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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#561

Post by cmrdporcupine »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #559
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And some of the company's recent moves re: labour practices etc. have also been questionable, or up for debate at least. What I also hear about Amazon is that the experience varies wildly from group to group. That's not a gamble I'd be willing to take. Google is not nearly so balkanized; there are fairly consistent expectations across the company in terms of what is acceptable manager behaviour. I am not hap…

You’re really just implying that if the experience is worse and we are treated badly (aka no company paid off sites to Hawaii or seasons working remotely in Tahoe) the only people at Amazon are there because they aren’t capable of getting better offers.

That I doubt very much. They're there because they're motivated by different things. I wouldn't last at Amazon, from what I have read. But some people thrive with different motivations. The most satisfied Amazon engineers I've spoken to spoke with pride about the pace and intensity of development. Goes for Apple, too. Those people would not be happy at Google. Things move slow there, and most people have little control over tech stack or many design choices at all, TBH. I hear that's better at Amazon.

The era of Hawaii offsites at Google is long over.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#562

Post by scarface74 »

rubber_duck wrote: post #314
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…

>Android / Chrome are amazing Chrome has been deteriorating in performance and power usage - on OSX at least, I recently switched back to Firefox because it was that bad (Safari is a step too far as I want to work on non-Apple platforms). Firefox has slipped from the mainstream and it's very obvious - so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup fro…

Android feels just as janky as Windows did for years. Everything about the ecosystem shows a lack of leadership. Microsoft did better with dealing with its OEMs in 1995 with WinHEC than Google does today.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#563

Post by scarface74 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #558
wutbrodo wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I have no reason to believe Amazon engineers are inferior, but I've been hearing bad things about how they're treated for almost a decade now. That isn't to say I absolutely wouldn't consider Amazon without trying to look into it more, but I definitely know people who, for that reason, don't consider Amazon when planning a move to a bigco.

Exactly. And some of the company's recent moves re: labour practices etc. have also been questionable, or up for debate at least. What I also hear about Amazon is that the experience varies wildly from group to group. That's not a gamble I'd be willing to take. Google is not nearly so balkanized; there are fairly consistent expectations across the company in terms of what is acceptable manager behaviour. I am not hap…

Exactly. And some of the company's recent moves re: labour practices etc. have also been questionable, or up for debate at least.

The only reason that you don’t hear as much about labor practices with the other tech companies is because they outsource all of the low skill employees that make their products to China. Google has a lot fewer physical products but the people who make their few hardware products are treated worse than any Amazon employee. Yes the same applies to Apple.

I’m not making a value judgement. Just calling a spade a spade.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#565

Post by Gollapalli »

rorykoehler wrote: post #543
eitland wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE. I've been preaching this for a while: - Chrome is dominant line IE was. - Chrome - like IE - doesn't care about the standards because they know developers will adapt to them. - Chrome - like IE - is starting to fail. Unfortunately, meanwhile Mozilla has been busy tearing apart a number of the things that made Firefox shine, especially the extension API. They've a…

Have you tried Brave?

Brave is basically just Chrome with an adblocker, just like edge is chrome with a reskin. Obviously that's a bit of an exaggeration, but they are all chromium at heart.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#566

Post by rorykoehler »

Gollapalli wrote: post #565
rorykoehler wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Brave?

Brave is basically just Chrome with an adblocker, just like edge is chrome with a reskin. Obviously that's a bit of an exaggeration, but they are all chromium at heart.

It's a pretty big distinction don't you think. FWIW I also use FireFox...

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#567

Post by lozenge »

Spooky23 wrote: post #445
realityking wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite This is clearly false. The screenshots in this Time article show gmail having advertising from day one. https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/

It’s accurate and inaccurate. Ads were there but many users saw none for a long time. IMO ads were a distraction to enable the data harvesting, which drove Adsense targeting. Even today, the ads I see on GMail are pretty low quality. Some lovelorn guy used my email address unintentionally to sign up for a 55+ dating site 3 years ago. The most targeted ads I get are for similar sites. Of course YMMV.

They actually stopped targeting by email contents a while back https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#568

Post by ebalit »

lakis wrote: post #76
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.

Translation to a single language back and forth seems to be really really good. Although quite impressive, it still suffers from the same problem that most other translator service have if you keep translating the same text between random languages. I translate the following text from English to various other languages (without going back to english) 6 times and then I went back to English. The original text is I won…

You might also be testing the inherent difficulty of lossless translation between many languages.

It would be interesting to see the same tasks with professional translators. I'm guessing some of the errors might still be there at the end, like the gnome one, whereas the last sentence would probably be folded in the previous sentences.

Do you remember which 6 languages you went through before going back to English?

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#569

Post by dx034 »

jariel wrote: post #422
dleslie wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. On the outset, you might think with such ridiculously high compensation there would be an expectation of quality, but I think that's an error. Google operates as an ad-company that happens to employ ridiculous amounts of exhorbitantly compensated individuals to engage in market and technological research, particularly to open or exp…

"_open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same." No, I think they wanted to make money from it directly via Enterprise sales. MS Office is the #1 source of profit for MS for a long while. In the 2000's it seemed 'everything was going cloud', naturally Google thought they could leapfrog MS into that space. But it didn't work out.

And that even though MSFT started creating Office Online much later and also had to basically create a whole new product. And yet they now have the by far superior product.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#570

Post by dx034 »

haolez wrote: post #353
olcor wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused. Doesn’t Microsoft 365 include the desktop versions of the product and the ability to update them?

Yes, but I believe that the parent was talking about the web versions, since the comparison was made against Google Suite.

You have all collaboration features with the desktop version.
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