always hard.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#127

Post by bogwog »

tengbretson wrote: post #71

It boggles my mind to imagine how many verticals in the technology space have been kneecapped because of google. There could be so many companies that could offer amazing services but they just can't compete with a half-assed "free" service made by Google, which is just a temporary cost center for all the ad revenue they don't know what to do with.

They can't be broken up fast enough.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#128

Post by ancarda »

searchableguy wrote: post #98
ancarda wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never met anyone who uses OSM. I have just shy of 500 edits on OSM because I kept going to use it, finding it didn't have what I was looking for, and making improvements. It would be nice if there was a viable alternative to Google Maps. Apple Maps is apparently not too bad, but I'm using Android and Linux these days.

well, I use osmodroid. I am sure you can find many here. I do want to contribute more after I have other things sorted. Wish you didn't have to worry about being poor. I agree with you that HN is a bubble which is what I meant by my comment. We need to do something to take it mainstream than patting ourselves here over and over again. Talk about how ways we can do that. I don't like google articles because we waste t…

>Wish you didn't have to worry about being poor.

What? Are you suggesting I don't use iOS and macOS because I can't afford Apple's hardware?

I have multiple Macs and iPhones in the house - I recently switched because I don't like Apple's direction. Not because I can't afford their products.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#129

Post by 0xCMP »

obulpathi wrote: post #54

They actually pushed ChromeOS and web services (GMail, Inbox, Docs, Sheets, ... ) pretty hard and realized that its not the way to go forward. While for lightweight tasks (like emailing and docs) it works pretty well, for heavy tasks (like video editing) and most importantly, as a development platform, chrome os din't do well. So they pivoted to Fuchsia OS. A new OS to provide seamless experience across several devic…

It seems like they're experimenting with it, but claim it's just for exploring stuff and is not the "future" yet. I've read on HN that it's much slower than Linux thanks to it's micro-kernel design.

That said, I've been very excited for Fuchsia for a long time.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#130

Post by lazyjones »

s3r3nity wrote: post #23
tengbretson wrote: post #9

> It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them. They appear to me to have begun monetizing google maps. And it is awful.

This is why I've switched to Apple Maps for like 98% of my navigation needs. I might be biased, because I live in one of the cities with the updated maps data, sure, but I find that it handles most of my use cases just as well as Google Maps.

Apple maps has the following drawbacks for me:

- no public transport routing where I live

- much worse satellite images

For all other uses, especially usability, it's superior to the extremely slow and cumbersome Google Maps. Both have odd UI bugs.

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