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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#311

Post by skinnymuch »

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…

I can’t imagine that being true. Gmail had “relevant” ads based off their other ad tech from the get go. That was a point vs other majors having banner ads.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#312

Post by thomasahle »

roenxi wrote: post #259
johnchristopher wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product" So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?

You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free. 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…

> You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free.

That's silly. Paid office suites use just as many computing resources, and Google docs use plenty resources through your browser as well.

I think the "if you don't pay for it, you're the product" quote is fine. You just have to exclude free and open source software.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#313

Post by charwalker »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #282
MperorM wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it's great for small teams and small organizations who will likely naturally come to a standardized way of doing things. I think it also can be great for larger organizations as long as that organization has a decent way to encourage (and ideally enforce) a standard way of organizing file shares. It's definitely a challenge once you start losing that structure, though.

Yeah, I think that if there are strong norms or rules on organization and structure then it can work really well for any size team. But as soon as 1 person or project starts to deviate (no matter how good the intentions) it can quickly drop into a mess like any free for all file share. My team at work technically owns this one file server that is open to most of the company and has been an easy duping ground. Like, project X needs a share, stick it on [Server] vs the effort to set up a new share on an appropriate server (there are many others including department specific).

We have a project slated for late this year or early next to audit the file server and shares then permission to begin migrating shares my team doesn't own to other servers. I'm so ready for that.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#314

Post by rubber_duck »

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…

>Android / Chrome are amazing

Chrome has been deteriorating in performance and power usage - on OSX at least, I recently switched back to Firefox because it was that bad (Safari is a step too far as I want to work on non-Apple platforms). Firefox has slipped from the mainstream and it's very obvious - so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) - the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.

And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation. Implementation is ridiculously inconsistent across OS versions and HW vendors - I was trying to create a WiFi management API for some industrial application that would connect to controller specific networks - Android has 2 layers of terrible and depricated API with documentation that was misleading at best, a new API that only worked on 10+ without backcompat, and the actual implementation was inconsistent across four Android devices we tested. We gave up on the project as the Matrix of features missing and hacks needed for every platform we could find was just not practical to maintain.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#315

Post by SahAssar »

intotheabyss wrote: post #172
SahAssar wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is not good lifeboat if you're jumping ship.

Brave on Android is pretty damn good imo. Brave on Desktop.. Needs work

Whatever platform the company has made some questionable decisions. So has mozilla, but definitely less so.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#316

Post by gokhan »

"Then something happened at Google. I’m not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software."

Google desperately iterates on multiple side-projects to find an additional revenue stream comparable to ads, that's all. Whenever the new toy can't deliver enough it gets nixed, we all know the practice.

I believe they know how vulnerable they are. An unexpected virus may shutter their ads business, this quarter results may be first of a kind in their history. They don't have the iron grip on marketplace on Android as tight as Apple. They know that cloud business will most likely be a Coke vs Pepsi market. I believe their monopoly on browser market feeds the status quo in ads, but what if Edge steals enough market share and comes default with ad blocking? What if the new the new Apple chip shifts desktops and laptops to Apple more and they need to seek permission of a hostile Safari to show ads?

Ads, their main source of income, is not something the end user wants. That's Google's problem.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#317

Post by smabie »

hedora wrote: post #123
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-re…

> It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend in a browser.

You mean like X? Which was created in 1984 and at the canonical version (11) in 1987?

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#318

Post by skinnymuch »

joshuamorton wrote: post #275
gumby wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does checking hashes of documents mean? Isn’t stuff either encrypted or not?

This might not be a good look for me to be confused by this as a web dev/programmer, but I does that mean they are securely or otherwise hashing everything they store on all users? Drive, Gmail and other Google services have tons of data. After THats they are also still only checking hashes?

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#319

Post by walljm »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #106

The choice of "alternatives" mentioned in the article, like "Hey", "Notion", "AirTable", etc. actually does more harm to the credibility to the article than good, because I can't think of any normal person using all these startup products for important tasks. Hell, I think the only demographic who would have switched all their workflow tools to these would be people who live in Silicon Valley, just helping each other…

My team (I am the director of software at my company) switched to Notion from Google Docs a little more than a year ago and I'm very happy with the change.

Google Docs addresses a slightly different use case than Notion. Notion is one document for a lot of people, owned by the organization. Google Docs are docs owned by many people, often duplicated. Notion is much better for building documentation and for storing institutional knowledge.

We still use Google docs for things that we don't need to share widely and don't need to be referenceable to a large number of people.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#320

Post by throwaheyy »

joshuamorton wrote: post #275
gumby wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Checking a hash of a document unavoidably necessitates reading the entirety of that document.
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