81–90 of 186 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't even know this ever existed.
Wait till you find out that the new Google Pay app also doubles as a chat app.
Google as an inovative company with amazing things to try died almost a decade ago. Today its more or less IBM. Would you try IBMs new chat app?
There's so many counter examples to this though... E.g. Stadia, which a lot of people doubted would be technically possible at all.
There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, (and off-by-one errors....) I feel like naming things is something Apple works really hard on. And why they place so much emphasis on it in their keynotes, when they use the phrase "And we're calling it ..."
"And we're calling it..." iPhone Xs Max Apple has improved their naming but they had a bunch of duds.
A comment I don't see here yet is that this is to some extent a consequence of Google's business model. The assumption seems to be that a company should be wary about doing what they're doing, because they'll lose business. But Google's not directly selling these services, in most cases. I assume they're happy with the way they do things, which is try a bunch of stuff in a slightly chaotic but fairly nimble way, be h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And not really iterated on... Maps got slightly better but Gmail and GDoc were uh... not really refactored into better stuff
Maps was entirely rewritten to use WebGL and support 3D. Gmail had the entire backend rewritten to scale much larger, priority inbox and categories, rich content emails, auto suggest as you type. Docs was completely rewritten, and they're working on another rewrite using canvas. Spreadsheets was rewritten twice, and a huge number of excel features ported over. It's true they don't overhaul the whole product every yea…
> Gmail had the entire backend rewritten
> Docs was completely rewritten
> Spreadsheets was rewritten twice
I think I’m starting to understand why these products very rarely receive new features, which I believe is the point di4na was making.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At the same time Apple’s stuff has improved year over year. Out of all the large tech companies I’m most bearish about Google’s future - they seem aimless. Deepmind is cool, but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing. As an iOS user, I feel the opposite in most areas except calling/messaging/facetime. I find Apple software to be severely limiting their own hardware. Their iPads are such excel…
I agree there’s a lot more potential for iPad hardware UI, but also think they’ve improved year over year. It’ll be interesting to see what they work out for iPad OS to make it more powerful. They’re obviously not willing to just slap a standard PC OS on there. I’d guess they’re going to come up with new stuff from first principles as best they can for it (even if that means limiting it in the short term).
A comment I don't see here yet is that this is to some extent a consequence of Google's business model. The assumption seems to be that a company should be wary about doing what they're doing, because they'll lose business. But Google's not directly selling these services, in most cases. I assume they're happy with the way they do things, which is try a bunch of stuff in a slightly chaotic but fairly nimble way, be h…
This and also: I wonder if the messiness of these products derives from a messy company structure. Maybe different departments or teams competing against each other for money, career advancements, etc. all without a strong leadership that can cut bad ideas before they start to be developed. Does anybody have information to prove or disprove this conjecture?
It hasn't been all that confusing to me. I was on Google Talk, then I switched to Hangouts, which I have been using with my family until about a month ago, we've since transitioned to the new Google Chat and it's been fine. I like that it works on every device just by logging in. I also use Signal if there's more confidential stuff I need to send. I haven't used SMS in years and I really hope they don't try to bake t…
> receiving codes I wish that would stop. SMS is horribly insecure as a 2nd factor.
I tried so hard to integrate into the Google ecosystem. I had a Gmail account and Google Talk to start. Eventually an Android phone, on Project Fi, with Hangouts and SMS (so I could send SMS over the internet). I upgraded from Gmail to Inbox. Then when they ditched that for Allo and Duo I tried to switch to those. Then I lost SMS on my computer because it got removed from Hangouts. Then I tried to switch to Google vo…
This is sad for me because I hate how locked down Apple ecosystem is, I constantly get rubbed by their store policy that I stick with Android, but life is much simpler in the Apple ecosystem and none of their competitors look like they have what it takes to compete (eg. Samsung software is a joke even when the hardware is competitive).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's so many counter examples to this though... E.g. Stadia, which a lot of people doubted would be technically possible at all.
>There's so many counter examples to this though... You work for Google; there may be some bias here. >E.g. Stadia, which a lot of people doubted would be technically possible at all. Technically impossible? Really? I don't think anyone held doubt. Perhaps people figured it'd be expensive to develop but certainly not impossible.
Yes, so many people were citing latency would make it unplayable, etc.
> You work for Google; there may be some bias here.
If I was stating an opinion, maybe. In this case, I am merely pointing out the counter example: Stadia, etc.