> I really like using my Samsung tablet. I previously used the Motorola Xoom for a while and liked that.
He liked the Xoom? It's sad. Like Bill Gates before him, for all his success, all his money and all of his intelligence, he can't use an iPad in public.
I have a Xoom and love it. Why is that sad to you? I deal with iPads at my job and hate the experience. I'd prefer my Xoom to any iPad without hesitation.
I have a xoom and love it. Have you used one? You might be surprised. The hardware is less sexy than competing tablets (heavier mostly), but the software is wonderful, and I'm extremely happy with the overall experience.
I miss the Google run by Eric Schmidt. What Larry Page is doing to Google reeks of what Ballmer did to Microsoft. It is no doubt a profitable strategy, at the cost of "coolness" that Google has always been known for. History books might remember Google Plus having displaced Facebook similar to how IE displaced Netscape.
He's trying to run the company more like Apple, which is what Steve Job's recommended that Larry do. It comes down to doing a few things well and focusing. Probably a lesson that we all need to learn.
He definitely learnt "focus" from how Steve Jobs ran Apple, which is a great thing.
But he also learnt a few things from Microsoft: clone the market leader, and use your dominant position to gain market share for your clone (eg. Android, Google+). That is just not Apple strategy.
How is that what they're doing? I personally miss the simple search engine it used to be. Didn't PG write something similar recently? Google has become a frustrating user experience. Everything is constantly moving around, it feels cluttered and I frequently lose interesting search results pages due to strange glitches, probably resulting from key mappings that I'm not aware of.
They are killing off lots of other projects and focusing on far fewer. What you wrote is a tangent from what I wrote. You are complaining because by focusing more on search they are making it worse. Whether search is better now can be debated, and I don't have an opinion, but they are certainly focusing on it.
Producing the best thing we possibly can for users is our paramount thing. I think we have demonstrated that over a very long period of time with a whole variety of different issues we’ve faced around the world.
Hilarious. Lately, Google's wannabe products/services are knee-jerk reactions to existing products. Google is driven by envy, not by the desire to innovate or create a better product or service.
I think Google+ is the only one that qualifies as a knee-jerk reaction, as Google realised very suddenly that social is a valuable currency on the internet, and they didn't have any.
Aside from that, there are no kneejerks in your list. Android was bought two years before the iPhone came out. Chrome was not a response to any kind of threat to Google. They created Google Offers after GroupOn refused to be bought. Google Docs was clearly an innovation, not a reaction. I could go on...
Not really relevant in this case, though. Clearly, Google was planning to get involved in the mobile space before the iPhone. The physical form of that involvement may have changed, but that doesn't qualify Android as a "knee-jerk reaction".
In any case, since then the iPhone notification tray has clearly copied Android, etc. etc. All to the benefit of the end user, IMO.
Considering the relative growth curves of RIM and Android since 2007, I think switching from "Linux/Java Blackberry clone" to "Linux/Java iPhone clone" was a solid decision.
In a theoretical world you might in principle be able to do more with Android, but given the "iOS First" approach that major developers take, it's hard to argue that it lets regular users "do more" in the real world.
Here's what I can do in Android that I can't do in iOS:
* develop an app on my own machine - you can't develop iOS on anything but AAPL hardware, android dev can be done on the big 3.
* without having to pay anything - how much does dev license in iOS cost? don't need to pay for android SDK and tools
* without having to jump through any loops to distribute it - I can just pack up the .apk and email it to you, provide a dropbox public link (when I used to use k9mail, I got my updates at http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/downloads/list rather than the android app store), or put it up in my own app store for it (look at amazon app store, or http://f-droid.org/, or that adult themed one that came out some time ago).
I've had my first Android for the better part of a year now (after two years with an iPhone 3G) and I have to agree with you. I was pretty excited to get into the "open" ecosystem but my ATT-locked Atrix is really not taking advantage of Android's supposed strengths. I'd probably like it more if I were developing mobile apps.
Right now the only thing I'd really miss if I went back to an iPhone is the navigation. The GMail integration is pretty sweet on the Android too, but maybe that's improved on iOS since I jumped ship last year.
It may be a knee-jerk reaction, but it was also the best decision. The iPhone represented a gigantic leap in usability on phones, and if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. If Google didn't come out with Android, Apple would own even more of the market than they do today.
Android was purchased by Google two years prior to the release of iOS [1][2]
Tablets are the natural progression of mobile platforms, and existed prior to the iPad.
The massive contention about Android fragmentation and update/upgrade paths has steadily grown to the point that controlling an additional choke point in that process could significantly improve the ecosystem. By purchasing Motorola and operating it separately they can produce phones with shorter wait times between Android version releases and updates, and set precedents for other manufacturers to follow.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a myriad of other platforms have proven that social is a huge market. Google+ was late to the party, but they would be stupid to ignore it altogether.
Google Offers is a natural tie-in with a mobile payments platform (Google Wallet), which they were essentially first to market with in the US despite having not yet gained significant traction.
I'm not very familiar with the Google Places, Hotpot, or Yelp services, but it seems like a natural tie-in with their existing Maps service. And sure, MapQuest was around first, but it still is, and I don't know anybody that prefers it to Google Maps.
Chrome may seem "me too" at the moment, but when it first released it was a pretty big deal. They proved that browsers could be minimal and functional, and as they said themselves it only made sense for them to contribute to the web at all points, from server to client.
Google Docs took Office products into a completely new space, one which Microsoft is now having a knee-jerk reaction to with their Office 365 platform.
On top of that, there's plenty of originality to be had still. Their self-driving cars project is really taking off, just a few short years ago nobody would ever have dreamed it would be possible to have a street-level view of nearly every road in the US (and tons of other countries now), their single account/sync structure is undoubtedly the inspiration for iOS's recent iCloud service, and they're in the process of revolutionizing internet connectivity itself right now with end-to-end fiber connections at reasonable consumer pricing in Kansas City.
Maybe there is a bit of envy in there, but who hasn't looked at something and said to themselves "I could do better"? I'd say that, for the most part, they have.
I'll grant you Plus, Offers, Places, and Tablets are due to competitive pressure. But even so, in most of those, they have not gone the route of just cloning the competitor.
Chrome was strictly about advancing the web platform, for users and application makers. Google figures that anything which makes the web better automatically benefits them. And it's been a brilliant success.
I agree in a lot of big categories - although I think they contribute even when they're nominal competitors more than leaders - but Chrome and Docs were both godsends. Chrome was a huge breakthrough in browser performance and I'll never buy a personal copy of Office again thanks to Docs. If you're going to call those "reactions", then any of their landmark products - search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube (an acquisition but a key one) - could be called reactionary.
You could come up with a similar list for just about any big corporation. A few of these really don't prove your point though, because you're comparing them to services that are also copies of something else.
iPad = Nokia N800
Facebook = Myspace, Friendster
IE/Firefox = Mosaic
MS Office = Lotus
I suspect that if we really put time into this, we could come up with examples of things the others might be considered copies of. Good artists copy, great artists steal.
Bit off topic. But i seriously don't understand the negative sentiment anything related to Google of late. It used to be Facebook a while back, and it seems to be Google's turn right now. There must be some sort of group behaviour explanation to this.
> There must be some sort of group behaviour explanation to this.
Inasmuch as Google acts and observers all sharing the same planet react, sure.
Let's run down the list!
- Perceived decline in search quality. They've remedied this to a decent extent, but when your SERPs are full of spammy, scrape-y dogshit for the better part of 18 months, that's going to ding your brand a bit.
- Shoe-horning Google+ into SERPs. Clutters a UI that was once sacred, often with content of lesser value than crawlable content from other platforms.
- Sharing user information across Google products that users considered to be separate. Complicated. Good for Google – helps their business. Not unreasonable for users to be suspicious.
- For special bonus points: Every time Schmidt's mouth has opened for the last three years, the creepiest shit pours out.
Google's willingness – delight? – to be misunderstood for long periods of time is laudable, but costly in terms of potentially irreplaceable goodwill.
Perceived? Result #2 in my industry features a site with 10 inbound links, while result #3 has #13. I can't start to imagine how much black SEO those companies are engaged in, but that is generally indicative of first-page results, which feature none of the paid and free services people actually use.
Maybe search is a "hard problem", but the reason Google gets crap over its quality freefall is that the company has the aggregate anonymized data to tell webmasters how long visitors stay on their sites keyword-by-keyword. And yet the company refuses to use this data to prune the garbage from its results, and instead seems focused on mining individual search data to compete with Facebook.
They killed my fantastic google reader experience, and forced the "social" aspect of it into G+. This might seem shallow on my side, but I am still livid about this. They completely ruined the reader experience for me.
They tried to mesh too much social into one product. Too many generalities, not enough specialization. Even with their "circles". Now I don't even use reader, when it used to be my crack fix.
Also, I added the Hacker News circle on G+, and all of the sudden I have 1704395784390582430 contacts in gchat. mother eff.
Also, I had a perfectly one off custom color scheme in gmail, and I couldn't transfer it over to the new style. now I'm just bickering. I'm really only legitimately pissed about reader.....
> Also, I added the Hacker News circle on G+, and all of the sudden I have 1704395784390582430 contacts in gchat. mother eff.
While it's semi-annoying that people in your G+ circles get added to gchat by default, you can easily disable this. https://plus.google.com -> click the arrow by your name in contact list -> privacy settings -> change to "custom" and disable any/all circles you don't want on your gchat list.
Also worth noting for anyone who is annoyed by the fact that these contacts are automagically added to your android phonebook(For instance Angry Birds apparently warrant a place in my phonebook?)
I found a nice setting in Android which only shows contacts with phone numbers. Invaluable. Otherwise I love Google contacts for syncing etc.
It could be a lot of people just think they are moving in the wrong direction, or perhaps no direction at all, in the last year. In my case the Google services I use are Docs, which has seen almost no improvement in ages, GMail which in my opinion took a step backwards, and Android which has only improved because I spent a few hours loading an ICS ROM onto my unsupported phone. They're not giving me much to be positive about right now. I'm not interested in Google+ and the more it's been shoved in my face the less interested I get.
In a few words, they are not thinking as much as before as to what Their core clients want. I.e. better search, among other things.
Shoving Google+ in everyone's mouth was not a smart move. Not everyone likes social media, and sharing stuff. Google used to serve the people who were primarily interested in "reading" the web, not necessarily participating into its content.
And the fact that Larry Page considers the move as "successful" and obviously does not acknowledge that they have any kind of issue is concerning. They are NOT listening to feedback. Just like they forced on everyone that horrible gmail redesign. Where was the feedback taken in account?
Just one thing I wanted to add. The "old" Google was all about solving problems. Searching on the net was difficult. They made it easy and relatively accurate. Creating documents online was a pain, they made Google Docs. Email clients were troublesome and did not have advanced features. They made Gmail. It was not easy to link addresses to real-life locations. They made Google Maps. Google Code made it easy to find out code extracts. Arguably, not all of their products solved problems, but many did.
Google Plus - does not solve any problem I had with their services. Actually made things worse as I do not want to share data among all those services, I like to keep apples and bananas in separate places.
Google Chrome - it's always good to have competition, but honestly, it does not bring much more than Firefox. It's not solving much of an issue here. What's with all the TV ads for a mere browser?
Google Play - I don't know what they are trying to solve here. Again, nothing wrong with adding more competitors on that field, but that's not really new-to-the-world problem solving solution. It's just more of the same stuff. It's plain boring.
This being said, the Google Cars project is very much true to the original spirit of the company. So, it's not all bad. But overall, there's a lot more crap being produced.
My view on this is pretty simple: Larry should keep doing what he's doing and let the haters keep on hating.
Before G+, people made fun of Google for not doing social and now that they have a good product, they are made fun of because they didn't kill facebook 6 months. People moaned and complained how no two Google products were alike or connected, and now that they complain that they work well together. And of course, Android's been hated forever, even as it takes over the market and iOS starts lifting its major features from Android.
So, Larry's focus and determination will probably result in a very productive reign, despite all the hate from the Valley folk and HNers
They don't have a good product (yet?). No one uses Google+ besides nerds and people who work at Google.
It makes it all the more irritating that they are forcing a non-compelling product down the throats of everyone. The only happiness generated from this is in their own egos.
i am not an android user. google, you know that. why, oh why, do i suddenly have a google play link in my now even more so useless google menu/top bar?! why are my picasa albums suddenly less relevant than circle's photos? the fukc do i need circles for? to be reminded why i went off facebook?!
pushing google services at every turn is really, really annoying. i like search, gmail, maps and docs to some extent - can i PLEASE disable the fucking rest, once and for all?
i grew up, internet wise, with google search. as it came out, it rocked my world. a super simple search box, with perfect results. my god, was it glorious. now it is turning into yahoo.
play, circles - google is pushing those things onto me, hereby cluttering up the rest of their products. yahoo, for me, always was the definition of clutter, whereas google had focused clarity.
that clarity is gone, under the helm of larry page. it is becoming more and more obvious just how great the performance of schmidt was.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 63.6 ms ] thread> I really like using my Samsung tablet. I previously used the Motorola Xoom for a while and liked that.
He liked the Xoom? It's sad. Like Bill Gates before him, for all his success, all his money and all of his intelligence, he can't use an iPad in public.
But he also learnt a few things from Microsoft: clone the market leader, and use your dominant position to gain market share for your clone (eg. Android, Google+). That is just not Apple strategy.
Hilarious. Lately, Google's wannabe products/services are knee-jerk reactions to existing products. Google is driven by envy, not by the desire to innovate or create a better product or service.
Android = iOS
Android tablets/ICS = iPad
Motorola Acquisition = iOS
Google+ = Facebook
Google Offers = Groupon
Google Places/Hotpot = Yelp
Chrome = IE/Firefox
Google Docs = MS Office
so on...
Aside from that, there are no kneejerks in your list. Android was bought two years before the iPhone came out. Chrome was not a response to any kind of threat to Google. They created Google Offers after GroupOn refused to be bought. Google Docs was clearly an innovation, not a reaction. I could go on...
obligatory http://www.technobuffalo.com/companies/google/android/androi...
In any case, since then the iPhone notification tray has clearly copied Android, etc. etc. All to the benefit of the end user, IMO.
Android copying the iPhone's user interface, touch screen, form factor, ecosystem, etc. is a knee-jerk reaction to iOS.
- click a button on my desktop web browser and have the current page appear on my phone
- flash a totally new ROM onto my phone
- give apps root access and let them directly access hardware
etc. etc. I agree that iOS has far more app capability, but Android has far more OS-level capability to take advantage of.
2 and 3 are theoretical ways to let software do more that are no more available to Android end-users than Jailbreaking is available to iOS users.
You've basically confirmed my point. Android's ability to 'do more' is theoretical.
Given that there are lots of things that everyday users want to do that come to Android much later, I just don't see a valid argument here.
"App Capacity" is what lets people do things.
* develop an app on my own machine - you can't develop iOS on anything but AAPL hardware, android dev can be done on the big 3.
* without having to pay anything - how much does dev license in iOS cost? don't need to pay for android SDK and tools
* without having to jump through any loops to distribute it - I can just pack up the .apk and email it to you, provide a dropbox public link (when I used to use k9mail, I got my updates at http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/downloads/list rather than the android app store), or put it up in my own app store for it (look at amazon app store, or http://f-droid.org/, or that adult themed one that came out some time ago).
Right now the only thing I'd really miss if I went back to an iPhone is the navigation. The GMail integration is pretty sweet on the Android too, but maybe that's improved on iOS since I jumped ship last year.
"OS-level capabilities" empower a handful of developers/hackers/etc..
Tablets are the natural progression of mobile platforms, and existed prior to the iPad.
The massive contention about Android fragmentation and update/upgrade paths has steadily grown to the point that controlling an additional choke point in that process could significantly improve the ecosystem. By purchasing Motorola and operating it separately they can produce phones with shorter wait times between Android version releases and updates, and set precedents for other manufacturers to follow.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a myriad of other platforms have proven that social is a huge market. Google+ was late to the party, but they would be stupid to ignore it altogether.
Google Offers is a natural tie-in with a mobile payments platform (Google Wallet), which they were essentially first to market with in the US despite having not yet gained significant traction.
I'm not very familiar with the Google Places, Hotpot, or Yelp services, but it seems like a natural tie-in with their existing Maps service. And sure, MapQuest was around first, but it still is, and I don't know anybody that prefers it to Google Maps.
Chrome may seem "me too" at the moment, but when it first released it was a pretty big deal. They proved that browsers could be minimal and functional, and as they said themselves it only made sense for them to contribute to the web at all points, from server to client.
Google Docs took Office products into a completely new space, one which Microsoft is now having a knee-jerk reaction to with their Office 365 platform.
On top of that, there's plenty of originality to be had still. Their self-driving cars project is really taking off, just a few short years ago nobody would ever have dreamed it would be possible to have a street-level view of nearly every road in the US (and tons of other countries now), their single account/sync structure is undoubtedly the inspiration for iOS's recent iCloud service, and they're in the process of revolutionizing internet connectivity itself right now with end-to-end fiber connections at reasonable consumer pricing in Kansas City.
Maybe there is a bit of envy in there, but who hasn't looked at something and said to themselves "I could do better"? I'd say that, for the most part, they have.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_(Apple)
-Steve Jobs started planning the development of the iPhone in 2002.
-Apple's collaboration with Motorola to produce the Rkr E1 started in 2004.
- Official Development of the iPhone started early 2005.
-Google bought Android in Aug 2005
Chrome was strictly about advancing the web platform, for users and application makers. Google figures that anything which makes the web better automatically benefits them. And it's been a brilliant success.
iPad = Nokia N800 Facebook = Myspace, Friendster IE/Firefox = Mosaic MS Office = Lotus
I suspect that if we really put time into this, we could come up with examples of things the others might be considered copies of. Good artists copy, great artists steal.
Inasmuch as Google acts and observers all sharing the same planet react, sure.
Let's run down the list!
- Perceived decline in search quality. They've remedied this to a decent extent, but when your SERPs are full of spammy, scrape-y dogshit for the better part of 18 months, that's going to ding your brand a bit.
- Shoe-horning Google+ into SERPs. Clutters a UI that was once sacred, often with content of lesser value than crawlable content from other platforms.
- Sharing user information across Google products that users considered to be separate. Complicated. Good for Google – helps their business. Not unreasonable for users to be suspicious.
- For special bonus points: Every time Schmidt's mouth has opened for the last three years, the creepiest shit pours out.
Google's willingness – delight? – to be misunderstood for long periods of time is laudable, but costly in terms of potentially irreplaceable goodwill.
Perceived? Result #2 in my industry features a site with 10 inbound links, while result #3 has #13. I can't start to imagine how much black SEO those companies are engaged in, but that is generally indicative of first-page results, which feature none of the paid and free services people actually use.
Maybe search is a "hard problem", but the reason Google gets crap over its quality freefall is that the company has the aggregate anonymized data to tell webmasters how long visitors stay on their sites keyword-by-keyword. And yet the company refuses to use this data to prune the garbage from its results, and instead seems focused on mining individual search data to compete with Facebook.
Also, I added the Hacker News circle on G+, and all of the sudden I have 1704395784390582430 contacts in gchat. mother eff.
Also, I had a perfectly one off custom color scheme in gmail, and I couldn't transfer it over to the new style. now I'm just bickering. I'm really only legitimately pissed about reader.....
While it's semi-annoying that people in your G+ circles get added to gchat by default, you can easily disable this. https://plus.google.com -> click the arrow by your name in contact list -> privacy settings -> change to "custom" and disable any/all circles you don't want on your gchat list.
I found a nice setting in Android which only shows contacts with phone numbers. Invaluable. Otherwise I love Google contacts for syncing etc.
Shoving Google+ in everyone's mouth was not a smart move. Not everyone likes social media, and sharing stuff. Google used to serve the people who were primarily interested in "reading" the web, not necessarily participating into its content.
And the fact that Larry Page considers the move as "successful" and obviously does not acknowledge that they have any kind of issue is concerning. They are NOT listening to feedback. Just like they forced on everyone that horrible gmail redesign. Where was the feedback taken in account?
Google Plus - does not solve any problem I had with their services. Actually made things worse as I do not want to share data among all those services, I like to keep apples and bananas in separate places.
Google Chrome - it's always good to have competition, but honestly, it does not bring much more than Firefox. It's not solving much of an issue here. What's with all the TV ads for a mere browser?
Google Play - I don't know what they are trying to solve here. Again, nothing wrong with adding more competitors on that field, but that's not really new-to-the-world problem solving solution. It's just more of the same stuff. It's plain boring.
This being said, the Google Cars project is very much true to the original spirit of the company. So, it's not all bad. But overall, there's a lot more crap being produced.
Before G+, people made fun of Google for not doing social and now that they have a good product, they are made fun of because they didn't kill facebook 6 months. People moaned and complained how no two Google products were alike or connected, and now that they complain that they work well together. And of course, Android's been hated forever, even as it takes over the market and iOS starts lifting its major features from Android.
So, Larry's focus and determination will probably result in a very productive reign, despite all the hate from the Valley folk and HNers
Google did 'social' before Google+, it was called Buzz (leaving Orkut, my dear Google Reader and Google Wave alone).
And people "made fun", if we want to call it that way, because of Google Buzz's lack of buzz.
> despite all the hate from the Valley folk and HNers
I don't think that's true.
It makes it all the more irritating that they are forcing a non-compelling product down the throats of everyone. The only happiness generated from this is in their own egos.
g+ didn't stop that. reddit people still post about how g+ looks like a ghost town.
seriously.
i am not an android user. google, you know that. why, oh why, do i suddenly have a google play link in my now even more so useless google menu/top bar?! why are my picasa albums suddenly less relevant than circle's photos? the fukc do i need circles for? to be reminded why i went off facebook?!
pushing google services at every turn is really, really annoying. i like search, gmail, maps and docs to some extent - can i PLEASE disable the fucking rest, once and for all?
i grew up, internet wise, with google search. as it came out, it rocked my world. a super simple search box, with perfect results. my god, was it glorious. now it is turning into yahoo.
Could you please outline how google.com is turning into a web portal like yahoo.com?
that clarity is gone, under the helm of larry page. it is becoming more and more obvious just how great the performance of schmidt was.