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By shame and disgust, I suspect you mean something along the lines of virtue-signalling, but I think it's much more simple than that, it's plain old economics:
by pgt 6y ago
By shame and disgust, I suspect you mean something along the lines of virtue-signalling, but I think it's much more simple than that, it's plain old economics:
Long-term reliability and excellence. If you keep shutting down products, who could risk relying on them? Not me, because switching costs are non-trivial.
If you launch ten different chat products (luckily the icons match) and shut them down a few months later, what kind of product mind want to join your company? Not me, because I want to work on products that survive.
If your product hiring pipeline suffers because you keep killing products and you disable customer accounts willy-nilly, who wants to risk falling behind because they are stuck with products designed by designers who never talk to customers? Not me.
So avoiding Google at this point is less about morality and more about insuring yourself against a myopic product strategy and engineers who are not allowed to talk to their customers.
If you want to fix Google, put engineers on call and let them talk to customers. Fire anybody who refuses to talk to customers. The problem will resolve itself in 6-12 months.
Of course, it is important to put your money where your mouth is, so to answer your question directly: I am actively de-Googling myself and being very vocal about it because I believe that's the only way to affect change in large corporates who. Here is what I've done:
- Switched from Google to DuckDuckGo. Haven't used Google in over 6 months.
- Switched from Chrome to Firefox. Very happy so far.
- This week I signed up for Fastmail and switched my MX records over, so Google can't learn show me ads anymore.
- Next up is Google Docs. Sheets is going to be tough.
Hey Google, you're screwing up BIG TIME. Talk to your customers!
- zaptheimpaler 6y agopeople keep trotting out this old story of Google kills products but it hasn't happened in years. Yes they killed some niche products years ago - social network/chat and an rss reader.. but the important stuff with huge user bases is stable. gmail, chrome, calendar, maps, docs have never been shutdown and likely never will until the entire tech world changes drastically.
- pgt 6y agoWhat is your definition of 'niche'? https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- smrq 6y agoInbox? Hangouts? Play Music?
- tpxl 6y ago>maps Maps suffered from a nice 100+ times price hike a few years ago and killed plenty of companies that relied on it. I'm currently using maps because it's the most reliable and the product can afford it, but I'll switch to something else as soon as possible. I'm working on getting the local government to sponsor an effort to improve Open Street Maps enough to be better than google.
- transcriptase 6y agoGoogle Finance was 'renovated' and went from a robust portfolio tracking and stock charting tool to a relatively useless news aggregator.
- RonanTheGrey 6y ago> Next up is Google Docs. Sheets is going to be tough. Microsoft 365 is reasonably priced and you can use the web-based versions for free.
- gpanders 6y agoIs Microsoft any better than Google?