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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#431

Post by haolez »

D13Fd wrote: post #368
haolez wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs You are in for a surprise. Office 365 (at least Excel and Word) looks like a toy compared to the desktop versions. I'm not talking about niche features or VBA, I'm talking about things like naming a table, which is explicitly only supported in the desktop version. Ah, of course! You need the table's name to use it in th…

And yet, for the typical office user, it supports most or all of the stuff they are going to do. It's also fast, reliable, it renders Office files correctly, and the UI matches what people are familiar with. All told, it's pretty good.

I'm not sure if the typical office user is the same as the casual office user.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#432

Post by wutbrodo »

tengbretson wrote: post #426
missedthecue wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an obnoxiously first world thing to say.

You might be too young to have experienced this, but this is literally how things used to be, and they worked pretty ok. When you payed your ISP for internet service it used to include an email account with it.

Not that I necessarily agree with the GP commenter, but this doesn't address his point. Things "used to" be this way during a time period with a billion less Internet users, who've come largely from the poorer parts of the developing world. The claim is that a high-quality free email service doesn't matter as much to someone with lots of disposable income in the first world as it does to people who aren't as fortunate.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#433

Post by dang »

listenallyall wrote: post #57

To be clear, this is a stealth ad for Hey email service wrapped in a rant against Google. #1 on HN 20 minutes after posting. It's quite impressive, actually.

You're underestimating the appeal of a "rant against Google". That's all that Occam needs in this case. I looked at the votes and they seem organic to me.

I'm afraid your comment breaks the HN guideline against insinuation of astroturfing/shilling/etc. without evidence. It's extremely common (well over 99% of these cases) for people to see something they find incongruent, massively overinterpret it, and jump into the internet to accuse others. We don't allow that here, because it poisons discussion and community. That doesn't mean real astroturfing doesn't exist (I blasted someone for it yesterday [1]). It means that we have to have something objective to go on—and if you have that, you should be letting us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate.

Plenty of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for anyone who wants it. Here's me saying the same thing 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986042.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619453, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619595

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#434

Post by falcolas »

Kiro wrote: post #308
falcolas wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion: Yes, it's true. - Canceling accounts, leaving people with the "Post it to HN and pray" customer support option. - Focusing more on growth than long-term support. See the original article for examples of this. - Taking their originally fast, svelte, and compliant web browser and injecting more and more features that are virtually required by Google domains, memory/CPU bloat, and privacy hostile tracking/te…

You're still talking about users within tech circles, which I'm not doubting has lost trust in Google. However, my mom or my siblings wouldn't understand what any of those points even mean.

They're hearing about notable accounts being closed in Google. Don't underestimate the exposure provided by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and a dozen other small sites who are also covering many of these "my account was lost/stolen/closed" stories.

They know (often better than I) when a service is relegated to Google's graveyard.

They wonder why their crappy 5-year old Lenovo laptop struggles with Chrome but not Firefox (which I installed for them too).

They notice Google's suite of apps popping and freezing and "just not working" and gripe to me with comparisons to Word and Excel.

Not being tech savvy doesn't mean they're idiots - they recognize when something isn't working well, or when something has become stale, just as well as we do.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#435

Post by hodgesrm »

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…

The "new features" ethos is really harmful in business apps.

Business users want focused things like accurate budget vs. actuals reports where you can flag and fix deviations quickly. There's an overall design--of course--but great enterprise software is the result of attention to very granular features related to specific work practices.

In this case the devil really is in the details.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#436

Post by wutbrodo »

franze wrote: post #115

I had the "pleasure" to work with Ex-Googlers which had "Project Managers at G" in their resume. Honestly, I do not wonder anymore why Google nowadays s#ck as hard as they do. They made great presentations and a grand plans using some project management saas tools. But both of them neither understood the basics of projectmanagement (Who does what when and what do they need when?) nor could react when challenged. Both…

I don't know if it's a "nowadays" thing. I joined Google 10 years ago and was there for a while, and I remember getting the distinct impression both internally and from looking at our products that we had world-class engineers and incredibly bad PMs, compared to the competition.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#437

Post by edm0nd »

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…

I still don't think you can even use G Suite domains with their voice assistant/home devices. It's beyond absurd.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#438

Post by Cactus2018 »

haolez wrote: post #170
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…

> Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs You are in for a surprise. Office 365 (at least Excel and Word) looks like a toy compared to the desktop versions. I'm not talking about niche features or VBA, I'm talking about things like naming a table, which is explicitly only supported in the desktop version. Ah, of course! You need the table's name to use it in th…

>You are in for a surprise.

Here's another Office 365 Web surprise. Last week we had 5 team members working in a shared Word document with track-changes; A) There is no "view final markup" option, and B) after a while the web-app crawled to a halt.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#439

Post by inakarmacoma »

hodgesrm wrote: post #408
SenHeng wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. To illustrate this point more. I used to work in a company where everyone had to submit their timesheet via docs. And if you did not keep a link or copy or whatever they call it of your own sheet, it's essentially impossible to search for it, because now there are 1000s of identically name…

This. I wish I had thought of your example first. We have service agreements that go through revisions. We copy the whole directory when there's a new release to ensure we don't lose old templates. At that point search on service agreements brings up a bunch of identically named documents in a listing that does not distinguish the directory location. It's actually caused us to send the wrong doc on several occasions.…

Docs has revision history.

For several of the concerns listed, I'm surprised to see how people are using the app.

Similar for asking every employee of a company to track their time in same name documents?

Perhaps poor processes and poor tool-to-solution matches contribute?

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#440

Post by tengbretson »

wutbrodo wrote: post #432
tengbretson wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be too young to have experienced this, but this is literally how things used to be, and they worked pretty ok. When you payed your ISP for internet service it used to include an email account with it.

Not that I necessarily agree with the GP commenter, but this doesn't address his point. Things "used to" be this way during a time period with a billion less Internet users, who've come largely from the poorer parts of the developing world. The claim is that a high-quality free email service doesn't matter as much to someone with lots of disposable income in the first world as it does to people who aren't as fortunat…

I don't know what to say. I don't claim to be an expert on what life is like in the developing world, so I'll have to defer to people like missedthecue and yourself to tell me what it's like there.
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