Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

secondbreakfast.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 576 posts

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#351

Post by benlivengood »

whoisjuan wrote: post #15

Google is only good at search. The only reason why I use everything else they create is because of their massive distribution, market penetration and inter-operability. Thankfully there are solid alternatives in certain areas like fore example using iPhone instead of Android. But for everything else I don't see a massive migration happening any time soon. Notion, Hey.com, DuckDuckGo are all niche products. My dad has…

Disclaimer: used to work there, but not in security/domains.

The other thing I find Google to be good at is account/login security. A gaccount with 2fa is unlikely to be stolen by anything less than a targeted zeroday against the 2fa device; social engineering just doesn't work to the extent that there's a trope of people who have permanently lost access to their accounts because they changed phones, phone numbers, lost recovery codes, etc. Combine that with Domains and I think it's pretty unlikely to lose a domain name registered with them.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#352

Post by ebg13 »

s3r3nity wrote: post #23
tengbretson wrote: post #9

> It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them. They appear to me to have begun monetizing google maps. And it is awful.

This is why I've switched to Apple Maps for like 98% of my navigation needs. I might be biased, because I live in one of the cities with the updated maps data, sure, but I find that it handles most of my use cases just as well as Google Maps.

I want to use Apple maps, but I just can't stand that the review boxes shunt me to the app store to download the Yelp app.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#353

Post by haolez »

olcor wrote: post #306
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…

I’m confused. Doesn’t Microsoft 365 include the desktop versions of the product and the ability to update them?

Yes, but I believe that the parent was talking about the web versions, since the comparison was made against Google Suite.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#354

Post by missedthecue »

tengbretson wrote: post #71

It boggles my mind to imagine how many verticals in the technology space have been kneecapped because of google. There could be so many companies that could offer amazing services but they just can't compete with a half-assed "free" service made by Google, which is just a temporary cost center for all the ad revenue they don't know what to do with.

yes, we'd all be better off if we had to pay for our email accounts.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#355

Post by ngold »

dleslie wrote: post #95
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…

> The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. On the outset, you might think with such ridiculously high compensation there would be an expectation of quality, but I think that's an error. Google operates as an ad-company that happens to employ ridiculous amounts of exhorbitantly compensated individuals to engage in market and technological research, particularly to open or exp…

And the reason they probably want to stay an ad company is so they don't get stuck with IBM sized workforce.

Their lack of customer support is border line criminal.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#356

Post by cpeterso »

felixgallo wrote: post #175
EthanHeilman wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always ha…

I like the "Alexander bias" term -- is that yours, or are you quoting someone else?

What does "Alexander" refer to here?

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#357

Post by Siira »

This article doesn't say anything worth hearing. It can be summarized as, "Google has not done visibly big consumer innovation." Which is not that true either. Their "cluttered" search is adding a lot of value. Their main innovation has also been in AI, mobile and the cloud.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#358

Post by cpeterso »

rubber_duck wrote: post #314
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…

>Android / Chrome are amazing Chrome has been deteriorating in performance and power usage - on OSX at least, I recently switched back to Firefox because it was that bad (Safari is a step too far as I want to work on non-Apple platforms). Firefox has slipped from the mainstream and it's very obvious - so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup fro…

> many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF)

You can report sites that are broken in Firefox at https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla engineers will debug the broken site and try to contact the site's developers. Firefox also ships some site-specific workarounds (such as spoofing Chrome's User-Agent string or tweaking some CSS). You can see the current list of site workarounds in Firefox's about:compat page.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#359

Post by hinkley »

munificent wrote: post #339
hinkley wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my employers was spun out twice, after having been acquired years ago. It was sort of a joke to tell people who the owners were. It made no goddamned sense. Sure, we had customers in common, but so do Xerox and people who lease out coffee machines. The toner-flavored coffee jokes practically write themselves. They just got onto a growth tear and bought a bunch of things they shouldn’t, and eventually rounded u…

> I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough. Is that not what Alphabet is?

That's what I was hoping Alphabet would be, but it seems like this bit is still a sticking point:

> or not high volume enough

Kind of a let-down

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#360

Post by roenxi »

thomasahle wrote: post #312
roenxi wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free. The quote is pithy but assumes some context - the [something] is being provided below the marginal cost to produce and therefore being provided with an expectation of benefit for the provider. Acquiring LibreOffice is not $0 marginal cost but they have a big "DONATE" button top-right corner of the website and The Document Foundation turns a…

> You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free. That's silly. Paid office suites use just as many computing resources, and Google docs use plenty resources through your browser as well. I think the "if you don't pay for it, you're the product" quote is fine. You just have to exclude free and open source software.

Excluding free software from a quote that starts "When something is free..." is equally silly. The quote stops being about anything.

But yeah, good point that my argument didn't make sense.

Post reply on HN