4 ms·

Gmail sucks. They use it as a vehicle for anti-competitive "standards" and it's needlessly difficult to deliver mail to. Their new JavaScript-riddled frontends

Gmail sucks. They use it as a vehicle for anti-competitive "standards" and it's needlessly difficult to deliver mail to. Their new JavaScript-riddled frontends (which they seem to develop and then shrug off every couple of years) have awful performance and are terrible at doing what has ultimately a very simple task for 30 years. Google Maps is fine. OSM is superior technically but Google Maps only wins because it has access to better data. It's not an example of great engineering, it's just okay. Google Docs is pretty good. At least it was, the last time I used it was several years ago. I can't comment on the code, which is mainly what I'm commenting on in this thread: their engineering quality. Throw enough monkeys at a typewriter and maybe Google Docs comes out, but who knows what it looks like on the inside.

jonfw 6y ago
Engineering quality is about nothing other than meeting the spec- how well does google accomplish that? It sounds like you have some issues with the design itself, maybe some issues with the business practices. Those are issues with the spec, not the engineering. The engineering team delivers the spec, they do it smoothly, they do it at scale
- ddevault 6y ago
  Highly used? So what? Might does not make right. They're definitely not cost efficient. Google's standard play is throwing tens of millions of dollars at a problem, which is not good engineering, even if it works. Edit: you changed your comment out from under me and I fail to rouse the enthusiasm to reply to your new comment.