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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

secondbreakfast.co

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#361

Post by listenallyall »

arkades wrote: post #287
listenallyall wrote: post #57

To be clear, this is a stealth ad for Hey email service wrapped in a rant against Google. #1 on HN 20 minutes after posting. It's quite impressive, actually.

If mentioning it in a one-liner is a stealth ad, I assume this was also an ad for Notion, Zoom, Twitch, Apple, Instagram, and TikTok.

Only one of these services is brand new and just starting to build mindshare. Only one has no free tier. Only one currently has few enough users that securing a highly desirable username is still wide open: "My new email is billy@hey.com. I love it so far."

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#362

Post by eitland »

HenryBemis wrote: post #112
dleslie wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data. This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all. Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating syst…

> And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data.

I am a vocal Google critic, but I have yet to see any evidence of them selling my data. Unlike a number of other companies and organizations Google serms to have realized long ago that they are totally dependent on user trust.

I'm not saying they are smart (judging by the ads they have sent me the last 13 years, the killing off of Reader, the nymwars and then killing off Google+ after it turned out to be nice) or nice (the way they keep trying to crush the open web, the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model of pushing Chrome relentlessly until they almost have monopoly, then try to remove the possibility to run adblockers etc etc)

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#363

Post by secondbreakfast »

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.

What do you find awful about the monetizing on Maps? So far I've found it not very intrusive, and it seems much more clear on Maps than on Search when something is an ad.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#364

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

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…

Google Assistant is a product that relies on cross-learning from large amounts of user data. GSuite is a product that is contractually obligated to NOT doing this. The silos between GSuite and the rest of Google are intentional.

I don't work at Google these days so I can't offer the exact reasons why, but it shouldn't be surprising then that the two don't play well.

Amazon, on the other hand is not contractually obligated to create this silo. For it, your GSuite account is just another third party account, no different from your GMail account.

Yes this is an undesirable outcome, but when business users choose to buy GSuite services with the assurance that the data won't be available to Google for general purpose learning, this is the price they pay for that privacy.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#365

Post by secondbreakfast »

jasonv wrote: post #286
awinder wrote: post #207

“At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats for macOS Big Sur. It reminded me how much Chrome makes my machine go WHURRRRRR. Yesterday, I made Safari my default browser again.” I talk to developer friends in my circles and I’m pretty sure I’m on a crazy list for running safari, but I really do think it’s the best Mac browser. Chrome is just an absolute hog and until there’s some Camino-like renaissance for Firefox/Mozilla on…

I use Safari for personal surfing, and separate Chrome accounts for my various business/work related surfing. Keeps things separate and tidy, and I keep Chrome closed as much as I need it to be closed.

I like this idea a lot. I've been using Station to stay logged in to all my various work web apps, and then Chrome (now Safari) for personal.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#366

Post by tengbretson »

missedthecue wrote: post #354
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.

I don't know if this is sarcastic or not, but I believe this.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#367

Post by nostrademons »

throwawaygler wrote: post #219
abc_lisper wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true, but there have been articles in public since 2010s if not longer, that show general contempt for having clean code and code maintenance, like having clean code is what lesser engineers worry about. I’m saying that thinking seeped into universities where smart kids, who generally imitate the smart professionals in their profession first. Google may not be the only company guilty of it, there are plac…

That doesn't match my experience at all. If anything, Google suffers from the opposite problem: engineering teams spend enormous resources on migrations and rewrites that make their systems cleaner/simpler/more general, but have little or no business value. There are tons of teams that could be making incremental user-facing improvements, but are instead spending their cycles on projects that are mostly about interna…

I think it's changed, dramatically. I was there from 09-14 and then just rejoined last week. In 09-10 there was a huge problem of "launch and run" - people would launch, they'd get promoted, then they'd be reassigned to other higher-priority projects to get them launched too, and their previous project would get shut down rather than maintained. Nowadays there seems to be a lot more emphasis on stability and long-term code-health, people are getting rewarded for internal cleanups rather than launches, and many people have multi-year tenures on the same team rather than lots of single-quarter launches.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#368

Post by D13Fd »

haolez wrote: post #170
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…

> 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…

And yet, for the typical office user, it supports most or all of the stuff they are going to do. It's also fast, reliable, it renders Office files correctly, and the UI matches what people are familiar with.

All told, it's pretty good.

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