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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#341

Post by duncanawoods »

throwawaygler wrote: post #219
abc_lisper wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true, but there have been articles in public since 2010s if not longer, that show general contempt for having clean code and code maintenance, like having clean code is what lesser engineers worry about. I’m saying that thinking seeped into universities where smart kids, who generally imitate the smart professionals in their profession first. Google may not be the only company guilty of it, there are plac…

That doesn't match my experience at all. If anything, Google suffers from the opposite problem: engineering teams spend enormous resources on migrations and rewrites that make their systems cleaner/simpler/more general, but have little or no business value. There are tons of teams that could be making incremental user-facing improvements, but are instead spending their cycles on projects that are mostly about interna…

Sounds like a different symptom of the same illness.

The team rushes at the problem, has a honeymoon period where things look nice and progress is fast but... it all then goes to shit. If your reaction is to blame technologies or the previous generation of staff, dump the code and repeat the cycle, you end up in the same place.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#342

Post by benhurmarcel »

ancarda wrote: post #81
searchableguy wrote: post #17

I am getting tired of these google articles. I know how this will go, users will pat themselves for using duckduckgo, open street maps, firefox and fastmail anytime now.

I've never met anyone who uses OSM. I have just shy of 500 edits on OSM because I kept going to use it, finding it didn't have what I was looking for, and making improvements. It would be nice if there was a viable alternative to Google Maps. Apple Maps is apparently not too bad, but I'm using Android and Linux these days.

I use it for hiking mostly. It's basically the default source for most hiking apps, and is quite good for it.

I wish I could use it for more but it lacks a good app like Google or Apple Maps.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#343

Post by an_d_rew »

edw wrote: post #340

My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning," whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the show. Chrome was the same thing, though the competitor was Microsoft. Google Docs? Same thing, Microsoft again. Google is good at building things 90% as good as they could be. For Gmail that 90% was leaps and bounds better than the web mail alternatives of 2004 w…

> ... SquirrelMail ...

Oh thank you for that trip down memory lane! Ran my own SquirrelMail servers for years...

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#344

Post by callmeal »

fireattack wrote: post #143
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…

Can you elaborate more? I have no issues to put files or Google Docs in whatever folders I want in Google Drive, and they stay where they are (after all, Google Drive has local sync. It would be unusable if they don't).

The issue is when there's more than one team that needs access. There are multiple ways to share a document and the links to the original are all different (based on how it was shared: via a shared drive or via a shared folder or via a shared document link). And finding that shared document (if you don't remember how it was shared in the first place) can be a nightmare.

Sometimes you don't have a choice - we are a small team, and we're pretty good about using a shared drive and a shared folder. But sometimes you have to share a document with an external collaborator (or someone in another firm shares a document with you). And if you forgot how that document was shared, then google makes it practically impossible to find the original.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#345

Post by celim307 »

scarface74 wrote: post #217
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…

I was listening to an interview from a manager at GCP on the “Screaming in the Cloud” podcast. He had written a great cost calculator that would show how much money that someone could save over AWS. But because he couldn’t convince corporate to adopt it and when it became a feature it fell under the reliability guidelines, they canned it even though customers liked it.

I figure they thought they weren’t going to be always cheaper than AWS

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#346

Post by orange3xchicken »

rubber_duck wrote: post #314
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 fro…

Chrome has recently (within the last year) been repeatedly making me frustrated with its pdf issues. It feels like 40% of the time I open a pdf in chrome, I instead get an error message like "the plugin has crashed" or some bs. The only solution is to restart the browser entirely. Switched back to FF for this reason.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#347

Post by karmakaze »

edw wrote: post #340

My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning," whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the show. Chrome was the same thing, though the competitor was Microsoft. Google Docs? Same thing, Microsoft again. Google is good at building things 90% as good as they could be. For Gmail that 90% was leaps and bounds better than the web mail alternatives of 2004 w…

Yes, but why doesn't Google "run away with the show" themselves while in the lead?

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#348

Post by centaphon »

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.

I don't know enough about Hey to judge that, but to me comparing Notion to Google Docs is like comparing Slack to Gmail. I mean sure, both Slack and Gmail are communication tools, but they solve for different use cases so they're not really interchangeable. I can imagine that if your use cases are all things that Slack is better at you might think "Wow, Gmail is so outdated and horrible why isn't it like Slack?" But personally I like having both because I have use cases that email is better for and I'm skeptical that one generalist tool that tried to be useful for all use cases would be particularly good for any of them.

Getting back to Notion and Google Docs, I'd rather use Notion for internal documentation and I'd really, really rather use Google Docs for redlining contracts, which is most often what I'm doing when I'm dealing with .doc/.docx files. In Microsoft's suite I think Notion is an alternative to OneNote, not to Word. So I would agree with the author if the implication was that Google should have a Notion-like tool in addition to Google Docs, but suggesting that Google Docs is bad because it's not Notion-like doesn't make any more sense to me than saying that Gmail is bad because it's not Slack.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#349

Post by DesiLurker »

tengbretson wrote: post #71

It boggles my mind to imagine how many verticals in the technology space have been kneecapped because of google. There could be so many companies that could offer amazing services but they just can't compete with a half-assed "free" service made by Google, which is just a temporary cost center for all the ad revenue they don't know what to do with.

wasnt this the main issue with small startups and Microsoft 'embracing' them with half-assed projects back in the day. some would even say that this was the main cause of dot-com bubble. thats when VCs realized that Microsoft cant touch these web based companies so now they can finally invest in these emerging businesses, thereby triggering a goldrush.

as always govt has failed everyone by failing to prosecute these big behemoths where the only 'innovation' they do is centralize and capitalize on an already emerging solution from the rise of internet and computing.

what we need is a philanthropic fund that funds startups like craigslist & does it completely open sourced from the getgo.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#350

Post by sireat »

Google is famous for half-assing and then abandoning promising projects. (insert comparison vs other tech companies).

One example of a half forgotten project is something called Google Classrooms - for teachers and students.

It is missing so many basic features.

For example there is no way to automatically take attendance when students log in.

You can hack around it but for a project aimed at teachers it shouldn't be so painful.

While I am ranting: I am still thankful(/s) to Google for abandoning Google Hangouts integration with Youtube live streaming.

This forced me onto OBS full time and is actually a good thing.

EDIT: I speculate that this frequent failure of integrating between various Google properties must be because there is a strong silo effect by now at Google just like any other big corporation.

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