251–260 of 576 posts
Imagine being a VC and hearing the pitch by Elasticsearch that you were going to make massive inroads in search (when they were early of course). I imagine most laughed at them like "How are you going to beat Google" ... Imagine if they answered "we expect Google to just completely abdicate their role in search." Google right now has a few wins but most of their projects fall flat. AWS is crushing it ...
For 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.
- It has only a handful of languages
- No OCR / photo support
- No speech / conversation support.
IMO, as is, it is way inferior to GT. But it is good to have competition in this area as there is still a lot of room for improvement.
> 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.
People like to conflate being popular (having large marketshare) with being a monopoly (exclusive control of supply). Being popular in those markets is likely because they do not monetize it directly.
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…
Really? Is that restriction on desktop or mobile? I've been using speaker mode on meet(mobile) for a while now. Or is it implicitly imposed by you due to lack of noise cancelling features?
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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.
Mmmmmm, Wave. (drooling dead-eyes Homer impression).
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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'm confused. Doesn't shared drives solve this problem? You can set up a group, created a shared drive for that group, and then everyone has access to what's stored within it.
They work when highly managed (e.g., our training team for sales org) but not for product development teams in my experience.
The expanding symlink functionality makes everything worse, because people think they're moving folders, but they're not, and permissions don't get rationalized. Ugh.
So when I look at Google's health I look at the research they are doing to see if they seem to be staying on the cutting edge. Stuff like Snap/Pony or TPUs makes me think they are. It's possible that the capabilities Google is developing won't lead to any new profitable businesses, but their success in geospatial data and other computationally-expensive products like machine vision and translation are examples of their abilities. The latent ability to just jump into a new line of business is a strength of Google's, and products they developed more than a decade ago, like Docs and Sheets, aren't really that important to their future.
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Stadia?
Stadia is a cloud gaming platform. Like Nvidia Shield, Microsoft xCloud, Sony PS Now, OnLive, and the rest. Gmail, maps, page-rank based search, and other pre-2010 Google tech were category makers. Every competitor has to massively step their game up to make something as good. Stadia is not a category maker. There's no massive competitive advantage or leading position for anyone else to catch up to. It's nowhere near…
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> _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 syst…
> Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product" So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?
The quote is pithy but assumes some context - the [something] is being provided below the marginal cost to produce and therefore being provided with an expectation of benefit for the provider.
Acquiring LibreOffice is not $0 marginal cost but they have a big "DONATE" button top-right corner of the website and The Document Foundation turns a small profit from donations.
DuckDuckGo'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.…
People on HN have said that Duck Duck Go is a for profit corporation that doesn't open source or independently validate their privacy claims.