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The IBM-ification of Google?

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Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#61

Post by antibios »

cyberax wrote: post #11
somesortofthing wrote: post #2

Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. People always talk about how big companies fail because they're unwilling to take risks and just recommit to their areas of strength, but this is what risk-taking looks like - you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the…

Can you name a good new Google product then? I just can't remember anything recent. I can't even remember any good recent _improvements_ to their core products. If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.

Waymo

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#62

Post by sylens »

raggi wrote: post #38

> Look at the Railway GCP account ban situation. A literally billion dollar startup running on Google Cloud and Google just randomly snaps their fingers and deletes their account. Zero warning. No phone number to call. No account rep. Poof. Gone. It is actual insanity to me. A billion dollar customer gets the exact same automated middle finger as a low effort spam bot. Your B2B business is completely cooked if that i…

Our team at work uses all three major public clouds and our Google Account Team is by far the worst of the three. Nothing like having to explain the same problem I’m having from the start again on every monthly cadence call because they don’t note anything or try to help resolve it

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#63

Post by sebstefan »

>YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too. Everyone hates the demonetization stuff but the low effort AI slop content is what really kills it for me. YouTube got massive because it had real creators. Supply and demand. A real marketplace. But if you keep kicking off the actual suppliers and replacing them with low effort garbage, literally anyone can host that garbage.

I don't see slop on youtube and nobody I know is complaining about it. My current problem is private equity buying all the channels I love!

Veritasium, Fern!

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#64

Post by antirealist »

hintymad wrote: post #16

> YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too One thing that I really really hate Youtube for is that they don't allow users to turn off their shorts. You can choose to "reduce" Shorts for a given session, but they come back right next time. That said, Youtube is tremendously valuable for its high-quality content. It's kinda like a restaurant. The service can be horrible. They decor can be hideous. But! I'm goin…

Yeah the 'not being able to turn off shorts' is such a brazen, anti-user form of enshitification. Alongside not being able to hide threads in Instragram (can only hide for 30 days), and so many other examples. Like there is enough demand for this that there are literally browser extensions to block shorts.

I can see why youtube don't want you to disable; because shorts are "addictive" in a certain moorish way and letting you disable would lesson your expected youtube use time.

But it's such a wierd choice on a certain level right. Like "lets make our product objectively worse for users because (in the short term?) we'll make more money". It's the sort of choice that does't really exist in the "real" "normal" economy. Like you bake some bread, you wanna make it as good as possible, I buy it from you because you make good bread.

So anyway I get why they do it. I'm just a little surprised that in their calculations the gains to engagement from forcing shorts are worth the loss of user goodwill. And even like employee morale right. Like how would you feel about your job if you're having to do this stuff, deliberately and explicitly curtailing the choices of your users.

But yes I agree the content is great.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#66

Post by Forgeties79 »

MrDarcy wrote: post #55
aurareturn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that Railway certainly had an account manager, right? Did they say they didn’t have one?

The article is incorrect and misleading. Railway did have an account manager and they did call them and they did pick up the phone and work with them to restore service.

An account manager overseeing such a major client should’ve never let this happen. If they don’t, why the hell are they the account manager? What are they even doing to earn their keep? This was such a preventable situation.

I once worked at a company that had their domain lapse because of an internal error at the company that was paid for the domain. There was no alert, there was no attempt to rectify the situation, one day we woke up and we simply did not have control of our website for a full week. There was nothing wrong with our payment method, there was no reason the payment shouldn’t have happened, it was completely their fault. They found out because we called them in a panic. This was a major company. We left them a week later and our CEO talks about it constantly as a horror story to other companies and there is no way our situation was unique.

It’s not just about the value of the contract. This whole situation has been in the news for days now. It’s terrible PR and I guarantee you it is costing them business in the long run. All I have seen for days is people talking about how poor Google’s support is, and I’m not even somebody who makes those decisions.

I get it, “Google is too big to fail.” But eventually, that stops being true

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#67

Post by kuschku »

amazingamazing wrote: post #13

I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. Google's stock was about $60 at the time. I look forward to reading this post and chuckling a few years from now. Doomers really do get more engagement, though. I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously? The one point I will make though is: these…

> I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. [...] I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously?

Can't you even consider the possibility that the reader shutdown and the death of RSS might be causally related?

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#68

Post by ghaff »

dekhn wrote: post #22
antibios wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reader was dropped in the run up to G+. I believe there was a strategic decision to try and get people to move to G+ and move both personal news and organisational news together.

The leadership was never completely honest about why Reader was shutdown, and the stated reasons didn't pass some basic sniff checks. But it was easy to read between the lines: the executives' attention was on other things, and Reader was a threat to their growth. But also it was a passion project that a company like Google would struggle to keep updating since it brought in little revenue (even though there were hor…

The decline of RSS among a certain audience was only peripherally related to the elimination of Reader; it's not like there aren't other RSS readers out there even if Google makes a convenient villain. But Google did whiff on social in general and certainly indexing the world's information became a very secondary goal especially after failing with some efforts on the copyright front.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#69

Post by ghaff »

blondin wrote: post #41
wrs wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product . Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object. Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support,…

Google+ couldn't handle spams. Inbox was an excellent execution. one needed the tech that made Gmail, and the other couldn't co-exist with Gmail? we will never truly know.

I would have said Knoll was the bigger fail on the spam front. You can't have unmoderated posting generally.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#70

Post by ventana »

wrs wrote: post #3
somesortofthing wrote: post #2

Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. People always talk about how big companies fail because they're unwilling to take risks and just recommit to their areas of strength, but this is what risk-taking looks like - you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the…

This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product . Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object. Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support,…

Well, actually, Google+ circa 2014 was the only social network that had enough of the interesting technical content for me, and I did use it in exactly the way how one would use a decent social network: I posted my content, got comments, and read what other people posted. Some formatting weirdness aside, it was not bad at all, and surely better and quieter, in a good sense, than Facebook back then, and especially than Facebook now.

I still have the Takeout archive of my posts, might be a nice time machine experience to parse that huge JSON and read through it.

So, yes, I do complain.

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