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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#411

Post by gota »

dandare wrote: post #247
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…

> They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there... I mostly use YouTube to watch series - PBS Space Time, World War Two, Crash Course etc. YouTube is absolutely horrible at navigating through these series - it is difficult to find where you left, it is difficult to find the next episode, there is absolutely no user comfort.

Yes - I find myself navigating Channel pages often, in hopes that the content creator took the time to create an applicable playlist

But then if I quit a video _that I played from a playlist_ and check my history _the playlist itself is listed, and not the actual video_

It is, indeed, a mess

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#412

Post by hodgesrm »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #380
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…

You're not the only one. Organizing documents in Google Drive is a huge pain. When I create a folder, I often want to put multiple existing documents in it. I find the documents by searching, and each time, the "Move to Folder" modal makes me navigate the directory hierarchy to find my new folder instead of having it available as a recently-accessed folder like Gnome does.

Seen that one too. The fact you can't do quick batch operations across many documents makes me crazy.

Google Docs has so much potential. Google should just spin it off into a separate company and let it find its own way. Making it conform to Google notions of search has crippled the design.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#413

Post by foobiekr »

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…

each unit of additional reliability and supportability is probably a bigger impact for google than any given user feature.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#414

Post by robotresearcher »

cpeterso wrote: post #356
felixgallo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the "Alexander bias" term -- is that yours, or are you quoting someone else?

What does "Alexander" refer to here?

'And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.'

Attributed to Alexander the Great.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander...

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#415

Post by foobiekr »

nostrademons wrote: post #367
throwawaygler wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it's changed, dramatically. I was there from 09-14 and then just rejoined last week. In 09-10 there was a huge problem of "launch and run" - people would launch, they'd get promoted, then they'd be reassigned to other higher-priority projects to get them launched too, and their previous project would get shut down rather than maintained. Nowadays there seems to be a lot more emphasis on stability and long-ter…

are they getting _promoted_ though. successful promo packet for sustaining work would be a very big change.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#416

Post by znpy »

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 don't sell it, they use it to profile you

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#417

Post by jariel »

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.

So there are at least a few things here:

1) A 'cost calculator' will be a hugely sensitive product, that is absolutely in the domain of sales, it has nothing to do with dev. So many sales issues around that - this will be the primary issue with such a product.

2) Just because some people like it doesn't mean it's worth maintaining. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. Paradoxically, because it was such a marketing/sales focused product, it's possible the Eng. driven culture didn't really understand it's value and thought it was maybe to simple of a product. Arguably, it's hardly a product, more of a marketing feature.

I suspect if sales was pushing hard for it it would have happened.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#418

Post by kikki »

jurassic wrote: post #97
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…

> 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. Hey's screener feature shows there's a lot of room to innovate on giving users control of their attention beyond the filters and labels that Gmail has deemed sufficient for more than a decade now. Setting up forwarding to use Hey as a r…

I watched the HEY video and I don't get it - the screener feature is not innovation - it's a block list with a different name. Gmail has this. The way Jason hyped up every feature and then you realise it's something that already exists with a special "product name" (Imbox, really?). I can see why people buy into the marketing speak but look a little deeper.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#419

Post by ciarannolan »

alexpetralia wrote: post #137
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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_price

>A limit price (or limit pricing) is a price, or pricing strategy, where products are sold by a supplier at a price low enough to make it unprofitable for other players to enter the market.

>It is used by monopolists to discourage entry into a market, and is illegal in many countries.[1] The quantity produced by the incumbent firm to act as a deterrent to entry is usually larger than would be optimal for a monopolist, but might still produce higher economic profits than would be earned under perfect competition.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#420

Post by jogjayr »

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 don't understand this "leetcoders produce bad code" meme. Is there something about being good at whiteboard interviews that makes you bad at writing clean code?

Outside Google, I've seen plenty of terrible code by people who would fail FizzBuzz.

Within Google, I've seen way more attention paid to code quality and system design than at any other place I've worked at.

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