Updates to our Google Voice apps • Hacker News Board

Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#361

Post by tornadoboy55 » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #279

tornadoboy55 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't care. You as a user (for Google) ain't a customer, you're the product. This is most starkly clear in their customer service. Most of their free products don't even have one and refer to the Google forums. Meanwhile AdWords, AdSense etc. customer service is top notch. What pisses me off most is that there is no clear alternative if you want to keep your data portable between multiple brands/devices. Microso…

You underestimate how stultifying size can be. When I was at Google, pretty much everyone cared about how the internal incentives were screwed up. There were a lot of attempts at changing structure of promotion and career development, but nobody knows how to do it. To be fair, I'm not aware of any entities of that size who don't have the same problem of with balancing the need for centralization with keeping bright w…

Why not just place a product manager above each product (Gmail, YouTube, Play Music, etc. etc.) that each report to the master manager who's only job is basically to unify all the services and make them work together in a nice way. He would be the one to force everyone to use the same animations, same icons, same conventions etc.. honestly I never understand how companies with millions of dollars can't come up with the simple fix of 'give an experienced person total authority'.

Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#362

Post by shaklee3 » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 4:14 AM UTC

rspeer wrote: post #347

shaklee3 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All operators have worked fine for over two years. They announced this back then.

Okay, you can announce that everything is fine, but it just ain't so. I missed MMS messages on T-Mobile in 2016. Google's suggested solution, besides twiddling cellular network settings and asking your friends to keep texting you until it works, is to stop using Hangouts [1]. [1] https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/6318464?hl=en

I believe you, but it's something that isn't quite as easy to compare anymore. I have a friend with an iPhone on verizon that has missed MMS or found it delayed by days. GV is easier to blame usually since it's different than other services.

Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#363

Post by thewhitetulip » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 5:09 AM UTC

soylentcola wrote: post #343

thewhitetulip wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read an essay on HN few weeks ago which said that the problem with G+ was that the higher mgmt at Google thought FB is famous because of a nicely designed product (rather than network effect), so they released a good product G+, it is somewhat a good product but it missed the train. Plus it has circles, it isn't intuitive.

I actually like G+ in principle. They already had the option to create a basic profile for your Google account which was good for those of us who already used Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Maps, etc. from them. I think they figured they had all of the pieces to make a "better Facebook" and compete in that space, but as you say, network effects are strong. I know a ton of people who set up a G+ profile and I found both the w…

Even I love G+ on principle, but that's the point, in principle. The problem with G+ goes deep, first of all, they just assumed that a network gets traction because of beautiful UI, it is not the case, if you look at facebook's growth, it started as a way to talk and later as a dev platform, because of farmville and games like that they get a lot of traffic, so essentially facebook means different things to different people.

When fb came into existence there wasn't much of a competitor to it, so they focused on making it easy to use and stuff, later, when g+ was being created they misread the entire picture. At that point fb had become a platform or was becoming a platform. Currently, FB has different users, some use it as a buy sell group, some for messenger, some for playing games (APIs) etc

g+ didn't focus on good things, just beautiful UI doesn't mean you win, you have to differentiate yourself, they should have gone this way, start a private beta, build a terrific API for developers, so devs will flock to your platform and build apps on it, plus the circles stuff, it is great for geeks like us, but not so much for my grandma, who doesn't even know what google means. Plus, g+ takes an awfully large amount of time to load on slow network. Overall. Plus they don't have an end vision.

Re: Updates to our Google Voice apps

#364

Post by vpeters25 » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 7:15 PM UTC

awiesen wrote: post #348

vpeters25 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a GV as the primary in my resume for years. Last year, many recruiters emailed me that calls weren't going through with a recording stating "The person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this time". I asked in GV forums to not avail. I don't know how many nice job opportunities I missed when hiring managers saw my application but could not call me back until I detected the issue. Ended up switchi…

That recording isn't in Google Voice. Maybe you had a forwarding phone on your Google Voice account that was eating your calls. (Maybe you had an old one you forgot to take off, and someone else took over the number and it was doing that.)

I was told that by GV support, but I'm struggling to find any other likely source for it.

I removed all redirections from my GV number and tested:

- I called from my home and cellphone, both hangouts and GV ringed.

- I asked my family and friends to try the number and it worked fine.

- Then I asked a recruiter who was having trouble and he got the recording.

- Same recruiter called using his personal cellphone, it worked fine.

While speaking with this recruiter on a different line, I asked him to put his phone on speaker and try calling, I was able to hear him getting the recording...

I did all this before trying to contact google voice support. To me, it looks as thought GV is in denial there might be an issue on their side and refused to look into it.

I speculate there is something wrong in the way calls get routed to GV from certain providers, or some sort of spam caller filter is blocking recruiters who might have been wrongly reported as "telemarketers" by google voice users.

Edit: formatting and grammar