211–220 of 375 posts
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"At Area 120, we work on 20% projects 100% of the time." It literally just has no backing by Google's corporate or business goals.
Aka we will kill this at any time.
Does anyone feels looking at Google's products lately that there's something tremendously wrong with the organization. I'm not talking about just dropping features but just quality of implementation and missing things that people should get fed up and do something during development. Like hangout > chat, let's drop the existing feature of read receipt that is even more important in the remote/work world in a product…
A few years ago it used to have air quality index. Then, it just disappeared one day for unknown reasons. According to this article, it disappeared in 2018 https://9to5google.com/2018/11/11/google-weather-missing-air...
So this bug fix or feature regression is probably sitting in their backlog somewhere. Now the past few weeks, the skies in the Bay Area have turned orange and there's extreme unhealthy air quality for weeks. And not a single Google developer thought, hey we really should prioritize fixing that air quality bug now? Does anyone at Google even use Android? How can the skies be orange and it's so dark during daytime from smoke that headlights are on, but no one noticed the Weather app doesn't have air quality index?
Strangely, why does a company like Google, wakes up so late when Airtable hits Series-D and not Series-A/B/C ? Looks like its straight forward product for somebody who makes google spreadsheets.
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Are all these comments about the near and inevitable death of your new product at all soul-crushing? I'm a stranger on the internet and even I can feel the burn. Good luck.
As a Googler, I'd just say it's a boring meme that shows little thought and just wastes time actually getting to interesting discussion here. It's almost akin to "first" from the old days of Slashdot or the race to mention generics whenever anything related to Go comes up. Products come and products go, this is not unique to Google. Killed By Google is cited as some sort of proof, but that goes back to _2003_, and do…
While products come and go is true, it's more a matter of scale on why this reputation exists.
I know I personally have been burned by the platform I was using going out from beneath me. That memory comes up each time I am considering between an AWS (where its never happened to me), azure, and google cloud solution.
Why do I care it is from Area 120? Why even share that branding - it just adds to the confusion. Is this an internal startup? Will it disappear? Stick around?
I already pay for Gsuite, now I should pay for this? Does it work in my gsuite org? Why would I not just go with Airtable at that pricing. How long will it stick around? Why is the feature list so much smaller compared to Airtable? What is their product road map? Why as a business user should I invest in this?
Come on Google, play for keeps, don't just dabble.
I see a lot of comments about people who are worried that Google might shutdown the service entirely and I agree with your concerns. The last months we have seen a lot of giants building their own database spreadsheet like hybrid, Google Tables, Microsoft Lists and Amazon Honeycode. Tools like these contain your most important data and you want to have freedom, security and independence as they can be an important pa…
Your website design looks very nice. What css/ui framework did you make use of it?
https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow/-/tree/develop/web-frontend...
They do use Nuxt, a fullstack framework for Vue.js, which is style-agnostic.
Strangely, why does a company like Google, wakes up so late when Airtable hits Series-D and not Series-A/B/C ? Looks like its straight forward product for somebody who makes google spreadsheets.
I wonder that too. Their gSuite products evolve soo slowly (when was the last time diagrams changed?). Ironically, unlike desktop software when you had to convince people to purchase a new copy each year, it seems like the Cloud distribution model allows google to basically put their products in maintenance mode indefinitely since people will still be paying for the subscription each month and switching cost is high.
At Google, they said, you get significant bonuses, promotions, and prestige for launching a brand new product, especially to large fanfare or hype. Conversely, you get little to no bonuses, promotions, or prestige for maintaining that product long-term.
That means that Googlers have huge incentives to create and launch promising projects, and then immediately transfer off that project to some other new project to create and launch that, leaving some other team to maintain it, thanklessly.
This means that, in the absence of top-down direction from the executive level, GSuite will remain effectively stagnant forever, with minimal, if any, improvements. In my experience managing IT for a small startup that used GSuite extensively, this was generally true; the service as a whole was "promising", but had huge gaps in functionality or integrations that would never be addressed (like being able to back up/export a user's data without having to log in as them and request a Takeout file).
Another example is Google Inbox; again, a new-ish project, launched to much fanfare and rave reviews, but once it's launched, who cares? So it was "integrated into" regular Google Mail inbox, except it wasn't because the team doing the integration isn't going to get those huge bonuses for doing all that work so why bother?
I'm not 100% sure that this is true; again, I "read it in a thing that someone said", for all the validity that has, but it would certainly explain why so many of Google's products feel 80-90% finished, and have for a decade or more.
In this respect, I've effectively given up on Google ever improving anything, unless doing so will help stifle the competition's growth. Improve Android to counter iOS? Sure. Improve Google Docs to counter Microsoft Office? Nah, we're mostly dominant there already.
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This is a bit of an over-used joke. Given this is explicitly being launched under "Area 120", "Google's workshop for experimental products", I think it's fair to let them ship things, try things out, see what works, and close what doesn't.
No joke. We have company policy now to not use google for anything.
Unless you're a Google competitor there's likely no reason to exclude Google products.
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Google Docs and Sheets already feels like abandonedware. I haven't seen any substantial changes in years.
I can't imagine what additional features the overwhelming majority of people need out of a word processor or spreadsheet software.
So much Google Hubris here. A day late and a dollar short with a heavy ladling of google self-importance. Why do I care it is from Area 120? Why even share that branding - it just adds to the confusion. Is this an internal startup? Will it disappear? Stick around? I already pay for Gsuite, now I should pay for this? Does it work in my gsuite org? Why would I not just go with Airtable at that pricing. How long will it…
That, and given Google's habit of cancelling novel projects, I just wouldn't trust this over a third party service.