Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#391

Post by smolder » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #360

thomasahle wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There is free as in Freedom as well as free as in beer. The quote seems to apply to things that are free as in beer but not free as in freedom. It'd be valid given that distinction.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#392

Post by jasonv » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

secondbreakfast wrote: post #365

jasonv wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use Mailplane for when I want to see all my email accounts, and Spark when I want to deal with all email accounts together.

Each work Chrome profile has a pinned Gmail and, maybe, a Slack.

So I can be universal, or targeted, where I want to spend my time.

That said, I'm also spread across too many endeavors, but that's a totally different problem.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#393

Post by jankiehodgpodge » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

sireat wrote: post #350

Google is famous for half-assing and then abandoning promising projects. (insert comparison vs other tech companies). One example of a half forgotten project is something called Google Classrooms - for teachers and students. It is missing so many basic features. For example there is no way to automatically take attendance when students log in. You can hack around it but for a project aimed at teachers it shouldn't be…

You can't take attendance in Google classroom because schools use MIS/SIS software to track attendance/assessment data etc. Without links back to the schools MIS data it gets held in a Google silo where it's not useful to anyone.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#394

Post by Crash0v3rid3 » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

searchableguy wrote: post #17

I am getting tired of these google articles. I know how this will go, users will pat themselves for using duckduckgo, open street maps, firefox and fastmail anytime now.

Same, always the same pattern here for any article about Google.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#395

Post by novok » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

s3r3nity wrote: post #63

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 google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily. This drove me nuts with my Nest Minis until I tried out Apple's Homepod. People hate on Apple for moving slow in the "connected home" space, but my Homepod sounds great, can distinguish between my wife and I, and can handle BOTH personal and work calendars for the two of us. I'll take the polish over my actual us…

I'm fairly frustrated with siri's voice recognition in general myself as a multi-year homepod user. The amazon echos I had before the homepod were more consistent and google's general voice transcription & knowledge base is still way ahead of siri.

I mostly chose the homepod because of privacy and better sound. If the privacy story was the same on google or amazon, I'd probably be using that right now instead.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#396

Post by Crash0v3rid3 » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

aphroz wrote: post #5

They also lost the trust of their users. They didn't drop the "don't be evil" for nothing..

Why does this still get posted?

They never dropped 'don't be evil', it's at the end of their code of conduct:

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#397

Post by arkades » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

listenallyall wrote: post #361

arkades wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Excising "no free tier" (because we damn well know "free" products ain't free either - that's not an indicator of marketing), your argument boils down to "one of those services is new, therefore, content marketing."

"All internet discussions of new products are content marketing" seems way overboard for me.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#398

Post by e_proxus » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #220

HenryBemis wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> _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…

> Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product" So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?

For open source, you kind of are in a weird way. Open source projects need contributions, for example in the form of bug reports, feature requests, proof reading and (in the rare case) source code. Many ousers provide these benefits to open source projects, which make them thrive.

On the other hand, looking at the coin from the other side you could also argue you’re paying with your time and effort and not your money.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#399

Post by jedberg » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

The author mentions switching to hey for email. Given all the press it's gotten recently, I decided to check it out.

I don't get the hype. This is how my gmail already works. I use priority inbox. New senders get high priority until I mark them as low priority, and then they don't. Gmail already has a snooze button so I can reply later (and also I have a reply-later tag that's easy to do with keyboard shortcuts).

You can do this search in gmail to replicate their sorted inbox: [is:updates in:inbox -l:important]. I just have a bookmark for that.

Finding attachments is easy. You just do [has:attachment]. I don't want all the attachments without their emails. The email provides context. Also, I can usually find it faster because I usually know who sent it or at least some words that were in the email.

What am I missing about hey.com? Why do people love it so much?

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#400

Post by raldi » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

I can't believe it's whatever year this is and Google Sheets can't remember that I just told it a particular sort range has a header row, or just figure it out by itself.