491–500 of 576 posts
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You might be too young to have experienced this, but this is literally how things used to be, and they worked pretty ok. When you payed your ISP for internet service it used to include an email account with it.
I thought the whole point here is that we don't like walled gardens?
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…
- Gmail is a very versatile tool, you can configure it to suit your needs and replicate most of the features of Hey. But they're basically hacks, like your bookmark of a search.
- Hey is a workflow and experience that the authors believe is the best, and it works in a clean way.
Another thing I like about Hey is how clean, light and fast it is. I don't need hangout, google meet, task and links to every Google product (but the Contacts page could be more accessible that buried between Photos and Drive!)
And I certainly need a friggin splash screen while my webmail takes 10 seconds to load. What were they thinking? Did they forget what made Gmail so good to start with??
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Can you elaborate more? I have no issues to put files or Google Docs in whatever folders I want in Google Drive, and they stay where they are (after all, Google Drive has local sync. It would be unusable if they don't).
The issue is when there's more than one team that needs access. There are multiple ways to share a document and the links to the original are all different (based on how it was shared: via a shared drive or via a shared folder or via a shared document link). And finding that shared document (if you don't remember how it was shared in the first place) can be a nightmare. Sometimes you don't have a choice - we are a sm…
I've been using DDG as my primary search for a while, because Google Search has been returning increasingly bad results already for quite some months.
For the past couple days I've tried Google's Search again, and, oh wow!, it is hilariously bad now, just laughable! It now entirely ignores search terms, and the AI and ad-based results work against me, not for me.
Google didn't blow a ten year lead, they blew a 20 year lead. AltaVista was better than this.
Initially, I thought this is because Google targets only big business customers, competing with Microsoft 365. Other product innovations do not scare them, they still offer a package with mail, video conferencing, docs, sheets, drive, etc' etc'. Great for big business collaboration tools. They just don't care for things like Notion or HEY. It's not their target and they don't make money from it.
But then I thought, this is an example targeted against Microsoft with a similar offering. What about Google Cloud? What about Android? They are both innovative. What happened there?
Then I saw it. Google consistently follows the market preventing its competitors from achieving market control. And in Google's case, "the market" is Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook.
We'll start with Microsoft since they were the first. And beating them down took place ~10 years ago, that's why it seems like the tech from back then never progressed much. Because the hit already strike.
Microsoft dominated the corporate world with its mail software Outlook, and with its Office suite, Word, Excel, etc'. Google is native to the web and they leveraged their position to slowly hit Microsoft in this spot. Gmail first, then Google Drive, and then Chrome to kill IE as a final strike. And it was successful.
Amazon got big into the tech business through AWS. Google went out to a fight through Google Cloud. Not only the offering is cheaper, it also provided technologies you can't explain any other way than just to hit AWS. Kubernetes as an open platform is against any business textbook to lock in customers. But it will allow for an easy way out of AWS in the long run, preferably to GCP but it can be any other cloud provider that provides Kubernetes service as well. It is strategically more of a hit to the front runner, Amazon, then a benefit to GCP.
These priorities order of first hit the front runner, then everything else is also seen with the Apple case. Android came after the iPhone. It has a much larger market share, and yet, it generates far less revenue to Google then the iPhone is to Apple. That's because the main goal is to prevent Apple from winning the market. And in that, it is successful.
Google Buzz. Ouch. Google Plus. Double ouch. Google spent so much effort into hitting Facebook as hard as they can. They were not successful here, but from the history of things it is obvious how Google try to hit Facebook. They did not try to create a new social platform, no. Otherwise they would come up with something that is not.. well, exactly like Facebook.
Google home initially released at 2016. Amazon Alexa in 2014.
I have so many more examples that comes to mind as I write, but the point is already clear.
On a final note, I'll say, Google is not only trying to bend down competitors. Google Glass is one new product market they tried to create. The self-driving cars initiative is another example the comes to mind. They do innovate.
They just have so much money, blocking out other big tech companies is a strategy they are not willing to give up. And when this is the strategy, well, Google sheets already took a huge chunk from Microsoft, what more does it need?
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All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always ha…
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…
I'm surprised the author doesn't spend more time discussing Google's search engine. I've been using DDG as my primary search for a while, because Google Search has been returning increasingly bad results already for quite some months. For the past couple days I've tried Google's Search again, and, oh wow!, it is hilariously bad now, just laughable! It now entirely ignores search terms, and the AI and ad-based results…
It 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 don't understand this "leetcoders produce bad code" meme. Is there something about being good at whiteboard interviews that makes you bad at writing clean code? Outside Google, I've seen plenty of terrible code by people who would fail FizzBuzz. Within Google, I've seen way more attention paid to code quality and system design than at any other place I've worked at.
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Lol, no. They have >100k employees.
Google has 118,899 employees. IBM has 352,600 which is about 3x the number of employees that Google has.
Give it time. My guess is Google will be well over 300,000 by 2030.