4 ms·

I’d never short anything, but I really don’t see the value of google. I used to love their services, but now the only one I use is maps, and that’s not because

by moksly 6y ago

I’d never short anything, but I really don’t see the value of google. I used to love their services, but now the only one I use is maps, and that’s not because of privacy concerns, it’s because their competition is just better. I used to have gsuite for my personal e-mail, file/photo and office stuff. I’ve been using the cheapest office365 business plan for a year and a couple of months now. Not because I was concerned about privacy, but because google made it harder for me to use their services as a private consumer on a business plan. On the flip side of this is my job in the public sector of Europe, where we’re using more and more cloud solutions, but don’t use google cloud or gsuite because of their poor business-to-business support and failure to work with EU legislation. Privately google search used to be the best in my native language, but these days I find myself doing !g less and less on DuckDuckGo, again not really because of privacy concerns but because the whole first page of my google search results are commercials for places that I’m not going to use. Just try searching for something baby related on google and see what happens. We have some very good public health sites with tons of info, run by our government, first results on DDG but burrowed deep below a heap of advertisements on google. Professionally we’re moving to the new Edge rather than Chrome because it’s easier for IT operations and support to control it, even though the google enterprise tools aren’t bad, they are just not as good. All of this is completely anecdotal of course, but I’m always worried about investments into companies that don’t make stuff I’d personally or professionally want to use. Then again, most of my investments like in green energy companies, so I’m probably just too conservative for tech investments and you likely shouldn’t take my advice.

rorykoehler 6y ago
What do you use instead of Google Suite?
- moksly 6y ago
  Office365 business essentials, same price, more disk space, and since we use Azure/office365 at my place of work the administrative skills correlate between the two. Costs about the same, but you pay for a year instead of a month at a time. OneDrive isn’t really better on iOS than google drive and google photos, even with the weird way google photos work on gsuite, but stuff like word and one note are really nice compared to what you get at google docs. The change was mainly because using gsuite privately turned out to be such a hassle for photos.
Sebb767 6y ago
> google search used to be the best in my native language, but these days I find myself doing !g less and less on DuckDuckGo, again not really because of privacy concerns but because the whole first page of my google search results are commercials for places that I’m not going to use. Of course we're discussing anecdotal evidences here, and Google searches have deteriorated for me, too, but for a lot of things DuckDuckGo fails to find the most relevant results and I tend to use !g quite often (~20% of the time). This might be due to SEO fighting making Googles results less relevant, but DDG is not steeled against this either. I agree on your general point, though; Google has lost a lot of competitive headway. On the other hand, however, it still has a lot of market penetration: YouTube is the largest video platform by far, Google search is "the internet" to a lot of people and while Android is technically a free OS, it practically belongs to Google. Also, there's still gmail, and for people to take the effort of switching mails takes quite some convincing.
user5994461 6y ago
> the only one I use is maps You never use youtube or google analytics?
- moksly 6y ago
  Not really. I mean, I’ve used YouTube but it’s not something I do regularly and I’ve never used google analytics.
izacus 6y ago
Your personal perception of a company's products isn't really correlated in market stock value of a company. Just because you personally switched products it doesn't mean that the companies are struggling or having issues - just think of all the thousands of articles announcing Apples, Microsofts, IBMs or whoever elses doom because they managed to muck up product strategy for a few years. Remember how there was a time where everyone here said that Microsoft's products are complete trash, Windows 8 is a failure, the company is doomed to failure and no self-respecting person would ever use their products and would never invest in it? And the stock kept growing and growing and growing. Investing based on your personal product usage is about as sensible as using Las Vegas casinos as a way of increasing your wealth.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Microsoft’s growth didn’t come from Windows. It cane from Azure and Office. But no matter how bad Windows was, what was the alternative for most people in the market Linux? People don’t buy Windows. OEMs and to a lesser extent big enterprise. Apple was almost doomed because of bad strategy. Jobs was a once in a lifetime event.
- moksly 6y ago
  I’m well aware of this, but I’m not comfortable investing into something I can’t personally see a reason to buy. I doubt google is going anyways, but I would never invest with them. This strategy has never failed me, though I obviously may have missed out on opportunities. I will note that there is a difference between what everyone says, and what everyone does. Microsoft may have taken a lot of heat over the years, but it’s remained one of the best tech partners to non-tech enterprise corporations and organisations for decades.

by moksly 6y ago

rorykoehler 6y ago

What do you use instead of Google Suite?

moksly 6y ago
Office365 business essentials, same price, more disk space, and since we use Azure/office365 at my place of work the administrative skills correlate between the two. Costs about the same, but you pay for a year instead of a month at a time. OneDrive isn’t really better on iOS than google drive and google photos, even with the weird way google photos work on gsuite, but stuff like word and one note are really nice compared to what you get at google docs. The change was mainly because using gsuite privately turned out to be such a hassle for photos.

Sebb767 6y ago

> google search used to be the best in my native language, but these days I find myself doing !g less and less on DuckDuckGo, again not really because of privacy concerns but because the whole first page of my google search results are commercials for places that I’m not going to use. Of course we're discussing anecdotal evidences here, and Google searches have deteriorated for me, too, but for a lot of things DuckDuckGo fails to find the most relevant results and I tend to use !g quite often (~20% of the time). This might be due to SEO fighting making Googles results less relevant, but DDG is not steeled against this either. I agree on your general point, though; Google has lost a lot of competitive headway. On the other hand, however, it still has a lot of market penetration: YouTube is the largest video platform by far, Google search is "the internet" to a lot of people and while Android is technically a free OS, it practically belongs to Google. Also, there's still gmail, and for people to take the effort of switching mails takes quite some convincing.

user5994461 6y ago

> the only one I use is maps You never use youtube or google analytics?

moksly 6y ago
Not really. I mean, I’ve used YouTube but it’s not something I do regularly and I’ve never used google analytics.

izacus 6y ago

Your personal perception of a company's products isn't really correlated in market stock value of a company. Just because you personally switched products it doesn't mean that the companies are struggling or having issues - just think of all the thousands of articles announcing Apples, Microsofts, IBMs or whoever elses doom because they managed to muck up product strategy for a few years. Remember how there was a time where everyone here said that Microsoft's products are complete trash, Windows 8 is a failure, the company is doomed to failure and no self-respecting person would ever use their products and would never invest in it? And the stock kept growing and growing and growing. Investing based on your personal product usage is about as sensible as using Las Vegas casinos as a way of increasing your wealth.

scarface74 6y ago
Microsoft’s growth didn’t come from Windows. It cane from Azure and Office. But no matter how bad Windows was, what was the alternative for most people in the market Linux? People don’t buy Windows. OEMs and to a lesser extent big enterprise. Apple was almost doomed because of bad strategy. Jobs was a once in a lifetime event.
moksly 6y ago
I’m well aware of this, but I’m not comfortable investing into something I can’t personally see a reason to buy. I doubt google is going anyways, but I would never invest with them. This strategy has never failed me, though I obviously may have missed out on opportunities. I will note that there is a difference between what everyone says, and what everyone does. Microsoft may have taken a lot of heat over the years, but it’s remained one of the best tech partners to non-tech enterprise corporations and organisations for decades.