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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

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.
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    > Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product" So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?
    - mostlysimilar 6y ago
      It's a rule of thumb. No, not every costless product is monetizing your use of it. FOSS is especially counter to this rule. In the case of web-based tools that are owned and operated by big advertising companies, I think it's a fairly safe bet. As always, think critically about each instance and consider the implications of the software and products you use.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free. The quote is pithy but assumes some context - the [something] is being provided below the marginal cost to produce and therefore being provided with an expectation of benefit for the provider. Acquiring LibreOffice is not $0 marginal cost but they have a big "DONATE" button top-right corner of the website and The Document Foundation turns a small profit from donations.
      - thomasahle 6y ago
        > You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free. That's silly. Paid office suites use just as many computing resources, and Google docs use plenty resources through your browser as well. I think the "if you don't pay for it, you're the product" quote is fine. You just have to exclude free and open source software.
monksy 6y ago
Google doesn't have time to fix that. They've got top-level leetcode engineers to make a new chat app.
- freehunter 6y ago
  But first they have to make their own programming languages and frameworks.
  - Aaronstotle 6y ago
    and don't forget launching an abysmal cloud gaming service that was DoA!
    - monksy 6y ago
      Goooogcorp: We have seen that you are displeased that we are not supporting product. In response we are shutting this down. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
      - Haga 6y ago
        If you stay longer then 2 years you obviously have never cared about what you build..
- moomin 6y ago
  Let's not forget that had gtalk, which could have dominated easily. Over ten year lead wasted on that one.
  - crawlcrawler 6y ago
    Gtalk was brilliant! When they launched it my appreciation for Google grew tenfold. It was so un-enterprisey and it just worked! Shortly thereafter they fixed their offering by launching the very Enterprise-friendly Wave. Mmmmmm, Wave. (drooling dead-eyes Homer impression).
  - 6y ago
s3r3nity 6y ago
> The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily. This drove me nuts with my Nest Minis until I tried out Apple's Homepod. People hate on Apple for moving slow in the "connected home" space, but my Homepod sounds great, can distinguish between my wife and I, and can handle BOTH personal and work calendars for the two of us. I'll take the polish over my actual use cases, rather than rough edges around a wider set of uses, most of which I never will use. And neither of us use iCloud for email! It blows my mind that a Google can offer email/calendars for both personal and work use can tie both to you as an individual, but _somehow_ can't make your "smart" speaker do the same.
- novok 6y ago
  I'm fairly frustrated with siri's voice recognition in general myself as a multi-year homepod user. The amazon echos I had before the homepod were more consistent and google's general voice transcription & knowledge base is still way ahead of siri. I mostly chose the homepod because of privacy and better sound. If the privacy story was the same on google or amazon, I'd probably be using that right now instead.
sergiotapia 6y ago
You can even get locked out of your google account by uploading old cartoons on youtube you thought were old enough to not care. So tell me again why I would use google products when they are all so interlinked that one affects the other? No thanks
jayd16 6y ago
I can only assume they don't want to make it work for some reason. The best practical answer is to just set up a normal gmail account and a lot of weird google bugs go away.
- bootlooped 6y ago
  I have a normal Gmail account, and the last time I checked Google Home could only access my primary calendar. So my imported-from-Outlook work calendar and any other custom calendars are invisible to it. It just just frustrating to look at calendar.google.com and say "there they are, my appointments!" and Google Home cannot read them unless they are on the default calendar.
jfengel 6y ago
I do find that failure baffling -- especially since it used to work. I don't use voice commands much, but setting reminders while I'm doing something else used to be very helpful. Suddenly last August, it's just "not available for g suite users". (https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/11607814?hl=en https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/11607814?hl=en) I get it for free, but g suite is valuable enough to me that I'd pay for it. The thread implies that paying for it wouldn't help.
timw4mail 6y ago
Youtube is a slow boated Javascript mess.
- amiga-workbench 6y ago
  I've been using invidio.us and mpv for more and more of my Youtube consumption, especially after it started becoming terribly unstable under Firefox.
SahAssar 6y ago
> Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything? Android / Chrome are providing what is primarily a platform, not a product. That's a very different mindset and way of working.
novaleaf 6y ago
> They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely. Namely, the things that directly contribute to the ads business.
digitalsushi 6y ago
I'm also an early gsuite user and have the same complaints about assistant integration - but I am 85% sure that I tried to create a new google for business account to verify that it would at least work if I was paying, and it didn't. Which led me to experimenting with migrating off my legacy gsuite, and with the API rate limiting, it seems it would take upwards of 30 days. I can download that data in 10 minutes if it's unhindered.
haolez 6y ago
> Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs You are in for a surprise. Office 365 (at least Excel and Word) looks like a toy compared to the desktop versions. I'm not talking about niche features or VBA, I'm talking about things like naming a table, which is explicitly only supported in the desktop version. Ah, of course! You need the table's name to use it in their Power Automate platform. Microsoft 365 is a mess right now. I hope it improves.
- olcor 6y ago
  I’m confused. Doesn’t Microsoft 365 include the desktop versions of the product and the ability to update them?
  - haolez 6y ago
    Yes, but I believe that the parent was talking about the web versions, since the comparison was made against Google Suite.
    - dx034 6y ago
      You have all collaboration features with the desktop version.
- D13Fd 6y ago
  And yet, for the typical office user, it supports most or all of the stuff they are going to do. It's also fast, reliable, it renders Office files correctly, and the UI matches what people are familiar with. All told, it's pretty good.
  - haolez 6y ago
    I'm not sure if the typical office user is the same as the casual office user.
- Cactus2018 6y ago
  >You are in for a surprise. Here's another Office 365 Web surprise. Last week we had 5 team members working in a shared Word document with track-changes; A) There is no "view final markup" option, and B) after a while the web-app crawled to a halt.
komali2 6y ago
> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off). What's that got to do with it? Are you suggesting this is the reason things aren't shipping? I saw the "strikes" as another symptom of a company that is now deaf. Employees can't get their voices heard as individuals anymore.
- chasd00 6y ago
  i think the point is engineers are spending too much time on Twitter and not doing enough actual engineering.
btmiller 6y ago
> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off). That is a really strange false equivalency. Not even the slightest bit relevant, yet it reads as if you believe that protesting for social change is a bad thing.
- akhilcacharya 6y ago
  There are lots of people that protest for social change without the luxury of getting company paid days off!
  - solvorn 6y ago
    You care about social change but you’re asking why they’re getting more instead of why you’re getting less? And people wonder why there is so much inequality out there. You lot would rather circle jerk each other for renaming obscure software features rather than align with other workers.
LeanderK 6y ago
> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off). This is totally unnecessary. Striking is a serious matter and not just getting company paid days off for some lazy egineers.
jeffbee 6y ago
Gsuite/GAFYD domain users (which are a tiny fraction of all Google accounts, for what it is worth) have a special pain with all Google consumer products. Many products and features simply do not work with Gsuite accounts. Why? Gsuite accounts have a different terms of service, and getting legal, privacy, compliance, etc to sign off on launching your feature is a pain in the neck. Also it's possible that some features and products really aren't compatible with the Gsuite TOS. So as an engineer you can choose to just not launch your feature to Gsuite, or you can go through a lot of work to launch it all the way, for which you will gain no marginal users and will receive no recognition or compensation.
starkruzr 6y ago
O365 live collaborative document editing has been an absolute broken nightmare for us. We abandoned it in favor of Google Docs and everything has gotten a LOT easier. Our general sense is that whatever MS is using for autoscaling the Sharepoint instances that run the service doesn't work. During busy work days Word loses its connection to the service constantly.
eagsalazar2 6y ago
While agree with you that google has been dropping the ball, you've got to use the online version of Office 365, it is awful. Like shockingly terrible. Gsuite is 10x better, no exaggeration. Apple's online office stuff is equally a joke. Google blew a 10 year lead but lucky for them, the other possible large competitors are doing even worse.
- eagsalazar2 6y ago
  Although they haven't evolved much in recent years, I still find most Gsuite apps to actually be quite good. What is terrible is Drive itself. File management is just a joke with Drive.
dandare 6y ago
> They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there... I mostly use YouTube to watch series - PBS Space Time, World War Two, Crash Course etc. YouTube is absolutely horrible at navigating through these series - it is difficult to find where you left, it is difficult to find the next episode, there is absolutely no user comfort.
- gota 6y ago
  Yes - I find myself navigating Channel pages often, in hopes that the content creator took the time to create an applicable playlist But then if I quit a video _that I played from a playlist_ and check my history _the playlist itself is listed, and not the actual video_ It is, indeed, a mess
jlarocco 6y ago
Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run. It's like they develop products just enough to get people using them so they can squeeze out some more meta-data and connect the dots back to a Google account, and then they stop development because it's not going to add more revenue. And if they can't figure out how to push advertising with it, they drop it.
- dorkinspace 6y ago
  > Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run. Absolutely. Just look at Google Maps these days. Google Maps used to be the only map app I'd use for everything. Now it is so littered with ads once you zoom in that I find it useless for anything other than directions. This is not a new trend for Google, the advertising company that occasionally builds things.
  - intellirogue 6y ago
    There's also a big problem with accuracy in GMaps. From what I can tell they put some effort in within the US, but in the two countries I've lived in, GMaps is sufficiently inaccurate that I have to use other maps. For example: About a third of the streets that show on GMaps for my previous town don't actually exist - they're paddocks. Every other map is correct: HERE, Apple Maps, OSM, TomTom, etc. As Google notoriously has no support, there's no way to get it fixed, so I simply had to instruct everyone coming to visit me that they needed to download and use a different map software in order to find me.
    - solvorn 6y ago
      OSM is better where I live in the US now when it used to be only better in Europe Edit: google maps is a spatial yellow pages. OSM is an atlas.
rrdharan 6y ago
In beta, but FYI you can grant calendar access: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/11/use-google-assistant-with-your-g-suite.html https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/11/use-google-assi...
- rnotaro 6y ago
  I'm using it but the fact the the assitant can only respond for the active google account is driving me nuts. The Google Calendar app from my Google Pixel merges all my accounts but yet, the assistant is linked to my Google Account instead of my device. It's useless because I'm using multiple calandars on multiple accounts.
  - sahaskatta 6y ago
    Same issue here. They have features like "okay google dial into my next meeting," however it doesn't work since my phone's primary account is my personal account. Assistant doesn't work with my secondary work account.
rubber_duck 6y ago
>Android / Chrome are amazing Chrome has been deteriorating in performance and power usage - on OSX at least, I recently switched back to Firefox because it was that bad (Safari is a step too far as I want to work on non-Apple platforms). Firefox has slipped from the mainstream and it's very obvious - so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) - the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE. And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation. Implementation is ridiculously inconsistent across OS versions and HW vendors - I was trying to create a WiFi management API for some industrial application that would connect to controller specific networks - Android has 2 layers of terrible and depricated API with documentation that was misleading at best, a new API that only worked on 10+ without backcompat, and the actual implementation was inconsistent across four Android devices we tested. We gave up on the project as the Matrix of features missing and hacks needed for every platform we could find was just not practical to maintain.
- orange3xchicken 6y ago
  Chrome has recently (within the last year) been repeatedly making me frustrated with its pdf issues. It feels like 40% of the time I open a pdf in chrome, I instead get an error message like "the plugin has crashed" or some bs. The only solution is to restart the browser entirely. Switched back to FF for this reason.
- cpeterso 6y ago
  > many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) You can report sites that are broken in Firefox at https://webcompat.com/ https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla engineers will debug the broken site and try to contact the site's developers. Firefox also ships some site-specific workarounds (such as spoofing Chrome's User-Agent string or tweaking some CSS). You can see the current list of site workarounds in Firefox's about:compat page.
lucasmullens 6y ago
> Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything They did. Sundar ran both Android and Chrome, and now he's CEO.
kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
Google Assistant is a product that relies on cross-learning from large amounts of user data. GSuite is a product that is contractually obligated to NOT doing this. The silos between GSuite and the rest of Google are intentional. I don't work at Google these days so I can't offer the exact reasons why, but it shouldn't be surprising then that the two don't play well. Amazon, on the other hand is not contractually obligated to create this silo. For it, your GSuite account is just another third party account, no different from your GMail account. Yes this is an undesirable outcome, but when business users choose to buy GSuite services with the assurance that the data won't be available to Google for general purpose learning, this is the price they pay for that privacy.
edm0nd 6y ago
I still don't think you can even use G Suite domains with their voice assistant/home devices. It's beyond absurd.
Spooky23 6y ago
MS Office online collaboration still hasn’t caught up with Google, even with Google’s neglect. Personally, I think web based office is something Microsoft wants to drive subscription revenue, but isn’t something customers want. Office is probably the best and most complex fat client app in the world, why sacrifice that? IMO, Office will embrace add on supplementation and value add to the Office apps.
tomaskafka 6y ago
Chrome? Try Edge. On mac, it's day and night, Edge does actually stop the pages you aren't viewing, bringing battery life and CPU use much closer to battery. It's like this was a low hanging fruit of finally cleaning up some old mess in Chromium, Google ignored it for years, and MS team just did it.
oarabbus_ 6y ago
>And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help. Glad you brought this one up. I had an issue with an enterprise account where I was attempting to access work and code I had contained in a doc I created for the client. I was the owner and creator of the doc, but somehow I got stuck in a loop where I had to request permission from myself. Google "Support" was basically nonexistent - I had to ask our company adminstrator, who told me only they could get access to speak with a human, and even that wouldn't be able to be done immediately. I ended up redoing all the work. AWS and Microsoft, in comparison, have had excellent enterprise support.
laingc 6y ago
I agree entirely with your sentiment, but this > now word in the cloud kinda works! is the overstatement of the century. I am stuck with this horrendous product, with its unbelievably bad live collaboration which constantly overwrites what other people are doing, its terrible SSO implementation, its penchant for presenting the least navigable UI I have ever had the misfortune to experience... Google Docs has stagnated, I agree, Office is light years away from having its seamless sync.
solvorn 6y ago
You should write a know about this.
sandos 6y ago
Yeah, I eventually just created "proper" gmail accounts for the rest of my family that is on a free gsuite.
marcusjt 6y ago
Strange, works fine for me, you can pick as many calendars as you want in Assistant Settings > Services > Calendar
pjmlp 6y ago
Android amazing?!? It uses a pseudo-compatible Java 8 subset, with no official roadmap to ever move beyond that, everyone is supposed to move to Kotlin, while they keep fixing the slower developer experience and broken tooling introduced by adding Kotlin support. NDK requires a great resistance to pain with a development experience that occasionally still makes me miss Carbide/Symbian C++. It took them 10 years to introduce any kind of packaging support for NDK dependencies, there are still no tools to improve the developer experience calling Android APIs, one has to manually write JNI wrappers, or use their unsafe C bindings to APIs that are actually written in somehow safer C++. I lost count how many stuff introduced as one year amazing IO stuff, is already deprecated the following year. Latest example, all the GUI layout editing tools still being worked on, which will be eventually deprecated when JetPack Composer hits stable. Critical libraries like Oboe, that are just dumped into Github, instead of having first class support on the SDK and project templates. Team that puts critical information everywhere on the Internet except on Android's official documentation. Very small rant, 10 years have a lot of stuff to rant on, so amazing? Not really.
chaosharmonic 6y ago
> I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom. The Hangouts move is still one of the most infuriating things I've seen in tech anytime in the last decade. Remember how Google was actively contributing to an open and interoperable spec for chat, and then just proceeded to go full Ayn Rand about it? There's a pretty strong argument to be made that if any major players were still backing XMPP as a standard, we wouldn't all have a bunch of people in our lives who have said some variation of "I would quit Facebook right now if I didn't need Messenger"
Already__Taken 6y ago
The cross-integration docs should have by now and doesn't simply blows my mind. Like why even doesn't sheets and docs have the exact same table cell formatting options? Following that, why can't a sheet seamlessly embed to a google doc.

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.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  > Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product" So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?
  - mostlysimilar 6y ago
    It's a rule of thumb. No, not every costless product is monetizing your use of it. FOSS is especially counter to this rule. In the case of web-based tools that are owned and operated by big advertising companies, I think it's a fairly safe bet. As always, think critically about each instance and consider the implications of the software and products you use.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free. The quote is pithy but assumes some context - the [something] is being provided below the marginal cost to produce and therefore being provided with an expectation of benefit for the provider. Acquiring LibreOffice is not $0 marginal cost but they have a big "DONATE" button top-right corner of the website and The Document Foundation turns a small profit from donations.
    - thomasahle 6y ago
      > You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free. That's silly. Paid office suites use just as many computing resources, and Google docs use plenty resources through your browser as well. I think the "if you don't pay for it, you're the product" quote is fine. You just have to exclude free and open source software.

monksy 6y ago

Google doesn't have time to fix that. They've got top-level leetcode engineers to make a new chat app.

freehunter 6y ago
But first they have to make their own programming languages and frameworks.
- Aaronstotle 6y ago
  and don't forget launching an abysmal cloud gaming service that was DoA!
  - monksy 6y ago
    Goooogcorp: We have seen that you are displeased that we are not supporting product. In response we are shutting this down. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
    - Haga 6y ago
      If you stay longer then 2 years you obviously have never cared about what you build..
moomin 6y ago
Let's not forget that had gtalk, which could have dominated easily. Over ten year lead wasted on that one.
- crawlcrawler 6y ago
  Gtalk was brilliant! When they launched it my appreciation for Google grew tenfold. It was so un-enterprisey and it just worked! Shortly thereafter they fixed their offering by launching the very Enterprise-friendly Wave. Mmmmmm, Wave. (drooling dead-eyes Homer impression).
- 6y ago

s3r3nity 6y ago

> The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily. This drove me nuts with my Nest Minis until I tried out Apple's Homepod. People hate on Apple for moving slow in the "connected home" space, but my Homepod sounds great, can distinguish between my wife and I, and can handle BOTH personal and work calendars for the two of us. I'll take the polish over my actual use cases, rather than rough edges around a wider set of uses, most of which I never will use. And neither of us use iCloud for email! It blows my mind that a Google can offer email/calendars for both personal and work use can tie both to you as an individual, but _somehow_ can't make your "smart" speaker do the same.

novok 6y ago
I'm fairly frustrated with siri's voice recognition in general myself as a multi-year homepod user. The amazon echos I had before the homepod were more consistent and google's general voice transcription & knowledge base is still way ahead of siri. I mostly chose the homepod because of privacy and better sound. If the privacy story was the same on google or amazon, I'd probably be using that right now instead.

sergiotapia 6y ago

You can even get locked out of your google account by uploading old cartoons on youtube you thought were old enough to not care. So tell me again why I would use google products when they are all so interlinked that one affects the other? No thanks

jayd16 6y ago

I can only assume they don't want to make it work for some reason. The best practical answer is to just set up a normal gmail account and a lot of weird google bugs go away.

bootlooped 6y ago
I have a normal Gmail account, and the last time I checked Google Home could only access my primary calendar. So my imported-from-Outlook work calendar and any other custom calendars are invisible to it. It just just frustrating to look at calendar.google.com and say "there they are, my appointments!" and Google Home cannot read them unless they are on the default calendar.

jfengel 6y ago

I do find that failure baffling -- especially since it used to work. I don't use voice commands much, but setting reminders while I'm doing something else used to be very helpful. Suddenly last August, it's just "not available for g suite users". (https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/11607814?hl=en https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/11607814?hl=en) I get it for free, but g suite is valuable enough to me that I'd pay for it. The thread implies that paying for it wouldn't help.

timw4mail 6y ago

Youtube is a slow boated Javascript mess.

amiga-workbench 6y ago
I've been using invidio.us and mpv for more and more of my Youtube consumption, especially after it started becoming terribly unstable under Firefox.

SahAssar 6y ago

> Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything? Android / Chrome are providing what is primarily a platform, not a product. That's a very different mindset and way of working.

novaleaf 6y ago

> They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely. Namely, the things that directly contribute to the ads business.

digitalsushi 6y ago

I'm also an early gsuite user and have the same complaints about assistant integration - but I am 85% sure that I tried to create a new google for business account to verify that it would at least work if I was paying, and it didn't. Which led me to experimenting with migrating off my legacy gsuite, and with the API rate limiting, it seems it would take upwards of 30 days. I can download that data in 10 minutes if it's unhindered.

haolez 6y ago

> Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs You are in for a surprise. Office 365 (at least Excel and Word) looks like a toy compared to the desktop versions. I'm not talking about niche features or VBA, I'm talking about things like naming a table, which is explicitly only supported in the desktop version. Ah, of course! You need the table's name to use it in their Power Automate platform. Microsoft 365 is a mess right now. I hope it improves.

olcor 6y ago
I’m confused. Doesn’t Microsoft 365 include the desktop versions of the product and the ability to update them?
- haolez 6y ago
  Yes, but I believe that the parent was talking about the web versions, since the comparison was made against Google Suite.
  - dx034 6y ago
    You have all collaboration features with the desktop version.
D13Fd 6y ago
And yet, for the typical office user, it supports most or all of the stuff they are going to do. It's also fast, reliable, it renders Office files correctly, and the UI matches what people are familiar with. All told, it's pretty good.
- haolez 6y ago
  I'm not sure if the typical office user is the same as the casual office user.
Cactus2018 6y ago
>You are in for a surprise. Here's another Office 365 Web surprise. Last week we had 5 team members working in a shared Word document with track-changes; A) There is no "view final markup" option, and B) after a while the web-app crawled to a halt.

komali2 6y ago

> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off). What's that got to do with it? Are you suggesting this is the reason things aren't shipping? I saw the "strikes" as another symptom of a company that is now deaf. Employees can't get their voices heard as individuals anymore.

chasd00 6y ago
i think the point is engineers are spending too much time on Twitter and not doing enough actual engineering.

btmiller 6y ago

> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off). That is a really strange false equivalency. Not even the slightest bit relevant, yet it reads as if you believe that protesting for social change is a bad thing.

akhilcacharya 6y ago
There are lots of people that protest for social change without the luxury of getting company paid days off!
- solvorn 6y ago
  You care about social change but you’re asking why they’re getting more instead of why you’re getting less? And people wonder why there is so much inequality out there. You lot would rather circle jerk each other for renaming obscure software features rather than align with other workers.

LeanderK 6y ago

> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off). This is totally unnecessary. Striking is a serious matter and not just getting company paid days off for some lazy egineers.

jeffbee 6y ago

Gsuite/GAFYD domain users (which are a tiny fraction of all Google accounts, for what it is worth) have a special pain with all Google consumer products. Many products and features simply do not work with Gsuite accounts. Why? Gsuite accounts have a different terms of service, and getting legal, privacy, compliance, etc to sign off on launching your feature is a pain in the neck. Also it's possible that some features and products really aren't compatible with the Gsuite TOS. So as an engineer you can choose to just not launch your feature to Gsuite, or you can go through a lot of work to launch it all the way, for which you will gain no marginal users and will receive no recognition or compensation.

starkruzr 6y ago

O365 live collaborative document editing has been an absolute broken nightmare for us. We abandoned it in favor of Google Docs and everything has gotten a LOT easier. Our general sense is that whatever MS is using for autoscaling the Sharepoint instances that run the service doesn't work. During busy work days Word loses its connection to the service constantly.

eagsalazar2 6y ago

While agree with you that google has been dropping the ball, you've got to use the online version of Office 365, it is awful. Like shockingly terrible. Gsuite is 10x better, no exaggeration. Apple's online office stuff is equally a joke. Google blew a 10 year lead but lucky for them, the other possible large competitors are doing even worse.

eagsalazar2 6y ago
Although they haven't evolved much in recent years, I still find most Gsuite apps to actually be quite good. What is terrible is Drive itself. File management is just a joke with Drive.

dandare 6y ago

> They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there... I mostly use YouTube to watch series - PBS Space Time, World War Two, Crash Course etc. YouTube is absolutely horrible at navigating through these series - it is difficult to find where you left, it is difficult to find the next episode, there is absolutely no user comfort.

gota 6y ago
Yes - I find myself navigating Channel pages often, in hopes that the content creator took the time to create an applicable playlist But then if I quit a video _that I played from a playlist_ and check my history _the playlist itself is listed, and not the actual video_ It is, indeed, a mess

jlarocco 6y ago

Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run. It's like they develop products just enough to get people using them so they can squeeze out some more meta-data and connect the dots back to a Google account, and then they stop development because it's not going to add more revenue. And if they can't figure out how to push advertising with it, they drop it.

dorkinspace 6y ago
> Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run. Absolutely. Just look at Google Maps these days. Google Maps used to be the only map app I'd use for everything. Now it is so littered with ads once you zoom in that I find it useless for anything other than directions. This is not a new trend for Google, the advertising company that occasionally builds things.
- intellirogue 6y ago
  There's also a big problem with accuracy in GMaps. From what I can tell they put some effort in within the US, but in the two countries I've lived in, GMaps is sufficiently inaccurate that I have to use other maps. For example: About a third of the streets that show on GMaps for my previous town don't actually exist - they're paddocks. Every other map is correct: HERE, Apple Maps, OSM, TomTom, etc. As Google notoriously has no support, there's no way to get it fixed, so I simply had to instruct everyone coming to visit me that they needed to download and use a different map software in order to find me.
  - solvorn 6y ago
    OSM is better where I live in the US now when it used to be only better in Europe Edit: google maps is a spatial yellow pages. OSM is an atlas.

rrdharan 6y ago

In beta, but FYI you can grant calendar access: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/11/use-google-assistant-with-your-g-suite.html https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/11/use-google-assi...

rnotaro 6y ago
I'm using it but the fact the the assitant can only respond for the active google account is driving me nuts. The Google Calendar app from my Google Pixel merges all my accounts but yet, the assistant is linked to my Google Account instead of my device. It's useless because I'm using multiple calandars on multiple accounts.
- sahaskatta 6y ago
  Same issue here. They have features like "okay google dial into my next meeting," however it doesn't work since my phone's primary account is my personal account. Assistant doesn't work with my secondary work account.

rubber_duck 6y ago

>Android / Chrome are amazing Chrome has been deteriorating in performance and power usage - on OSX at least, I recently switched back to Firefox because it was that bad (Safari is a step too far as I want to work on non-Apple platforms). Firefox has slipped from the mainstream and it's very obvious - so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) - the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE. And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation. Implementation is ridiculously inconsistent across OS versions and HW vendors - I was trying to create a WiFi management API for some industrial application that would connect to controller specific networks - Android has 2 layers of terrible and depricated API with documentation that was misleading at best, a new API that only worked on 10+ without backcompat, and the actual implementation was inconsistent across four Android devices we tested. We gave up on the project as the Matrix of features missing and hacks needed for every platform we could find was just not practical to maintain.

orange3xchicken 6y ago
Chrome has recently (within the last year) been repeatedly making me frustrated with its pdf issues. It feels like 40% of the time I open a pdf in chrome, I instead get an error message like "the plugin has crashed" or some bs. The only solution is to restart the browser entirely. Switched back to FF for this reason.
cpeterso 6y ago
> many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) You can report sites that are broken in Firefox at https://webcompat.com/ https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla engineers will debug the broken site and try to contact the site's developers. Firefox also ships some site-specific workarounds (such as spoofing Chrome's User-Agent string or tweaking some CSS). You can see the current list of site workarounds in Firefox's about:compat page.

lucasmullens 6y ago

> Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything They did. Sundar ran both Android and Chrome, and now he's CEO.

kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago

Google Assistant is a product that relies on cross-learning from large amounts of user data. GSuite is a product that is contractually obligated to NOT doing this. The silos between GSuite and the rest of Google are intentional. I don't work at Google these days so I can't offer the exact reasons why, but it shouldn't be surprising then that the two don't play well. Amazon, on the other hand is not contractually obligated to create this silo. For it, your GSuite account is just another third party account, no different from your GMail account. Yes this is an undesirable outcome, but when business users choose to buy GSuite services with the assurance that the data won't be available to Google for general purpose learning, this is the price they pay for that privacy.

edm0nd 6y ago

I still don't think you can even use G Suite domains with their voice assistant/home devices. It's beyond absurd.

Spooky23 6y ago

MS Office online collaboration still hasn’t caught up with Google, even with Google’s neglect. Personally, I think web based office is something Microsoft wants to drive subscription revenue, but isn’t something customers want. Office is probably the best and most complex fat client app in the world, why sacrifice that? IMO, Office will embrace add on supplementation and value add to the Office apps.

tomaskafka 6y ago

Chrome? Try Edge. On mac, it's day and night, Edge does actually stop the pages you aren't viewing, bringing battery life and CPU use much closer to battery. It's like this was a low hanging fruit of finally cleaning up some old mess in Chromium, Google ignored it for years, and MS team just did it.

oarabbus_ 6y ago

>And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help. Glad you brought this one up. I had an issue with an enterprise account where I was attempting to access work and code I had contained in a doc I created for the client. I was the owner and creator of the doc, but somehow I got stuck in a loop where I had to request permission from myself. Google "Support" was basically nonexistent - I had to ask our company adminstrator, who told me only they could get access to speak with a human, and even that wouldn't be able to be done immediately. I ended up redoing all the work. AWS and Microsoft, in comparison, have had excellent enterprise support.

laingc 6y ago

I agree entirely with your sentiment, but this > now word in the cloud kinda works! is the overstatement of the century. I am stuck with this horrendous product, with its unbelievably bad live collaboration which constantly overwrites what other people are doing, its terrible SSO implementation, its penchant for presenting the least navigable UI I have ever had the misfortune to experience... Google Docs has stagnated, I agree, Office is light years away from having its seamless sync.

solvorn 6y ago

You should write a know about this.

sandos 6y ago

Yeah, I eventually just created "proper" gmail accounts for the rest of my family that is on a free gsuite.

marcusjt 6y ago

Strange, works fine for me, you can pick as many calendars as you want in Assistant Settings > Services > Calendar

pjmlp 6y ago

Android amazing?!? It uses a pseudo-compatible Java 8 subset, with no official roadmap to ever move beyond that, everyone is supposed to move to Kotlin, while they keep fixing the slower developer experience and broken tooling introduced by adding Kotlin support. NDK requires a great resistance to pain with a development experience that occasionally still makes me miss Carbide/Symbian C++. It took them 10 years to introduce any kind of packaging support for NDK dependencies, there are still no tools to improve the developer experience calling Android APIs, one has to manually write JNI wrappers, or use their unsafe C bindings to APIs that are actually written in somehow safer C++. I lost count how many stuff introduced as one year amazing IO stuff, is already deprecated the following year. Latest example, all the GUI layout editing tools still being worked on, which will be eventually deprecated when JetPack Composer hits stable. Critical libraries like Oboe, that are just dumped into Github, instead of having first class support on the SDK and project templates. Team that puts critical information everywhere on the Internet except on Android's official documentation. Very small rant, 10 years have a lot of stuff to rant on, so amazing? Not really.

chaosharmonic 6y ago

> I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom. The Hangouts move is still one of the most infuriating things I've seen in tech anytime in the last decade. Remember how Google was actively contributing to an open and interoperable spec for chat, and then just proceeded to go full Ayn Rand about it? There's a pretty strong argument to be made that if any major players were still backing XMPP as a standard, we wouldn't all have a bunch of people in our lives who have said some variation of "I would quit Facebook right now if I didn't need Messenger"

Already__Taken 6y ago

The cross-integration docs should have by now and doesn't simply blows my mind. Like why even doesn't sheets and docs have the exact same table cell formatting options? Following that, why can't a sheet seamlessly embed to a google doc.