It boggles my mind to imagine how many verticals in the technology space have been kneecapped because of google. There could be so many companies that could offer amazing services but they just can't compete with a half-assed "free" service made by Google, which is just a temporary cost center for all the ad revenue they don't know what to do with.
Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
71–80 of 576 posts
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#72To 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.
There are more Apple products listed. Maybe it’s a push to get beta OS users?
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#73I can use photoshop for free now, on the web. I do that. https://www.photopea.com/ - The world is very different.
My family can use office for free now, on the web. We do that. https://www.office.com/
Most of my family uses facebook.
We all use maps, youtube, google search, gmail (not me, although I have an account).
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
this study exists! it's called the resource curse, it's about (I think) weird inflation effects that happen when all your wealth comes from a natural resource like oil
Ha! Google as an oil emirate is not a bad mental model. Thanx!
The phrase "Data is the new oil" dates back to at least 2014, so it seems rather appropriate.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#75I get the desire to abandon google services, and have done so myself for email and search, but there isn't much to this article.
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.
Airtable has some nice functionality, but I don't think it's head-and-shoulders above sheets and this article doesn't give me any reason to change my mind.
Same things goes for Meet vs Zoom.
Honestly, despite Google's history of trashing projects I'd put my money on gmail/docs outliving hey/notion and so he might just be planting the seeds of a painful switch later. When I switched my email I did it with a domain I own so that I can avoid the same fate.
That's not to say google doesn't have problems. Privacy aside, ads as a primary source of revenue can have a negative effect on usability of their products (like search), but I wouldn't call that "squandering a 10-year lead", it's more like "failure to find a second golden goose"
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#76For 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.
The original text isThe final English text is I wonder if the test they gave me was biased? I guess being an elf, there is a bias in the question. I'm sure the water gnomes would have no problem answering the question of whether the unicorn is wet. ? But the elves.
Notice how drarfs became gnomes. The last sentence is not a sentence. Various other problems like a "?" by itself etc.
Translation to a single language back and forth seems to be really really good.Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#77I'm sure these alternatives work for some, but I really don't find "Hey" a suitable alternatives to Gmail, nor "Notion" to Google Docs. I think the innovation and updating in those Google products has stagnated a lot, but they're still better for actual work and business than the new hip things.
I still use gmail for my mail server but I use Windows Mail for my PC mail client nowadays. Not that Windows Mail is great but Google is determined to make Gmail progressively worse. All they had to do was nothing.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#78Big Sur made me switch to Mail and Calendar (away from GMail and GCal in Safari). Oh my god is it fast and snappy. GChat within GMail kept me in the browser, but they ruined it. Now I use the standalone Chat "app", which is some webframe crap, but hey, corporate standard. Big Sur is like iPadOS and I always use native apps on iPadOS/iOS. Can't imagine what a truly native Figma, Slack, JIRA would be like.
I am really looking forward to better touch-screen support in Figma.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#79I'm sure these alternatives work for some, but I really don't find "Hey" a suitable alternatives to Gmail, nor "Notion" to Google Docs. I think the innovation and updating in those Google products has stagnated a lot, but they're still better for actual work and business than the new hip things.
I don't know the name for it, but this seems like a "the market leader doesn't know what it's doing" fallacy. While I will concede that Google is not the market leader in many of these areas, It's Microsoft, not Airtable that's leading the way.
To me, Google has always been a relatively "boring" company, it's just that boring in the early to mid 2000s was a welcome change of pace. There innovations were almost entirely in back-end technology and simplicity, not innovative user experiences. Google docs was meant to be as boring as Microsoft word, because it turns out that most people know exactly what Microsoft Word does and like the single-purposeness of it. I love Notion, but I think the idea that Notion will every be as popular as word or docs is nuts. The vast majority of the market doesn't know what a Kanban board is much less want to embed one in their docs.
Making the argument that Google isn't as innovative as smaller startups is easy. Google is trying to appeal to the masses, not a niche. Saying they blew a ten-year lead is a stretch.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#80To 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.
(author here) i promise this is not an ad for Hey haha, have no affiliation with basecamp and wish i was that good at content marketing.