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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#521

Post by solvorn »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #327
btmiller wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off). That is a really strange false equivalency. Not even the slightest bit relevant, yet it reads as if you believe that protesting for social change is a bad thing.

There are lots of people that protest for social change without the luxury of getting company paid days off!

You care about social change but you’re asking why they’re getting more instead of why you’re getting less? And people wonder why there is so much inequality out there. You lot would rather circle jerk each other for renaming obscure software features rather than align with other workers.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#522

Post by solvorn »

intellirogue wrote: post #410
dorkinspace wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 notoriou…

OSM is better where I live in the US now when it used to be only better in Europe Edit: google maps is a spatial yellow pages. OSM is an atlas.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#523

Post by amznthrowaway5 »

iknowpromo wrote: post #474
foobiekr wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are they getting _promoted_ though. successful promo packet for sustaining work would be a very big change.

I've seen a bunch of successful promo packets for work on code health, system reliability, etc. - including promos to L6. The "trick" to successful L5 and L6 promos (and above) for this sort of work is to have credible estimates of the actual impact of your work. Way too many engineers spend quarters or years refactoring or rewriting systems, and then go for promo with a case that's basically: "System X was kludgy, c…

These "objective" estimates are usually nonsense, or deceptively only show one side of the story. Not everything can be easily quantified.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#524

Post by amohn9 »

crazygringo wrote: post #452

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) interoperabi…

90% of the time, Sheets's recommended graph is exactly what I wanted, and is in general a much cleaner and enjoyable experience than Excel. Pivot tables too are much more obvious and usable to non-power users in Sheets than Excel

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#525

Post by SenHeng »

agustamir wrote: post #254
SenHeng wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We recently switched from Meet back to Zoom, because Zoom lets you use your speakers while Meet requires everyone to use a headset. Zoom does some kind of active noise-cancelling where it will avoid picking up whatever the person on the other end just said, preventing the echo effect. Meet doesn't, it picks up everything. So if you use a speaker, everything the other person says gets repeated back at them. When Meet…

> Zoom lets you use your speakers while Meet requires everyone to use a headset Really? Is that restriction on desktop or mobile? I've been using speaker mode on meet(mobile) for a while now. Or is it implicitly imposed by you due to lack of noise cancelling features?

It's not a technical imposition, if that's what you're asking. We can use speakers with Meet, but then everyone now hears themselves speaking.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#526

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

x2f10 wrote: post #293
nostromo wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually close Netflix because of this. However, Netflix is full of smart people, so I have to assume that they've tested it and it increases engagement. Perhaps we're the outliers.

FYI: You can turn it off in settings.

But it took them a long long time to add that setting.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#527

Post by ImprobableTruth »

eloisant wrote: post #484
agentdrtran wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail does not have something like Hey's screener.

I'm using hey right now as my main email, forwarding from gmail and using the full trial to decide before I buy. There are a lot of features I like, but I don't really get all the fuss about the screener. You're still getting those emails, they're not getting in your "imbox" but you still have to review them. In practice it doesn't seem to make a big difference with gmail "mark as spam".

>You're still getting those emails, they're not getting in your "imbox" but you still have to review them.

Sure, but the point is that you can do this only occasionally (e.g. once a day), whereas with gmail they take up space and attention in your inbox until you get to them.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#528

Post by luord »

I've always cared about the privacy issues regarding Google's applications way less than I should, probably, but he definitely makes a good point regarding how increasingly outdated they're feeling.

I'm most likely gonna start switching out too.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#529

Post by ImprobableTruth »

kikki wrote: post #483
jurassic wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Look a little deeper. Your "screener" section is an inbox. You can either whitelist or blacklist messages that come into here. In your Gmail inbox, you can also block addresses and never see them again. It is the same interaction - no matter what marketing spin you put on it. If that's HEY's value proposition, then they're in for a rude awakening. Personally, I think the proposition is simply using something other th…

The entire point is that it's separated, that you have two separate inboxes. The underlying mechanism is the same, but the user experience is quite different. In my opinion it's similar to Roam in that the framing leads to a different workflow, even though neither has any truly revolutionary "technical feature".

If you think this is just "marketing spin", I think you're simply not part of the target demographic, which is people that have currently have issues with e-mail.

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