Someday, Google will be a business school case study on the dangers of a) having all your money come from one cash cow and b) having too many self-directed engineers with no management vision. Google is a car with a 1,000 horsepower engine but which can't drive in a straight line.
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
Seems like it is easier for a smaller group of capable people to make a big change than a giant org of diverse talented people from different backgrounds
I'm starting to think Google (probably Facebook too) scoops up top talent simply to deprive potential competitors (e.g., startups) of the resources they would need to challenge them. Actually having something for them to do is secondary.
I have believed this for a very long time. Both Google and Facebook are well known for hiring top talent at top dollar and then putting them on projects that are far below their ability level. It takes that talent off the market.
Yea, hard to believe great engineers would be happy that way. They apparently can't even have side/personal projects to scratch that creative itch if the day job isn't providing enough challenge. But leaving or doing a startup would result in a big drop in pay (at least initially). Easy to see how burn-out happens under those conditions.
> having too many self-directed engineers with no management vision
I personally feel it's the opposite. I think management, and Google's internal incentives, lead to a lot of their issues.
As one obvious example, the leveling system is totally flawed and creates incentives for their greatest issues, such as releasing many competing projects only to deprecate/ abandon all of them.
That's on management, not the engineers who are explicitly being told "To get a promotion we need you to do this type of work, we don't really care what happens after that".
A little more control for engineers might mean that passion projects can be taken further, can go in directions that management maybe can't see the immediate "promotable" value from. You wouldn't be incentivized to compete as much, but maybe to collaborate - because you wouldn't need to lead a project to get a promotion, just add value and do good work.
If you look at Google's earlier years I think this is evidence. They used to feel a lot more moonshotty, a lot less managery, and perhaps a bit more culty due to the engineering driven culture. There were flops, but it didn't feel quite as ridiculous.
Just my observations though, as an outsider with some colleagues there.
I think in the early days, Google Engineers just worked on whatever they felt like. This resulted in fantastically profitable cool technology, and vast holes in the products for things no one volunteered to work on.
Then things were turned around to today's "jump through these hoops and you'll get promoted" system.
I was there 2006-2009, and I think the turn happened in that era, though it's hard to tell from "the floor".
And for the future it will be tough to change without losing ability to create new things. If they switch their internal incentive structure to maintenance they lose the new ideas.
- running a secret local server on client machines (which incidentally led to several vulnerabilities including the one that enabled attackers to gain webcam and audio access, as well as login credentials)
- lying about e2e encryption (or if you give them the benefit of the doubt, at the very least being disingenuous about it)
- routing all calls through servers in China
- not being explicit about the many conditions that disabled encryption (such as having a participant call in from a phone, recording the session, etc)
- widespread data collection for targeting purposes
- sharing said data with Facebook
- automatically reinstalling the client after you have tried to delete it
- a shady installer that uses preinstall scripts to install the app without the user ever having to click “install”
- gaining root access in their installer
- overriding the password prompt message to make it seem like the system is requesting admin rights and not Zoom itself
Many of these have been patched, to Zoom’s credit, and others have been explained away. But you can’t look at a company with a history like that and say that Zoom would knowingly be the app of choice for a privacy conscious user.
> youtube remains un-crossed, but it will be replaced by better offerings in core categories: vloggers, how-to / structured / lego, and music / covers
For streaming it already has tough competition by twitch. If twitch manages to improve their stream archive and then take their user base into YouTube's core domain YT might see plausible competition.
Is that actually true though? I've seen more and more regular people outside tech circles dismiss Facebook but Google? Not so much. In fact, outside of HN I haven't seen many complaints at all.
Well I'm the "computer expert" in the family. So every mom, dad, aunt, sister brother and family friend gets Brave and Duckduckgo as their default search when I need to help them with anything on their computers. That's exactly how it happened back in the day when Chrome was released and those users "outside tech" were converted from Internet Explorer. Once a tech company loses the goodwill of the geeks, they're as good as done.
It's anecdotal at best, but the 'regular people' in middle america that I know who have switched from Google have only done so because the right-wing political commentators on the radio told them to do it.
My very disconnected from technology father uses Duck-Duck-Go now because of that. (subsequently, he 'dropped using facebook' because they track you across the web. His solution to beat their tracking is to use DDG to look up facebook.com and log-in through the link it presents. Not sure of the logic there.)
- Canceling accounts, leaving people with the "Post it to HN and pray" customer support option.
- Focusing more on growth than long-term support. See the original article for examples of this.
- Taking their originally fast, svelte, and compliant web browser and injecting more and more features that are virtually required by Google domains, memory/CPU bloat, and privacy hostile tracking/telemetry features.
- People don't trust in any Google product which didn't exist 10 years ago, for fear that it's going to be canceled.
People are noticing. The migration is slow (largely due to the smartphone duopoly), but it's happening.
You're still talking about users within tech circles, which I'm not doubting has lost trust in Google. However, my mom or my siblings wouldn't understand what any of those points even mean.
They're hearing about notable accounts being closed in Google. Don't underestimate the exposure provided by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and a dozen other small sites who are also covering many of these "my account was lost/stolen/closed" stories.
They know (often better than I) when a service is relegated to Google's graveyard.
They wonder why their crappy 5-year old Lenovo laptop struggles with Chrome but not Firefox (which I installed for them too).
They notice Google's suite of apps popping and freezing and "just not working" and gripe to me with comparisons to Word and Excel.
Not being tech savvy doesn't mean they're idiots - they recognize when something isn't working well, or when something has become stale, just as well as we do.
It's funny because I usually use the same argument but for the opposite case: people are not idiots and know very well about the implications of giving up their data to Big Tech but they simply don't care and think it's worth it. As a response to the common trope that we all we need to do is inform users and they will stop doing it.
Anecdote: the majority of non-tech business owners I know passionately hate Google. These are guys in their 40s and 50s. The reasons may differ, but the hatred does not.
For them, the reasons are more about manipulating search results to control public opinion.
For me, it's things like hiding organic search queries from Google analytics and saying they broke it for "privacy reasons". Even though I can still see search queries for paid traffic. And the terrible quality of search results now. Oh, and the completely selective enforcement of rules (looking at you "unfair advantage" policy).
Business owners and techies are still a minority of users. I'm not taking a stance here, just trying to realistically evaluate the "users have lost trust in Google" statement but it seems that we want to stay oblivious and glutton in Google's presumed downfall instead.
People also increasingly care about privacy, which goes after Google’s core revenue stream. Google is also easier to switch away from than Facebook. None of their services have strong network effects. (Except chat...)
Most places I’ve worked switch cloud office suites every few years. Quip seems to be the new hotness at the current job. Its documents feature is fine, and the spreadsheet is good enough 99% of the time.
> blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy.
For general vocabulary, very likely. I believe Google Translate's competitive edge comes in the form of figuring out translations for jargon, slang, etc. from equivalent-corpus context.
I like to think of Google Translate as a keyword extractor on steroids. It doesn't necessarily give you the right prose, but it does better than anything I know of at giving you the right bag-of-words for indexing a foreign-language document in English.
(I hypothesize this to be Google Translate's real driving purpose, and the reason it still sees regular updates after all these years: it's used to index foreign-language web pages, books, and videos so that there can be a single TF-IDF token in Google's backend for each language-neutral conceptual category rather than distinct token for each language-specific word.)
Don't know about slang, but I recently translated some technical documentation from German to English. I was surprised how many specific terms deepl knew, and even if it failed at that the grammar surrounding the offending term was still mostly correct. It was night and day compared to Google. Bag of words describes it well.
I just pasted a few conversations from whatsapp in portuguese and at least for that language google translate was 10x more accurate on the meaning of the very colloquial words used, mixed with English etc.
Edit: thanks for the link though, I'm saving it and trying from time to time, we use translation a ton in my household (everyone is learning English after moving abroad)
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 wonder if the test you gave me was biased. My belief is that because I'm an elf, some questions are inherently biased. Water dwarfs would not have a problem answering the question: Are unicorns wet? But elves do.
The 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.
This could be considered a "feature" if used for comedic effect. Anyone who has young children that are into Disney movies should check out this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bVAoVlFYf0. This woman runs "Let It Go" from the movie Frozen through Google Translate a bunch of times and then sings the result.
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?
Being in a relationship with a English/French language divide, DeepL was a total game-changer. I can't attest to its abilities in other languages, but it is obviously superior to google translate on correctness and "natural" translations for our use-case.
For Japanese Deepl leaves GT in the dust and I've found myself using it more over the last few months.
I've often seen GT get the basics dead wrong - for example formal greetings Japanese people have been using in formal correspondence for hundreds of years. When it gets things right it's often fleeting, a week later it gives you something different.
I immediately checked it, it has good translation for some languages (specificaly German), but definitely does not blow GT out of water, it is on par at best for a few languages for translation quality. Besides,
- It has only a handful of languages
- No OCR / photo support
- No speech / conversation support.
IMO, as is, it is way inferior to GT. But it is good to have competition in this area as there is still a lot of room for improvement.
I'm curious to see how many of my friends will stop using Google Translate on their phones and just go with Apple's new translation app coming in iOS 14.
It probably will be like Maps where the first year or two were just a joke and then Maps became faster, easier to use, and just as good as Google Maps.
I was recently translating a French tweet to English that happens to mention the title of a French book. I was very surprised to find that DeepL kept the book title in its original French instead of translating it. It suggests to me that DeepL seems to have more "understanding" of the text, if deep learning algorithms can be said to have any understanding at all.
- that seems to be worldwide (I see for example swiss and french providers in the list), which isn't necessarily relevant. Gmail can be a monopoly in the US for example, while not being one worldwide.
Unfortunately I cannot find better numbers, if someone does that would be interesting to discuss.
Chrome is arguably a monopoly if you segment desktop web traffic, but iOS Safari is such a large percentage that Safari can't be ignored.
People will disagree with email - but I challenge you to go look at email threads you're on and see what % of the emails are @gmail.com - not to mention G Suite addresses you don't know are Gmail. Outside of enterprise, there's no alternative.
Not bad either that Android and Chrome are duopolies at this point.
I actually don't think Gmail (as other comments here claim) is nearly as much "monopoly" as YouTube. There are many email providers, people use whatever.
This is why I've switched to Apple Maps for like 98% of my navigation needs.
I might be biased, because I live in one of the cities with the updated maps data, sure, but I find that it handles most of my use cases just as well as Google Maps.
I find the Apple Maps navigation to be far more polished and human. Whenever they added "After the stop sign, at the next light turn right" made it my goto nav app.
The search is still not great compared to Google Maps, though.
People like to conflate being popular (having large marketshare) with being a monopoly (exclusive control of supply). Being popular in those markets is likely because they do not monetize it directly.
Is not the only, nor even the most useful, definition of a monopoly. And there's also not a magic moment where one second you're not a monopoly, and the next second you are when user X+1 signs up. It's a gradual process and that's why it is such a huge area of law.
You might want to reflect on why you want anti-trust law to only apply to the strict definition of a monopoly. That's why it's called "anti-trust" not "anti-monopoly".
What do you find awful about the monetizing on Maps? So far I've found it not very intrusive, and it seems much more clear on Maps than on Search when something is an ad.
exactly this. The only reason the other services exist is to feed more data into the advertising (search?) machinations. Because the company is so myopically focused on Advertising dollars and everything else as loss leaders(or under monetized), they are unable to see a potential reversal of roles where the other products become ends unto themselves
Google is only good at search. The only reason why I use everything else they create is because of their massive distribution, market penetration and inter-operability.
Thankfully there are solid alternatives in certain areas like fore example using iPhone instead of Android.
But for everything else I don't see a massive migration happening any time soon. Notion, Hey.com, DuckDuckGo are all niche products. My dad has Gmail and I can assure that's going to be the case for ever. He is never going to find out what Hey.com is. Even if he does he is not even going to consider it.
Sounds like they're also good at interoperability, market penetration, and distribution. Do you not think they're good at video streaming, security research, email, or cloud hosting?
I think you missed my point. Of course saying that they are only good at search is a catch-all statement. They are probably good at many things but their relevance is tied exclusively to their search product. Products like YouTube are what they are because of Google's search expertise.
Also let's not forget that AdWords either subsidizes or leverages everything that Google builds. So I would add that they are also great at selling ads.
I understood your point, I just think it's incorrect. For instance, I don't think search is even close to the hardest problem YouTube is solving. I would say that magically streaming a crazy volume of video at the best possible resolution is a pretty tough technical problem, and totally unrelated to search. Ditto security research for the most part, modulo some of the work TAG does on finding 0days in the wild.
This is a common trope about Google; they're only a search company, only an ad company. It's simply not the case.
Edit: if you wanted to make a broad sweeping statement, I would say that they're only good at hard technical challenges. That's why they succeeded at e.g. search and YouTube, and failed at chat and social.
Disclaimer: used to work there, but not in security/domains.
The other thing I find Google to be good at is account/login security. A gaccount with 2fa is unlikely to be stolen by anything less than a targeted zeroday against the 2fa device; social engineering just doesn't work to the extent that there's a trope of people who have permanently lost access to their accounts because they changed phones, phone numbers, lost recovery codes, etc. Combine that with Domains and I think it's pretty unlikely to lose a domain name registered with them.
Yeah, I love google maps. It has saved me a ton of hours routing me around what I assume were multi-lane car crashes. Also, I really like exploring cities with their 3d maps and I've heard google earth VR is amazing which I want to try sometime.
I think OC's point is that they're breaking up their own monopoly with a complete lack of product vision.
Google Wallet/Pay/Android Pay could have become Stripe, Venmo. Google Hangouts/Meet/Chat could have become Zoom, Slack, Teams, iMessage, etc. Google Finance could have become Robinhood, Mint.
I am getting tired of these google articles. I know how this will go, users will pat themselves for using duckduckgo, open street maps, firefox and fastmail anytime now.
I've never met anyone who uses OSM. I have just shy of 500 edits on OSM because I kept going to use it, finding it didn't have what I was looking for, and making improvements.
It would be nice if there was a viable alternative to Google Maps. Apple Maps is apparently not too bad, but I'm using Android and Linux these days.
well, I use osmodroid. I am sure you can find many here. I do want to contribute more after I have other things sorted. Wish you didn't have to worry about being poor.
I agree with you that HN is a bubble which is what I meant by my comment. We need to do something to take it mainstream than patting ourselves here over and over again. Talk about how ways we can do that. I don't like google articles because we waste time giving them feedback rather than to all the cool open source projects that deserve it.
No. you are wildly misunderstanding me. I mean I can't devote more time to contributing to open street maps or other open source projects because of the worry.
Oh I see, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope things will improve for you soon.
It's understandable you would be focused on more important things. Lately I have been wondering if more people would get into open source if they didn't have bigger things to worry about like poverty and climate change.
I suppose I am privileged enough to do OSM contributions in my spare time. I'm not sure how to feel about that...
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 to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom.
We were making the move to docs and sheets, but it's basically stuck. Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs. For those of us who are older this is totally incredible - Office was so anti-linux / cloud it was incredible, and now word in the cloud kinda works!
And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.
Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything? Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).
Gtalk was brilliant! When they launched it my appreciation for Google grew tenfold. It was so un-enterprisey and it just worked! Shortly thereafter they fixed their offering by launching the very Enterprise-friendly Wave.
Mmmmmm, Wave. (drooling dead-eyes Homer impression).
At this point I don't even know what's their main chat/video product. Meet? Hangouts? Duo? I have all three on my phone for some reason but still end up using Zoom and Whatsapp
> The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily.
This drove me nuts with my Nest Minis until I tried out Apple's Homepod.
People hate on Apple for moving slow in the "connected home" space, but my Homepod sounds great, can distinguish between my wife and I, and can handle BOTH personal and work calendars for the two of us. I'll take the polish over my actual use cases, rather than rough edges around a wider set of uses, most of which I never will use.
And neither of us use iCloud for email! It blows my mind that a Google can offer email/calendars for both personal and work use can tie both to you as an individual, but _somehow_ can't make your "smart" speaker do the same.
I'm fairly frustrated with siri's voice recognition in general myself as a multi-year homepod user. The amazon echos I had before the homepod were more consistent and google's general voice transcription & knowledge base is still way ahead of siri.
I mostly chose the homepod because of privacy and better sound. If the privacy story was the same on google or amazon, I'd probably be using that right now instead.
> 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 expand markets for their ads.
They didn't create mail, docs, drive et al in order to create productivity apps, they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same. They don't really care what content is in the browser so long as it is browser-based content the user consumes and not native apps. The more browser time spent, the higher the likelihood of being served Google ads, or providing Google with data, and similar.
> _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same
Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data.
This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all.
Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating systems, then it's +1 for them and -1 for the competition.
It's a rule of thumb. No, not every costless product is monetizing your use of it. FOSS is especially counter to this rule.
In the case of web-based tools that are owned and operated by big advertising companies, I think it's a fairly safe bet. As always, think critically about each instance and consider the implications of the software and products you use.
You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free.
The quote is pithy but assumes some context - the [something] is being provided below the marginal cost to produce and therefore being provided with an expectation of benefit for the provider.
Acquiring LibreOffice is not $0 marginal cost but they have a big "DONATE" button top-right corner of the website and The Document Foundation turns a small profit from donations.
There is free as in Freedom as well as free as in beer. The quote seems to apply to things that are free as in beer but not free as in freedom. It'd be valid given that distinction.
Originally this product knwn as StarOffice ws not free. It only became so after Sun aquired it and reeased it as OpenOffice. This was basically a loss-leader not just fr sun but for other companies as well to break Microsoft's capture of the Knowledege Worker productivity which they leveraged into other areas.
So the idea was you were the product, "sold" to the non-MS-Windows/Intel companies in te hopes of you being retained or transferred to a non-MS stack.
LibreOffice is post Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but the idea is still the same.
Nobody called them “knowledge workers” outside of Page Mill Dr. when StarOffice was made and Sun didn’t compete in that space as much though Microsoft was starting to eat their lunch in other areas, like academia, government, military, and high end computation.
I worked on a Sun at NOAA in the 90s in Hawaii and the computer we used for bathymetry imaging was a Sun and the ships used Suns.
Most of that equipment was replaced with a little Linux and Windows Servers.
Same experience, maybe few years earlier . We all had the Sun pizzaboxes that had replaced Lisp Machines, and 2 years later we all had Mac's and later PC's.
Latex still had it's place in academia, and would continue to dominate academic publishing for quite some time, but for 'ordinary' daily productivity needs first MacWrite and MacDraw, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and later Word and Excel were becoming the staples.
With both software being ported to the PC/Mac platforms, and Linux starting to make inroads into the Unix compute workloads, Sun needed an answer fast to stop the bleeding.
Their inability to transform their high tough / high margin business model would do them in eventually as the commodity / thin margin model of the PC ecosystem grinded them into dust. But before that, they would try several things one of which was an attempt to 'complete' the offering of a single box solution which would have to include an 'office' package so as to keep the Mac / PC of the desks.
For open source, you kind of are in a weird way. Open source projects need contributions, for example in the form of bug reports, feature requests, proof reading and (in the rare case) source code. Many ousers provide these benefits to open source projects, which make them thrive.
On the other hand, looking at the coin from the other side you could also argue you’re paying with your time and effort and not your money.
StarOffice was developed by a company that was trying to sell it the old fashioned way but became Open Source because Sun was trying to keep its Unix workstations viable (no way we'd see "Office for SPARC") and also challenging Microsoft with Java.
Oracle bought Sun. Oracle kept Sun products alive because they know one reason people $$$ for Oracle is support.
Once it got renamed and spun out of Oracle, LibreOffice has been kept alive by various stakeholders such as companies that have big fleets of heavily hacked instances, Eurocrats who wish they could break the hold of American software monopolies, linux distros who want another piece of shovelware to list on the box, etc.
A typical end user might not perceive that leaving an issue on GitHub is not good customer service, even if some people enjoy the liberty of fixing things for themselves.
---
More seriously, Libreoffice is software you run on a computer you control (e.g. your desktop, a cloud server, whatever, ...) Since you are paying for the computer, you don't have conflicts about how generously to provision hardware.
Libreoffice is a ship in a bottle. 1000 years from now somebody might dig up an optical disk from a landfill and boot Libreoffice, but it is hard to believe Google Docs will last that long.
They aggregate what they learn about each user across all their properties. (Their hope was the plus would make this easier). So while I seriously doubt they tell advertisers, “joshuamorton writes about JavaScript, metallurgy and anime”, whatever they learn from the enormous number of places they are collecting info increases the probability that you might see an ad on gmail relating to anime.
And they are quite public about scanning documents written using the free drive service, as they are proud that they take down documents with content they or the government consider inappropriate, as discussed on HN recently.
So your contention is that because they check hashes of documents stored on drive for unlawful material, we'll say, that this proves that Google is lying about how it uses data from docs and drive?
Or are you saying they don't actually share any data learned from docs and drive
This is ~super common with things like copyright violations and child porn. You store a database of hashes of copyrighted or pornographic data. And specifically you can use visual-similarity hashing to detect even somewhat perturbed documents.
What does checking hashes of documents mean? Isn’t stuff either encrypted or not?
This might not be a good look for me to be confused by this as a web dev/programmer, but I does that mean they are securely or otherwise hashing everything they store on all users? Drive, Gmail and other Google services have tons of data. After THats they are also still only checking hashes?
For using Gmail, Drive and Docs you will have a Google account and you'll be logged in often or all the time. Quite useful for targeting you outside those tools.
Everything searchable is indexed. Everything indexed and associated with a user is used to profile that user in order to provide superior search results.
> And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data.
I am a vocal Google critic, but I have yet to see any evidence of them selling my data. Unlike a number of other companies and organizations Google serms to have realized long ago that they are totally dependent on user trust.
I'm not saying they are smart (judging by the ads they have sent me the last 13 years, the killing off of Reader, the nymwars and then killing off Google+ after it turned out to be nice) or nice (the way they keep trying to crush the open web, the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model of pushing Chrome relentlessly until they almost have monopoly, then try to remove the possibility to run adblockers etc etc)
I guess throwing away your key asset is not in the interest of Google or Facebook. I presume Cambridge Analytica only got so far with Facebook because Facebook didn't realize the potential value of its user data till then. Now they'll engage in the same act themselves.
mail, docs, drive et al ... they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising
This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite as a paid service, and "everyone uses the same service at home that they do at work" has clear advantages, whether or not there is advertising in your gmail. Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite (or "google apps for domains", as they called it then - horrible).
Completely accurate. The ads were even touted as somewhat of a feature. Something along the lines of "Gmail has ads, just like the other services, but our ads will be relevant to your interests."
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.
When using GSuite it is used in a browser, and this is key to the Google strategy. The goal is to get more users spending more time in their browsers, in order to funnel them to Google Ads and to serve Google their browsing data.
GSuite exists, at least in part, to break down the model of the walled corporate intranet. There are just too many people behind the corporate veil to ignore; and as a bonus, the browsing and cloud app usage habits they develop at work will tend to translate to their usage habits at home.
Also, as noted by another responder, GMail has had ads since launch. I was a beta user from day 1, and I recall the ads.
Edit: worth noting the historical difficulty of getting open source software into the business environment because corporate purchasers were wary of anything that was "free"; putting a price on something makes it more palatable to corporate adoption.
I can’t imagine that being true. Gmail had “relevant” ads based off their other ad tech from the get go. That was a point vs other majors having banner ads.
Gmail very quickly introduced advertising in your mailbox. There was a huge outcry because they would scan your mails to provide contextual advertising.
This was before other GSuite components even existed.
Well, obviously, if Google was going to have to take an actual phone call from somebody when things went pear-shaped, that was never going to 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.
I can only assume they don't want to make it work for some reason. The best practical answer is to just set up a normal gmail account and a lot of weird google bugs go away.
I have a normal Gmail account, and the last time I checked Google Home could only access my primary calendar. So my imported-from-Outlook work calendar and any other custom calendars are invisible to it. It just just frustrating to look at calendar.google.com and say "there they are, my appointments!" and Google Home cannot read them unless they are on the default calendar.
I do find that failure baffling -- especially since it used to work. I don't use voice commands much, but setting reminders while I'm doing something else used to be very helpful. Suddenly last August, it's just "not available for g suite users". (https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/11607814?hl=en)
I get it for free, but g suite is valuable enough to me that I'd pay for it. The thread implies that paying for it wouldn't help.
> 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.
Namely, the things that directly contribute to the ads business.
I'm also an early gsuite user and have the same complaints about assistant integration - but I am 85% sure that I tried to create a new google for business account to verify that it would at least work if I was paying, and it didn't.
Which led me to experimenting with migrating off my legacy gsuite, and with the API rate limiting, it seems it would take upwards of 30 days. I can download that data in 10 minutes if it's unhindered.
> Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs
You are in for a surprise. Office 365 (at least Excel and Word) looks like a toy compared to the desktop versions. I'm not talking about niche features or VBA, I'm talking about things like naming a table, which is explicitly only supported in the desktop version. Ah, of course! You need the table's name to use it in their Power Automate platform. Microsoft 365 is a mess right now. I hope it improves.
And yet, for the typical office user, it supports most or all of the stuff they are going to do. It's also fast, reliable, it renders Office files correctly, and the UI matches what people are familiar with.
Here's another Office 365 Web surprise. Last week we had 5 team members working in a shared Word document with track-changes; A) There is no "view final markup" option, and B) after a while the web-app crawled to a halt.
We've had some bugs with loss of recent modifications to some spreadsheets when several users modify it collaboratively (Google Sheets-style). It sucks, unfortunately.
> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).
What's that got to do with it? Are you suggesting this is the reason things aren't shipping? I saw the "strikes" as another symptom of a company that is now deaf. Employees can't get their voices heard as individuals anymore.
> 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.
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.
Gsuite/GAFYD domain users (which are a tiny fraction of all Google accounts, for what it is worth) have a special pain with all Google consumer products. Many products and features simply do not work with Gsuite accounts. Why? Gsuite accounts have a different terms of service, and getting legal, privacy, compliance, etc to sign off on launching your feature is a pain in the neck. Also it's possible that some features and products really aren't compatible with the Gsuite TOS. So as an engineer you can choose to just not launch your feature to Gsuite, or you can go through a lot of work to launch it all the way, for which you will gain no marginal users and will receive no recognition or compensation.
O365 live collaborative document editing has been an absolute broken nightmare for us. We abandoned it in favor of Google Docs and everything has gotten a LOT easier.
Our general sense is that whatever MS is using for autoscaling the Sharepoint instances that run the service doesn't work. During busy work days Word loses its connection to the service constantly.
While agree with you that google has been dropping the ball, you've got to use the online version of Office 365, it is awful. Like shockingly terrible. Gsuite is 10x better, no exaggeration. Apple's online office stuff is equally a joke. Google blew a 10 year lead but lucky for them, the other possible large competitors are doing even worse.
Although they haven't evolved much in recent years, I still find most Gsuite apps to actually be quite good. What is terrible is Drive itself. File management is just a joke with Drive.
> They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there...
I mostly use YouTube to watch series - PBS Space Time, World War Two, Crash Course etc. YouTube is absolutely horrible at navigating through these series - it is difficult to find where you left, it is difficult to find the next episode, there is absolutely no user comfort.
Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run.
It's like they develop products just enough to get people using them so they can squeeze out some more meta-data and connect the dots back to a Google account, and then they stop development because it's not going to add more revenue.
And if they can't figure out how to push advertising with it, they drop it.
> 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 notoriously has no support, there's no way to get it fixed, so I simply had to instruct everyone coming to visit me that they needed to download and use a different map software in order to find me.
Same issue here. They have features like "okay google dial into my next meeting," however it doesn't work since my phone's primary account is my personal account. Assistant doesn't work with my secondary work account.
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 from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) - the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.
And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation. Implementation is ridiculously inconsistent across OS versions and HW vendors - I was trying to create a WiFi management API for some industrial application that would connect to controller specific networks - Android has 2 layers of terrible and depricated API with documentation that was misleading at best, a new API that only worked on 10+ without backcompat, and the actual implementation was inconsistent across four Android devices we tested. We gave up on the project as the Matrix of features missing and hacks needed for every platform we could find was just not practical to maintain.
Chrome has recently (within the last year) been repeatedly making me frustrated with its pdf issues. It feels like 40% of the time I open a pdf in chrome, I instead get an error message like "the plugin has crashed" or some bs. The only solution is to restart the browser entirely. Switched back to FF for this reason.
> many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF)
You can report sites that are broken in Firefox at https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla engineers will debug the broken site and try to contact the site's developers. Firefox also ships some site-specific workarounds (such as spoofing Chrome's User-Agent string or tweaking some CSS). You can see the current list of site workarounds in Firefox's about:compat page.
> 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 also been busy trying to destroy the massive trust many of us had in them by doing stupid things like injecting a silly ad extension and lying (IIRC) about the Pocket thing (nothing against Pocket, they just shouldn't have lied about it, many of us are looking for ways to fund FF development.)
Edit: I still use and recommend Firefox. For me it is still the best browser out there in more than one way, I just feel it could have been so much better.
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.
> so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF
I find this really interesting, and would like to hear more. I've been a Firefox ESR user for almost a decade, and apart from some breakage on some videoconferencing sites, and sometimes having to disable uBlock Origin, I've not faced an unusable site. And this is on ESR!
I also use FF on daily basis and I don't remember having such problems. Some webapps like Skype were blocking FF user-agent on purpose (changing User-Agent made it work). Maybe I use different sites than the one complaining but it may also be worth checking addons and considering starting FF in Safe Mode (which disables addons temporarily). Sometimes addons can mess up sites in unexpected ways.
> And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation.
Ho ho ho. You haven't even touched the worst that Android has to offer.
- The bluetooth stack. My god the bluetooth stack. A mix of absolutely awful APIs trying to disguise state machines, APIs trying to simplify GATT (but awfully failing at it), the Android lifecycle making you tear your hair out when you want any kind of long lived connection.
- Camera. Thankfully, CameraX from the AndroidX team makes it much easier. But a few years back? I'll just let Google's very own Camera2BasicFragment speak for itself. https://github.com/googlearchive/android-Camera2Basic/blob/m... . 1100 lines of basicness.
- The java.io.File API is basically gone. The reasons themselves are "good". The replacement, SAF is a horrible, slow, inconvenient API that breaks pretty much every file manager.
- Looking at the bug tracker is a whole other level of sadness. What's that, You'd need your testing library to ba able to instantiate a Fragment in an arbitrary Activity ? radio silence since 2019
I have to say, as a FF user who's never gotten on board the Chrome train other than as a target for dev work (because it doesn't have tree-style tabs), I do not see the problems you're reporting.
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.
Google Assistant is a product that relies on cross-learning from large amounts of user data. GSuite is a product that is contractually obligated to NOT doing this. The silos between GSuite and the rest of Google are intentional.
I don't work at Google these days so I can't offer the exact reasons why, but it shouldn't be surprising then that the two don't play well.
Amazon, on the other hand is not contractually obligated to create this silo. For it, your GSuite account is just another third party account, no different from your GMail account.
Yes this is an undesirable outcome, but when business users choose to buy GSuite services with the assurance that the data won't be available to Google for general purpose learning, this is the price they pay for that privacy.
MS Office online collaboration still hasn’t caught up with Google, even with Google’s neglect.
Personally, I think web based office is something Microsoft wants to drive subscription revenue, but isn’t something customers want. Office is probably the best and most complex fat client app in the world, why sacrifice that?
IMO, Office will embrace add on supplementation and value add to the Office apps.
Chrome? Try Edge. On mac, it's day and night, Edge does actually stop the pages you aren't viewing, bringing battery life and CPU use much closer to battery.
It's like this was a low hanging fruit of finally cleaning up some old mess in Chromium, Google ignored it for years, and MS team just did it.
>And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.
Glad you brought this one up. I had an issue with an enterprise account where I was attempting to access work and code I had contained in a doc I created for the client. I was the owner and creator of the doc, but somehow I got stuck in a loop where I had to request permission from myself.
Google "Support" was basically nonexistent - I had to ask our company adminstrator, who told me only they could get access to speak with a human, and even that wouldn't be able to be done immediately.
I ended up redoing all the work. AWS and Microsoft, in comparison, have had excellent enterprise support.
is the overstatement of the century. I am stuck with this horrendous product, with its unbelievably bad live collaboration which constantly overwrites what other people are doing, its terrible SSO implementation, its penchant for presenting the least navigable UI I have ever had the misfortune to experience...
Google Docs has stagnated, I agree, Office is light years away from having its seamless sync.
It uses a pseudo-compatible Java 8 subset, with no official roadmap to ever move beyond that, everyone is supposed to move to Kotlin, while they keep fixing the slower developer experience and broken tooling introduced by adding Kotlin support.
NDK requires a great resistance to pain with a development experience that occasionally still makes me miss Carbide/Symbian C++. It took them 10 years to introduce any kind of packaging support for NDK dependencies, there are still no tools to improve the developer experience calling Android APIs, one has to manually write JNI wrappers, or use their unsafe C bindings to APIs that are actually written in somehow safer C++.
I lost count how many stuff introduced as one year amazing IO stuff, is already deprecated the following year. Latest example, all the GUI layout editing tools still being worked on, which will be eventually deprecated when JetPack Composer hits stable.
Critical libraries like Oboe, that are just dumped into Github, instead of having first class support on the SDK and project templates.
Team that puts critical information everywhere on the Internet except on Android's official documentation.
Very small rant, 10 years have a lot of stuff to rant on, so amazing? Not really.
> I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom.
The Hangouts move is still one of the most infuriating things I've seen in tech anytime in the last decade. Remember how Google was actively contributing to an open and interoperable spec for chat, and then just proceeded to go full Ayn Rand about it?
There's a pretty strong argument to be made that if any major players were still backing XMPP as a standard, we wouldn't all have a bunch of people in our lives who have said some variation of "I would quit Facebook right now if I didn't need Messenger"
Because photoshop is primarily a complex software for professional raster image editing/designing. Those who use it for that purpose will not think of Figma as its replacement. Figma is a SVG based UX design tool and those who do UX design in 2020 most likely (hopefully) aren't using a heavy/complex raster graphics tool like photoshop.
No, I understand and agree with all of that, I sometimes design UIs and I wouldn’t touch PS with a laser pointer for that purpose.
But the article talks about software from 10 years ago to now. I remember even as Sketch had been rising for a while, something like 52% of UI designers still used PS. Pretty sure that wasn’t even close to 10 years ago!
So I guess that’s why I thought PS->Figma was a reasonable jump in that context. Even if they used Sketch in the interim or whatever.
I'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 think Google is screwing up massively with letting these things rot on the vine, but I still prefer google docs/drive to sharepoint/office365 even - word on desktop is okay but the web based version is utter crap compared to Google Docs.
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.
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.
- GMail with "unlimited" (never-seen-before 1GB) of storage when everyone had 10MB quotas was a "holy shit" moment, and fast web mail was a fresh breath of air
- Google Maps, yet another "holy shit" experience when you used Mapquest before
- Google Translate, so much better than everything that came before
- Google search - OK that's late 1990s but I remember the "aha" moment of trying the Google beta after needing to become a power user of lycos/altavista/askjeeves
You notice that all of these were more than a decade ago before their IPO. Larry and Sergei have gotten old and lazy, and so have their CxOs and VPs. No goals, no focus, no discipline because who cares if all the execs already have their private jets.
You touch on something I have thought about a lot.... why don’t we launch companies with the intent of winding them down once we have achieved what we set out to? It’s rhetorical as I know the answer is money But I yearn to live in a society where that would be the norm.
If your “actual work” is designing documents for printing on dead tree paper, then sure. If your work is modern digital-first collaboration there are way more effective choices these days.
I highly doubt this. It might be, might be, a majority. But there are lots of academic, personal, and even business cases that are digital only or digital mostly.
> but I really don't find "Hey" a suitable alternatives to Gmail
I don't get why people need an alternative to Gmail. Email is already decentralized. Just buy a custom domain for a few dollars per year, and then use any email provider you want. You'll own your email address forever.
I currently host my email on Protonmail, but if I ever decide to switch providers, I can do it without having to give people a new email address. I could even go back to Gmail. Worst-case scenario is that I lose the old messages in my inbox that I failed to back up, but that's no big deal.
A coworker asked me last night about a cloud but controlled email option and protonmail was my first thought, though I don't know the current competition. Own a domain, put some cash aside for paying for the service, and go from there.
According to my gf, a rabid Inbox fan, many important feature didn’t make he transition. She said a lot of her colleagues were pissed off about it too...and she was working at google at the time (not on Inbox/Gmail of course).
Scuttlebutt I heard (not via her) was it was the usual Google story: internal political fight unrelated to features or technical issues.
I agree with this. I have had Hey for more than a week now. The UI is nice and feels fresh but that's about it. There are some features which won't work well if you keep an address for long enough.
- Screener: This works well at start but it won't scale well. I still have to see every address for the first time. Google is smart to send spam to spam. I almost never have to check it. I have used other email services and no one comes even close to recognizing and flagging spam well.
- Categorization : Algos work well mostly in Gmail. Auto Categorization works reall well, sure it sometimes mislabels and sends email to a different category. But it is accurate most of the times. I don't have to spend time on these rules.
I don't know enough about Hey to judge that, but to me comparing Notion to Google Docs is like comparing Slack to Gmail. I mean sure, both Slack and Gmail are communication tools, but they solve for different use cases so they're not really interchangeable. I can imagine that if your use cases are all things that Slack is better at you might think "Wow, Gmail is so outdated and horrible why isn't it like Slack?" But personally I like having both because I have use cases that email is better for and I'm skeptical that one generalist tool that tried to be useful for all use cases would be particularly good for any of them.
Getting back to Notion and Google Docs, I'd rather use Notion for internal documentation and I'd really, really rather use Google Docs for redlining contracts, which is most often what I'm doing when I'm dealing with .doc/.docx files. In Microsoft's suite I think Notion is an alternative to OneNote, not to Word. So I would agree with the author if the implication was that Google should have a Notion-like tool in addition to Google Docs, but suggesting that Google Docs is bad because it's not Notion-like doesn't make any more sense to me than saying that Gmail is bad because it's not Slack.
Google has minimal interest in "apps" (which many companies can do an OK job at) and much more interested in planet-scale data/machine-learning/AI (which is much much harder and something that Google is still very far ahead of everyone at).
They actually pushed ChromeOS and web services (GMail, Inbox, Docs, Sheets, ... ) pretty hard and realized that its not the way to go forward. While for lightweight tasks (like emailing and docs) it works pretty well, for heavy tasks (like video editing) and most importantly, as a development platform, chrome os din't do well.
So they pivoted to Fuchsia OS. A new OS to provide seamless experience across several devices (in home or in vehicle while commuting. Some of the resource can be living in cloud). Its a sort of networked OS. Streaming music to your Google Home, let me fetch that music form the Fuchsia Desktop's cache and stream it to Google Home, rather than fetching it all the way from Cloud.
With out applications, OS is not much of use. Here comes Flutter. Let the developers make apps for Android and iOS in Flutter (currently over 50k apps on Google Play store) and have them run the same app on Fuchsia OS. I believe it will take probably another year or two for Google to bring in Fuchsia to Pixelbook. Let's hope so! I would like an OS as open as Linux, with macOS like user experience.
> and most importantly, as a development platform, chrome os din't do well
Microsoft completely lapped the industry on this with VS Code. It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend in a browser.
It seems like they're experimenting with it, but claim it's just for exploring stuff and is not the "future" yet. I've read on HN that it's much slower than Linux thanks to it's micro-kernel design.
That said, I've been very excited for Fuchsia for a long time.
To 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's no urgency in switching to DDG or Safari or anything Apple. There definitely IS urgency to sign up for Hey if you want an email address as simple as "billy@hey.com", instead of "william.s.1993@hey.com"
I have a really minimal/desirable gmail address and it's been only annoying. I constantly get emails from people by accident. I made my Hey address longer to avoid this.
The fact that Hey can on day one offer so much over a Gmail experience which hasn’t improved since the Bush administration is less an ad than underscoring how bad Google’s management are.
Only one of these services is brand new and just starting to build mindshare. Only one has no free tier. Only one currently has few enough users that securing a highly desirable username is still wide open: "My new email is billy@hey.com. I love it so far."
Excising "no free tier" (because we damn well know "free" products ain't free either - that's not an indicator of marketing), your argument boils down to "one of those services is new, therefore, content marketing."
"All internet discussions of new products are content marketing" seems way overboard for me.
No, that's not correct, it's far more specific. This article advertises the fact that Hey (which is asking you to pay $99 for a service most people currently get for free) has one very significant benefit, a short email address, which might be gone if you don't take immediate action. And the author does this ingeniously, by offering social proof after bonding via attacking a common enemy. As I said earlier, I'm impressed.
You're underestimating the appeal of a "rant against Google". That's all that Occam needs in this case. I looked at the votes and they seem organic to me.
I'm afraid your comment breaks the HN guideline against insinuation of astroturfing/shilling/etc. without evidence. It's extremely common (well over 99% of these cases) for people to see something they find incongruent, massively overinterpret it, and jump into the internet to accuse others. We don't allow that here, because it poisons discussion and community. That doesn't mean real astroturfing doesn't exist (I blasted someone for it yesterday [1]). It means that we have to have something objective to go on—and if you have that, you should be letting us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate.
Dang, I've just explained my reasoning in more detail below, in response to a comment earlier than yours.
To be very clear, my comment was intended to be complimentary, not negative. I stated it was impressive. The author's opinion about Google is totally valid and widely shared -- and that's what makes the article such a clever vehicle in which to insert a call to action on behalf of Hey. <-- no direct evidence, just my opinion, of course.
> In 2010, I predicted that by 2020 Chrome OS would be the most popular desktop OS in the world. It was fast, lightweight, and $0.
Sounds like your crystal ball malfunctioned on that forecast. I'll recalibrate it for you but will forecast it for this decade:
In 2020, I predict that by 2030, Fuchsia OS would be one of the most popular desktop and mobile OSes in the world and will replace Chrome OS and Android. It was fast, lightweight, and $0.
There you go. That makes much more sense according to my crystal ball.
Stadia is a cloud gaming platform. Like Nvidia Shield, Microsoft xCloud, Sony PS Now, OnLive, and the rest.
Gmail, maps, page-rank based search, and other pre-2010 Google tech were category makers. Every competitor has to massively step their game up to make something as good.
Stadia is not a category maker. There's no massive competitive advantage or leading position for anyone else to catch up to. It's nowhere near the pre-2010 Google products.
I was making some last minute changes while you were replying to clarify my thoughts, but you can see my edits about why Stadia isn't like old Google products.
I've never spoken to you before and goalposts have always been. You just think every product is major. No, Spanner is not equivalent to Google Maps or Search.
Big 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.
You've switched to Big Sur because it's snappy? I just installed the beta and it's super buggy with periodic pauses for no reason. Are you using it every day now?
Yeah, I'm not sure why the author was so excited about web apps. I have a 12 core Ryzen 3900x and all web apps are slow pieces of shit. I want native apps for everything and no, electron doesn't count.
It's crazy how people all the time say on HN that performance doesn't matter and how optimizing code is a waste of time while I'm simultaneously frustrated about how slow the majority of software I use is.
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.
>A limit price (or limit pricing) is a price, or pricing strategy, where products are sold by a supplier at a price low enough to make it unprofitable for other players to enter the market.
>It is used by monopolists to discourage entry into a market, and is illegal in many countries.[1] The quantity produced by the incumbent firm to act as a deterrent to entry is usually larger than would be optimal for a monopolist, but might still produce higher economic profits than would be earned under perfect competition.
You’ve just made the core argument of anti-trust legislation, which is far broader in scope than discussion of monopolies and far subtler. At root, monopolies are easy to detect, and it follows fairly uncontroversially from basic economics that’s been agreed-upon for centuries that if there are no (potential) competitors than there is no competition, rent-seeking/profit-gouging behaviour ensures by the incumbent, and capitalism basically dies. Anti-trust, however, it a great deal less clearly defined.
Let’s imagine a firm, and let’s call it Adobe. Adobe makes Photoshop. Photoshop has a full set of features and is sold for a high price to a market segment comprised of professional users who need the features provided by Photoshop, and are happy to pay the price since it enables them to make a decent living even once the cost of the tool is deducted. Adobe gets a decent revenue that allows it to cover expenses, capital costs, and develop future versions.
On the other side of the spectrum, you have Microsoft. Microsoft ships Paint for free. Paint has very few features, but it covers some (mainly ironic) usage cases, and it gets used by those who wish to manipulate images but have no need for the complex features of Photoshop. Sure, some people who wish to do high-level image manipulation but cannot afford Adobe’s asking price for Photoshop are not well-served by this arrangement, but hardly anybody would argue that Microsoft’s inclusion of Paint would be anti-competitive towards Adobe: it’s not worth adding all the features of Photoshop to Paint only to give it away for free (and the argument that you would give it away for free only long enough to bankrupt Adobe and then start charging for Mega-Paint might be profitable, but it’s uncertain and depends on costs of capital and expected rates or return, plus the costs of an almost certain lawsuit).
Nor can Adobe be anti-competitive against Microsoft: dropping the price of Photoshop to zero just to stop people from using Microsoft’s own free product would be... pointless as it would zero their revenue.
These are two extreme cases, and it’s easy to just think in these dualistic terms and come to the wrong conclusion (or wonder what I’m getting at with this bizarre and apparently off-topic rant).
Now to tie it all together, introduce a middle-ground player such as Affinity. Affinity makes Photo, a product that is midway between Paint and Photoshop both in terms of price and features. People who need the full features of Photoshop (including those not present in Photo) will still choose Photoshop, which might slightly dip Adobe’s revenue. Microsoft’s will however remain stationary at zero. Affinity has captured the market of those who are defined by Paint being unsuitable but who do not wish to pay Photoshop’s full price (because Photos contains all the features they need).
Now, finally, the final step: say Adobe turns a blind eye to piracy of Photoshop. It still gets paid by its professional customers so it’s revenue remains unchanged. However, people who found Paint to be frustrating are now faced with an interesting choice: steal Photoshop (which has all the functions they could possibly want, and is free) or buy Photos (which has all the functions they want, albeit a subset of those offered by Photoshop, but does so for a higher price).
This is one obvious case that comes under the broad rubric of ‘dumping’ (selling at prices that damage one’s own short-term interest in order to damage one’s competitor and increase one’s net long-term advantage) but there’s plenty others where that came from. The tech industry is rife with them. Mainly, lack of successful prosecution is probably due to regulatory capture by way of lobbying.
This is a great summary! The thing I see Google doing that I believe is even worse is that they swoop in early on in an innovative space and get their subsidized free offering on the market first or early. This seems to prevent these tiers from forming entirely, since even if a competitor can beat "free" they have to constantly be looking over their shoulder to make sure Google doesn't give away their killer features, so no one ends up even playing!
wasnt this the main issue with small startups and Microsoft 'embracing' them with half-assed projects back in the day. some would even say that this was the main cause of dot-com bubble. thats when VCs realized that Microsoft cant touch these web based companies so now they can finally invest in these emerging businesses, thereby triggering a goldrush.
as always govt has failed everyone by failing to prosecute these big behemoths where the only 'innovation' they do is centralize and capitalize on an already emerging solution from the rise of internet and computing.
what we need is a philanthropic fund that funds startups like craigslist & does it completely open sourced from the getgo.
Yes, there was this "but what if Microsoft releases a competing product?" typical VC question in the 90's that became "but what if Google releases a competing product?" in the 2000's and early 10's.
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is? Perhaps you don't owe it better, but you owe the community better—we should all be posting in a way that protects the container for future discussion. It's fragile, and it's under more pressure than ever these days.
A better way to respond to that one might be by saying something about all the people who can't afford to pay for email, who benefit from the free services we're talking about.
Not that I necessarily agree with the GP commenter, but this doesn't address his point. Things "used to" be this way during a time period with a billion less Internet users, who've come largely from the poorer parts of the developing world. The claim is that a high-quality free email service doesn't matter as much to someone with lots of disposable income in the first world as it does to people who aren't as fortunate.
I don't know what to say. I don't claim to be an expert on what life is like in the developing world, so I'll have to defer to people like missedthecue and yourself to tell me what it's like there.
575 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 428 ms ] threadGoogle as an oil emirate is not a bad mental model. Thanx!
Focus=speed. Focus is what's missing at Google, and why they have such a sprawling staff and politics.
Golden handcuffs, I suppose.
I personally feel it's the opposite. I think management, and Google's internal incentives, lead to a lot of their issues.
As one obvious example, the leveling system is totally flawed and creates incentives for their greatest issues, such as releasing many competing projects only to deprecate/ abandon all of them.
That's on management, not the engineers who are explicitly being told "To get a promotion we need you to do this type of work, we don't really care what happens after that".
A little more control for engineers might mean that passion projects can be taken further, can go in directions that management maybe can't see the immediate "promotable" value from. You wouldn't be incentivized to compete as much, but maybe to collaborate - because you wouldn't need to lead a project to get a promotion, just add value and do good work.
If you look at Google's earlier years I think this is evidence. They used to feel a lot more moonshotty, a lot less managery, and perhaps a bit more culty due to the engineering driven culture. There were flops, but it didn't feel quite as ridiculous.
Just my observations though, as an outsider with some colleagues there.
Then things were turned around to today's "jump through these hoops and you'll get promoted" system.
I was there 2006-2009, and I think the turn happened in that era, though it's hard to tell from "the floor".
youtube remains un-crossed, but it will be replaced by better offerings in core categories: vloggers, how-to / structured / lego, and music / covers
love that this person is privacy-conscious but is making 'purchase' decisions based on the fact that the products just suck now
I wish people pushed back more, but 'conscious' better than 'unconscious'
- running a secret local server on client machines (which incidentally led to several vulnerabilities including the one that enabled attackers to gain webcam and audio access, as well as login credentials)
- lying about e2e encryption (or if you give them the benefit of the doubt, at the very least being disingenuous about it)
- routing all calls through servers in China
- not being explicit about the many conditions that disabled encryption (such as having a participant call in from a phone, recording the session, etc)
- widespread data collection for targeting purposes
- sharing said data with Facebook
- automatically reinstalling the client after you have tried to delete it
- a shady installer that uses preinstall scripts to install the app without the user ever having to click “install”
- gaining root access in their installer
- overriding the password prompt message to make it seem like the system is requesting admin rights and not Zoom itself
Many of these have been patched, to Zoom’s credit, and others have been explained away. But you can’t look at a company with a history like that and say that Zoom would knowingly be the app of choice for a privacy conscious user.
For streaming it already has tough competition by twitch. If twitch manages to improve their stream archive and then take their user base into YouTube's core domain YT might see plausible competition.
Genuinely curious given the amount of shenanigans they have pulled out and said oops. Most recent one - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...
If you think Chrome is better than Firefox, then you'll think Brave is also better than Firefox.
My very disconnected from technology father uses Duck-Duck-Go now because of that. (subsequently, he 'dropped using facebook' because they track you across the web. His solution to beat their tracking is to use DDG to look up facebook.com and log-in through the link it presents. Not sure of the logic there.)
- Canceling accounts, leaving people with the "Post it to HN and pray" customer support option.
- Focusing more on growth than long-term support. See the original article for examples of this.
- Taking their originally fast, svelte, and compliant web browser and injecting more and more features that are virtually required by Google domains, memory/CPU bloat, and privacy hostile tracking/telemetry features.
- People don't trust in any Google product which didn't exist 10 years ago, for fear that it's going to be canceled.
People are noticing. The migration is slow (largely due to the smartphone duopoly), but it's happening.
They know (often better than I) when a service is relegated to Google's graveyard.
They wonder why their crappy 5-year old Lenovo laptop struggles with Chrome but not Firefox (which I installed for them too).
They notice Google's suite of apps popping and freezing and "just not working" and gripe to me with comparisons to Word and Excel.
Not being tech savvy doesn't mean they're idiots - they recognize when something isn't working well, or when something has become stale, just as well as we do.
For them, the reasons are more about manipulating search results to control public opinion.
For me, it's things like hiding organic search queries from Google analytics and saying they broke it for "privacy reasons". Even though I can still see search queries for paid traffic. And the terrible quality of search results now. Oh, and the completely selective enforcement of rules (looking at you "unfair advantage" policy).
Most places I’ve worked switch cloud office suites every few years. Quip seems to be the new hotness at the current job. Its documents feature is fine, and the spreadsheet is good enough 99% of the time.
They never dropped 'don't be evil', it's at the end of their code of conduct:
https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
It's absolutely insane, blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy.
For general vocabulary, very likely. I believe Google Translate's competitive edge comes in the form of figuring out translations for jargon, slang, etc. from equivalent-corpus context.
I like to think of Google Translate as a keyword extractor on steroids. It doesn't necessarily give you the right prose, but it does better than anything I know of at giving you the right bag-of-words for indexing a foreign-language document in English.
(I hypothesize this to be Google Translate's real driving purpose, and the reason it still sees regular updates after all these years: it's used to index foreign-language web pages, books, and videos so that there can be a single TF-IDF token in Google's backend for each language-neutral conceptual category rather than distinct token for each language-specific word.)
Edit: thanks for the link though, I'm saving it and trying from time to time, we use translation a ton in my household (everyone is learning English after moving abroad)
The 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.
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?
https://www.wordreference.com/
I've often seen GT get the basics dead wrong - for example formal greetings Japanese people have been using in formal correspondence for hundreds of years. When it gets things right it's often fleeting, a week later it gives you something different.
- It has only a handful of languages
- No OCR / photo support
- No speech / conversation support.
IMO, as is, it is way inferior to GT. But it is good to have competition in this area as there is still a lot of room for improvement.
https://www.deepl.com/translator#en/ru/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0...
It probably will be like Maps where the first year or two were just a joke and then Maps became faster, easier to use, and just as good as Google Maps.
They appear to me to have begun monetizing google maps. And it is awful.
Though technically they also have YouTube and do monetize it.
A bunch of people have listed Gmail on their lists, but Gmail is not even close to a monopoly, even in consumer email. https://email-verify.my-addr.com/list-of-most-popular-email-...
- that's from 2016
- that seems to be worldwide (I see for example swiss and french providers in the list), which isn't necessarily relevant. Gmail can be a monopoly in the US for example, while not being one worldwide.
Unfortunately I cannot find better numbers, if someone does that would be interesting to discuss.
While I'm sure we could disagree on if Google actually has a monopoly in these domains, I think it's obvious they have a _substantial_ foothold.
Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube
Chrome is arguably a monopoly if you segment desktop web traffic, but iOS Safari is such a large percentage that Safari can't be ignored.
People will disagree with email - but I challenge you to go look at email threads you're on and see what % of the emails are @gmail.com - not to mention G Suite addresses you don't know are Gmail. Outside of enterprise, there's no alternative.
Not bad either that Android and Chrome are duopolies at this point.
I might be biased, because I live in one of the cities with the updated maps data, sure, but I find that it handles most of my use cases just as well as Google Maps.
The search is still not great compared to Google Maps, though.
- no public transport routing where I live
- much worse satellite images
For all other uses, especially usability, it's superior to the extremely slow and cumbersome Google Maps. Both have odd UI bugs.
People like to conflate being popular (having large marketshare) with being a monopoly (exclusive control of supply). Being popular in those markets is likely because they do not monetize it directly.
Is not the only, nor even the most useful, definition of a monopoly. And there's also not a magic moment where one second you're not a monopoly, and the next second you are when user X+1 signs up. It's a gradual process and that's why it is such a huge area of law.
- Monopoly = Exclusive control of supply
- Monopsony = Exclusive control of demand
If you want to redefine it to popular things, you should reflect on your motivation to do so.
That's a clear mission?
Thankfully there are solid alternatives in certain areas like fore example using iPhone instead of Android.
But for everything else I don't see a massive migration happening any time soon. Notion, Hey.com, DuckDuckGo are all niche products. My dad has Gmail and I can assure that's going to be the case for ever. He is never going to find out what Hey.com is. Even if he does he is not even going to consider it.
Google didn't blew a ten-year lead on anything.
Also let's not forget that AdWords either subsidizes or leverages everything that Google builds. So I would add that they are also great at selling ads.
This is a common trope about Google; they're only a search company, only an ad company. It's simply not the case.
Edit: if you wanted to make a broad sweeping statement, I would say that they're only good at hard technical challenges. That's why they succeeded at e.g. search and YouTube, and failed at chat and social.
For consumer products I completely agree. I use DuckDuckGo as my default, but I still find myself hitting !g a lot to find what I'm looking for.
The other thing I find Google to be good at is account/login security. A gaccount with 2fa is unlikely to be stolen by anything less than a targeted zeroday against the 2fa device; social engineering just doesn't work to the extent that there's a trope of people who have permanently lost access to their accounts because they changed phones, phone numbers, lost recovery codes, etc. Combine that with Domains and I think it's pretty unlikely to lose a domain name registered with them.
(I am a big fan of Play Music too but of course they killed it.)
Okay, but we don't want Google as a monopoly... or do we?
Breaking up the monopoly means throwing away the ten-year lead.
Google Wallet/Pay/Android Pay could have become Stripe, Venmo. Google Hangouts/Meet/Chat could have become Zoom, Slack, Teams, iMessage, etc. Google Finance could have become Robinhood, Mint.
It would be nice if there was a viable alternative to Google Maps. Apple Maps is apparently not too bad, but I'm using Android and Linux these days.
I agree with you that HN is a bubble which is what I meant by my comment. We need to do something to take it mainstream than patting ourselves here over and over again. Talk about how ways we can do that. I don't like google articles because we waste time giving them feedback rather than to all the cool open source projects that deserve it.
What? Are you suggesting I don't use iOS and macOS because I can't afford Apple's hardware?
I have multiple Macs and iPhones in the house - I recently switched because I don't like Apple's direction. Not because I can't afford their products.
It's understandable you would be focused on more important things. Lately I have been wondering if more people would get into open source if they didn't have bigger things to worry about like poverty and climate change.
I suppose I am privileged enough to do OSM contributions in my spare time. I'm not sure how to feel about that...
You should feel proud and good imo. At least, I am proud of you that you choose to spend time contributing to something valuable.
Other sites however incorporate osm (Facebook, Apple etc.) into their offerings.
I'd like if openstreetmap.org would be improved accordingly, but I myself don't do more than pointing at other volunteers.
I wish I could use it for more but it lacks a good app like Google or Apple Maps.
> I started using HEY last week
refreshing to see a person who 's not suggestable and easily swayed by fads
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 to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom.
We were making the move to docs and sheets, but it's basically stuck. Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs. For those of us who are older this is totally incredible - Office was so anti-linux / cloud it was incredible, and now word in the cloud kinda works!
And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.
Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything? Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).
https://killedbygoogle.com/
Mmmmmm, Wave. (drooling dead-eyes Homer impression).
This drove me nuts with my Nest Minis until I tried out Apple's Homepod.
People hate on Apple for moving slow in the "connected home" space, but my Homepod sounds great, can distinguish between my wife and I, and can handle BOTH personal and work calendars for the two of us. I'll take the polish over my actual use cases, rather than rough edges around a wider set of uses, most of which I never will use.
And neither of us use iCloud for email! It blows my mind that a Google can offer email/calendars for both personal and work use can tie both to you as an individual, but _somehow_ can't make your "smart" speaker do the same.
I mostly chose the homepod because of privacy and better sound. If the privacy story was the same on google or amazon, I'd probably be using that right now instead.
So tell me again why I would use google products when they are all so interlinked that one affects the other? No thanks
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 expand markets for their ads.
They didn't create mail, docs, drive et al in order to create productivity apps, they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same. They don't really care what content is in the browser so long as it is browser-based content the user consumes and not native apps. The more browser time spent, the higher the likelihood of being served Google ads, or providing Google with data, and similar.
Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data.
This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all.
Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating systems, then it's +1 for them and -1 for the competition.
So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?
In the case of web-based tools that are owned and operated by big advertising companies, I think it's a fairly safe bet. As always, think critically about each instance and consider the implications of the software and products you use.
The quote is pithy but assumes some context - the [something] is being provided below the marginal cost to produce and therefore being provided with an expectation of benefit for the provider.
Acquiring LibreOffice is not $0 marginal cost but they have a big "DONATE" button top-right corner of the website and The Document Foundation turns a small profit from donations.
That's silly. Paid office suites use just as many computing resources, and Google docs use plenty resources through your browser as well.
I think the "if you don't pay for it, you're the product" quote is fine. You just have to exclude free and open source software.
But yeah, good point that my argument didn't make sense.
It is still about stuff other than open source software.
You can't expect some Internet quote to apply universally. Just know the exceptions and use it when it applies.
So the idea was you were the product, "sold" to the non-MS-Windows/Intel companies in te hopes of you being retained or transferred to a non-MS stack.
LibreOffice is post Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but the idea is still the same.
I worked on a Sun at NOAA in the 90s in Hawaii and the computer we used for bathymetry imaging was a Sun and the ships used Suns.
Most of that equipment was replaced with a little Linux and Windows Servers.
Latex still had it's place in academia, and would continue to dominate academic publishing for quite some time, but for 'ordinary' daily productivity needs first MacWrite and MacDraw, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and later Word and Excel were becoming the staples.
With both software being ported to the PC/Mac platforms, and Linux starting to make inroads into the Unix compute workloads, Sun needed an answer fast to stop the bleeding.
Their inability to transform their high tough / high margin business model would do them in eventually as the commodity / thin margin model of the PC ecosystem grinded them into dust. But before that, they would try several things one of which was an attempt to 'complete' the offering of a single box solution which would have to include an 'office' package so as to keep the Mac / PC of the desks.
On the other hand, looking at the coin from the other side you could also argue you’re paying with your time and effort and not your money.
StarOffice was developed by a company that was trying to sell it the old fashioned way but became Open Source because Sun was trying to keep its Unix workstations viable (no way we'd see "Office for SPARC") and also challenging Microsoft with Java.
Oracle bought Sun. Oracle kept Sun products alive because they know one reason people $$$ for Oracle is support.
Once it got renamed and spun out of Oracle, LibreOffice has been kept alive by various stakeholders such as companies that have big fleets of heavily hacked instances, Eurocrats who wish they could break the hold of American software monopolies, linux distros who want another piece of shovelware to list on the box, etc.
A typical end user might not perceive that leaving an issue on GitHub is not good customer service, even if some people enjoy the liberty of fixing things for themselves.
---
More seriously, Libreoffice is software you run on a computer you control (e.g. your desktop, a cloud server, whatever, ...) Since you are paying for the computer, you don't have conflicts about how generously to provision hardware.
Libreoffice is a ship in a bottle. 1000 years from now somebody might dig up an optical disk from a landfill and boot Libreoffice, but it is hard to believe Google Docs will last that long.
And they are quite public about scanning documents written using the free drive service, as they are proud that they take down documents with content they or the government consider inappropriate, as discussed on HN recently.
Or are you saying they don't actually share any data learned from docs and drive
I think the complaint was they scan your entire doc, for all it's content.
This is ~super common with things like copyright violations and child porn. You store a database of hashes of copyrighted or pornographic data. And specifically you can use visual-similarity hashing to detect even somewhat perturbed documents.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA)
This might not be a good look for me to be confused by this as a web dev/programmer, but I does that mean they are securely or otherwise hashing everything they store on all users? Drive, Gmail and other Google services have tons of data. After THats they are also still only checking hashes?
I am a vocal Google critic, but I have yet to see any evidence of them selling my data. Unlike a number of other companies and organizations Google serms to have realized long ago that they are totally dependent on user trust.
I'm not saying they are smart (judging by the ads they have sent me the last 13 years, the killing off of Reader, the nymwars and then killing off Google+ after it turned out to be nice) or nice (the way they keep trying to crush the open web, the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model of pushing Chrome relentlessly until they almost have monopoly, then try to remove the possibility to run adblockers etc etc)
Uh, what do you think an ad is?
This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite as a paid service, and "everyone uses the same service at home that they do at work" has clear advantages, whether or not there is advertising in your gmail. Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite (or "google apps for domains", as they called it then - horrible).
This is clearly false. The screenshots in this Time article show gmail having advertising from day one.
https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/
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.
GSuite exists, at least in part, to break down the model of the walled corporate intranet. There are just too many people behind the corporate veil to ignore; and as a bonus, the browsing and cloud app usage habits they develop at work will tend to translate to their usage habits at home.
Also, as noted by another responder, GMail has had ads since launch. I was a beta user from day 1, and I recall the ads.
Edit: worth noting the historical difficulty of getting open source software into the business environment because corporate purchasers were wary of anything that was "free"; putting a price on something makes it more palatable to corporate adoption.
It's not obviously false when advertising makes up something like 80%+ of their revenue:
https://theatlas.com/charts/n8ea9MPE0
This was before other GSuite components even existed.
Their lack of customer support is border line criminal.
IBM has 352,600 which is about 3x the number of employees that Google has.
Give it time. My guess is Google will be well over 300,000 by 2030.
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.
I get it for free, but g suite is valuable enough to me that I'd pay for it. The thread implies that paying for it wouldn't help.
Android / Chrome are providing what is primarily a platform, not a product. That's a very different mindset and way of working.
Namely, the things that directly contribute to the ads business.
Which led me to experimenting with migrating off my legacy gsuite, and with the API rate limiting, it seems it would take upwards of 30 days. I can download that data in 10 minutes if it's unhindered.
You are in for a surprise. Office 365 (at least Excel and Word) looks like a toy compared to the desktop versions. I'm not talking about niche features or VBA, I'm talking about things like naming a table, which is explicitly only supported in the desktop version. Ah, of course! You need the table's name to use it in their Power Automate platform. Microsoft 365 is a mess right now. I hope it improves.
All told, it's pretty good.
Here's another Office 365 Web surprise. Last week we had 5 team members working in a shared Word document with track-changes; A) There is no "view final markup" option, and B) after a while the web-app crawled to a halt.
The web version is intended for basic/common use cases, not power user functions.
What's that got to do with it? Are you suggesting this is the reason things aren't shipping? I saw the "strikes" as another symptom of a company that is now deaf. Employees can't get their voices heard as individuals anymore.
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.
This is totally unnecessary. Striking is a serious matter and not just getting company paid days off for some lazy egineers.
Our general sense is that whatever MS is using for autoscaling the Sharepoint instances that run the service doesn't work. During busy work days Word loses its connection to the service constantly.
I mostly use YouTube to watch series - PBS Space Time, World War Two, Crash Course etc. YouTube is absolutely horrible at navigating through these series - it is difficult to find where you left, it is difficult to find the next episode, there is absolutely no user comfort.
But then if I quit a video _that I played from a playlist_ and check my history _the playlist itself is listed, and not the actual video_
It is, indeed, a mess
It's like they develop products just enough to get people using them so they can squeeze out some more meta-data and connect the dots back to a Google account, and then they stop development because it's not going to add more revenue.
And if they can't figure out how to push advertising with it, they drop it.
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.
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 notoriously has no support, there's no way to get it fixed, so I simply had to instruct everyone coming to visit me that they needed to download and use a different map software in order to find me.
The Google Calendar app from my Google Pixel merges all my accounts but yet, the assistant is linked to my Google Account instead of my device.
It's useless because I'm using multiple calandars on multiple accounts.
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 from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) - the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.
And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation. Implementation is ridiculously inconsistent across OS versions and HW vendors - I was trying to create a WiFi management API for some industrial application that would connect to controller specific networks - Android has 2 layers of terrible and depricated API with documentation that was misleading at best, a new API that only worked on 10+ without backcompat, and the actual implementation was inconsistent across four Android devices we tested. We gave up on the project as the Matrix of features missing and hacks needed for every platform we could find was just not practical to maintain.
You can report sites that are broken in Firefox at https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla engineers will debug the broken site and try to contact the site's developers. Firefox also ships some site-specific workarounds (such as spoofing Chrome's User-Agent string or tweaking some CSS). You can see the current list of site workarounds in Firefox's about:compat page.
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 also been busy trying to destroy the massive trust many of us had in them by doing stupid things like injecting a silly ad extension and lying (IIRC) about the Pocket thing (nothing against Pocket, they just shouldn't have lied about it, many of us are looking for ways to fund FF development.)
Edit: I still use and recommend Firefox. For me it is still the best browser out there in more than one way, I just feel it could have been so much better.
I find this really interesting, and would like to hear more. I've been a Firefox ESR user for almost a decade, and apart from some breakage on some videoconferencing sites, and sometimes having to disable uBlock Origin, I've not faced an unusable site. And this is on ESR!
Ho ho ho. You haven't even touched the worst that Android has to offer.
- The bluetooth stack. My god the bluetooth stack. A mix of absolutely awful APIs trying to disguise state machines, APIs trying to simplify GATT (but awfully failing at it), the Android lifecycle making you tear your hair out when you want any kind of long lived connection.
- Camera. Thankfully, CameraX from the AndroidX team makes it much easier. But a few years back? I'll just let Google's very own Camera2BasicFragment speak for itself. https://github.com/googlearchive/android-Camera2Basic/blob/m... . 1100 lines of basicness.
- Well, speaking of lifecycle, here's the Fragment lolcycle: http://boloorian.free.fr/_Media/complete_android_fragment_l_...
- The java.io.File API is basically gone. The reasons themselves are "good". The replacement, SAF is a horrible, slow, inconvenient API that breaks pretty much every file manager.
- Looking at the bug tracker is a whole other level of sadness. What's that, You'd need your testing library to ba able to instantiate a Fragment in an arbitrary Activity ? radio silence since 2019
They did. Sundar ran both Android and Chrome, and now he's CEO.
I don't work at Google these days so I can't offer the exact reasons why, but it shouldn't be surprising then that the two don't play well.
Amazon, on the other hand is not contractually obligated to create this silo. For it, your GSuite account is just another third party account, no different from your GMail account.
Yes this is an undesirable outcome, but when business users choose to buy GSuite services with the assurance that the data won't be available to Google for general purpose learning, this is the price they pay for that privacy.
Personally, I think web based office is something Microsoft wants to drive subscription revenue, but isn’t something customers want. Office is probably the best and most complex fat client app in the world, why sacrifice that?
IMO, Office will embrace add on supplementation and value add to the Office apps.
It's like this was a low hanging fruit of finally cleaning up some old mess in Chromium, Google ignored it for years, and MS team just did it.
Glad you brought this one up. I had an issue with an enterprise account where I was attempting to access work and code I had contained in a doc I created for the client. I was the owner and creator of the doc, but somehow I got stuck in a loop where I had to request permission from myself.
Google "Support" was basically nonexistent - I had to ask our company adminstrator, who told me only they could get access to speak with a human, and even that wouldn't be able to be done immediately.
I ended up redoing all the work. AWS and Microsoft, in comparison, have had excellent enterprise support.
> now word in the cloud kinda works!
is the overstatement of the century. I am stuck with this horrendous product, with its unbelievably bad live collaboration which constantly overwrites what other people are doing, its terrible SSO implementation, its penchant for presenting the least navigable UI I have ever had the misfortune to experience...
Google Docs has stagnated, I agree, Office is light years away from having its seamless sync.
It uses a pseudo-compatible Java 8 subset, with no official roadmap to ever move beyond that, everyone is supposed to move to Kotlin, while they keep fixing the slower developer experience and broken tooling introduced by adding Kotlin support.
NDK requires a great resistance to pain with a development experience that occasionally still makes me miss Carbide/Symbian C++. It took them 10 years to introduce any kind of packaging support for NDK dependencies, there are still no tools to improve the developer experience calling Android APIs, one has to manually write JNI wrappers, or use their unsafe C bindings to APIs that are actually written in somehow safer C++.
I lost count how many stuff introduced as one year amazing IO stuff, is already deprecated the following year. Latest example, all the GUI layout editing tools still being worked on, which will be eventually deprecated when JetPack Composer hits stable.
Critical libraries like Oboe, that are just dumped into Github, instead of having first class support on the SDK and project templates.
Team that puts critical information everywhere on the Internet except on Android's official documentation.
Very small rant, 10 years have a lot of stuff to rant on, so amazing? Not really.
The Hangouts move is still one of the most infuriating things I've seen in tech anytime in the last decade. Remember how Google was actively contributing to an open and interoperable spec for chat, and then just proceeded to go full Ayn Rand about it?
There's a pretty strong argument to be made that if any major players were still backing XMPP as a standard, we wouldn't all have a bunch of people in our lives who have said some variation of "I would quit Facebook right now if I didn't need Messenger"
Like why even doesn't sheets and docs have the exact same table cell formatting options?
Following that, why can't a sheet seamlessly embed to a google doc.
But the article talks about software from 10 years ago to now. I remember even as Sketch had been rising for a while, something like 52% of UI designers still used PS. Pretty sure that wasn’t even close to 10 years ago!
So I guess that’s why I thought PS->Figma was a reasonable jump in that context. Even if they used Sketch in the interim or whatever.
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.
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.
- GMail with "unlimited" (never-seen-before 1GB) of storage when everyone had 10MB quotas was a "holy shit" moment, and fast web mail was a fresh breath of air
- Google Maps, yet another "holy shit" experience when you used Mapquest before
- Google Translate, so much better than everything that came before
- Google search - OK that's late 1990s but I remember the "aha" moment of trying the Google beta after needing to become a power user of lycos/altavista/askjeeves
You notice that all of these were more than a decade ago before their IPO. Larry and Sergei have gotten old and lazy, and so have their CxOs and VPs. No goals, no focus, no discipline because who cares if all the execs already have their private jets.
I don't, and neither does wikipedia:
Gmail: April 1, 2004
IPO: Aug 19, 2004
Maps: February 8, 2005
Translate: April 28, 2006
I would reckon 99+% of most people's use cases for something like Google Docs falls into this category.
I don't get why people need an alternative to Gmail. Email is already decentralized. Just buy a custom domain for a few dollars per year, and then use any email provider you want. You'll own your email address forever.
I currently host my email on Protonmail, but if I ever decide to switch providers, I can do it without having to give people a new email address. I could even go back to Gmail. Worst-case scenario is that I lose the old messages in my inbox that I failed to back up, but that's no big deal.
Scuttlebutt I heard (not via her) was it was the usual Google story: internal political fight unrelated to features or technical issues.
- Screener: This works well at start but it won't scale well. I still have to see every address for the first time. Google is smart to send spam to spam. I almost never have to check it. I have used other email services and no one comes even close to recognizing and flagging spam well.
- Categorization : Algos work well mostly in Gmail. Auto Categorization works reall well, sure it sometimes mislabels and sends email to a different category. But it is accurate most of the times. I don't have to spend time on these rules.
Getting back to Notion and Google Docs, I'd rather use Notion for internal documentation and I'd really, really rather use Google Docs for redlining contracts, which is most often what I'm doing when I'm dealing with .doc/.docx files. In Microsoft's suite I think Notion is an alternative to OneNote, not to Word. So I would agree with the author if the implication was that Google should have a Notion-like tool in addition to Google Docs, but suggesting that Google Docs is bad because it's not Notion-like doesn't make any more sense to me than saying that Gmail is bad because it's not Slack.
So they pivoted to Fuchsia OS. A new OS to provide seamless experience across several devices (in home or in vehicle while commuting. Some of the resource can be living in cloud). Its a sort of networked OS. Streaming music to your Google Home, let me fetch that music form the Fuchsia Desktop's cache and stream it to Google Home, rather than fetching it all the way from Cloud.
With out applications, OS is not much of use. Here comes Flutter. Let the developers make apps for Android and iOS in Flutter (currently over 50k apps on Google Play store) and have them run the same app on Fuchsia OS. I believe it will take probably another year or two for Google to bring in Fuchsia to Pixelbook. Let's hope so! I would like an OS as open as Linux, with macOS like user experience.
Microsoft completely lapped the industry on this with VS Code. It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend in a browser.
Edit: I thought I just read it just got to 53% market share. It was at 18% and growing fast in 2018, so it’s plausible they have majority market share now: https://triplebyte.com/blog/editor-report-the-rise-of-visual...
You mean like X? Which was created in 1984 and at the canonical version (11) in 1987?
I didn’t mean to imply they were the first do build a development environment using a thin client.
I meant they are way ahead on in-browser / on tablet IDE’s, which is surprising, since Google had a 10 year lead on the office suite side of things.
That said, I've been very excited for Fuchsia for a long time.
The article doesn't really say anything, so I can see how it being at the top would be suspicious.
Validating people's spleen is generally a good way to get to the top of the fp.
"All internet discussions of new products are content marketing" seems way overboard for me.
I'm afraid your comment breaks the HN guideline against insinuation of astroturfing/shilling/etc. without evidence. It's extremely common (well over 99% of these cases) for people to see something they find incongruent, massively overinterpret it, and jump into the internet to accuse others. We don't allow that here, because it poisons discussion and community. That doesn't mean real astroturfing doesn't exist (I blasted someone for it yesterday [1]). It means that we have to have something objective to go on—and if you have that, you should be letting us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate.
Plenty of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for anyone who wants it. Here's me saying the same thing 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986042.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619453, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619595
To be very clear, my comment was intended to be complimentary, not negative. I stated it was impressive. The author's opinion about Google is totally valid and widely shared -- and that's what makes the article such a clever vehicle in which to insert a call to action on behalf of Hey. <-- no direct evidence, just my opinion, of course.
Sounds like your crystal ball malfunctioned on that forecast. I'll recalibrate it for you but will forecast it for this decade:
In 2020, I predict that by 2030, Fuchsia OS would be one of the most popular desktop and mobile OSes in the world and will replace Chrome OS and Android. It was fast, lightweight, and $0.
There you go. That makes much more sense according to my crystal ball.
Gmail, maps, page-rank based search, and other pre-2010 Google tech were category makers. Every competitor has to massively step their game up to make something as good.
Stadia is not a category maker. There's no massive competitive advantage or leading position for anyone else to catch up to. It's nowhere near the pre-2010 Google products.
Tensorflow, TPUs, Spanner, Photos, Waymo. Just keep shifting the goal posts.
Waymo's not even out of private alpha yet =)
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.
Once you don't use browsers for everything, the machine is cooler and more responsive.
Seriously feels as if I bought new hardware.
I close Safari when not using it, same for all other browsers (have Brave, Chrome, ...).
It's crazy how people all the time say on HN that performance doesn't matter and how optimizing code is a waste of time while I'm simultaneously frustrated about how slow the majority of software I use is.
>It is used by monopolists to discourage entry into a market, and is illegal in many countries.[1] The quantity produced by the incumbent firm to act as a deterrent to entry is usually larger than would be optimal for a monopolist, but might still produce higher economic profits than would be earned under perfect competition.
Let’s imagine a firm, and let’s call it Adobe. Adobe makes Photoshop. Photoshop has a full set of features and is sold for a high price to a market segment comprised of professional users who need the features provided by Photoshop, and are happy to pay the price since it enables them to make a decent living even once the cost of the tool is deducted. Adobe gets a decent revenue that allows it to cover expenses, capital costs, and develop future versions.
On the other side of the spectrum, you have Microsoft. Microsoft ships Paint for free. Paint has very few features, but it covers some (mainly ironic) usage cases, and it gets used by those who wish to manipulate images but have no need for the complex features of Photoshop. Sure, some people who wish to do high-level image manipulation but cannot afford Adobe’s asking price for Photoshop are not well-served by this arrangement, but hardly anybody would argue that Microsoft’s inclusion of Paint would be anti-competitive towards Adobe: it’s not worth adding all the features of Photoshop to Paint only to give it away for free (and the argument that you would give it away for free only long enough to bankrupt Adobe and then start charging for Mega-Paint might be profitable, but it’s uncertain and depends on costs of capital and expected rates or return, plus the costs of an almost certain lawsuit).
Nor can Adobe be anti-competitive against Microsoft: dropping the price of Photoshop to zero just to stop people from using Microsoft’s own free product would be... pointless as it would zero their revenue.
These are two extreme cases, and it’s easy to just think in these dualistic terms and come to the wrong conclusion (or wonder what I’m getting at with this bizarre and apparently off-topic rant).
Now to tie it all together, introduce a middle-ground player such as Affinity. Affinity makes Photo, a product that is midway between Paint and Photoshop both in terms of price and features. People who need the full features of Photoshop (including those not present in Photo) will still choose Photoshop, which might slightly dip Adobe’s revenue. Microsoft’s will however remain stationary at zero. Affinity has captured the market of those who are defined by Paint being unsuitable but who do not wish to pay Photoshop’s full price (because Photos contains all the features they need).
Now, finally, the final step: say Adobe turns a blind eye to piracy of Photoshop. It still gets paid by its professional customers so it’s revenue remains unchanged. However, people who found Paint to be frustrating are now faced with an interesting choice: steal Photoshop (which has all the functions they could possibly want, and is free) or buy Photos (which has all the functions they want, albeit a subset of those offered by Photoshop, but does so for a higher price).
This is one obvious case that comes under the broad rubric of ‘dumping’ (selling at prices that damage one’s own short-term interest in order to damage one’s competitor and increase one’s net long-term advantage) but there’s plenty others where that came from. The tech industry is rife with them. Mainly, lack of successful prosecution is probably due to regulatory capture by way of lobbying.
as always govt has failed everyone by failing to prosecute these big behemoths where the only 'innovation' they do is centralize and capitalize on an already emerging solution from the rise of internet and computing.
what we need is a philanthropic fund that funds startups like craigslist & does it completely open sourced from the getgo.
A better way to respond to that one might be by saying something about all the people who can't afford to pay for email, who benefit from the free services we're talking about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When you payed your ISP for internet service it used to include an email account with it.
You're better off paying for your email - if you don't want, or can't, you just have to pay with your privacy.