8 ms·

Besides the terrible UX I’d say Google is getting left behind due to the virtually zero improvement in its apps over the last decade. Started using Google Driv

Besides the terrible UX I’d say Google is getting left behind due to the virtually zero improvement in its apps over the last decade. Started using Google Drive for work in around 2011 and stopped last year when I moved to a Microsoft-based company. In that time it didn’t seem like there were any major improvements in functionality to the core Drive, Docs and Sheets (and poor, forgotten Draw) apps. In fact most changes made things worse. Drive’s search is so poor that it’s often easier to get a colleague to resend the invite to a doc than it is find the thing via search. Docs is pretty much stagnant, with the only noticeable new feature being the section navigator on the side. Gmail went from being a stunning demonstration of the possibilities of web technologies to a bloated, over-JavaScripted hog that takes ages to load. Chat services came and went but none of them were particularly better than their predecessors. Just a slightly different arrangement of deckchairs. It’s amazing that Google have left room for competitors like Airtable, Notion and Miro to both flourish and fulfil some of Google docs’ early promise.

barkingcat 6y ago
Google drive nested subfolder is also a mess.
Lutzb 6y ago
When Google Mail was invite only, it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be. Fast, forward thinking in the way mails were presented. Then it became a monstrosity that I can no longer recommend to anyone. Suddenly Google Inbox came along. Fast, simple, focused packed with useful new features like mail grouping and content extraction. And it was killed off after roughly two years without any of the features being migrated to another product. It seems like Google became unable to innovate in the basic services they once revolutionized.
- ogjunkyard 6y ago
  Google Inbox was so good. I was honestly shocked that they got rid of what felt like true innovation in the email space (at the time).
  - websterisk 6y ago
    And any hands for Google Reader? I don't think any other tool has had that level of impact on my content consumption, prior or since. It was everything it needed to be and not anything more. RIP.
    - discordance 6y ago
      I don’t know if it would still work well these days, but when Google Reader left I genuinely felt less information-abled
      - Hasu 6y ago
        I never used Google Reader, but did use other RSS, and I stopped years ago - not because RSS doesn't still work great, it does. But because so much of the content I used to consume with it is gone now. I used to follow a few dozen blogs that got updated regularly, and had RSS feeds. Now almost all those blogs are dead, migrated to Substack or Twitter, or post so infrequently that it's not worth a subscription. A decade ago, the web browser felt like an endless source of amazing content, and an RSS feed was a great way to keep track of a lot of it at once. Today, I feel like there's still great content, but it's in Twitter feeds and newsletters, and my browser is for accessing webapps and storefronts. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong content or just don't know where to go to find the good stuff anymore, but somehow the end of Google Reader was prophetic, and whether that was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not is up to each of us to decide.
        nxtbl 6y ago
        You can follow twitter, facebook, vkontakte, newsletters, youtube etc. with a RSS reader. The page you're interested in doesn't offer a feed? Try the integrated web feeds from your reader or another source. https://www.inoreader.com/blog/ https://www.inoreader.com/blog/
    - sliken 6y ago
      I miss it, kinda annoyed by feedly, but not quite enough to find or host my own RSS aggregator.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  Google inbox was the last Google product I used and easily the best. Completely got rid of my inbox clutter and gave the ability to snooze emails.
- polishdude20 6y ago
  What sort of email client would you recommend instead?
  - kerng 6y ago
    I cant believe I'm saying this but Outlook. I used to not like Outlook at work, but when I worked for a startup they used GSuites and the Google mail experience is so bad I honestly couldn't believe that anyone would be using it. Threads are mixed together when multiple people reply its impossible to read content anymore and they do also change the formatting of content which puzzled me the most. Maybe for people that only ever used Gmail it's okay, because they are used to its weirdness and have never seen a more structured and visually appealing way to read email.
    - jyrkesh 6y ago
      Outlook for Desktop has its quirks, but it's still extremely usable and (mostly) performant, especially compared to any of the web-based mail clients out there.
    - ryantgtg 6y ago
      I just changed from a job that used GSuite to one that uses Office 365. I think Outlook is total garbage. The desktop client especially, and the website is barely an improvement. I've gotten used to it in the last month, but I still think the threading UX (my main gripe at this point) is really poor. Maybe the lesson here is that if you use one of them for years, then the other seems really bad.
  - wcarron 6y ago
    I actually just began the process of migrating away from Google about two weeks ago. I chose FastMail for my new email provider. It's $5/mo, but honestly, I'm fine paying that, solely to get Google out of my emails. I find their UI to be simple and clear. I enjoy the notes/calendar features that come with the email. Their mobile app works fine on my android phone, and the push notifications from the Fastmail calendar are relatively unobtrusive. Only downside so far was I had to cancel my NYTimes sub (honestly probably a plus) because it doesn't recognize the @fastmail.com domain as a valid email address. It's the only service I've had that problem with, including the important ones like banking, etc.
- jyrkesh 6y ago
  Weird for me to see all the love for Inbox in a thread about bloated webapps. I liked the Inbox UI a lot, but until it was spun down, I had an issue where each Inbox tab would eventually bloat up to 2-3 GBs. Considering I'd have 3 of those open, one for each of my Gmail accts, it quickly became something I couldn't use on my laptop (unless I refreshed each tab every couple hours).
  - IggleSniggle 6y ago
    I never noticed that. Inbox was what got me to inbox zero, quickly. I also used it almost exclusively on my phone, however.
    - jyrkesh 6y ago
      Yeah, the phone app was crazy fast, and having moved from Mailbox, I loved the ability to easily archive from notifications. Now that's Gmail standard, though
- deckard1 6y ago
  > it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google. Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is not the invincible Superman they pretended to be. Their "don't be evil" motto was a lie and not everything they touched turned to gold. In fact, it was almost always the opposite of that.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    > you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google. It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering, conversation threading that actually works, and tags instead of folders (e.g. a message can have more than one tag, but it can only be in one folder). At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
    - deckard1 6y ago
      > truly effective spam filtering I don't recall it being that much better than the competitors. And even today it seems like a coin toss as to whether an obviously spam email lands in the spam folder or not. Not to mention the seemingly shady backroom deals companies like Sendgrid, SES, etc. are making to ensure their emails get delivered to the inbox. That seems like an area ripe for corruption. > At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it. Anecdotal, but I very much preferred Thunderbird to Gmail, and was using it up until 2010 or so. Nowadays I use K-9 Mail (Android) where I need to and try to avoid the disaster that is modern email as much as possible.
    - philsnow 6y ago
      > conversation threading that actually works Gmail's "threading" is probably its worst sin (beating out its weird IMAP interface). When I started using Gmail, my other mail client was mutt, but every other client at the time showed replies to email threads properly as a tree. As an aside, you could argue that email conversations should look like a DAG (since you could totally quote multiple emails and have multiple In-Reply-To headers, why not) but I'm not aware of any clients that did that. Gmail went a third way, completely linearizing a thread into a "conversation". This view makes it harder to have discourse over email: if you want to make sure to split a conversation and have both forks get addressed, you have to change the subject line to un-thread replies to your message.
- istillwritecode 6y ago
  I was a Google employee from 2005 to 2018. I HATED inbox, and I certainly wasn't alone. It divided users into two pieces, and the real issue was Google tried to force it on users rather than make it an option.
anonygler 6y ago
That's because the last decade of improvements at GSuite aren't for you. They're to satisfy made up requirements by Government and Enterprise IT departments, with the rest of the energy sucked out by European Regulations. Data location and retention policies, privacy, logging, data export, legal, etc etc.
- Closi 6y ago
  Meanwhile Microsoft had managed to include all those requirements and actually push on capability.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  The GDPR didn't require Gmail to become slow, or Google to provide multiple confusingly competing video call products.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    Ahh the good old days of when I was recommended Allo, Duo and Hangouts by the Playstore.
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    GDPR also can't be implemented in the UI layer, because it would also apply to the IMAP/Gmail API, which doesn't suck... at least from a user perspective. Gmail is just fine in a real email client.
- lr1970 6y ago
  Everything you mentioned has nothing to do with UI/UX.
  - bobyfyfy 6y ago
    I believe that is the point. Google isn't updating for UI/UX reasons.
    - rchaud 6y ago
inetknght 6y ago
Where I used Google Drive in the past I now use NextCloud in the future. Where Google Drive promised in the past "unlimited" storage, I can now provide for myself for cheaper and better.
ouid 6y ago
I would amend this to say that chat services have all been bad except for the first one, which was great.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  Google Chat makes HipChat look like the pinnacle of chat applications, and HipChat wasn't that great.
mrweasel 6y ago
One major mistake Google also makes is assuming that everything is web, it's not. Google have world class engineers, they have the ability to develop infrastructure that scales globally, yet they apparently can't write desktop application. A few days ago I tried to install Google Chat, for work. There's no download buttons to be found, you're just logged into Chat directly and is greeted by a "You need Chrome to download Chat". Well that just weird, but okay, I can uninstall Chrome afterwards, no problem. Imagine my surprise when launching Chat also launched Chrome. I disregard this as being something Chat just do on first launch. Existing Chrome however also closed Chat.... Okay. Uninstall Chrome then, that should teach Chat to no fool around with Chrome. Now Chat doesn't work, because what Google doesn't tell you is that Chat is now a progressive web app. The icon is pretty though. Chat can be a web app all it want, but it doesn't get to launch Chrome, I don't want that abomination running all day. The current fix is apparently to install via Home Brew, that downloads a stand-alone app. Google claims the new version is stand-alone, but if it was to launch Chrome it's not really stand-alone is it. What struck me about all this is that Google doesn't actually have the ability to develop real desktop application. That's really weird, why wouldn't they want to have the best performing, most powerful applications possible on the desktops? Because they can't. Google as an organisation doesn't have the mental capacity and patience to do real desktop programs.
- sofixa 6y ago
  > What struck me about all this is that Google doesn't actually have the ability to develop real desktop application. That's really weird, why wouldn't they want to have the best performing, most powerful applications possible on the desktops? Because they can't. Google as an organisation doesn't have the mental capacity and patience to do real desktop programs. Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop native desktop apps in 3 different platforms?
  - lock-free 6y ago
    > Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop native desktop apps in 3 different platforms? and yet the latest-and-greatest cross platform framework is supposed to be Flutter
mekster 6y ago
I agree there are many poor UI under Google's products, the map is still uncontested and still amazingly good including Google Earth.
- astrange 6y ago
  The Earth Mac app feels like it hasn’t been updated in 15 years though.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Have you used other maps? I see this opinion a lot, but Apple Maps is pretty great now. Bing Maps is excellent. HERE Maps has been a big one I relied on for a number of years too. I mean, their web UI is slow, but MapQuest... actually still does it's job pretty darn well too. I used their API for a program I wrote.
  - mekster 6y ago
    Is there a reason to switch when they don't have street view and 3D modeling?
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      I think you just made my point for me: Nearly all of the ones I mentioned have both street view and 3D models of buildings. (I'd really discourage using MapQuest's web UI, mind you.) If you had used anything but Google, you'd realize everyone else has these features too. Bear in mind, Bing Maps powers a world-scale reproduction of the world for Flight Simulator... you thought that didn't have 3D models of buildings? It does have to fill in a lot of missing data, but it does start on a very good foundation.
      - mekster 6y ago
        Thanks for mentioning. I tried but there are some deficiencies. - Apple Map : Better street view than Google. The scenes look more natural and having a higher point of view is much better but the point of interest is quite unfocused and their map app acts quite weirdly and very laggy under 3D and almost unusable. Funny their UI guideline always says not to block UI process but they can't do that themselves. - Bing map : Map is very good. Point of interest is fairly placed but their satellite view is very rough in Japan. Searching is weird. If I search for "California" I get taken to some location in Columbia with that name... And not sure how they don't support Android? I get redirected to their search site when I visit maps. - HERE map : I suppose this is US only? I checked a Japanese location and there's 1 big road in a major city and nothing else... - MapQuest : Not really competing... All in all, there are a few better things here and there for other maps, but nothing really beats the overall quality of Google maps at this point.
lock-free 6y ago
> Drive’s search is so poor that it’s often easier to get a colleague to resend the invite to a doc than it is find the thing via search. For a search company, it's embarrassing how hard it is to search for things in their office suite.
- danudey 6y ago
  Drive in general is a phenomenal mess (unless you upgrade and go all-in on team drives). We inadvertently ended up with a weird heirarchy like A -> B -> C, where A was owned by user 1, B was owned by user 2, and C was owned by user 3, and everything was just shared with everyone else. Then one day while cleaning up the account of a user who had left, I inadvertently un-shared "myself" (her account) from everything that everyone had shared with her. This apparently resulted in her Drive account going through everything that had been shared with her and removing it from the directory it was in. In this case, Drive un-shared C to her, removing it from B, then un-shared B from her, removing it from A. Now all of those files still existed, and were still shared to everyone else, but there was no hierarchy to them anymore, at all. This was a completely massive pain in the ass, meaning that one of our project managers had to recreate the entire directory structure, then go through every document that their knew of, search for it in their Drive, find what folder it was in, and then put it into the right place in the hierarchy. Thankfully, they were the kind of person who had wanted to go through and reorganize for years, so aside from the sudden and completely unmanagable imposition on their time, they were pretty stoked to have a reason to deal with it. I, on the other hand, learned to just never touch Drive at all and migrate everyone to Team Drives instead. Which it turns out you can't safely share to users outside of your organization. Fucking great. Thanks, Google.
Minor49er 6y ago
Not only is Drive's search poor, but Google's own search results have been getting notably worse. Somewhat recently, they rolled out a change where some keywords in your query will be left out to generate results for something unrelated. I've been having to wrap everything in quotes, add plus signs, and/or click on the "no, what I submitted really was what I wanted to search for, thanks" links on the results pages. I really hate to say it, but half of my searches are done on Bing now where I don't notice this kind of behavior taking place. Also, if you want to talk about bad UX on Google products, I could write a book on frustrations I have with using Maps.
r00fus 6y ago
My major GDocs/Sheets frustration is that doing a paste-without-formatting in Mac/Firefox silently fails. It works in Mac Chrome. No workaround that I can find. This is a regression from say, 2 years ago. I used to be psyched that I could use GDocs for work but now I hate that I'm forced to use it for work.

barkingcat 6y ago

Google drive nested subfolder is also a mess.

Lutzb 6y ago

When Google Mail was invite only, it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be. Fast, forward thinking in the way mails were presented. Then it became a monstrosity that I can no longer recommend to anyone. Suddenly Google Inbox came along. Fast, simple, focused packed with useful new features like mail grouping and content extraction. And it was killed off after roughly two years without any of the features being migrated to another product. It seems like Google became unable to innovate in the basic services they once revolutionized.

ogjunkyard 6y ago
Google Inbox was so good. I was honestly shocked that they got rid of what felt like true innovation in the email space (at the time).
- websterisk 6y ago
  And any hands for Google Reader? I don't think any other tool has had that level of impact on my content consumption, prior or since. It was everything it needed to be and not anything more. RIP.
  - discordance 6y ago
    I don’t know if it would still work well these days, but when Google Reader left I genuinely felt less information-abled
    - Hasu 6y ago
      I never used Google Reader, but did use other RSS, and I stopped years ago - not because RSS doesn't still work great, it does. But because so much of the content I used to consume with it is gone now. I used to follow a few dozen blogs that got updated regularly, and had RSS feeds. Now almost all those blogs are dead, migrated to Substack or Twitter, or post so infrequently that it's not worth a subscription. A decade ago, the web browser felt like an endless source of amazing content, and an RSS feed was a great way to keep track of a lot of it at once. Today, I feel like there's still great content, but it's in Twitter feeds and newsletters, and my browser is for accessing webapps and storefronts. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong content or just don't know where to go to find the good stuff anymore, but somehow the end of Google Reader was prophetic, and whether that was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not is up to each of us to decide.
      - nxtbl 6y ago
        You can follow twitter, facebook, vkontakte, newsletters, youtube etc. with a RSS reader. The page you're interested in doesn't offer a feed? Try the integrated web feeds from your reader or another source. https://www.inoreader.com/blog/ https://www.inoreader.com/blog/
  - sliken 6y ago
    I miss it, kinda annoyed by feedly, but not quite enough to find or host my own RSS aggregator.
camjohnson26 6y ago
Google inbox was the last Google product I used and easily the best. Completely got rid of my inbox clutter and gave the ability to snooze emails.
polishdude20 6y ago
What sort of email client would you recommend instead?
- kerng 6y ago
  I cant believe I'm saying this but Outlook. I used to not like Outlook at work, but when I worked for a startup they used GSuites and the Google mail experience is so bad I honestly couldn't believe that anyone would be using it. Threads are mixed together when multiple people reply its impossible to read content anymore and they do also change the formatting of content which puzzled me the most. Maybe for people that only ever used Gmail it's okay, because they are used to its weirdness and have never seen a more structured and visually appealing way to read email.
  - jyrkesh 6y ago
    Outlook for Desktop has its quirks, but it's still extremely usable and (mostly) performant, especially compared to any of the web-based mail clients out there.
  - ryantgtg 6y ago
    I just changed from a job that used GSuite to one that uses Office 365. I think Outlook is total garbage. The desktop client especially, and the website is barely an improvement. I've gotten used to it in the last month, but I still think the threading UX (my main gripe at this point) is really poor. Maybe the lesson here is that if you use one of them for years, then the other seems really bad.
- wcarron 6y ago
  I actually just began the process of migrating away from Google about two weeks ago. I chose FastMail for my new email provider. It's $5/mo, but honestly, I'm fine paying that, solely to get Google out of my emails. I find their UI to be simple and clear. I enjoy the notes/calendar features that come with the email. Their mobile app works fine on my android phone, and the push notifications from the Fastmail calendar are relatively unobtrusive. Only downside so far was I had to cancel my NYTimes sub (honestly probably a plus) because it doesn't recognize the @fastmail.com domain as a valid email address. It's the only service I've had that problem with, including the important ones like banking, etc.
jyrkesh 6y ago
Weird for me to see all the love for Inbox in a thread about bloated webapps. I liked the Inbox UI a lot, but until it was spun down, I had an issue where each Inbox tab would eventually bloat up to 2-3 GBs. Considering I'd have 3 of those open, one for each of my Gmail accts, it quickly became something I couldn't use on my laptop (unless I refreshed each tab every couple hours).
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  I never noticed that. Inbox was what got me to inbox zero, quickly. I also used it almost exclusively on my phone, however.
  - jyrkesh 6y ago
    Yeah, the phone app was crazy fast, and having moved from Mailbox, I loved the ability to easily archive from notifications. Now that's Gmail standard, though
deckard1 6y ago
> it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google. Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is not the invincible Superman they pretended to be. Their "don't be evil" motto was a lie and not everything they touched turned to gold. In fact, it was almost always the opposite of that.
- twblalock 6y ago
  > you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google. It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering, conversation threading that actually works, and tags instead of folders (e.g. a message can have more than one tag, but it can only be in one folder). At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
  - deckard1 6y ago
    > truly effective spam filtering I don't recall it being that much better than the competitors. And even today it seems like a coin toss as to whether an obviously spam email lands in the spam folder or not. Not to mention the seemingly shady backroom deals companies like Sendgrid, SES, etc. are making to ensure their emails get delivered to the inbox. That seems like an area ripe for corruption. > At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it. Anecdotal, but I very much preferred Thunderbird to Gmail, and was using it up until 2010 or so. Nowadays I use K-9 Mail (Android) where I need to and try to avoid the disaster that is modern email as much as possible.
  - philsnow 6y ago
    > conversation threading that actually works Gmail's "threading" is probably its worst sin (beating out its weird IMAP interface). When I started using Gmail, my other mail client was mutt, but every other client at the time showed replies to email threads properly as a tree. As an aside, you could argue that email conversations should look like a DAG (since you could totally quote multiple emails and have multiple In-Reply-To headers, why not) but I'm not aware of any clients that did that. Gmail went a third way, completely linearizing a thread into a "conversation". This view makes it harder to have discourse over email: if you want to make sure to split a conversation and have both forks get addressed, you have to change the subject line to un-thread replies to your message.
istillwritecode 6y ago
I was a Google employee from 2005 to 2018. I HATED inbox, and I certainly wasn't alone. It divided users into two pieces, and the real issue was Google tried to force it on users rather than make it an option.

anonygler 6y ago

That's because the last decade of improvements at GSuite aren't for you. They're to satisfy made up requirements by Government and Enterprise IT departments, with the rest of the energy sucked out by European Regulations. Data location and retention policies, privacy, logging, data export, legal, etc etc.

Closi 6y ago
Meanwhile Microsoft had managed to include all those requirements and actually push on capability.
ceejayoz 6y ago
The GDPR didn't require Gmail to become slow, or Google to provide multiple confusingly competing video call products.
- fakedang 6y ago
  Ahh the good old days of when I was recommended Allo, Duo and Hangouts by the Playstore.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  GDPR also can't be implemented in the UI layer, because it would also apply to the IMAP/Gmail API, which doesn't suck... at least from a user perspective. Gmail is just fine in a real email client.
lr1970 6y ago
Everything you mentioned has nothing to do with UI/UX.
- bobyfyfy 6y ago
  I believe that is the point. Google isn't updating for UI/UX reasons.
  - rchaud 6y ago

inetknght 6y ago

Where I used Google Drive in the past I now use NextCloud in the future. Where Google Drive promised in the past "unlimited" storage, I can now provide for myself for cheaper and better.

ouid 6y ago

I would amend this to say that chat services have all been bad except for the first one, which was great.

mrweasel 6y ago
Google Chat makes HipChat look like the pinnacle of chat applications, and HipChat wasn't that great.

mrweasel 6y ago

One major mistake Google also makes is assuming that everything is web, it's not. Google have world class engineers, they have the ability to develop infrastructure that scales globally, yet they apparently can't write desktop application. A few days ago I tried to install Google Chat, for work. There's no download buttons to be found, you're just logged into Chat directly and is greeted by a "You need Chrome to download Chat". Well that just weird, but okay, I can uninstall Chrome afterwards, no problem. Imagine my surprise when launching Chat also launched Chrome. I disregard this as being something Chat just do on first launch. Existing Chrome however also closed Chat.... Okay. Uninstall Chrome then, that should teach Chat to no fool around with Chrome. Now Chat doesn't work, because what Google doesn't tell you is that Chat is now a progressive web app. The icon is pretty though. Chat can be a web app all it want, but it doesn't get to launch Chrome, I don't want that abomination running all day. The current fix is apparently to install via Home Brew, that downloads a stand-alone app. Google claims the new version is stand-alone, but if it was to launch Chrome it's not really stand-alone is it. What struck me about all this is that Google doesn't actually have the ability to develop real desktop application. That's really weird, why wouldn't they want to have the best performing, most powerful applications possible on the desktops? Because they can't. Google as an organisation doesn't have the mental capacity and patience to do real desktop programs.

sofixa 6y ago
> What struck me about all this is that Google doesn't actually have the ability to develop real desktop application. That's really weird, why wouldn't they want to have the best performing, most powerful applications possible on the desktops? Because they can't. Google as an organisation doesn't have the mental capacity and patience to do real desktop programs. Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop native desktop apps in 3 different platforms?
- lock-free 6y ago
  > Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop native desktop apps in 3 different platforms? and yet the latest-and-greatest cross platform framework is supposed to be Flutter

mekster 6y ago

I agree there are many poor UI under Google's products, the map is still uncontested and still amazingly good including Google Earth.

astrange 6y ago
The Earth Mac app feels like it hasn’t been updated in 15 years though.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Have you used other maps? I see this opinion a lot, but Apple Maps is pretty great now. Bing Maps is excellent. HERE Maps has been a big one I relied on for a number of years too. I mean, their web UI is slow, but MapQuest... actually still does it's job pretty darn well too. I used their API for a program I wrote.
- mekster 6y ago
  Is there a reason to switch when they don't have street view and 3D modeling?
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    I think you just made my point for me: Nearly all of the ones I mentioned have both street view and 3D models of buildings. (I'd really discourage using MapQuest's web UI, mind you.) If you had used anything but Google, you'd realize everyone else has these features too. Bear in mind, Bing Maps powers a world-scale reproduction of the world for Flight Simulator... you thought that didn't have 3D models of buildings? It does have to fill in a lot of missing data, but it does start on a very good foundation.
    - mekster 6y ago
      Thanks for mentioning. I tried but there are some deficiencies. - Apple Map : Better street view than Google. The scenes look more natural and having a higher point of view is much better but the point of interest is quite unfocused and their map app acts quite weirdly and very laggy under 3D and almost unusable. Funny their UI guideline always says not to block UI process but they can't do that themselves. - Bing map : Map is very good. Point of interest is fairly placed but their satellite view is very rough in Japan. Searching is weird. If I search for "California" I get taken to some location in Columbia with that name... And not sure how they don't support Android? I get redirected to their search site when I visit maps. - HERE map : I suppose this is US only? I checked a Japanese location and there's 1 big road in a major city and nothing else... - MapQuest : Not really competing... All in all, there are a few better things here and there for other maps, but nothing really beats the overall quality of Google maps at this point.

lock-free 6y ago

> Drive’s search is so poor that it’s often easier to get a colleague to resend the invite to a doc than it is find the thing via search. For a search company, it's embarrassing how hard it is to search for things in their office suite.

danudey 6y ago
Drive in general is a phenomenal mess (unless you upgrade and go all-in on team drives). We inadvertently ended up with a weird heirarchy like A -> B -> C, where A was owned by user 1, B was owned by user 2, and C was owned by user 3, and everything was just shared with everyone else. Then one day while cleaning up the account of a user who had left, I inadvertently un-shared "myself" (her account) from everything that everyone had shared with her. This apparently resulted in her Drive account going through everything that had been shared with her and removing it from the directory it was in. In this case, Drive un-shared C to her, removing it from B, then un-shared B from her, removing it from A. Now all of those files still existed, and were still shared to everyone else, but there was no hierarchy to them anymore, at all. This was a completely massive pain in the ass, meaning that one of our project managers had to recreate the entire directory structure, then go through every document that their knew of, search for it in their Drive, find what folder it was in, and then put it into the right place in the hierarchy. Thankfully, they were the kind of person who had wanted to go through and reorganize for years, so aside from the sudden and completely unmanagable imposition on their time, they were pretty stoked to have a reason to deal with it. I, on the other hand, learned to just never touch Drive at all and migrate everyone to Team Drives instead. Which it turns out you can't safely share to users outside of your organization. Fucking great. Thanks, Google.

Minor49er 6y ago

Not only is Drive's search poor, but Google's own search results have been getting notably worse. Somewhat recently, they rolled out a change where some keywords in your query will be left out to generate results for something unrelated. I've been having to wrap everything in quotes, add plus signs, and/or click on the "no, what I submitted really was what I wanted to search for, thanks" links on the results pages. I really hate to say it, but half of my searches are done on Bing now where I don't notice this kind of behavior taking place. Also, if you want to talk about bad UX on Google products, I could write a book on frustrations I have with using Maps.

r00fus 6y ago

My major GDocs/Sheets frustration is that doing a paste-without-formatting in Mac/Firefox silently fails. It works in Mac Chrome. No workaround that I can find. This is a regression from say, 2 years ago. I used to be psyched that I could use GDocs for work but now I hate that I'm forced to use it for work.