THEY KILLED GOOGLE READER AND BLOGGING AS WE KNOW IT.
I'll never forgive them for that, alone.
Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
401–410 of 576 posts
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#402Google 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…
Google maps is still pretty amazing. Maps and search are the only two Google products I still struggle to move away from.
(I am a big fan of Play Music too but of course they killed it.)
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#403I can relate a bit. I have been trying to 'degooglify' my life for sometime. Made these couple of shifts in the last two years:
* Chrome --> Firefox
* Google search --> DuckDuckGo
These are in pipeline:
* YouTube --> Newpipe (which is YouTube minus ads and tracking)
* Drive --> Mega.nz
* Gmail --> Protonmail
* Playstore --> F-droid (whenever possible)
At the same time, I have been using Google's Photos and Podcasts a tad more lately. Need to find good alternatives to these.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#404Couldn't happen to nicer company. I've been disentangling my personal stuff and company's I host for from the google hive for less woke options. Hit em where it hurts.
When the people you pay start threatening to walk out because they don't like what you are working on you know you have a systemic problem.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
and don't forget launching an abysmal cloud gaming service that was DoA!
Goooogcorp: We have seen that you are displeased that we are not supporting product. In response we are shutting this down. https://killedbygoogle.com/
If you stay longer then 2 years you obviously have never cared about what you build..
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#406It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy. May be this is just a natural outcome of that. This is one of the most damaging things Google and the people it influenced did to programming profession. There is a generation of programmers now who can do very well on leetcode, but god help those who maintain that code after them - I know t…
I was listening to an interview from a manager at GCP on the “Screaming in the Cloud” podcast. He had written a great cost calculator that would show how much money that someone could save over AWS. But because he couldn’t convince corporate to adopt it and when it became a feature it fell under the reliability guidelines, they canned it even though customers liked it.
Me!
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was listening to an interview from a manager at GCP on the “Screaming in the Cloud” podcast. He had written a great cost calculator that would show how much money that someone could save over AWS. But because he couldn’t convince corporate to adopt it and when it became a feature it fell under the reliability guidelines, they canned it even though customers liked it.
I figure they thought they weren’t going to be always cheaper than AWS
Nope, we will.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article rings completely true to me. One simple example: folders in Google Drive. * It's a constant struggle to keep documents in folders so that you can find them easily. * Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist. * Moreover, I can't ensure that important documents are reliably stored in folders where everyone else can find th…
> Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist. To illustrate this point more. I used to work in a company where everyone had to submit their timesheet via docs. And if you did not keep a link or copy or whatever they call it of your own sheet, it's essentially impossible to search for it, because now there are 1000s of identically name…
This. I wish I had thought of your example first.
We have service agreements that go through revisions. We copy the whole directory when there's a new release to ensure we don't lose old templates. At that point search on service agreements brings up a bunch of identically named documents in a listing that does not distinguish the directory location. It's actually caused us to send the wrong doc on several occasions.
Google if you are listening please fix this. Just do what everyone else does. You don't have to be creative.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#409The 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…
Everyone knows google is "better" software. Just like employees are promoted to one level above their potential, companies always push the envelope one step too far when pushing for growth/monetization. Google has been pushing way too much, way too often.
At this point, something that doesn't read my emails, give any bullshit law enforcement request a master key, and doesn't try and abuse the spirit of antitrust laws at every step is worth trying out, even if it's just only workable.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run. It's like they develop products just enough to get people using them so they can squeeze out some more meta-data and connect the dots back to a Google account, and then they stop development because it's not going to add more revenue. And if they can't figure out how to push advertising with it, they drop it.
> Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run. Absolutely. Just look at Google Maps these days. Google Maps used to be the only map app I'd use for everything. Now it is so littered with ads once you zoom in that I find it useless for anything other than directions. This is not a new trend for Google, the advertising company that occasionally builds things.
There's also a big problem with accuracy in GMaps. From what I can tell they put some effort in within the US, but in the two countries I've lived in, GMaps is sufficiently inaccurate that I have to use other maps.
For example: About a third of the streets that show on GMaps for my previous town don't actually exist - they're paddocks. Every other map is correct: HERE, Apple Maps, OSM, TomTom, etc. As Google notoriously has no support, there's no way to get it fixed, so I simply had to instruct everyone coming to visit me that they needed to download and use a different map software in order to find me.