Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#271

Post by gumby » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

hodgesrm wrote: post #110

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…

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…

> One simple example: folders in Google Drive.

Tell me about it! The local Scout troop uses google docs for routine stuff like flyers, sign up sheets etc. I continue to routinely see unrelated material there: kids’ homework, doctor’s patient records, once a marketing plan for $BIG_SV_COMPANY etc. It’s not like there are one or two clueless souls: several documents a week show ip from all sorts of different people.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#272

Post by dleslie » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #195

dleslie wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

mail, docs, drive et al ... they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite as a paid service, and "everyone uses the same service at home that they do at work" has clear advantages, whether or not there is advertising in your gmail. Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite (or "google apps for domains", as they called it then - h…

When using GSuite it is used in a browser, and this is key to the Google strategy. The goal is to get more users spending more time in their browsers, in order to funnel them to Google Ads and to serve Google their browsing data.

GSuite exists, at least in part, to break down the model of the walled corporate intranet. There are just too many people behind the corporate veil to ignore; and as a bonus, the browsing and cloud app usage habits they develop at work will tend to translate to their usage habits at home.

Also, as noted by another responder, GMail has had ads since launch. I was a beta user from day 1, and I recall the ads.

Edit: worth noting the historical difficulty of getting open source software into the business environment because corporate purchasers were wary of anything that was "free"; putting a price on something makes it more palatable to corporate adoption.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#273

Post by jlarocco » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

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…

Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run.

It's like they develop products just enough to get people using them so they can squeeze out some more meta-data and connect the dots back to a Google account, and then they stop development because it's not going to add more revenue.

And if they can't figure out how to push advertising with it, they drop it.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#274

Post by MperorM » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 4:59 PM UTC

txcwpalpha wrote: post #203

MperorM wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

That does sound awful!

Thankfully we use Box and regular office at my workplace, so I have not had to experience that side of Drive.

Would it be fair to say Drive is very well suited for small organisations, but has trouble scaling?

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#275

Post by joshuamorton » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #263

joshuamorton wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 publ…

So your contention is that because they check hashes of documents stored on drive for unlawful material, we'll say, that this proves that Google is lying about how it uses data from docs and drive?

Or are you saying they don't actually share any data learned from docs and drive

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#276

Post by yt-sdb » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

three_seagrass wrote: post #260

yt-sdb wrote: post #118

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.…

How do you know Duck Duck Go actually prioritizes privacy though? 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.

(1) From a branding perspective, I don't know how much it matters. (2) e.g. If they're using my location data, they're terrible at it.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#277

Post by mark_l_watson » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

I can't totally agree with this. It may be true that Google Docs and Sheets get updated slowly, but they are functional and as long as they are maintained properly, I am a happy consumer.

Also, on Chromebooks having Microsoft Office 365 available as web apps provides higher level tools when you need them.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#278

Post by josefresco » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

This article was weird. I started about ChromeOS and I was expecting a deep dive or interesting viewpoint on the OS market. Then it veered into "alternatives to Google" land, with a side promotion of HEY (of all things). It left me wanting, for an article about Google's OS strategy.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#279

Post by gumby » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

jldugger wrote: post #225

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.

Perhaps I'm in a time warp -- wasn't Inbox basically integrated with gmail last year?

According to my gf, a rabid Inbox fan, many important feature didn’t make he transition. She said a lot of her colleagues were pissed off about it too...and she was working at google at the time (not on Inbox/Gmail of course).

Scuttlebutt I heard (not via her) was it was the usual Google story: internal political fight unrelated to features or technical issues.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#280

Post by jasonv » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

mostlysimilar wrote: post #265

hinkley wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've recently been bothered because I hate all my email clients (except Outlook, weirdly enough, but I don't want to use Outlook with my Gmail accounts, because tag support isn't awesome...) and realized, of course, half my problem is I'm trying to manage too many emails I have no interest in reading.

There are a lot of newsletters I like, though.. for things related to fitness and outdooring, that are wholly in the "sign up for this virtual version of the event you were interested in!" and I've simply resigned myself to unsubscribing from all of them. I'll figure all this out later, but so much email feels like the parts of the web and RSS I work hard to avoid.

So, unsubscribe it is...

(That said, I've been trying HEY, and I don't like it [Such. Big. Fonts.] but I do like their "bundle" feature, and I wish I could set tags in Gmail to auto-delete after //n// days... that would make some things nicer to live with.)