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I’m afraid his comments on not because my customer focussed enough jibe with my experience of Google. Google has done great UX, but two examples of dreadful cu

I’m afraid his comments on not because my customer focussed enough jibe with my experience of Google. Google has done great UX, but two examples of dreadful customer apps are Google Groups and the Google Admin interface. I have to daily make routine changes to accounts and Google Admin is so unbelievably slow that I curse it every time I have to login to it (which is incredibly frequently). The UI is slow, non-intuitive and confusing. And for a search company, it’s ability to search for Group addresses is appalling. And don’t get me started on Collaborative Inboxes... Google has innovated in the past, but it seems there is no polish and no attempt at fully developing products. They aren’t terribly great for enterprise management, which is sad for me because they have so much potential.

bitexploder 9y ago
Yes. Google admin is very opaque and docs seem to always be subtly or outright out of date. It is not fun.
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
Google Groups has been on life support for 15+ years. If they knew what they were doing it could have been a Reddit killer integrated into a functioning G+.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  Google groups is not a Reddit Killer, it is basically an evolved DejaNews, essentially the Archive.org of USENET. Perhaps the real flaw was abandoning the federated architecture of USENET for the centralized architecture of say Reddit or Facebook. Maybe we should bring back UUCP. :)
- chris_wot 9y ago
  Except it is used as a distribution list. It’s not the same as groups.google.com
kevingadd 9y ago
Google's incentive and performance review systems reward shipping and don't reward finishing or maintaining. That's a root cause of many bad/rotting Google products (though hardly the only one). For things involving open source or standards processes, it's really transparent when this has happened - Web Audio is the most notable one I've had the misfortune of interacting with, but there are some other cases where a pet project or prototype was kicked out the door and handed off to someone else (or no one).

bitexploder 9y ago

Yes. Google admin is very opaque and docs seem to always be subtly or outright out of date. It is not fun.

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago

Google Groups has been on life support for 15+ years. If they knew what they were doing it could have been a Reddit killer integrated into a functioning G+.

cromwellian 9y ago
Google groups is not a Reddit Killer, it is basically an evolved DejaNews, essentially the Archive.org of USENET. Perhaps the real flaw was abandoning the federated architecture of USENET for the centralized architecture of say Reddit or Facebook. Maybe we should bring back UUCP. :)
chris_wot 9y ago
Except it is used as a distribution list. It’s not the same as groups.google.com

kevingadd 9y ago

Google's incentive and performance review systems reward shipping and don't reward finishing or maintaining. That's a root cause of many bad/rotting Google products (though hardly the only one). For things involving open source or standards processes, it's really transparent when this has happened - Web Audio is the most notable one I've had the misfortune of interacting with, but there are some other cases where a pet project or prototype was kicked out the door and handed off to someone else (or no one).