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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#201
post #52

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.

Let's not forget that had gtalk, which could have dominated easily. Over ten year lead wasted on that one.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#202

I 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…

We recently switched from Meet back to Zoom, because Zoom lets you use your speakers while Meet requires everyone to use a headset.

Zoom does some kind of active noise-cancelling where it will avoid picking up whatever the person on the other end just said, preventing the echo effect. Meet doesn't, it picks up everything. So if you use a speaker, everything the other person says gets repeated back at them.

When Meet recently announced noise-cancelling, we got really excited, only to be disappointed when they were referring to cancelling of background noises and not of participants.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I don't really understand this sentiment, here's how my drive looks: https://i.imgur.com/UUUboTd.png does your drive look significantly different from this?

Mine does. I agree wholeheartedly with the parent commenter.

My personal G Drive looks similar to yours. It looks like your Drive is mostly used by you, and not many (if any) other collaborators. The problem is that my work G Drive is an utter clusterfuck because of the numerous different ways that documents can be shared between people/teams. There are shared folders, shared drives, individually shared documents, and probably more. And each one of them shows up in a completely different place than the others.

If you're working with one specific team, you can likely get that entire team to conform to one way of doing things (everyone puts documents in this shared folder). But once you start involving 10s/100s of teams, thousands of individuals, etc... some teams use "Shared drives" (which show up on the left panel under "Shared drives"), some teams use shared folders (which show up in your folders list), some teams use individually shared documents (which show up in any number of random places, with the only reliable way of getting back to it is to find the email where they shared it with you). Some teams use shared drives internally within their team, but because they don't want to share the entire drive with an outside collaborator, they will share only a specific folder/file. The entire sharing mechanism becomes a mess and impossible to track and keep organized.

G drive is nice in many aspects, but the sharing is one in which IMO it allows far too much flexibility. The nice thing about file systems of yesteryear like Sharepoint (ugh, ew) is that they at least said "this is the folder tree. use it, because you don't have any choice" which at least encouraged some modicum of structure. G Drive instead says "here's a sandbox, do what you want" which sounds nice in theory, but in practical use is a mess when you have 1000+ people building their own personal sandcastle.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#204

Big 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?

Yes, on my main work machine. MBP13, 2018.

Once you don't use browsers for everything, the machine is cooler and more responsive.

Seriously feels as if I bought new hardware.

I close Safari when not using it, same for all other browsers (have Brave, Chrome, ...).

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#205

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 ha…

One of my employers was spun out twice, after having been acquired years ago. It was sort of a joke to tell people who the owners were. It made no goddamned sense. Sure, we had customers in common, but so do Xerox and people who lease out coffee machines. The toner-flavored coffee jokes practically write themselves.

They just got onto a growth tear and bought a bunch of things they shouldn’t, and eventually rounded up all of the vaguely similar ones and divested.

I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough. Not every idea has to be a billion dollar idea, and a one time cash infusion to five $200M ideas would be a pretty small opportunity cost for them.

The fact that such ideas are not a direct competitor also achieves another goal of overly large employee pools, which is to choke off the supply of talent to upstarts.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#206
post #115

I 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…

Interesting how you are basing your assumptions on two ex-employees who no longer work there probably because of what you experienced, not to mention the small sample size.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#207
“At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats for macOS Big Sur. It reminded me how much Chrome makes my machine go WHURRRRRR. Yesterday, I made Safari my default browser again.”

I talk to developer friends in my circles and I’m pretty sure I’m on a crazy list for running safari, but I really do think it’s the best Mac browser. Chrome is just an absolute hog and until there’s some Camino-like renaissance for Firefox/Mozilla on Mac it’s not going to work for me.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#208

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…

Gsuite/GAFYD domain users (which are a tiny fraction of all Google accounts, for what it is worth) have a special pain with all Google consumer products. Many products and features simply do not work with Gsuite accounts. Why? Gsuite accounts have a different terms of service, and getting legal, privacy, compliance, etc to sign off on launching your feature is a pain in the neck. Also it's possible that some features and products really aren't compatible with the Gsuite TOS. So as an engineer you can choose to just not launch your feature to Gsuite, or you can go through a lot of work to launch it all the way, for which you will gain no marginal users and will receive no recognition or compensation.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#210
post #155

Google's main liability is that they can never, under any circumstances, prioritize user privacy. The reason the products listed by the author have rough corners is that those products don't contribute much to the bottom line. Google is an advertising company that happens to use technology. The problem is that too many people view it as a technology company that happens to be into advertising. As browsers adopt ad-bl…

Google has the best software development tooling in the business internally. Their problems are not around technology. Their problems are product focus, commitment and follow through. Google is in fact primarily a technology company. They struggle with being a "product" company.
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