13 ms·

Google’s different brands remind me of MSFT of the early 2000s. No rhyme or reason. More chaos and throwing spaghetti at the wall. No issues changing or depreca

by fjabre 7y ago

Google’s different brands remind me of MSFT of the early 2000s. No rhyme or reason. More chaos and throwing spaghetti at the wall. No issues changing or deprecating APIs and products like this on a whim. They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades.

inetknght 7y ago
> They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades. Even Gmail is a giant blob of garbage.
- leoh 7y ago
  What?
  - inetknght 7y ago
    Google has a vested interest in reading your email. Google lets users think that setting up a mail server is difficult, that email is a dead end communication medium compared to walled gardens, and that phishing is difficult to combat effectively.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      FWIW though, setting up a mail server is difficult. Setting up a mail client with reasonable spam filtering to make email usable is also difficult. Compare the list of steps on either of those tasks to the list for getting email via Gmail: "1) Sign up to a Google account, 2) visit gmail.com"; it's obvious almost all users are going to do the latter (or its equivalent at a Google competitor).
      - inetknght 7y ago
        Setting up a mail server isn't difficult. It's about as easy as installing and configuring a web server, and just about as technical. Email has been around for decades. The fact that Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and many paid services have had one-click email addresses for twenty-plus years should demonstrate that it's not difficult. Businesses just don't want to make it easy for lay people to do it.
        jefftk 7y ago
        I've run a mail server, and still help out with one, and getting consistent deliverability is hard. We've wanted to move to another hosting service for years, but the only reason we're doing ok right now is that our dedicated IP has a solid history and we just can't give that up in a migration.
        ceejayoz 7y ago
        The services you mention all have entire large teams devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc. That it's easy and cheap on a marginal basis for them to add one more inbox to their millions doesn't mean the overall infrastructure is easy to keep running.
        inetknght 7y ago
        > The services you mention all have entire large teams devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc. Can you provide specific numbers to the count of people devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc? I suspect the number's a lot smaller than you think. I also suspect the peoples' duties are less devoted than you think. If Google, for example, truly worked to tackle spam then it wouldn't have a spam problem today. If Yahoo truly worked to tackle reputation, people wouldn't have trouble sending email using an email client instead of a browser. I'll grant you that uptime does have dedicated people. But it's not to tackle spam or reputation. It's because offline services don't make a profit.
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        I work with these teams at Google. There are teams that actively (and solely) work on spam and abuse detection. They're larger than you seem to believe, though I won't give exact numbers. There's also obviously sre teams that maintain uptime. (Note I said teams, and there's a public approximate minimum size for an are team at Google of 8-12 people) The problem is that spam can't be "solved". Reputation is easy to solve: only accept email from a known list of good senders. Gmail, Yahoo, MailChimp (or not), etc. But that makes people on HN complain. So your have to try and infer reputation of mailservers on shared hosts. And spammers are always trying to beat you, and there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of spam outfits. Af they're sneaky. They try to use awa or gcp to send email, or even send spam from Gmail, prevent trickier things. So you're left to defend from a spam campaign from Yahoo while also trying to not block everyone at Yahoo, and detect the spammers who are using Gmail to spam Yahoo too. And the spammers are always innovating, so you have to as well. My personal belief is that Google likely considers spam detection to be an area of competitive advantage so investments are warranted.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      Phishing is difficult to combat effectively. Part of the problem is technological in that we never adopted a way of verifying senders are who they claim to be, but a large part of it is that humans are really good at fooling other humans, at least enough of the time to cause trouble. Ironically, it is the technical problem of verification that makes it difficult to run (not setup) a mailserver: no one wants to trust it.
      - inetknght 7y ago
        > Part of the problem is technological in that we never adopted a way of verifying senders are who they claim to be, but a large part of it is that humans are really good at fooling other humans, at least enough of the time to cause trouble. Tell me more about how DKIM and SPF and TLS with client certificates don't verify senders.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        I didn't say they didn't, I said we haven't adopted a way of verifying senders. If DKIM, SPF, and TLS were universal, it would be a solved issue, but they aren't for a whole lot of reasons. P.S.: However, come to think of it, they don't. You can receive a perfectly legit and verified email from scammer@consrus.ru with the name displayed as "Mr. Your CEO".
      - kedean 7y ago
        I don't think verification of sender is the problem (see PGP), it's that email was built such that anyone can contact anyone without setup ahead of time. I can give my address to some guy I meet at a conference and he can email me later with no issues, we don't need to agree ahead of time that we know who each other are. If he uses PGP, I need to accept the first communication is him, which means anyone can send me anything claiming to be anyone. Unfortunately, as soon as you solve this part of the issue with technology, I think you've just reinvented social media.
        jimmydorry 7y ago
        He said "adopted". Not "invented". PGP is not main-stream and probably never will be. Such technologies have to be done behind the scenes and presented seamlessly, or they will probably never take off.
    - toast0 7y ago
      > Google lets users think that [...] phishing is difficult to combat effectively. It sure is when they don't even bother to show the From address, there's no way to make links unclickable as an email administrator. At this point, between Microsoft and Google ruining it in different ways, email has very little hope as a medium.
  - horsawlarway 7y ago
    Eh, I agree with him. I've been with gmail since middle school (going on... a LOT of years now, back when it was invite only). Somewhere in the last 10 years or so it feels like the gmail team switched from "Make a good email client" to "Shove all the enterprisey things into gmail!". It's gotten SO slow to load and is incredibly bloated. I was a happy inbox user until... drumroll... they shut that down too. I still use Gmail because old habits die hard, but I won't ever suggest a google tool at work. Fool me once, shame on you...
    - benhurmarcel 7y ago
      Actually for work Gmail has gotten (and is getting) better. My workplace switched from Outlook to Gmail recently and I felt like it was a net improvement.
- juped 7y ago
  Gmail cannot even do threading, and it makes threads burst into flame when a threaded mailreader tries to interact with people using gmail.
- dathinab 7y ago
  > Even Gmail is a giant blob of garbage. Sadly from a UX point of view I can't disagree. Google inbox (and other products) showed how the UX for mail clients can be tremendously improved. But they shut it down and only migrated some of the more irrelevant features. IMHO the UX of gmail is so bad that I wonder if they want to phase out email altogether. This doesn't even include some of the thing inbox (and maybe gmail, idk) supported wrt. metadata and live updates and now is discontinued "because it's no longer needed with dynamic amp pages". Just that amp kinda misses the whole point of email :( . I really want to write my own client. But I know it's way to much work to get to the point where it's nice _and_ that is pointless if the people sending mails will stop including thinks like json-ld sections in mail. Really sad, as that had a lot more potential then the amp * they want to ship now.
- ape4 7y ago
  There is a hamburger icon (top-left), 9-dot icon (top-right), gear icon (top-right) and 3-dot icon (top-left). What do they all do? (I actually know).
  - komali2 7y ago
    And that's before you open up the compose field. To this day I click the wrong button every time when I want to forward an email. Every time. Despite knowing I do it every time, I still click the wrong one.
    - monkeypizza 7y ago
      Huh, I imagine that internally nobody notices this type of problem because they all use keyboard shortcuts and hit 'f' to forward.
  - kedean 7y ago
    Don't forget the menu with a picture of your face on it (probably).
  - jwalton 7y ago
    Google Play music is like this in Android Auto: https://twitter.com/JasonCWalton/status/1065631146090868736 https://twitter.com/JasonCWalton/status/1065631146090868736 They've replaced the hamburger menu in the upper left with a "back arrow", which does the same thing as the hamburger menu did, while making even less sense.
itg 7y ago
From what I hear, this is due to the promo driven culture at Google. You can good reviews/promos based on new products that get pushed to market, nobody cares about maintenance at Google.
- lrem 7y ago
  I got my first promotion in Google for preventing a half-forgotten system from imploding.
  - Roritharr 7y ago
    That's actually a bad sign, as it shows how notable it is at Google when something like this is prevented... ️ Preventing Products from failing should be SOP.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      But consider incentives. If nobody gets promoted for doing it, nobody does it. Promotion for maintenance isn't a bad sign if your corporate culture is "hire the smartest people in the room and let them build great products;" you're going to have to incentivize maintenance somehow, and "maintain it or you're fired" is counter to your cultural goals.
    - romanows 7y ago
      It's bad that there are half forgotten systems but almost every sizable business that has been around for many years will have this. On mobile, but there's a famous story of a server that had been drywalled over and had been running just fine, unnoticed and unattended, for years. It's good to see that maintenance is rewarded at Google at least occasionally. I only ever hear that it is only new products that are rewarded. And I notice new people piling on to issues in their product trackers that I've been following for years.
      - theandrewbailey 7y ago
        > On mobile, but there's a famous story of a server that had been drywalled over and had been running just fine, unnoticed and unattended, for years. This one? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_serv...
monocasa 7y ago
Stadia .net 2003.

by fjabre 7y ago

inetknght 7y ago

> They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades. Even Gmail is a giant blob of garbage.

leoh 7y ago
What?
- inetknght 7y ago
  Google has a vested interest in reading your email. Google lets users think that setting up a mail server is difficult, that email is a dead end communication medium compared to walled gardens, and that phishing is difficult to combat effectively.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    FWIW though, setting up a mail server is difficult. Setting up a mail client with reasonable spam filtering to make email usable is also difficult. Compare the list of steps on either of those tasks to the list for getting email via Gmail: "1) Sign up to a Google account, 2) visit gmail.com"; it's obvious almost all users are going to do the latter (or its equivalent at a Google competitor).
    - inetknght 7y ago
      Setting up a mail server isn't difficult. It's about as easy as installing and configuring a web server, and just about as technical. Email has been around for decades. The fact that Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and many paid services have had one-click email addresses for twenty-plus years should demonstrate that it's not difficult. Businesses just don't want to make it easy for lay people to do it.
      - jefftk 7y ago
        I've run a mail server, and still help out with one, and getting consistent deliverability is hard. We've wanted to move to another hosting service for years, but the only reason we're doing ok right now is that our dedicated IP has a solid history and we just can't give that up in a migration.
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        The services you mention all have entire large teams devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc. That it's easy and cheap on a marginal basis for them to add one more inbox to their millions doesn't mean the overall infrastructure is easy to keep running.
        inetknght 7y ago
        > The services you mention all have entire large teams devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc. Can you provide specific numbers to the count of people devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc? I suspect the number's a lot smaller than you think. I also suspect the peoples' duties are less devoted than you think. If Google, for example, truly worked to tackle spam then it wouldn't have a spam problem today. If Yahoo truly worked to tackle reputation, people wouldn't have trouble sending email using an email client instead of a browser. I'll grant you that uptime does have dedicated people. But it's not to tackle spam or reputation. It's because offline services don't make a profit.
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        I work with these teams at Google. There are teams that actively (and solely) work on spam and abuse detection. They're larger than you seem to believe, though I won't give exact numbers. There's also obviously sre teams that maintain uptime. (Note I said teams, and there's a public approximate minimum size for an are team at Google of 8-12 people) The problem is that spam can't be "solved". Reputation is easy to solve: only accept email from a known list of good senders. Gmail, Yahoo, MailChimp (or not), etc. But that makes people on HN complain. So your have to try and infer reputation of mailservers on shared hosts. And spammers are always trying to beat you, and there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of spam outfits. Af they're sneaky. They try to use awa or gcp to send email, or even send spam from Gmail, prevent trickier things. So you're left to defend from a spam campaign from Yahoo while also trying to not block everyone at Yahoo, and detect the spammers who are using Gmail to spam Yahoo too. And the spammers are always innovating, so you have to as well. My personal belief is that Google likely considers spam detection to be an area of competitive advantage so investments are warranted.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Phishing is difficult to combat effectively. Part of the problem is technological in that we never adopted a way of verifying senders are who they claim to be, but a large part of it is that humans are really good at fooling other humans, at least enough of the time to cause trouble. Ironically, it is the technical problem of verification that makes it difficult to run (not setup) a mailserver: no one wants to trust it.
    - inetknght 7y ago
      > Part of the problem is technological in that we never adopted a way of verifying senders are who they claim to be, but a large part of it is that humans are really good at fooling other humans, at least enough of the time to cause trouble. Tell me more about how DKIM and SPF and TLS with client certificates don't verify senders.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        I didn't say they didn't, I said we haven't adopted a way of verifying senders. If DKIM, SPF, and TLS were universal, it would be a solved issue, but they aren't for a whole lot of reasons. P.S.: However, come to think of it, they don't. You can receive a perfectly legit and verified email from scammer@consrus.ru with the name displayed as "Mr. Your CEO".
    - kedean 7y ago
      I don't think verification of sender is the problem (see PGP), it's that email was built such that anyone can contact anyone without setup ahead of time. I can give my address to some guy I meet at a conference and he can email me later with no issues, we don't need to agree ahead of time that we know who each other are. If he uses PGP, I need to accept the first communication is him, which means anyone can send me anything claiming to be anyone. Unfortunately, as soon as you solve this part of the issue with technology, I think you've just reinvented social media.
      - jimmydorry 7y ago
        He said "adopted". Not "invented". PGP is not main-stream and probably never will be. Such technologies have to be done behind the scenes and presented seamlessly, or they will probably never take off.
  - toast0 7y ago
    > Google lets users think that [...] phishing is difficult to combat effectively. It sure is when they don't even bother to show the From address, there's no way to make links unclickable as an email administrator. At this point, between Microsoft and Google ruining it in different ways, email has very little hope as a medium.
- horsawlarway 7y ago
  Eh, I agree with him. I've been with gmail since middle school (going on... a LOT of years now, back when it was invite only). Somewhere in the last 10 years or so it feels like the gmail team switched from "Make a good email client" to "Shove all the enterprisey things into gmail!". It's gotten SO slow to load and is incredibly bloated. I was a happy inbox user until... drumroll... they shut that down too. I still use Gmail because old habits die hard, but I won't ever suggest a google tool at work. Fool me once, shame on you...
  - benhurmarcel 7y ago
    Actually for work Gmail has gotten (and is getting) better. My workplace switched from Outlook to Gmail recently and I felt like it was a net improvement.
juped 7y ago
Gmail cannot even do threading, and it makes threads burst into flame when a threaded mailreader tries to interact with people using gmail.
dathinab 7y ago
> Even Gmail is a giant blob of garbage. Sadly from a UX point of view I can't disagree. Google inbox (and other products) showed how the UX for mail clients can be tremendously improved. But they shut it down and only migrated some of the more irrelevant features. IMHO the UX of gmail is so bad that I wonder if they want to phase out email altogether. This doesn't even include some of the thing inbox (and maybe gmail, idk) supported wrt. metadata and live updates and now is discontinued "because it's no longer needed with dynamic amp pages". Just that amp kinda misses the whole point of email :( . I really want to write my own client. But I know it's way to much work to get to the point where it's nice _and_ that is pointless if the people sending mails will stop including thinks like json-ld sections in mail. Really sad, as that had a lot more potential then the amp * they want to ship now.
ape4 7y ago
There is a hamburger icon (top-left), 9-dot icon (top-right), gear icon (top-right) and 3-dot icon (top-left). What do they all do? (I actually know).
- komali2 7y ago
  And that's before you open up the compose field. To this day I click the wrong button every time when I want to forward an email. Every time. Despite knowing I do it every time, I still click the wrong one.
  - monkeypizza 7y ago
    Huh, I imagine that internally nobody notices this type of problem because they all use keyboard shortcuts and hit 'f' to forward.
- kedean 7y ago
  Don't forget the menu with a picture of your face on it (probably).
- jwalton 7y ago
  Google Play music is like this in Android Auto: https://twitter.com/JasonCWalton/status/1065631146090868736 https://twitter.com/JasonCWalton/status/1065631146090868736 They've replaced the hamburger menu in the upper left with a "back arrow", which does the same thing as the hamburger menu did, while making even less sense.

itg 7y ago

From what I hear, this is due to the promo driven culture at Google. You can good reviews/promos based on new products that get pushed to market, nobody cares about maintenance at Google.

lrem 7y ago
I got my first promotion in Google for preventing a half-forgotten system from imploding.
- Roritharr 7y ago
  That's actually a bad sign, as it shows how notable it is at Google when something like this is prevented... ️ Preventing Products from failing should be SOP.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    But consider incentives. If nobody gets promoted for doing it, nobody does it. Promotion for maintenance isn't a bad sign if your corporate culture is "hire the smartest people in the room and let them build great products;" you're going to have to incentivize maintenance somehow, and "maintain it or you're fired" is counter to your cultural goals.
  - romanows 7y ago
    It's bad that there are half forgotten systems but almost every sizable business that has been around for many years will have this. On mobile, but there's a famous story of a server that had been drywalled over and had been running just fine, unnoticed and unattended, for years. It's good to see that maintenance is rewarded at Google at least occasionally. I only ever hear that it is only new products that are rewarded. And I notice new people piling on to issues in their product trackers that I've been following for years.
    - theandrewbailey 7y ago
      > On mobile, but there's a famous story of a server that had been drywalled over and had been running just fine, unnoticed and unattended, for years. This one? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_serv...

monocasa 7y ago

Stadia .net 2003.