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I'm tired of Google's business products

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: I'm tired of Google's business products

#71

Post by wesnerm2 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #43
ghaff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Microsoft Office for years. Leaving aside collaborative editing which has been a game-changer for me (and, of course, you can get from Microsoft as well now), Google products do everything* I need and most of the features in Office just get in the way. *I'm not a power-spreadsheet user these days and every now and then I run into some very specific thing I can do in Word that I can't do in Docs--or it's easier…

I see Excel as the weak point in Office, at least from the viewpoint of getting the right answers. There was that time I went and gave a talk in NYC and then came back to give the same talk in Ithaca and had an eagle-eyed web developer note an error in a chart I made with Excel because of the broken defaults. There are numerous ways people get wrong answers with Excel, plus Excel does some really strange stuff to hid…

Former Excel developer here. In Excel 97, the difference between the values needed to be less than 1e-16 times the magnitudes of the operands to be considered equal. It makes sense since such a small proportion is unlikely to occur by chance through arithmetic without the values being "equal" in the original base.

Re: I'm tired of Google's business products

#72

Post by huffer »

thisiscorrect wrote: post #39
gumby wrote: post #34

Drive is incredible…ly terrible. Our non-technical staff (and some good technical people too) are always losing track of where files are. They write a doc then can’t find it later. The desktop tool (so you can use it like Dropbox) keeps getting confused and disconnecting on the Mac. I’m also part of a scout troop that uses google to organize its activities. In the troop’s Drive I’ve found doctor’s patient records, th…

I'm not making the trip. It sounds like you're saying users are moving files to the the wrong folders on their computers and the desktop tool respects that. What should the software do differently?

I guess the idea was that it's very confusing for non-technical people, and very easy to misplace..

(sorry if your message was accompanied by an "/s" -- I didn't see any)

Re: I'm tired of Google's business products

#73

Post by _jal »

One aspect of building a business is resilience: What happens when things break?

Because things break.

I personally would not use Google business products for a startup. They're fine for established shops where when Google fucks up your account, they 'know' who you are. If you're a small-$ nobody, the support policy is "sucks to be you".

But everyone has different risk tolerances and fond feelings for certain companies. More important than that choice is to ask, "what do I do when Google/whoever breaks, or I have to generate a quote and the connectivity is down", and so on.

Speaking of which, is Atlasssian still rebuilding?

Re: I'm tired of Google's business products

#74

Post by jsnell »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #50
thisiscorrect wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of Google's productivity apps collect your data for ads? Can you provide some proof?

The fact that Google engages in and facilitates privacy invasion shouldn't need proof at this point. https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/gmail-snooping/ Can you prove or show anything in their terms of service or privacy policy that legally prevents it? Being a profit driven company, the only reasonable assumption is that anything that can be used to increase profits will be used.

Of course both the privacy policy and TOS are very explicit about this.

https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US

> We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos.

https://workspace.google.com/security/

> Google does not collect, scan, or use your data in Google Workspace services for advertising purposes and we do not display ads in Google Workspace

https://workspace.google.com/terms/2013/1/premier_terms.html

> Notwithstanding any other term of the Agreement, Google will not process Customer Data for Advertising purposes or serve Advertising in the Services.

Will you be retracting your claims, or are you planning on moving the goal posts instead?

Re: I'm tired of Google's business products

#75

Post by pocketsand »

Beltalowda wrote: post #56
pocketsand wrote: post #24

I created a small ad campaign to advertise a side project. The projects makes no money, has no plan for monetization, does not use passwords. The only personal data it collects is an email address. I bought $50 worth of ads using my credit card. My account was immediately suspended for suspicious payment. I appealed, noting the card was mine, and I bought the ads. The appeal was rejected. I have occasionally tried to…

Did they take the $50 or was the payment rejected? And did you get the money back if they took it?

I do not believe the payment was ever attempted. If I remember right, I approved a max spend budget, put in payment details, and then the account was immediately suspended before anything could be charged as the ad campaign never ran.

Re: I'm tired of Google's business products

#76

Post by huffer »

mcs_ wrote: post #26

> their search engine is still the best, sorry haters Naming or using the "hater" word in the sentence does not make us in the right side of the story. Considering users of other search engines as Haters does not sound right. You think is the best, fine. Recently today, in this network, there is an analysis about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31020229

as far as I understood it, it was a tongue-in-cheek, a joke... or are you trolling too (in which case joke's on me :D)?

Re: I'm tired of Google's business products

#77

Post by Cordivae »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #55
Cordivae wrote: post #18

I hate Google Workspace so much. Not because of the product, which seems fine. But because 10 years ago I signed up for google apps. It was marketed as a way to have a vanity gmail domain. Free forever up to 10 users. I thought it was cool, was a huge Google fan at the time, and created a custom domain for myself and another one for my grandparents. Now, 10 years later they are holding my online persona hostage in a…

> Now, 10 years later they are holding my online persona hostage in a shameless cash grab to try and make Workspaces more profitable. I'm in the same boat, but since ~2006 when I started my first company (dont recall exactly when I set up my google apps account though). I have to chose whether to move my account (which thanks to sign in with google is attached to more places than I can even remember), or pony up $6/m…

Exactly. If I have to leave I will leave forever as well. To the point of buying a mac / iphone, and completely leaving the google ecosystem. That's how much this pisses me off.

Its now about the principle rather than how much it actually costs.

Re: I'm tired of Google's business products

#78

Post by gumby »

ghaff wrote: post #40
gumby wrote: post #34

Drive is incredible…ly terrible. Our non-technical staff (and some good technical people too) are always losing track of where files are. They write a doc then can’t find it later. The desktop tool (so you can use it like Dropbox) keeps getting confused and disconnecting on the Mac. I’m also part of a scout troop that uses google to organize its activities. In the troop’s Drive I’ve found doctor’s patient records, th…

I can usually find the docs I've created pretty easily--but then I'm pretty good about sensibly filing things. But finding random Shared with Me is pretty problematic especially if I don't know exactly what I'm looking for. And, of course, as you say, if you're sharing docs, it's pretty easy to share with someone you don't mean to. Of course, the same could be said with sending around docs on email.

And docs shared with me can’t be moved into my filesystem

Re: I'm tired of Google's business products

#79

Post by gumby »

orangepurple wrote: post #44
gumby wrote: post #34

Drive is incredible…ly terrible. Our non-technical staff (and some good technical people too) are always losing track of where files are. They write a doc then can’t find it later. The desktop tool (so you can use it like Dropbox) keeps getting confused and disconnecting on the Mac. I’m also part of a scout troop that uses google to organize its activities. In the troop’s Drive I’ve found doctor’s patient records, th…

If your drive folder has more than 50,000 files and you try to download an archive ZIP of them, your files will disappear at random. The only way to avoid this outcome is to install a desktop client and sync the folder.

> The only way to avoid this outcome is to install a desktop client and sync the folder.

Except the google desktop client is utterly flaky. They make Dropbox look good.

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