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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#451

Post by kccqzy »

PhearTheCeal wrote: post #8

For Google Translate you should check out DeepL https://www.deepl.com/translator It's absolutely insane, blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy.

I was recently translating a French tweet to English that happens to mention the title of a French book. I was very surprised to find that DeepL kept the book title in its original French instead of translating it. It suggests to me that DeepL seems to have more "understanding" of the text, if deep learning algorithms can be said to have any understanding at all.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#452

Post by crazygringo »

Google's been improving G Suite a ton, but just not "innovating" in the way the author wants.

What Google hasn't been doing is blowing up how word processors and spreadsheets work, like a "Google Wave" re-envisioning or something of them. Why? Because people understand how Word and Excel and Docs and Sheets work and don't want change.

What Google has been doing over the past ten years centers around 1) interoperability, 2) business needs, 3) intelligence and 4) performance.

For example, interoperability: you can use Google Drive File Stream to access your Drive files like a local filesystem. Or being able to comment in PDF's, or edit Office files directly without first making a copy in Docs or Sheets.

Or business needs: Google Classroom lets you use Docs with your students. Or things like document diffs and approvals. These things don't seem "innovative"... but they're necessary.

Intelligence? Look at how Sheets will automatically analyze your data to try to produce meaningful graphs. Or how Docs now fixes your spelling mistakes as you type, vastly better than e.g. autocorrect on iOS.

And performance is mainly with Sheets -- it's much better at handling large amounts of data than it used to be.

But yes, Google's been focused on giving users the features they actually need, rather than capital-I "Innovation". Because that's what users actually want.

I don't want Google trying to reimagine word processing and shoving it in my face or something.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#453

Post by sireat »

jankiehodgpodge wrote: post #393
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.

Thank you! Chesterton's fence strikes again. There had to be a reason for this misfeature.

Then the question is why would schools use Google classroom at all then if they have their own MIS/SIS.

As I was teaching to adults I was puzzled on how to effectively use Google Classroom.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#454

Post by PaulHoule »

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 ?

It's not a good comparison.

StarOffice was developed by a company that was trying to sell it the old fashioned way but became Open Source because Sun was trying to keep its Unix workstations viable (no way we'd see "Office for SPARC") and also challenging Microsoft with Java.

Oracle bought Sun. Oracle kept Sun products alive because they know one reason people $$$ for Oracle is support.

Once it got renamed and spun out of Oracle, LibreOffice has been kept alive by various stakeholders such as companies that have big fleets of heavily hacked instances, Eurocrats who wish they could break the hold of American software monopolies, linux distros who want another piece of shovelware to list on the box, etc.

A typical end user might not perceive that leaving an issue on GitHub is not good customer service, even if some people enjoy the liberty of fixing things for themselves.

---

More seriously, Libreoffice is software you run on a computer you control (e.g. your desktop, a cloud server, whatever, ...) Since you are paying for the computer, you don't have conflicts about how generously to provision hardware.

Libreoffice is a ship in a bottle. 1000 years from now somebody might dig up an optical disk from a landfill and boot Libreoffice, but it is hard to believe Google Docs will last that long.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#455

Post by kccqzy »

karmakaze wrote: post #347
edw wrote: post #340

My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning," whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the show. Chrome was the same thing, though the competitor was Microsoft. Google Docs? Same thing, Microsoft again. Google is good at building things 90% as good as they could be. For Gmail that 90% was leaps and bounds better than the web mail alternatives of 2004 w…

Yes, but why doesn't Google "run away with the show" themselves while in the lead?

It's a free product. They can spend more money and more engineering resources on a project to improve it, but with little financial results to show. Google has only been very slowly figuring out how to make money from anything other than ads.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#456

Post by gamblor956 »

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…

If you need power features, you should be using the desktop version...

The web version is intended for basic/common use cases, not power user functions.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#457

Post by jedberg »

Androider wrote: post #430
jedberg wrote: post #399

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…

When you open the Hey inbox, it only has the important stuff in it, not the messages of whoever decided to reach out to you today. It's a subtle difference but I love it. Then when you have a moment, it's also very satisfying to just go through the screener list in bulk and click thumbs down/up and knowing you'll never see that sender again. Sometimes in GMail, no matter how many times I mark some thing as spam, the…

> When you open the Hey inbox, it only has the important stuff in it,

So does my gmail. It only shows things marked important.

> Sometimes in GMail, no matter how many times I mark some thing as spam, the mail keeps on coming

That happens to me occasionally, but I just click on "filter messages like this" and then set it to never mark as important (or straight to spam).

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#458

Post by jurassic »

kikki wrote: post #418
jurassic wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just starting a new email address. Hey's screener feature shows there's a lot of room to innovate on giving users control of their attention beyond the filters and labels that Gmail has deemed sufficient for more than a decade now. Setting up forwarding to use Hey as a r…

I watched the HEY video and I don't get it - the screener feature is not innovation - it's a block list with a different name. Gmail has this. The way Jason hyped up every feature and then you realise it's something that already exists with a special "product name" (Imbox, really?). I can see why people buy into the marketing speak but look a little deeper.

Gmail does not have this. Hey inverts the default behavior to one that is consent-based, and things can only reach your inbox if you thumbs up the first time they send something to you. This is not some minor technical point, it is at the core of Hey's value proposition. In Gmail, the default is that everything gets to you and it's up to you to play whackamole with filters and unsubscribes, requiring several clicks each time.

In addition to the simple whitelist behavior, on the initial Hey screening you can (with a single click) route second-tier messages into Feed and Paper Trail, which is a much better UX than what you can build in gmail by creating a filter for every sender that labels + autoarchives.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#459

Post by listenallyall »

dang wrote: post #433
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.

You're underestimating the appeal of a "rant against Google". That's all that Occam needs in this case. I looked at the votes and they seem organic to me. I'm afraid your comment breaks the HN guideline against insinuation of astroturfing/shilling/etc. without evidence. It's extremely common (well over 99% of these cases) for people to see something they find incongruent, massively overinterpret it, and jump into the…

Dang, I've just explained my reasoning in more detail below, in response to a comment earlier than yours.

To be very clear, my comment was intended to be complimentary, not negative. I stated it was impressive. The author's opinion about Google is totally valid and widely shared -- and that's what makes the article such a clever vehicle in which to insert a call to action on behalf of Hey. <-- no direct evidence, just my opinion, of course.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#460

Post by tomaskafka »

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…

Chrome? Try Edge. On mac, it's day and night, Edge does actually stop the pages you aren't viewing, bringing battery life and CPU use much closer to battery.

It's like this was a low hanging fruit of finally cleaning up some old mess in Chromium, Google ignored it for years, and MS team just did it.

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