I have used everything from google (as a typical user and as dev using their GCP) and everything they do "works" I feel like they do something messy and that's it. Kind of let's throw products and the client will figure out and if it isn't successful or we lose our main team we shut down the product.
I'm tired of Google's business products
41–50 of 193 posts
Re: I'm tired of Google's business products
#42Just go 100% Linux with the LibreOffice suite and if the business takes off, kick down a sizable donation.
Re: I'm tired of Google's business products
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
If somebody was trying to make Microsoft Office look good they would invent Google Docs. I hate to admit it but I am a boss with Powerpoint, I can get almost any kind of business illustration out of my head and into Powerpoint with the greatest of ease. Giving me Google Docs to attempt the same is like giving Superman Kryptonite. I think some people don't know how bad Google Docs is compared to Microsoft Word because…
I used Microsoft Office for years. Leaving aside collaborative editing which has been a game-changer for me (and, of course, you can get from Microsoft as well now), Google products do everything* I need and most of the features in Office just get in the way. *I'm not a power-spreadsheet user these days and every now and then I run into some very specific thing I can do in Word that I can't do in Docs--or it's easier…
I see Excel as the weak point in Office, at least from the viewpoint of getting the right answers.
There was that time I went and gave a talk in NYC and then came back to give the same talk in Ithaca and had an eagle-eyed web developer note an error in a chart I made with Excel because of the broken defaults.
There are numerous ways people get wrong answers with Excel, plus Excel does some really strange stuff to hide the fact that
0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3
There is something brilliant in the spreadsheet model, namely, it frees programming from the need to sequence operations in some particular order. The CS community has seen relaxing this as a way to find parallelism for the CPU & friends but not so much as a way to take a burden off the programmer who might not need to think about it.
However there is quite a bit structurally inadequate about Excel from the grid model which doesn't necessarily fit the problem and no support for software eng practices to make complex sheets that really work.
Re: I'm tired of Google's business products
#44Drive is incredible…ly terrible. Our non-technical staff (and some good technical people too) are always losing track of where files are. They write a doc then can’t find it later. The desktop tool (so you can use it like Dropbox) keeps getting confused and disconnecting on the Mac. I’m also part of a scout troop that uses google to organize its activities. In the troop’s Drive I’ve found doctor’s patient records, th…
If your drive folder has more than 50,000 files and you try to download an archive ZIP of them, your files will disappear at random. The only way to avoid this outcome is to install a desktop client and sync the folder.
Re: I'm tired of Google's business products
#45You're not alone.
Re: I'm tired of Google's business products
#46I completely agree - this is nearly verbatim a personal frustration I recorded in my work log from a few days ago:
Extremely frustrated with Google Shopping ads. I can’t understand how they make money. Spent an hour trying to figure out how to:
- Add custom UTM parameters (can’t unless with a manual feed, it looks like) because Google doesn’t doesn’t seem to track shopping ads unless you install extra JS events and modify google analytics
- Change search queries that products come up for (after deeper research, look like you can’t - again, handled by the data feed but your product title must be now SEO’d to all heck to hit the right keywords. Good luck if you have an original product name)
- Fix the product disapprovals (their bot was too dumb to understand how to navigate native shopify variants, it keeps seeing a mismatch between a variant and its price… and this is the data feed that Googles own app in Shopify generates!)
- Understand why the shopping ads dashboard in Google and the in-Shopify google shopping ads dashboard show different product disapprovals... just why? Genuinely confused here.
It’s ridiculous. It wasn’t this hard a few years ago. In the quest to add more ‘automation’ and ‘smartness’ they’ve made it so dumb and so bad it drives me up the wall.
It reminds me of the time when a friend tried to do Google’s recommendations for “smart” ads and it optimized his local North Carolina health store ads to ads for dieticians targetting neighboring states, because of a few logical algorithmic leaps of “well this is what other users see success with, with ads like yours.” He wasted a few hundred dollars and time fielding confused calls, until we reverted the campaign, turned all the recommendations off and made it a simple, dumb but effective campaign.
What a joke. A horribly infuriating joke played by a group of product managers and engineers. They are literally leaving so much money on the table because the platform is so unusable (speaking for experience: I regularly have people turn to me asking for help setting up their ads because they can’t make heads or tails of it).
Re: I'm tired of Google's business products
#47I created a small ad campaign to advertise a side project. The projects makes no money, has no plan for monetization, does not use passwords. The only personal data it collects is an email address. I bought $50 worth of ads using my credit card. My account was immediately suspended for suspicious payment. I appealed, noting the card was mine, and I bought the ads. The appeal was rejected. I have occasionally tried to…
"I've called Google to try to talk to them"... Currently contemplating this, but am certain it will leave me with a feeling of "well, I'll never get that 30 minutes back"
To their credit, the automated system told me I was banned and couldn't talk to anyone until I got unbanned, so I never got anyone on the phone.
Re: I'm tired of Google's business products
#48Makes me think of a question I've pondered but to which I don't have an answer: is there a way to use Libre Office synched through cloud storage such that multiple people can work on different parts of the same document at the same time and see each other's changes?
Nextcloud with Collabora CODE has worked pretty well for me, but please keep in mind I'm only using it at home.
They offer a more enterprise option, I believe. CODE is more the development track.
Re: I'm tired of Google's business products
#49Google is an advertising company. Their productivity apps exist for one reason --- privacy invasion/data collection --- in support of their advertising objectives. Using Google apps for anything other than advertising is like going to a medical doctor for a toothache. You might receive something that temporarily eases the pain but the root problem remains largely unsolved.
Do you think Google is reading the contents of drive documents? I struggle to make the connection between those kinds of business apps and advertising. Perhaps they get some usage data of how/when people work? I do believe much of what Google does (i.e. chrome) is to benefit their ads business, but I think it's a bit cynical to think that's true of every product they have. FWIW I've worked at companies that use both…
>Do you think Google is reading the contents of drive documents?
It literally says in gdrive tos that they read the docs, yes they do .
"Our automated systems analyse your content to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customised search results, and spam and malware detection,"
Re: I'm tired of Google's business products
#50Google is an advertising company. Their productivity apps exist for one reason --- privacy invasion/data collection --- in support of their advertising objectives. Using Google apps for anything other than advertising is like going to a medical doctor for a toothache. You might receive something that temporarily eases the pain but the root problem remains largely unsolved.
Which of Google's productivity apps collect your data for ads? Can you provide some proof?
The fact that Google engages in and facilitates privacy invasion shouldn't need proof at this point.
https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/gmail-snooping/
Can you prove or show anything in their terms of service or privacy policy that legally prevents it?
Being a profit driven company, the only reasonable assumption is that anything that can be used to increase profits will be used.