4 ms·

The annual Google bit my hand thread. I just cannot recommend anyone seriously use GSuite or GCP until Google starts treating customers better.

technion 6y ago
There is definitely a bubble effect here. Every trendy startup seems to use gsuite, but you'd be looked at quite strangely if you suggested it in some of the circles I've worked in.
- edp 6y ago
  And yet, my father works at Airbus and they switched to gsuite last year. Needless to say, the transition from excel to gsheets is not easy, but he's learning javascript in the process.
  - rootsudo 6y ago
    Wow, really? That's insane. I wouldn't/couldn't imagine a company move away from Excel, wow. Wow.
    - Clewza313 6y ago
      Google Sheets supports 99% of what Excel does and most existing sheets can be imported as is. Of course, odds are that the company's One Critical Sheet that reimplements SAP in Excel is critically reliant on the 4DMATRIXTRANSFORM.OLDCHURCHSLAVONIC() function that falls into the remaining 1%.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Google Sheets supports 99% of what Excel does VBA is more than 1%, and Sheets doesn't support it at all.
        dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
        And I hope they never support it, otherwise it will become even slower than it is now.
martin_a 6y ago
It's more likely a monthly thing right now. Wonder when people will realize that they should not rely on Google (or Facebook) (or Apple) for doing business.
sneak 6y ago
After 10-ish years of using G Suite for my corp email, I finally switched last year when they started rewriting URLs in my emails to the google redirector, breaking PGP signatures and the like, even via IMAP. The only way to get my original unmodified emails is via Takeout now. The situation is getting worse, not better. :(
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- drivebycomment 6y ago
  Either you had the Advanced Protection enabled, or your G Suite admin must have turned on the link munging: https://hackaday.com/2020/10/21/google-meddling-with-urls-in-emails-causing-security-concerns/ https://hackaday.com/2020/10/21/google-meddling-with-urls-in... FWIW, Microsoft have had a similar feature long before Google: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/atp-safe-links?view=o365-worldwide https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/offi...
  - sneak 6y ago
    Anyone who uses G Suite for anything remotely important should have Advanced Protection on at all times for everyone in their organization. I don't use Google Accounts without it. TOTP codes are vulnerable to phishing, and SIM swapping is very much a thing.
- marton78 6y ago
  They broke IMAP? How so? I never noticed that something doesn't work. How exactly did they break it?
  - sneak 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818024 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10173182 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10173182 It's on (and can't be disabled) if you have the Advanced Protection Program enabled. Started around three months ago. Hilariously, they warn you when doing the Takeout export that because you have APP enabled, your export may take weeks or even months to be generated. https://s.sneak.berlin/@sneak/105599881937545540 https://s.sneak.berlin/@sneak/105599881937545540
nolite 6y ago
What would you suggest instead? (serious question)
- sipos 6y ago
  MS Office 365 and Azure or AWS. You can get collaborative editing of documents in MS Office now, if they are stored on OneDrive/SharePoint I think.
sipos 6y ago
As someone who runs IT for a medium sized organisation using G Suite (now Google Workspace), I can not recomend against it enough. I understand why the decision was taken at the time it was (it was before my time, but it was when G Suite had much better collaborative editing than MS offered, and when the company needed to upgrade it's on-prem file server, and didn't have any capable of managing things like that in house), but it turned out, with hindsight, to be a huge mistake. You get things like issues with a user not having visiblity of items in a folder, and support ask you to check all folders shared with the user to see how many are affected. There are tens of thousands of these, so this is obviously impractical. I had an issue with their "eventually consistent" admin interface not showing whether a user was part of a group, and their response was to wait 24 hours to see if they have been sucessfully added to it, or to email the entire group and ask the user to check whether they got the test email. We had a Google Sheets file that, for whatever reason, was not able to be opened. Months later, the issue is unresolved. If we didn't have daily backups that use the API to make a copy, exporting Google Docs, Sheets and Slides files as MS Office documents, using a thrd-party service, we would have just effectively lost this data. It is clear that Google does not treat this as a business class product, and it hurts to business users. It is getting worse and worse IMHO, while the MS competition is getting better and better. It is only a matter of time until we switch I think, and I would strongly caution anyone against adopting it, especially if you plan to use it as the primary file sharing method for more than 10 users. For us, the thing making it hard to move is that our data on Google Drive is a mess. We haven't been using Team Drives, because we have been using Google Drive since before they were a thing, so have complicated nested permissions, meaning we can't simply move things to Team Drives. If you have used it for as long as we have, when there was no way to prevent users from doing this, and didn't have policies about how it was used to prevent this (whiuch we didn't, we started using it before I joined the company) I don't see how you can have avoided this. I'm not sure how GCP compares, but I have been pretty disappointed by how slow they have been to support recent versions of PostgreSQL and MySQL in their hosted DB service. We use AWS mostly, and, while there are things about GCP that look nice, they seem to fail to do the basics that would not be at all hard for them to do, and it looks like they don't take it seriously as a product either really. It is sad really, given that there really needs to be more competition for AWS and Azure IMHO.

technion 6y ago

There is definitely a bubble effect here. Every trendy startup seems to use gsuite, but you'd be looked at quite strangely if you suggested it in some of the circles I've worked in.

edp 6y ago
And yet, my father works at Airbus and they switched to gsuite last year. Needless to say, the transition from excel to gsheets is not easy, but he's learning javascript in the process.
- rootsudo 6y ago
  Wow, really? That's insane. I wouldn't/couldn't imagine a company move away from Excel, wow. Wow.
  - Clewza313 6y ago
    Google Sheets supports 99% of what Excel does and most existing sheets can be imported as is. Of course, odds are that the company's One Critical Sheet that reimplements SAP in Excel is critically reliant on the 4DMATRIXTRANSFORM.OLDCHURCHSLAVONIC() function that falls into the remaining 1%.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > Google Sheets supports 99% of what Excel does VBA is more than 1%, and Sheets doesn't support it at all.
      - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
        And I hope they never support it, otherwise it will become even slower than it is now.

martin_a 6y ago

It's more likely a monthly thing right now. Wonder when people will realize that they should not rely on Google (or Facebook) (or Apple) for doing business.

sneak 6y ago

After 10-ish years of using G Suite for my corp email, I finally switched last year when they started rewriting URLs in my emails to the google redirector, breaking PGP signatures and the like, even via IMAP. The only way to get my original unmodified emails is via Takeout now. The situation is getting worse, not better. :(

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
drivebycomment 6y ago
Either you had the Advanced Protection enabled, or your G Suite admin must have turned on the link munging: https://hackaday.com/2020/10/21/google-meddling-with-urls-in-emails-causing-security-concerns/ https://hackaday.com/2020/10/21/google-meddling-with-urls-in... FWIW, Microsoft have had a similar feature long before Google: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/atp-safe-links?view=o365-worldwide https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/offi...
- sneak 6y ago
  Anyone who uses G Suite for anything remotely important should have Advanced Protection on at all times for everyone in their organization. I don't use Google Accounts without it. TOTP codes are vulnerable to phishing, and SIM swapping is very much a thing.
marton78 6y ago
They broke IMAP? How so? I never noticed that something doesn't work. How exactly did they break it?
- sneak 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818024 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10173182 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10173182 It's on (and can't be disabled) if you have the Advanced Protection Program enabled. Started around three months ago. Hilariously, they warn you when doing the Takeout export that because you have APP enabled, your export may take weeks or even months to be generated. https://s.sneak.berlin/@sneak/105599881937545540 https://s.sneak.berlin/@sneak/105599881937545540

nolite 6y ago

What would you suggest instead? (serious question)

sipos 6y ago
MS Office 365 and Azure or AWS. You can get collaborative editing of documents in MS Office now, if they are stored on OneDrive/SharePoint I think.

sipos 6y ago

As someone who runs IT for a medium sized organisation using G Suite (now Google Workspace), I can not recomend against it enough. I understand why the decision was taken at the time it was (it was before my time, but it was when G Suite had much better collaborative editing than MS offered, and when the company needed to upgrade it's on-prem file server, and didn't have any capable of managing things like that in house), but it turned out, with hindsight, to be a huge mistake. You get things like issues with a user not having visiblity of items in a folder, and support ask you to check all folders shared with the user to see how many are affected. There are tens of thousands of these, so this is obviously impractical. I had an issue with their "eventually consistent" admin interface not showing whether a user was part of a group, and their response was to wait 24 hours to see if they have been sucessfully added to it, or to email the entire group and ask the user to check whether they got the test email. We had a Google Sheets file that, for whatever reason, was not able to be opened. Months later, the issue is unresolved. If we didn't have daily backups that use the API to make a copy, exporting Google Docs, Sheets and Slides files as MS Office documents, using a thrd-party service, we would have just effectively lost this data. It is clear that Google does not treat this as a business class product, and it hurts to business users. It is getting worse and worse IMHO, while the MS competition is getting better and better. It is only a matter of time until we switch I think, and I would strongly caution anyone against adopting it, especially if you plan to use it as the primary file sharing method for more than 10 users. For us, the thing making it hard to move is that our data on Google Drive is a mess. We haven't been using Team Drives, because we have been using Google Drive since before they were a thing, so have complicated nested permissions, meaning we can't simply move things to Team Drives. If you have used it for as long as we have, when there was no way to prevent users from doing this, and didn't have policies about how it was used to prevent this (whiuch we didn't, we started using it before I joined the company) I don't see how you can have avoided this. I'm not sure how GCP compares, but I have been pretty disappointed by how slow they have been to support recent versions of PostgreSQL and MySQL in their hosted DB service. We use AWS mostly, and, while there are things about GCP that look nice, they seem to fail to do the basics that would not be at all hard for them to do, and it looks like they don't take it seriously as a product either really. It is sad really, given that there really needs to be more competition for AWS and Azure IMHO.