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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

• raldi 6y ago
  I can't believe it's whatever year this is and Google Sheets can't remember that I just told it a particular sort range has a header row, or just figure it out by itself.
• NN88 6y ago
  THEY KILLED GOOGLE READER AND BLOGGING AS WE KNOW IT. I'll never forgive them for that, alone.
• Analemma_ 6y ago
  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.
  • awinter-py 6y ago
    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
    • BurningFrog 6y ago
      Ha! Google as an oil emirate is not a bad mental model. Thanx!
      • lostlogin 6y ago
        I’ve usually seen the comparison come up when discussing the toxicity of user tracking and advertising tech.
      • lmkg 6y ago
        The phrase "Data is the new oil" dates back to at least 2014, so it seems rather appropriate.
  • darepublic 6y ago
    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
    • ativzzz 6y ago
      Pretty sure this was a motivating factor in the re-organization from Google to Alphabet.
    • paulsutter 6y ago
      A small focused team of diverse talented people from different backgrounds, can make the biggest-impact. Focus=speed. Focus is what's missing at Google, and why they have such a sprawling staff and politics.
      • darepublic 6y ago
        You're right, diversity is fine, it's the lack of focus I suppose... but even with 'focus' I think the small size aspect is still important.
  • jcadam 6y ago
    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.
    • api 6y ago
      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.
      • jcadam 6y ago
        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. Golden handcuffs, I suppose.
  • staticassertion 6y ago
    > 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.
    • BurningFrog 6y ago
      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".
      • johannes1234321 6y ago
        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.
• awinter-py 6y ago
  love the cross-outs section 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
  • jsf01 6y ago
    Privacy conscious yet uses Zoom. Hmm
    • bitcharmer 6y ago
      Zoom is now offering e2e encryption for all users. What exactly do you have problem with?
      • falcolas 6y ago
        "Now" being the key word. It wasn't for a very long time.
      • jsf01 6y ago
        They have a history. - 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.
• aphroz 6y ago
  They also lost the trust of their users. They didn't drop the "don't be evil" for nothing..
  • Kiro 6y ago
    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.
    • laichzeit0 6y ago
      I've switched to Brave and duckduckgo. They are evil and I try avoid them at all costs. AMP is a good enough reason.
      • searchableguy 6y ago
        Why would you switch to brave but not firefox? 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027
        • jjcon 6y ago
          What would you suggest, Firefox? Mozilla has had their own set of black eyes https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...
        • lostlogin 6y ago
          Are Firefox still taking Google money? I’ve had a hunt but can’t find anything recent that is clear cut. If they are, a purist might object to that.
        • zackees 6y ago
          Firefox fired their CEO because he donated to a Christian group. So this guy went and forked the Chrome browser into Brave. If you think Chrome is better than Firefox, then you'll think Brave is also better than Firefox.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• PhearTheCeal 6y ago
  For Google Translate you should check out DeepL https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator It's absolutely insane, blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy.
  • laichzeit0 6y ago
    It supports considerably less languages though.
  • derefr 6y ago
    > 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.)
    • iforgotpassword 6y ago
      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.
  • emp_ 6y ago
    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)
• tengbretson 6y ago
  > It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them. They appear to me to have begun monetizing google maps. And it is awful.
  • jtbayly 6y ago
    What are the four monopolies?
    • elwell 6y ago
      Search, Email, Maps (they own Waze), YouTube
    • dgellow 6y ago
      I would say: Search, Map, Translate, Gmail. Though technically they also have YouTube and do monetize it.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • dfabulich 6y ago
      Search, Maps, YouTube, Chrome. (They all have competitors, some more successful than others.) 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-domains.php https://email-verify.my-addr.com/list-of-most-popular-email-...
      • dgellow 6y ago
        I have 2 remarkes: - 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.
    • ashconnor 6y ago
• flerchin 6y ago
  Owning the software they build doesn't seem to scale.
• _jal 6y ago
  I find it interesting how much of that article talks about features, but is about fashion and brand identification.
• justin66 6y ago
  Microsoft has a new clear mission: The Cloud. That's a clear mission?
  • shadowgovt 6y ago
    Good question, but it's clear enough that it's also Google's mission.
  • kweinber 6y ago
    No, it’s cloudy with an 80% chance of pain.
• dsschnau 6y ago
  Google has a clear mission and it's advertising, duh
  • maerF0x0 6y ago
    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
• whoisjuan 6y ago
  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. Google didn't blew a ten-year lead on anything.
  • Godel_unicode 6y ago
    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?
    • whoisjuan 6y ago
      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.
      • Godel_unicode 6y ago
        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.
• vsareto 6y ago
  >I’m a long shareholder of Google. It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them. Okay, but we don't want Google as a monopoly... or do we? Breaking up the monopoly means throwing away the ten-year lead.
  • haberdasher 6y ago
    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.
• searchableguy 6y ago
  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.
  • ancarda 6y ago
    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.
    • searchableguy 6y ago
      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.
      • ancarda 6y ago
        >Wish you didn't have to worry about being poor. 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.
        • searchableguy 6y ago
          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.
• buboard 6y ago
  > At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats > I started using HEY last week refreshing to see a person who 's not suggestable and easily swayed by fads
  • lostlogin 6y ago
    My gauge is okaying up, is this sarcastic?
    • buboard 6y ago
      yes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNy_GNWwhQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNy_GNWwhQk
• thoraway1010 6y ago
  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).
  • dleslie 6y ago
    > 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.
    • HenryBemis 6y ago
      > _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.
• vinay_ys 6y ago
  Photoshop->Figma :D that's hilarious!
  • arcturus17 6y ago
    Why? I guess it's because Figma has fewer features, but if OP used PS for web/app design, wouldn't this be fair?
    • chadlavi 6y ago
      esp because no one serious in our field has used photoshop for web design in almost a decade
    • vinay_ys 6y ago
      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.
      • arcturus17 6y ago
        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.
• eugenekolo 6y ago
  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.
  • jaekash 6y ago
    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.
  • MiddleEndian 6y ago
    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.
  • mikkergp 6y ago
    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.
    • MagnumOpus 6y ago
• xnx 6y ago
  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).
  • ceo_tim_crook 6y ago
    yeah Google is to busy mastering mind-control by search censorship and advertising to give a damn about "apps"
• obulpathi 6y ago
  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.
  • hedora 6y ago
    > 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. 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-studio-code https://triplebyte.com/blog/editor-report-the-rise-of-visual...
    • smabie 6y ago
      > It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend in a browser. You mean like X? Which was created in 1984 and at the canonical version (11) in 1987?
      • hedora 6y ago
        Yeah, but (presumably) much more latency tolerant. 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.
• listenallyall 6y ago
  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.
  • lostlogin 6y ago
    There are more Apple products listed. Maybe it’s a push to get beta OS users?
    • listenallyall 6y ago
      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"
      • testcase_delta 6y ago
        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.
        • 1-6 6y ago
          First world email problems.
    • rplnt 6y ago
      Everyone knows Apple, I have never heard about HEY. The article doesn't really say anything, so I can see how it being at the top would be suspicious.
      • arkades 6y ago
        The article deservedly bashes Google in a way that many here agree with, and praises a number of services that many here at least somewhat agree with. Validating people's spleen is generally a good way to get to the top of the fp.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• rvz 6y ago
  > 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.
• nailer 6y ago
  Google hasn't had any major new products for 10 years.
  • tsak 6y ago
    Stadia?
    • nailer 6y ago
      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.
      • jldugger 6y ago
        Well, now we're moving the goalposts. You can release a major product in an existing category. In fact, half your examples already existed.
        • nailer 6y ago
          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.
      • mav3rick 6y ago
        This is getting old now. Tensorflow, TPUs, Spanner, Photos, Waymo. Just keep shifting the goal posts.
        • nailer 6y ago
          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.
• shadowtree 6y ago
  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.
  • chadlavi 6y ago
    I am really looking forward to better touch-screen support in Figma.
  • joshmarinacci 6y ago
    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?
    • shadowtree 6y ago
      Yes, on my main work machine. MBP13, 2018. 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, ...).
      • smabie 6y ago
        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.
• tengbretson 6y ago
  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.
  • bogwog 6y ago
    They can't be broken up fast enough.
  • alexpetralia 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_price
    • ciarannolan 6y ago
      >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.
  • qubex 6y ago
    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.
• Supermancho 6y ago
  I can use photoshop for free now, on the web. I do that. https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/ - The world is very different. My family can use office for free now, on the web. We do that. https://www.office.com/ https://www.office.com/ Most of my family uses facebook. We all use maps, youtube, google search, gmail (not me, although I have an account).
• loughnane 6y ago
  I get the desire to abandon google services, and have done so myself for email and search, but there isn't much to this article. An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just starting a new email address. Airtable has some nice functionality, but I don't think it's head-and-shoulders above sheets and this article doesn't give me any reason to change my mind. Same things goes for Meet vs Zoom. Honestly, despite Google's history of trashing projects I'd put my money on gmail/docs outliving hey/notion and so he might just be planting the seeds of a painful switch later. When I switched my email I did it with a domain I own so that I can avoid the same fate. That's not to say google doesn't have problems. Privacy aside, ads as a primary source of revenue can have a negative effect on usability of their products (like search), but I wouldn't call that "squandering a 10-year lead", it's more like "failure to find a second golden goose"
  • jurassic 6y ago
    > An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just starting a new email address. Hey's screener feature shows there's a lot of room to innovate on giving users control of their attention beyond the filters and labels that Gmail has deemed sufficient for more than a decade now. Setting up forwarding to use Hey as a read client for my incoming gmail email has shown me that my address being old and public is not the problem. Inbox had bundling that was a promising direction, but that seems to have been scrapped when they shut that client down. I'm not a tinfoil hat person and don't really mind being tracked, but it doesn't surprise me that a company that makes its living off monetizing attention would never lead on giving control of it back to users.
    • kikki 6y ago
      I watched the HEY video and I don't get it - the screener feature is not innovation - it's a block list with a different name. Gmail has this. The way Jason hyped up every feature and then you realise it's something that already exists with a special "product name" (Imbox, really?). I can see why people buy into the marketing speak but look a little deeper.
• krtkush 6y ago
  [Shameless plug] For anyone who uses DuckDuckGo but finds themselves using !g too and is curious how much their DDG vs !g search distribution is - I have made a small FOSS add-on for Firefox called DDG Stats[1]. I am planning on a Chrome port too (though, I would always recommend Firefox over chrome). [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/
• api 6y ago
  I've personally backed way off when it comes to putting everything in the cloud. I know some people love the convenience and I get that, but I spend a lot of time and energy creating what I create and I want to actually have some control over it. I also don't trust cloud companies at all when it comes to either privacy or continuity. For similar reasons I've started data hoarding again. When I find an interesting video or podcast I tend to mirror and stash it on a NAS. Things disappear from the cloud quite regularly.
• burtonator 6y ago
  Imagine being a VC and hearing the pitch by Elasticsearch that you were going to make massive inroads in search (when they were early of course). I imagine most laughed at them like "How are you going to beat Google" ... Imagine if they answered "we expect Google to just completely abdicate their role in search." Google right now has a few wins but most of their projects fall flat. AWS is crushing it ...
  • deleted 6y ago
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• k__ 6y ago
  Google Docs/Sheets is pretty crappy compared LibreOffice. But its collaboration features are really good and everyone has a Google account, so working together remote works like a charm.
• abc_lisper 6y ago
  It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy. May be this is just a natural outcome of that. This is one of the most damaging things Google and the people it influenced did to programming profession. There is a generation of programmers now who can do very well on leetcode, but god help those who maintain that code after them - I know this from personal experience working on projects left behind by people who ended at Google
  • EthanHeilman 6y ago
    All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always hard.
    • felixgallo 6y ago
      I like the "Alexander bias" term -- is that yours, or are you quoting someone else?
      • cpeterso 6y ago
        What does "Alexander" refer to here?
        • necheffa 6y ago
          Probably Alexander the Great.
        • deleted 6y ago
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        • deleted 6y ago
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• cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
  The choice of "alternatives" mentioned in the article, like "Hey", "Notion", "AirTable", etc. actually does more harm to the credibility to the article than good, because I can't think of any normal person using all these startup products for important tasks. Hell, I think the only demographic who would have switched all their workflow tools to these would be people who live in Silicon Valley, just helping each other out.
  • walljm 6y ago
    My team (I am the director of software at my company) switched to Notion from Google Docs a little more than a year ago and I'm very happy with the change. Google Docs addresses a slightly different use case than Notion. Notion is one document for a lot of people, owned by the organization. Google Docs are docs owned by many people, often duplicated. Notion is much better for building documentation and for storing institutional knowledge. We still use Google docs for things that we don't need to share widely and don't need to be referenceable to a large number of people.
• AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  The mobile Google results page is so cluttered that I switched my iPhone’s default search to DuckDuckGo. The results are a tad worse, but I’m never doing heavy-duty searches on the go. And now I don’t have to scroll past 6 ads to get the first result. I use DDG as default search on my phone and it's measurably worse than google for the majority of searches I do and there are absolutely ads on ddg. I inevitably switch for at least half of my searches.
  • Angostura 6y ago
    I only switch for maybe 5%
  • lhopki01 6y ago
    I use Firefox with uBlockOrigin on my phone to avoid all the ads. It works great.
    • AndrewKemendo 6y ago
      I assume you're on Android. Is there a way to use uBO on iOS? Last I checked there wasn't.
      • magnio 6y ago
        I think your best option is AdGuard.
  • RMPR 6y ago
    FWIW Searx is a really decent alternative for search, plus it's open source and can be self-hosted
• mafia303 6y ago
  You lost me at tiktok
• peteyPete 6y ago
  Not sure I want everything to be rewritten to run on a browser. How unoptimized is that.. Not all comparisons are equal there. Like youtube vs twitch? Talking about livestreaming? replays? I don't go to twitch to look up peoples vlogs, how to's, etc. Apples / oranges even though you can livestream on both. Gmail clogged? Unsubscribe to some stuff or adjust your filters. I've had my gmail account since gmail became available and I have no issues keeping a clean inbox. Spam folder is massive, but I guess its doing its job. I get what you're saying.. But thats how the industry works. Giants can't move as quick when they have billions of users that rely on 100% uptime and backwards compatibility. You can't upend your stuff all the time. Startups are scrappy and can do crazy stuff. But notice how many crazy things don't last.
• franze 6y ago
  I had the "pleasure" to work with Ex-Googlers which had "Project Managers at G" in their resume. Honestly, I do not wonder anymore why Google nowadays s#ck as hard as they do. They made great presentations and a grand plans using some project management saas tools. But both of them neither understood the basics of projectmanagement (Who does what when and what do they need when?) nor could react when challenged. Both of them were lower to middle management, but sure as hell anything that you hand them would end in total mediocrity if not fail at all. On the other hand one of the most capable front end engineers I knew joined Google for 2 years. Where he spent most of his time - with a whole team - working on .... fold in and fold out animations (for a single mobile product) He quit. Google now is one of his customers. His work has gotten much more interesting. Google / Alphabet - the organization - did not scale well. My bet: There will be a huge crisis soon. Lots of G-people will loose their jobs.
  • Axsuul 6y ago
    Interesting how you are basing your assumptions on two ex-employees who no longer work there probably because of what you experienced, not to mention the small sample size.
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • franze 6y ago
      yes, it's definitely anecdotal. so please see it this way.
  • jldugger 6y ago
    You tell a nice story with the data, but I cannot dismiss the potential selection bias: perhaps these PMs were not up to Google's standards and were invited to leave?
    • deleted 6y ago
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• TrackerFF 6y ago
  Credit where credit is due: I think Google colab is fantastic. I've used Repl.it for a coupe of years now, but for the past year it's been Colab pretty much 100% of the time. Whenever I have to set up a new machine with dev. environment, I get a impending sense of doom. I get the "I really, really don't want to be doing this" feeling. The fact that you can open up your browser, and start coding in just mere seconds, is just an incredible feeling. In February I had to set up an older laptop with Python - I did this via Conda, which is usually a pretty smooth process. But I ended up spending 3 hours tracking down some persistent and conflicting DLL errors, which made numpy crash. Turns out some other applications on the computer caused this error.
• justinhj 6y ago
  I feel like sheets and docs not changing for years is a feature not problem. I don't like innovation in these kind of apps. It's far too common, historically, for people to add all kinds of useless crap like Mr Clippy and rearrange the toolbars and whatnot. Once you're familiar with the tools the interface is consistent across docs, sheets and slides as well as over time. The programmability is also really good. I actually built an app for a friend using just sheets and its automation features to implement a web form for their national poetry contest.
• yt-sdb 6y ago
  DuckDuckGo's rise feels like textbook "Innovator's Dilemma" stuff. By prioritizing privacy, something Google can't do because all the institutional values are misaligned with that goal, DDG were able to make headway into a niche market. Now they're established, and their results are getting better and better, even in the broader market. For example, I use DDG mostly because their results are visually easier to parse. It remains to be seen if they'll ever beat Google at their own search game, but Google certainly feels vulnerable for the first time in many years.
  • hogFeast 6y ago
    The visually easier part also relates to how Google "innovated". At some point Google seems to have realised that all they needed to do to grow, was just stuff more ads above the fold, and remove all non-Google content (i.e. when you search for travel, you get Google's OTA...when you search for finance news, you get Google's clickjacked articles, etc.). It is far easier to hit earnings that way (and btw, this was the intention...they rolled this out slowly so could they could control the numbers they reported). In my personal opinion, Google also optimises for hiring bureaucrats. Something has gone wrong with hiring when you are hiring a bunch of "smart" people and your strategy is this weak. Either you are hiring a bunch of people you don't need or you are hiring a bunch of people with the wrong skills (in this case, it is probably both). Google jobs seem like a sinecure...lots of people busily doing nothing...just imo. It is classic Innovator's Dilemma though (that book is amazing).
  • three_seagrass 6y ago
    How do you know Duck Duck Go actually prioritizes privacy though? People on HN have said that Duck Duck Go is a for profit corporation that doesn't open source or independently validate their privacy claims.
    • yt-sdb 6y ago
      (1) From a branding perspective, I don't know how much it matters. (2) e.g. If they're using my location data, they're terrible at it.
• franze 6y ago
  Another micro example of how bad Google is nowadays: The sitemap.xml API is deliberately broken for 1 1/2 years by now. The response does no longer deliver an indexed value back other than 0 or a frozen number form years ago. After I found out about it a few months later there was a tweet and blogpost about it. The documentation was never updated ... https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/search-console-api-original/v3/sitemaps#resource https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/search-console... My guess, there is no one responsible anymore, hey it just is a 200k people company ...
• jokit 6y ago
  Google may have once been an innovation company, but as usual, they became an acquisition/market share defending company.
• deleted 6y ago
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• askjdlkasdjsd 6y ago
  I am starting to think everything is an ad for Hey on hacker news these days.
• t0mmyb0y 6y ago
  This is google in a nutshell. I lived near google for many years and knew many employees and this drives them crazy. In order to have innovation and support for a particular product, google allows engineers to do what they want until nobody wants to touch the bloated pos and everyone walks away. Gmail has thousands of hidden functions. To get gmail built they allowed each engineer to add what they wanted...and most of it was for them personally. Remember the gmail2 thteat from a number of years ago? They couldn't figure out how to force every user into a new platform.
• aazaa 6y ago
  Google's main liability is that they can never, under any circumstances, prioritize user privacy. The reason the products listed by the author have rough corners is that those products don't contribute much to the bottom line. Google is an advertising company that happens to use technology. The problem is that too many people view it as a technology company that happens to be into advertising. As browsers adopt ad-blockers by default, Chrome will be the lone holdout. As smaller companies and startups realize that you can "monetize" products by charging a price and adopting stringent privacy policies, Google will be stuck with its "free" business model. Nothing Google will try to do in the years ahead will change the basic equation.
  • bogwog 6y ago
    > Nothing Google will try to do in the years ahead will change the basic equation. If Google splits up their various products into separate companies forced to survive on their own without Google's monopoly money to fall back on, we might actually see some quality products and services out of Google for the first time in a long, long time. Of course, the leadership will have to pull their heads out of their gilded asses for something like that to ever happen.
  • buttersbrian 6y ago
    The internet runs on ads and unless every site becomes membership driven ads are a natural revenue stream. And I personally don't see memberships becoming a preferred method of subsidizing much of the internet for most people. So ads it is, and ads it will likely be. With that said, Google doesn't have to a bad actor to survive with regards to advertisements, as it is relatively safe revenue stream for the foreseeable future.
  • zaphar 6y ago
    Google has the best software development tooling in the business internally. Their problems are not around technology. Their problems are product focus, commitment and follow through. Google is in fact primarily a technology company. They struggle with being a "product" company.
• smellsdonkey 6y ago
  Here's a free idea for Google that would make my life better... you know these voice assistant thingys? I would love if they could tell me when things happen instead of having to ask them if something is currently happening. For example, "Hey Google, tell me when XXX announces a concert in town." or "tell me when YYY is on sale" etc. Having to look these things up all the time really sucks.
• rkagerer 6y ago
  I had an early Chromebook (from I/O) and was never very impressed. I always felt the lackluster support for local storage would hold it back from ever seriously competing with my PC. I saw its value as more of a dedicated device for people who do limited things on their laptop (e.g. sales team using only a handful of web apps), and even in that niche it had to compete with iPads, etc.
• haolez 6y ago
  I have a Chromebook and I'm really found of it, but the Android and Linux parts seem half-baked and a depart from the Chromebook's initial proposition. I really like this setup where my computer is just a thin client to my infrastructure. In the case of ChromeOS, this is all a closed/proprietary environment managed by Google, but nothing prevents challengers from implementing this setup based on open standards and user freedom.
• marban 6y ago
  To Quote SJ: "The only problem with Microsoft is, they just have no taste" Repeat that for Google.
• siddarthd2919 6y ago
  The same article will fit well for Waymo as well.
• jcims 6y ago
  Google is an experiment in what happens when you give a bunch of smart people a 6-7 figure UBI (funded, of course, by search).
• ogre_codes 6y ago
  The adage "If you aren't paying for it, then you are the product" is a bit trite and worn out, but it in Google's case "If you aren't paying for it, you aren't the customer" is entirely accurate. While individual Google engineers are almost certainly motivated to do great things for end users, the company as a whole has little incentive to make a great consumer experience. Google feels like it's in a very awkward "You can't get there from here" position. I think they'd like to move more towards having a direct financial relationship (Google Pixel, YouTube's ad-free service, are good examples) with their customers but can't quite figure out how to get there. Pivoting a free product like Docs into a for-fee product often creates a ton of bad feelings for a company.
• mcot2 6y ago
  Not sure why he called it “TheFacebook”. That was an early name used way prior to even 2005. ChromeOS was released in 2010/2011.
  • petepete 6y ago
    Figma was released in 2016. The author must be some kind of prophet.
• mberning 6y ago
  Also in that timeframe the privacy landscape and people’s sensitivity to it have changed a great deal. It’s a much bigger concern amongst normies than it was 10-15 years ago.
• bookmarkable 6y ago
  The future does not belong to Google and Facebook. Data privacy is too important to allow massive grow in ads, and they are not companies organized around selling software. As the article points out, we can live without both. It isn’t 2009.
• MR4D 6y ago
  Someone once described the big tech companies this way: Google is about solving tough/new engineering problems; Microsoft is about building software; Apple is about the consumer; Facebook is about your attention span; Amazon is about your wallet. I thought that summed up their personalities pretty well so thought I’d share.
  • CobrastanJorji 6y ago
    I agree with you for Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but I disagree about Amazon and Facebook. Amazon's not about your wallet. They're frequently more expensive than other sites; they're about convenience and lock-in. If you need a Sprocket, you type sprocket into the search bar, click buy on the Amazon button, and you're done. The result will probably be a pretty good sprocket for an unobjectionable price. You don't need to worry about little details like who sold it to you or whether it's likely to show up functional. It'll probably work, and if it doesn't, you can return it. No need to do research, no need to drive to a store. Facebook doesn't care about your attention; it just needs your eyes. That sounds like the same thing, but it's very different. If you're just scrolling through without really reading anything, that's absolutely fine with Facebook so long as you keep doing it.
  • Axsuul 6y ago
    The Microsoft one is kind of vague. Maybe... Microsoft is about trying to extract more value from their business customers.
• jorblumesea 6y ago
  They were too busy grinding leetcode and focusing on "playing the game" and not growing or hiring innovators. The Max Howell incident is a perfect example. Creates legitimately useful software that everyone loves, can't invert a binary tree (because we do this all day right? this question is highly relevant to the job /s) so you can't work here. Maybe at one point edit distance questions were useful in identifying the 2% of CS grads that actually paid attention in class, but now it just produces code bots. Google gamified the interview, and in the process, became beholden and captured by its own madness.
• DannyB2 6y ago
  Google had (or still has) perverse incentives. No incentive to do the boring work of maintaining and improving existing products. Lots of incentive to create new things -- even if they overlap functionality of existing things -- which then must be phased out to make room for the awkward new things. Even if everyone preferred the old things.
• mrbonner 6y ago
  There was some point in the past year I read a comment here about the problem with Google is that when people wants to get promoted at Google to a senior or Staff (PE?) position they need to invent those big changes or projects. It results in adding bloat into existing software or abandon one. I am having that feeling at this point in my career. Without a moonshot project I wouldn’t expect to get pass an assessment committee. It’s sad. One of my colleagues working for Netflix tells me that they don’t have any fancy titles except senior SDE there. They pay you more if you’re that worthy, though. I can’t stop wondering what if tech companies follow this practice. Then, people would just focus on making stuff better instead of chasing the carrots waved in front of them.
  • dmitriid 6y ago
    > Then, people would just focus on making stuff better And yet, Netflix had autoplaying videos at full volume that didn't even show trailers, but some random snippet from the movie/show
    • nostromo 6y ago
      I actually close Netflix because of this. However, Netflix is full of smart people, so I have to assume that they've tested it and it increases engagement. Perhaps we're the outliers.
      • x2f10 6y ago
        FYI: You can turn it off in settings.
        • bostonvaulter2 6y ago
          But it took them a long long time to add that setting.
      • luhn 6y ago
        Netflix is well-known as a very data-driven company, so you can assume almost any change is backed by data. But solely data-driven decisions can be a bit myopic—You're likely to end up in a local maximum. For example, Netflix selects the "optimal" categories to display on your home screen. For several years, "My List" and "Continue Watching" were part of those categories, meaning they would change position and sometimes not show up at all, with no way to access them. It drove me crazy that I specifically chose shows I wanted to watch and Netflix would sometimes choose not to show me them.
• roland35 6y ago
  I'm still upset they shuttered inbox and reader!
• gnramires 6y ago
  I believe it's their corporate culture. Google just hires problem solvers, good engineers. It's a sort of dual of Apple, that prioritizes design and marketing. The result is you get things that Just work (and nothing else). While Apple gets you things that Just works. I don't see real vision in their products those days. None of them have real vision (Apple is too design centric and afraid to try new things, Google lacks creativity).
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• julianeon 6y ago
  There's a strange cognitive dissonance in how Google is both the most prestigious company that can employ you, and a maker of crappy, second-rate software. It seems like they can't both be simultaneously true.
• awinder 6y ago
  “At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats for macOS Big Sur. It reminded me how much Chrome makes my machine go WHURRRRRR. Yesterday, I made Safari my default browser again.” I talk to developer friends in my circles and I’m pretty sure I’m on a crazy list for running safari, but I really do think it’s the best Mac browser. Chrome is just an absolute hog and until there’s some Camino-like renaissance for Firefox/Mozilla on Mac it’s not going to work for me.
  • jasonv 6y ago
    I use Safari for personal surfing, and separate Chrome accounts for my various business/work related surfing. Keeps things separate and tidy, and I keep Chrome closed as much as I need it to be closed.
    • secondbreakfast 6y ago
      I like this idea a lot. I've been using Station to stay logged in to all my various work web apps, and then Chrome (now Safari) for personal.
      • jasonv 6y ago
        I use Mailplane for when I want to see all my email accounts, and Spark when I want to deal with all email accounts together. Each work Chrome profile has a pinned Gmail and, maybe, a Slack. So I can be universal, or targeted, where I want to spend my time. That said, I'm also spread across too many endeavors, but that's a totally different problem.
• thenoblesunfish 6y ago
  "Then something happened at Google. I’m not sure what." Occam's Razor would say that what happened is that they couldn't figure out how to make much money from these tools, and therefore directed fewer resources to them :(
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• Touche 6y ago
  > Then something happened at Google. I’m not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software. What happened was they were printing money on the cloud software they already had. Classic innovators dilemma.
• poulsbohemian 6y ago
  And yet the stock is at $1400+ this morning. I wonder if you did a survey and described Google without using the name Google, IE: single line of business responsible for 90%+ of revenue, limited switching costs for consumers, regularly kills products consumers like, would anyone think this is a stock worth holding? What weird times we live in.
• jeffbee 6y ago
  Most of the stuff in the article is not really central to Google's business, in my view. Google's business is dirt-cheap high-performance computing. They are well ahead of everyone in this line of endeavor. They use their ads revenues to fund R&D in hardware and software and build out capacity so they can opportunistically enter new lines of business. Usually these are businesses that nobody else could profitably execute, like YouTube. Or they are businesses that are technically unique, like Cloud Spanner, to which I see no competitors. So when I look at Google's health I look at the research they are doing to see if they seem to be staying on the cutting edge. Stuff like Snap/Pony or TPUs makes me think they are. It's possible that the capabilities Google is developing won't lead to any new profitable businesses, but their success in geospatial data and other computationally-expensive products like machine vision and translation are examples of their abilities. The latent ability to just jump into a new line of business is a strength of Google's, and products they developed more than a decade ago, like Docs and Sheets, aren't really that important to their future.
• rushabh 6y ago
  The biggest problem with Google is that they became so successful in search and ads. It confuses the hell out of the company who their real customer is. What if instead of monetizing via ads, they had gone with premium accounts with personal search history and enterprise search products? That would have forced them to innovate on their core expertise and kept them empathetic to the end user. Right now, all they care is about usage stats. Also Google never had a good design ethic right from the beginning. Early products like Chat, Groups were badly designed and very inconsistent. They cared more about scale and performance at that point. The Google we see today is probably because of those early decisions made on the backs of runaway ad revenue. I hope the management has a change of heart, because I can see other companies chipping away at Google otherwise.
• Peteris 6y ago
  The author is forgetting that Google is a search monopoly. AI was (and continues to be) the biggest threat to their success in search so they invested heavily in that (it was called ML back then). Clearly they are still doing well even with subpar cloud software, so this has proven out.
• draw_down 6y ago
  Google docs is such a drag after you get used to something nicer like (imo) Dropbox Paper. It's like JIRA vs something simpler/nicer such as (again, imo) Trello. The latter tools help you do what you're actually trying to do, the former are closer to CRUD forms that you use to update fields in database rows. Google Calendar has the same feel. I suppose I don't mind Gmail too much. Maybe one day Google will briefly introduce something similar to Notion/Dropbox Paper (and then mothball it after 40 months).
• mark_l_watson 6y ago
  I can't totally agree with this. It may be true that Google Docs and Sheets get updated slowly, but they are functional and as long as they are maintained properly, I am a happy consumer. Also, on Chromebooks having Microsoft Office 365 available as web apps provides higher level tools when you need them.
• josefresco 6y ago
  This article was weird. I started about ChromeOS and I was expecting a deep dive or interesting viewpoint on the OS market. Then it veered into "alternatives to Google" land, with a side promotion of HEY (of all things). It left me wanting, for an article about Google's OS strategy.
• numbers 6y ago
  This post is a summary of how I feel about a lot of google products as well. Especially email, yes google has amazing AI to figure out spam but the UX of gmail just feels like I'm still in 2012 or 2015 with email. I've been using Hey for about a week as well and wow, checking and responding to email feels less of a burden and having the Feed, Paper Trail, and Imbox is actually a good way to separate types of emails sent nowadays.
• mtgx 6y ago
  > Google Drive remains impossible to navigate Google Drive/Docs is infamous for its stagnation over the years. However, probably the most "WTF" moment I've ever had with it is the fact that the search on it is absolute horrendous. Like until very recently it couldn't find the files or folders I was searching for unless I typed like 80%+ of the name or something. Amazing to see this level of incompetence in a product from a ... search company.
• gokhan 6y ago
  "Then something happened at Google. I’m not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software." Google desperately iterates on multiple side-projects to find an additional revenue stream comparable to ads, that's all. Whenever the new toy can't deliver enough it gets nixed, we all know the practice. I believe they know how vulnerable they are. An unexpected virus may shutter their ads business, this quarter results may be first of a kind in their history. They don't have the iron grip on marketplace on Android as tight as Apple. They know that cloud business will most likely be a Coke vs Pepsi market. I believe their monopoly on browser market feeds the status quo in ads, but what if Edge steals enough market share and comes default with ad blocking? What if the new the new Apple chip shifts desktops and laptops to Apple more and they need to seek permission of a hostile Safari to show ads? Ads, their main source of income, is not something the end user wants. That's Google's problem.
• jbaker1 6y ago
  This article comes off as woefully naive towards the average user and frankly quite elitist. You're forgetting that Google does not optimize for power users like yourself. Instead, they are just interested in adding the most amount of people into their ecosystem. Free, easy-to-use, and familiar products like Docs and Sheets will no doubt garner the most amount of users.
• Ericson2314 6y ago
  > I’m a long shareholder of Google. It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them. I’m confident they have a bright future ahead. What? Name me a company to make a comeback on the R&D-is-dead-slowly-killing-bussines front?[1]. Clearly Google (and Intel) are on the IBM train now, with only a lack of anti-trust possibly keeping them barely sentient in a few years. [I say "sentient" because they could continue to rent-seek into their feeding tube way after.] And clearly this person is letting their investment guide their thinking rather than vice-versa. You almost get it, just a bit more! [1]: Don't say MS, yet, they have embraced tons of web-era trappings and culture, but are they actually pushing the envelope or still assimilating?
• A7med 6y ago
  So because you started using other services that's mean Google is behind, what kind of logic is that
• zarkov99 6y ago
  This is exactly right. You see the flashes of brilliance and the incredible untapped value in GDocs. But its slow, disorganized and stagnant. Google could be making its money the honest way, by providing genuine value, making people more productive and and collaborative. Its heartbreaking to see them instead massively profiting through spying and manipulating their users. They destroyed their brand and surely they are no longer an appealing place to work for those who can afford to have a conscience.
• edw 6y ago
  My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning," whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the show. Chrome was the same thing, though the competitor was Microsoft. Google Docs? Same thing, Microsoft again. Google is good at building things 90% as good as they could be. For Gmail that 90% was leaps and bounds better than the web mail alternatives of 2004 which included…SquirrelMail. Does Google care that you're switching to Hey or Safari or whatever has replaced Google Sheets? No. Are they going to buckle down at finish the last 10% of all of these products? No. Is that an opportunity for all of us reading this story? Yes. One way to think of Google's products as the equivalent of Microsoft Write — or Apple's iWork. Google's platform is not Windows or Mac OS or iOS: it is the Internet. Google's products come free in the shrink-wrapped box when you drive to Egghead Software pick a copy of "Internet" up off the shelf.
  • an_d_rew 6y ago
    > ... SquirrelMail ... Oh thank you for that trip down memory lane! Ran my own SquirrelMail servers for years...
    • edw 6y ago
      Me too! It was bundled with OS X server, which I was running on the G4 Cube that got relegated to utility box status when I went all-in on laptop life.
  • karmakaze 6y ago
    Yes, but why doesn't Google "run away with the show" themselves while in the lead?
    • kccqzy 6y ago
      It's a free product. They can spend more money and more engineering resources on a project to improve it, but with little financial results to show. Google has only been very slowly figuring out how to make money from anything other than ads.
• sireat 6y ago
  Google is famous for half-assing and then abandoning promising projects. (insert comparison vs other tech companies). One example of a half forgotten project is something called Google Classrooms - for teachers and students. It is missing so many basic features. For example there is no way to automatically take attendance when students log in. You can hack around it but for a project aimed at teachers it shouldn't be so painful. While I am ranting: I am still thankful(/s) to Google for abandoning Google Hangouts integration with Youtube live streaming. This forced me onto OBS full time and is actually a good thing. EDIT: I speculate that this frequent failure of integrating between various Google properties must be because there is a strong silo effect by now at Google just like any other big corporation.
  • jankiehodgpodge 6y ago
    You can't take attendance in Google classroom because schools use MIS/SIS software to track attendance/assessment data etc. Without links back to the schools MIS data it gets held in a Google silo where it's not useful to anyone.
    • sireat 6y ago
      Thank you! Chesterton's fence strikes again. There had to be a reason for this misfeature. Then the question is why would schools use Google classroom at all then if they have their own MIS/SIS. As I was teaching to adults I was puzzled on how to effectively use Google Classroom.
• sbmthakur 6y ago
  I can relate a bit. I have been trying to 'degooglify' my life for sometime. Made these couple of shifts in the last two years: * Chrome --> Firefox * Google search --> DuckDuckGo These are in pipeline: * YouTube --> Newpipe (which is YouTube minus ads and tracking) * Drive --> Mega.nz * Gmail --> Protonmail * Playstore --> F-droid (whenever possible) At the same time, I have been using Google's Photos and Podcasts a tad more lately. Need to find good alternatives to these.
• Siira 6y ago
  This article doesn't say anything worth hearing. It can be summarized as, "Google has not done visibly big consumer innovation." Which is not that true either. Their "cluttered" search is adding a lot of value. Their main innovation has also been in AI, mobile and the cloud.
• mrlatinos 6y ago
  This feels like an ad for HEY more than anything else...
• neixidbeksoxyd 6y ago
  Google is a classic case of "show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome". Google's performance reviews and promotions are based on building shiny complex things, not on simple but grungy work that solves real problems. So they constantly come up with things nobody uses or cancel products that many use but aren't shiny enough to get a bunch of people promoted so no leaders want to own them.
• OOPMan 6y ago
  Thank goodness ChromeOS didn't take over. I'd like for my computer to be more than a toy.
• jedberg 6y ago
  The author mentions switching to hey for email. Given all the press it's gotten recently, I decided to check it out. I don't get the hype. This is how my gmail already works. I use priority inbox. New senders get high priority until I mark them as low priority, and then they don't. Gmail already has a snooze button so I can reply later (and also I have a reply-later tag that's easy to do with keyboard shortcuts). You can do this search in gmail to replicate their sorted inbox: [is:updates in:inbox -l:important]. I just have a bookmark for that. Finding attachments is easy. You just do [has:attachment]. I don't want all the attachments without their emails. The email provides context. Also, I can usually find it faster because I usually know who sent it or at least some words that were in the email. What am I missing about hey.com? Why do people love it so much?
  • sub7 6y ago
    Everyone knows google is "better" software. Just like employees are promoted to one level above their potential, companies always push the envelope one step too far when pushing for growth/monetization. Google has been pushing way too much, way too often. At this point, something that doesn't read my emails, give any bullshit law enforcement request a master key, and doesn't try and abuse the spirit of antitrust laws at every step is worth trying out, even if it's just only workable.
  • Androider 6y ago
    When you open the Hey inbox, it only has the important stuff in it, not the messages of whoever decided to reach out to you today. It's a subtle difference but I love it. Then when you have a moment, it's also very satisfying to just go through the screener list in bulk and click thumbs down/up and knowing you'll never see that sender again. Sometimes in GMail, no matter how many times I mark some thing as spam, the mail keeps on coming. Hey is the nuclear option to Gmail's fly swatter.
    • rement 6y ago
      You can add filters to delete mail from specific senders. I have quite a few that ignore my requests to unsubscribe.
• mmargerum 6y ago
  Couldn't happen to nicer company. I've been disentangling my personal stuff and company's I host for from the google hive for less woke options. Hit em where it hurts. When the people you pay start threatening to walk out because they don't like what you are working on you know you have a systemic problem.
• softwaredoug 6y ago
  Still can’t copy a folder full of docs in google drive and it’s so frustrating.
• tehjoker 6y ago
  Google has reached the mature phase of the corporate lifecycle. They have economic dominance and are putting the screws in to extract more money. The writing was on the wall when they got an ex-Goldman Sachs CFO, but it has become more and more externally obvious over the past few years. https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/finance/business-life-cycle/ https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/fi... The mature phase can last a long time so long as they keep buying the competition or use their position to shut others out. Or they can screw up and start to lose their grip to another company or group of companies that slice off their market share one service at a time. In any case, Google was never actually trying to help the world, their marketing was extremely good though. Hopefully the advertising economy collapses as people realize the ads don't work and we have to find a model (such as public funding of essential services) that actually works.
• the_black_hand 6y ago
  The new office online surprisingly works really great. Funny enough, office 365 works better online than desktop. I do thing Web OS is the future. User's are now spending 90% of their time in the browser. Basically browser === os. Apps like electron, react are proving that point. Chrome OS was maybe a start (I've never personally used it because I've never really felt the need to make such a huge OS transition), but at the present business incentives were weak. Why would someone pay (not monetary, but by opportunity cost) for just a browser?
• crazygringo 6y ago
  Google's been improving G Suite a ton, but just not "innovating" in the way the author wants. What Google hasn't been doing is blowing up how word processors and spreadsheets work, like a "Google Wave" re-envisioning or something of them. Why? Because people understand how Word and Excel and Docs and Sheets work and don't want change. What Google has been doing over the past ten years centers around 1) interoperability, 2) business needs, 3) intelligence and 4) performance. For example, interoperability: you can use Google Drive File Stream to access your Drive files like a local filesystem. Or being able to comment in PDF's, or edit Office files directly without first making a copy in Docs or Sheets. Or business needs: Google Classroom lets you use Docs with your students. Or things like document diffs and approvals. These things don't seem "innovative"... but they're necessary. Intelligence? Look at how Sheets will automatically analyze your data to try to produce meaningful graphs. Or how Docs now fixes your spelling mistakes as you type, vastly better than e.g. autocorrect on iOS. And performance is mainly with Sheets -- it's much better at handling large amounts of data than it used to be. But yes, Google's been focused on giving users the features they actually need, rather than capital-I "Innovation". Because that's what users actually want. I don't want Google trying to reimagine word processing and shoving it in my face or something.
  • agentdrtran 6y ago
    I'm not asking Google to throw away how docs or slides work and I like the simplicity of G Suite, but look at the quarterly reports for G Suite customers and Docs will get one or two things. It's still missing tons of basic features (mixed page orientation!). Sheet's "explore" mode has been useless for me, as most AI features are. Drive File Stream is cool but the transition process was a disaster and accessing cloud files on a local machine is not exactly amazing. I would love if Google didn't try to "innovate" and focused on making improvements to what they have.
  • amohn9 6y ago
    90% of the time, Sheets's recommended graph is exactly what I wanted, and is in general a much cleaner and enjoyable experience than Excel. Pivot tables too are much more obvious and usable to non-power users in Sheets than Excel
• newshhh 6y ago
  Google has an Engineer-driven gene that is a double-edge sword. This enabled them to utilize worlds' most brilliant minds to solve some of the most technically challenging problems. But at the same time, the best engineers lose their interests and quickly move away from "plain and easy" problems, which in fact the consumers face everyday. And the straight-forward logical engineering mindset is often naive in understanding and solving deep human and societal problems. This is why Google has been notoriously good at solving technical problems like search and massive distributed systems, but bad at designing and improving consumer and social products. On the contrary, Apple has been relentless about improving even the tiniest thing in the user experience like a round corner on an icon. Google's lack of drive on delivering the best user experience will eventually bite them hard.
• addicted 6y ago
  One of the problems with Google is that it’s hard to evangelize their products anymore. I used to evangelize Macs with my friends and family, since the mid 2000s (before the iPhone revolution) and it served me and the people I pushed it to well. At least until a few years ago with the whole new MBP fiasco with the touchbar and butterfly keyboard and no ports and a minimum price in the mid 2000s. But it’s hardware and people can continue using what they already own for the most part till Apple fixed a lot of those issues. But with Google I have been burnt. A lot. I got my family on Picasa to share photos, and Google stopped supporting it. Personally, Google Reader always stings. And whatever google did with GChat and Hangouts, which I pushed on all my friends, was embarrassing. At least I gave up on recommending Google products before Allo and Duo. My friends who did that turn red when they are mentioned to this day. And then there’s GSuite. A clients company switched wholesale on my recommendation right at the beginning. They’ve been using it for almost its entire existence (right from the days when it was Google Apps? and the first 10 users were free). They’ve been spending a ton of money on it for so long, but they couldn’t get a Google rep to offer them a discount on 5 accounts (basically they wanted tiered access and did not want to bring everyone onto the most expensive plans because a few users were not full time employees and using it for very basic purposes). It was a matter of a few hundred dollars a year, but between the fact that they could hardly get a rep to talk to them, and when they did the reps had absolutely no flexibility, MS reps swooped in, offered tiered access, discounts, and a full time rep and within a couple of months they were a complete O365 shop. They still miss their email search, but overall it’s been completely worth it. It’s still mind boggling to me how Google’s managed to screw this up.
• johnnydoe9 6y ago
  Seems to be their modus operandi to me, there have been some talks ranging from light ribbing to full on bashing regarding the new iOS update cause they have added features that have existed in Android for decades now. But what have they done with widgets in all this while other than letting it rot? Even Google services themselves don't bother with making a good widget and now Apple will do the same, possibly better.
• joshocar 6y ago
  I'm still annoyed that they screwed up the release of Google Wave. The mistake was to make it a separate service instead of building it into Gmail and making it another "type of email" you can send.
• uniqueid 6y ago
  I'm surprised the author doesn't spend more time discussing Google's search engine. I've been using DDG as my primary search for a while, because Google Search has been returning increasingly bad results already for quite some months. For the past couple days I've tried Google's Search again, and, oh wow!, it is hilariously bad now, just laughable! It now entirely ignores search terms, and the AI and ad-based results work against me, not for me. Google didn't blow a ten year lead, they blew a 20 year lead. AltaVista was better than this.
  • mav3rick 6y ago
    Yes, the entire world is raving about DDG results.
    • uniqueid 6y ago
      Let's revisit the topic three months from now. The change to which I refer probably occurred less than a month ago. Not that Google results hadn't already been going downhill for months prior, but it became dramatically worse at some point over the past month.
    • uniqueid 6y ago
      ...and by the way, have you not noticed that your Google search results are peppered with paid results, and search terms that went "missing"?
• snird 6y ago
  (This comment grew so much, I actually posted it too https://snir.dev/blog/google-10-years-lead https://snir.dev/blog/google-10-years-lead ) Initially, I thought this is because Google targets only big business customers, competing with Microsoft 365. Other product innovations do not scare them, they still offer a package with mail, video conferencing, docs, sheets, drive, etc' etc'. Great for big business collaboration tools. They just don't care for things like Notion or HEY. It's not their target and they don't make money from it. But then I thought, this is an example targeted against Microsoft with a similar offering. What about Google Cloud? What about Android? They are both innovative. What happened there? Then I saw it. Google consistently follows the market preventing its competitors from achieving market control. And in Google's case, "the market" is Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook. We'll start with Microsoft since they were the first. And beating them down took place ~10 years ago, that's why it seems like the tech from back then never progressed much. Because the hit already strike. Microsoft dominated the corporate world with its mail software Outlook, and with its Office suite, Word, Excel, etc'. Google is native to the web and they leveraged their position to slowly hit Microsoft in this spot. Gmail first, then Google Drive, and then Chrome to kill IE as a final strike. And it was successful. Amazon got big into the tech business through AWS. Google went out to a fight through Google Cloud. Not only the offering is cheaper, it also provided technologies you can't explain any other way than just to hit AWS. Kubernetes as an open platform is against any business textbook to lock in customers. But it will allow for an easy way out of AWS in the long run, preferably to GCP but it can be any other cloud provider that provides Kubernetes service as well. It is strategically more of a hit to the front runner, Amazon, then a benefit to GCP. These priorities order of first hit the front runner, then everything else is also seen with the Apple case. Android came after the iPhone. It has a much larger market share, and yet, it generates far less revenue to Google then the iPhone is to Apple. That's because the main goal is to prevent Apple from winning the market. And in that, it is successful. Google Buzz. Ouch. Google Plus. Double ouch. Google spent so much effort into hitting Facebook as hard as they can. They were not successful here, but from the history of things it is obvious how Google try to hit Facebook. They did not try to create a new social platform, no. Otherwise they would come up with something that is not.. well, exactly like Facebook. Google home initially released at 2016. Amazon Alexa in 2014. I have so many more examples that comes to mind as I write, but the point is already clear. On a final note, I'll say, Google is not only trying to bend down competitors. Google Glass is one new product market they tried to create. The self-driving cars initiative is another example the comes to mind. They do innovate. They just have so much money, blocking out other big tech companies is a strategy they are not willing to give up. And when this is the strategy, well, Google sheets already took a huge chunk from Microsoft, what more does it need?
• lwhi 6y ago
  I don't understand how Notion can be used to replace a fully fledged word processor. Am I missing something?
• luord 6y ago
  I've always cared about the privacy issues regarding Google's applications way less than I should, probably, but he definitely makes a good point regarding how increasingly outdated they're feeling. I'm most likely gonna start switching out too.
• machinehermit 6y ago
  Not to mention they lucked out that DuckDuckGo is called DuckDuckGo. I just can't believe such smart people could believe that is good branding. What exactly were the brand names they rejected to go with DuckDuckGo?
• inthewoods 6y ago
  This article brings to mind the saying "A poor craftsman blames his tools".
• jaimex2 6y ago
  And it all coincides with Larry and Sergei stepping down. Google is very much just a cash cow being milked, zero innovation - just products rusting away.
• classics2 6y ago
  Google is dying under the pressure to make everything they do connect to and be dominated by their ad sales. Google is what happens when you let he accounts start running the ship.
• ksec 6y ago
  I went through most of the comment and something I thought hasn't been mentioned yet. May be those product should not have been built with Javascript in the first place? I remember when Chrome OS was launched, people like the blog post author were all over it. It was the future!. And I was surprised he was an Apple user. I thought Apple users cared way more, and way beyond some high level abstraction convenience at the expense of quality. I have been working with dozens if not hundreds of companies, and none of them use Google Sheet for anything serious. It is on Excel, and if it is on the web the trend is now Excel 365. If you demand quality, there isn't even a single App built with Web Technology that is A Class. This may change when WASM is a thing. But for now there is simply no replacement. Lots of educations were initially switching to ChromeOS and Google. They later switched back to iPad. Why is that? There is something about Google and ChromeOS's quality that is not up to standard. And the users knows it, they just couldn't explain it. But it was crap, at least compare it to their iPad. And it has performance hit on its user. Because they were not satisfied. This isn't to say ChromeOS cant be Good. But Google, generally speaking has absolutely no taste on quality. They are even worst than Microsoft. In Microsoft you could still see a glimpse of product person fighting with ( sorry HN ) idiotic geeks solution and then came out with a compromise. And MS Product person isn't anywhere as good as Apple's in the first place. But you see ZERO User product design in Google. It is as if a product is designed by geeks, built by geeks, marketed by geeks, and feed into their own echo chamber how great it is. And Android now is no different to Windows in the 90s. I never took a serious look into Google's financial, but I am surprised they are a trillion dollar company while Apple is only worst 50% more.
• muddi900 6y ago
  I ran a whole business for years with Google Sheets API and Python front end. I agree that sheets is slow and lumbering, but the API works perfectly. I did a small layman's demo here recently[1]. [1]https://medium.com/@muddi900/use-google-sheets-as-a-database-with-python-30-days-of-blog-4-1d288c614163?sk=32ea57e789e2b4de396240a750c7f674 https://medium.com/@muddi900/use-google-sheets-as-a-database...
• HeavyStorm 6y ago
  Google never had a ten year lead, that's pretty naive. Google had a ten year _lag_. Microsoft already had office when Google appeared, and while fans have numerous reasons to like Google docs & friends, they were never better or bigger than Office. Chrome OS has a tremendous lag on windows and Mac. It's really hard to innovate once you start to be compared to a established brand. Go ask Bing. Unless duck duck go becomes larger than Google, they never blew any lead, only were defeated in places opponents were stronger.