31–40 of 171 posts
anyone taking bets... ehm willing to speculate on what big is next dying at google? I'm thinking about google tv, or is that Q already gone? music? books? I'm happy to see G staying on the marketing garden
I'm going with FeedBurner. Although you could argue it's already 90% dead.
Google is making the same mistakes Microsoft made. Trying to enter into every industry it can thinking it can use it's monopoly power to take over the world. Reality: Doing 20 things mediocrely is not as profitable of doing 2 things very very well. Result: 1) Constant experiments and dropped products (just like Microsoft). 2) Consumers no longer trust your services to stick around and no longer even invest in your pl…
Completely agree. I'm so disappointed in Google for having Checkout for years and not doing anything serious with it. I really wanted it to become a serious alternative to Paypal. But it's like they never even tried. And it turned out to be huge mistake for them because they could've really used Checkout accounts from day one of Android, to get people to pay for Android apps. I still believe this has been one of the…
Google is making the same mistakes Microsoft made. Trying to enter into every industry it can thinking it can use it's monopoly power to take over the world. Reality: Doing 20 things mediocrely is not as profitable of doing 2 things very very well. Result: 1) Constant experiments and dropped products (just like Microsoft). 2) Consumers no longer trust your services to stick around and no longer even invest in your pl…
This is bizarre considering that the Gmail money thing just launched so Google is remaining in the payment processing business (different from Play in that Checkout and Google Gmail Money are much more accessible to recipients).
The "Gmail money" thing is a Google Wallet feature, as Google Wallet doesn't include credit card processing on the merchant side, I suspect that for things where Google is, effectively, the "merchant" (like sending money through Gmail), they are paying a third party for processing services.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems to be a mistake that a ton of startups make as well. It's a result of indecisive (read:poor) management and inevitably leads to doing nothing particularly well. One company that I've seen not fall into this trap is Dropbox. Dropbox offers one amazing service and pours all it's efforts into that, and from what I hear they have some insanely smart people working there doing that. As a result they can afford…
Question. Do you actually use Dropbox ? Because for me it is one of the most overrated services I use. They haven't actually done anything new to the product since the beginning and the CPU load when syncing is still ridiculously high. IMHO The only reason Dropbox is successful because the alternatives e.g. SkyDrive, Google Drive are so much worse.
The biggest gripe I've had with anything Drive-related, has been Google's 'Keep' losing some data from notes I made on my phone while I had a tab open with Keep on my laptop. Apparently my phone didn't get a chance to sync properly before I touched my computer again, so it just totally discarded everything I did on my phone. That was annoying, but it's not really something I associate with Drive specifically, since it still seems like an experimental side project they could potentially kill off at any point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems to be a mistake that a ton of startups make as well. It's a result of indecisive (read:poor) management and inevitably leads to doing nothing particularly well. One company that I've seen not fall into this trap is Dropbox. Dropbox offers one amazing service and pours all it's efforts into that, and from what I hear they have some insanely smart people working there doing that. As a result they can afford…
Question. Do you actually use Dropbox ? Because for me it is one of the most overrated services I use. They haven't actually done anything new to the product since the beginning and the CPU load when syncing is still ridiculously high. IMHO The only reason Dropbox is successful because the alternatives e.g. SkyDrive, Google Drive are so much worse.
>IMHO The only reason Dropbox is successful because the alternatives e.g. SkyDrive, Google Drive are so much worse.
Thank you for partially restating what I wrote in my comment.
I think the problem was Google's Api was very ill written compared to Paypal's. This may be an old implementation, but I think the Api didn't allow subscription services easily, and also notified it's sellers of an order immediately (regardless if the transaction was successful or not). Beside, I think Google is investing the proper resources in building Waller to be a formidable product against Paypal, Amazon, and o…
It's a real shame that Google Checkout never really was what was promised, we've integrated it into our shop and we have more GoCardless payments than Google Checkout, it was a horrible system to deal with and I won't miss it when it goes (and if I ever get a response about the Stripe UK beta I'll be swapping that quick sharpish) We've had more declined transactions on Google Checkout than PayPal + GoCardless put tog…
Sorry you haven't gotten one yet! I just sent an invite your way.
All of our payments come through either Google Checkout or PayPal. And some people really hate PayPal, so we will be looking for alternatives (Amazon Payments springs to mind).
I could see the writing on the wall for Google Checkout a couple years back, though. They failed to add any new features in recent times in order to try to match PayPal. The reporting was weak. E-mail notifications didn't always work right. Declined charges were a hassle. E-mail payment requests couldn't be formatted and were too short. Those were my main complaints, I'm sure there were many more problems faced by people who had different requirements.
Checkout had huge potential to integrate into Google's other services. For example, it let Google see directly who the best and most reliable merchants were. In fact, I believe you can still have Adwords show stars on your text ad based upon Checkout customer feedback.
Another useful integration is with Analytics. They did attempt some information sharing there. Tying Analytics directly to sales information is fantastic, and I wish they had made them work together better.