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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#261

Post by milesskorpen »

MperorM wrote: post #180
hodgesrm wrote: post #110

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?

Sure, I've got the same buttons ... but I've got >150,000 files in my Drive managed by >2,000 colleagues assembled over 6+ years, including files inherited from colleagues/reports who have left with their own approaches to file management, which turns it all into a massive disaster.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#262

Post by zackees »

searchableguy wrote: post #59
laichzeit0 wrote: post #51

Earlier 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

Firefox fired their CEO because he donated to a Christian group. So this guy went and forked the Chrome browser into Brave.

If you think Chrome is better than Firefox, then you'll think Brave is also better than Firefox.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#263

Post by gumby »

joshuamorton wrote: post #236
HenryBemis wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> _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…

Who does Google sell your docs and drive data to?

They aggregate what they learn about each user across all their properties. (Their hope was the plus would make this easier). So while I seriously doubt they tell advertisers, “joshuamorton writes about JavaScript, metallurgy and anime”, whatever they learn from the enormous number of places they are collecting info increases the probability that you might see an ad on gmail relating to anime.

And they are quite public about scanning documents written using the free drive service, as they are proud that they take down documents with content they or the government consider inappropriate, as discussed on HN recently.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#264

Post by blago »

PhearTheCeal wrote: post #8

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 detected my Bulgarian (Cyrillic alphabet) test sentence as English:

https://www.deepl.com/translator#en/ru/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0...

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#265

Post by mostlysimilar »

hinkley wrote: post #237
loughnane wrote: post #75

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…

Last spring I sat down to binge re-watch a TV series and just went back through my inbox looking for every mailing list I was on, unsubscribe, and then delete all previous messages. Probably took 8 hours total, but I deleted thousands of messages and now I get about 6 messages a day in my inbox, most of them from humans or services I just recently used. It’s worth my time to look at it again.

I do this every few months and it feels amazing each time. Even if I'm intentional about unchecking the marketing email boxes, somehow I still end up on dozens of mailing lists.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#266

Post by rushabh »

The biggest problem with Google is that they became so successful in search and ads. It confuses the hell out of the company who their real customer is.

What if instead of monetizing via ads, they had gone with premium accounts with personal search history and enterprise search products? That would have forced them to innovate on their core expertise and kept them empathetic to the end user. Right now, all they care is about usage stats.

Also Google never had a good design ethic right from the beginning. Early products like Chat, Groups were badly designed and very inconsistent. They cared more about scale and performance at that point.

The Google we see today is probably because of those early decisions made on the backs of runaway ad revenue. I hope the management has a change of heart, because I can see other companies chipping away at Google otherwise.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#267

Post by mapgrep »

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…

>It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy

I'm not so sure that's the case. It seems like historically certain products are starved of feautures and resources while other products are made a priority, and it also seems like these priorities can shift pretty rapidly.

In the Google+ era for example there was the concept of "more wood behind fewer arrows" and a ton of money and resources went into plus to the detriment of other products (some of which were outright cancelled) and now obviously plus is no longer a priority.

Hangouts was developed (iirc) for plus to attract users for a social network then eventually became Meets which seems to be attached to Google Apps as a business offering to attract paying subscribers. Which on some level makes sense but from the vantage of the actual product leads to some wasted effort and changes that seem arbitrary to users. There doesn't seem to have been a clear incentive to put features into Hangouts/Meet; instead the incentive seems to have been to grow the distinct platforms the product was attached to as a feature of those platforms. (Hence Duo as a separate product, it is attached to yet another platform, Android). Meanwhile Zoom, by staying focused on just the actual product of videoconferencing software, left Google's offering in the dust.

Are there as many people working on features at say Blogger as there were 10 years ago? I doubt it. I'm not even saying that's wrong just that it contradicts the idea that Google can be said to incentivize features in the arbitrary case. I think it's clearly only for blessed products and that set of products that are blessed will change over time.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#268

Post by nailer »

jldugger wrote: post #258
nailer wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, now we're moving the goalposts. You can release a major product in an existing category. In fact, half your examples already existed.

I was making some last minute changes while you were replying to clarify my thoughts, but you can see my edits about why Stadia isn't like old Google products.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#269

Post by Peteris »

The author is forgetting that Google is a search monopoly.

AI was (and continues to be) the biggest threat to their success in search so they invested heavily in that (it was called ML back then).

Clearly they are still doing well even with subpar cloud software, so this has proven out.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#270

Post by draw_down »

Google docs is such a drag after you get used to something nicer like (imo) Dropbox Paper. It's like JIRA vs something simpler/nicer such as (again, imo) Trello. The latter tools help you do what you're actually trying to do, the former are closer to CRUD forms that you use to update fields in database rows. Google Calendar has the same feel. I suppose I don't mind Gmail too much.

Maybe one day Google will briefly introduce something similar to Notion/Dropbox Paper (and then mothball it after 40 months).

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