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For as long a I am a “wanna-be founder”, I used to be afraid of working on ideas that compete with (parts of) Google business. That feeling is no more. I use G

by vtail 5y ago

For as long a I am a “wanna-be founder”, I used to be afraid of working on ideas that compete with (parts of) Google business. That feeling is no more. I use GSuite at work at a FAANG company, and Google slides with 50+ pages is so slow (multi-second pauses when changing slides) to be practically unusable. Finding documents in Google drive is hard to impossible, and good luck keeping track of comments or tasks assigned to you in multiple unrelated documents. I’m sure at some level consolidating their offerings is a right product move, but I don’t think Basecamp or Calendly should be particularly concerned.

runawaybottle 5y ago
It makes you wonder if they really do have the best people working on stuff. Is this really the same team that made gmail/maps?
- vtail 5y ago
  People use to laugh at PMs (disclaimer: I’m a PM), but making right product decisions in a big Corp, with multiple parties to align with that had competing interests, is hard. I’m sure Google has high quality engineers working more or less on every product. It’s just the solution space of products with big surface area and many interdependencies is really large. When you are more steps removed from your customers, and can’t move fast (comparing to a small nibble team), finding the optimum becomes a very non-trivial exercise. Most successful products at big corps have laser-focused teams with highly influential leaders. Anything else results on mediocrity.
  - derefr 5y ago
    Why is it, then, that Google products with ~N users tend to be less good than equivalent open-source projects in the same verticals with ~N users, when those open-source projects mostly don’t even have access to effective product management?
    - vtail 5y ago
      That’s a good question, even if I disagree slightly about the premise, as random large open-source products targeting consumers (as opposed to infrastructure projects like Linux kernel) can dramatically vary in quality. My hypothesis: devs are much closer to users, as they are often users themselves, and have more freedom to work on fixing broken experiences, as opposed to just rolling new features.
      - ItsMonkk 5y ago
        Exactly. Linus was able to out-compete a team of hundreds of Microsoft Engineers who spent years building a Source Control system by himself within a span of 10 days when he built git. You can't take Microsoft Source Control, add a few stories, and end up with git in a Sprint. You can't split that work up between different teams. The essence of git is in a unified design that matches the essential complexity of source control requirements. When you play the game of telephone from user to sales to program manager to project manager to architect to lead developer to UX designer to DB modeler, each step along the path introduces errors. Those errors made the system harder to design for, harder to scale, and harder to use. Linus was able to cover every element of those to a passable degree himself. You need to empower your developers. If they don't use the product, if they are not dogfooding, you have no chance to compete against those that are.
        belval 5y ago
        IMO Linus is a very unique, one in a million, engineer building a proto git in 10 days is really not a common feat and is the result of a mix of passion and focus that is very hard to replicate. That being said, I agree with the general point that having vision and trusting your developers with their vision can be a winning strategy.
        lfairy 5y ago
        I think it's less "passion" and "focus", more his position as the Linux lead giving him first-hand experience with change control at scale. He didn't need a product manager to gather requirements, because he already knew them. That's basically what ItsMonkk is saying, but I think it's worth making it more explicit. Because a one-in-a-million engineer is not replicable, but a deep understanding of your users' needs is.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - debacle 5y ago
    Making the right decision is easy. Winning the internal political battles to nurture that decision to production is sisyphean, especially when the alternative is falling in line, not taking risks, and collecting a paycheck.
- jerf 5y ago
  I'd lay money it's not the engineers, but management. If management doesn't put performance as a top-tier requirement, there's no way to stuff enough features into a program for something like an office suite (already half-crippled by having to run in a browser) and keep the performance high. It's too much work for even the engineers who care to take it on in the cracks & edges around their other projects... it has to be something management prioritizes. Seems like this is how all "enterprise-grade" software becomes a pain to use. Usability and performance get short shrift below getting the next 100 bullet-point-features and before you know it the only computers in the world that can run it decently are the developer's, where it still is frankly only on the edge of usability and far from where it would be a joy to use.
  - lazide 5y ago
    There is another factor with enterprise software - people build workflows around it that are business critical (think checklists and HOW-TO guides), and taught to folks that just want to turn the crank and get things done, not mess around with the latest changes (in general). UX changes (usually what people mean when they say ‘usability) are problematic because they often require disruptive changes, retraining people, and breaking someone’s business for awhile if they can’t know this is coming and stage it out properly. That is a good way to lose customers. Performance improvements over unlocking some major business area with a feature are not as high priority - because an extra .5% in cost to an existing customer is usually not as important as unlocking another 10% of sales. Over time it can of course kill the product if not addressed. It’s easy to see how the incentives lead people there though. And for an enterprise, they already pay people to do things they aren’t excited to do every day - why should they care the software is motivating when people already clean toilets, deal with retail customers, and mop floors without any of those being exciting either? As long as it works, it works.
    - jerf 5y ago
      "why should they care the software is motivating when people already clean toilets, deal with retail customers, and mop floors without any of those being exciting either?" Efficient. I'm not looking to enterprise software to provide personal affirmation in life, but if it takes me 5 minutes of staring at loading screens to do something I ought to have been able to do in 15 seconds, that's that much lost productivity, and it multiplies over days, months, years, and across employees. Moreover, while supermegaultra performance tuning may be expensive, many performance improvements can be had for much less than the cost of time they are losing people, and many others can be obtained relatively cheaply if they are simply something that is kept in mind at all parts of the design process rather than completely ignored until it can't possibly be ignored any more. To a large degree, I'm not asking for these companies to make a moon shot to make me slightly happier... I'm asking for them to pick the freaking low-hanging fruit that is right in front of them, and, ideally, to do so on an ongoing basis. Computers are pretty fast nowadays, you don't really have to try that hard to put something on the screen in less than 30 seconds.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  In general, it is not. The people who made Gmail are either still working on Gmail, working somewhere else, or working on a pet project because they bought the proof-of-competence to choose their project. Google's management structure basically doesn't have anything that says "Hey, you were successful at X, can you work on (thing adjacent to X)?" and incentivize the employee to do that if the employee wants to do something else. There's no reason to assume the people working on Slides, Spreadsheets, Drive, Docs, &c started particularly overlapped (though I'm sure there's consolidation these days). Similarly with GCloud; all the pieces of GCloud started as independent initiatives (App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Compute Engine, &c). All of these started separate and only began using consolidated resources / providing consolidated UX frontends and APIs as they were forced to by a management chain ad-hoc'd together after Google decided "Cloud" was a space they wanted to do business in as an organized front.
- JustFinishedBSG 5y ago
  Are we using the same Gmail ? GMail is TRASH for me. It's the slowest, most ressoruce intensive site/app I've ever had the "pleasure" of using. I'm using Fastmail now and it's mindblowing how slow Gmail is in comparison.
  - josefresco 5y ago
    > Are we using the same Gmail ? Right back at you. I've used Gmail daily since it's launch and have never experienced "slow" unless I was on a slow/poor connection. How many tabs /instances are you opening? Are you using ancient hardware?
    - handrous 5y ago
      Google Fiber, powerful MacBooks for the last decade-plus (currently an Apple Silicon machine). Normal gmail takes longer to do its AJAX requests than full-page loads on "basic HTML" gmail, consistently. Lots longer. It also likes to eat 400-500MB of memory and all the processor cycles it can get, sitting in the background. Inbox was even worse, but I think they fattened up Gmail to match it after Inbox folded so the Inbox-loving people wouldn't suffer from increased performance when they had to switch back. On the plus side they drove me to finally start using real, native mail clients again, so... I guess I can thank them for that.
      - josefresco 5y ago
        Maybe it's a Mac thing? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm on PC and don't experience any of these issues. My Chrome is using <400 MB of memory with two instances of Gmail, G Drive, Google Calendar, Google Ads and a couple more tabs, and is consuming maybe 0-1% of my CPU. I routinely have 4 separate Gmail inboxes open each in their own tab. Compose windows is instantaneous. Opening /viewing email is also nearly instantaneous. Same for search, and navigating between labels/folders.
        handrous 5y ago
        > My Chrome is using <400 MB of memory with two instances of Gmail, G Drive, Google Calendar, Google Ads and a couple more tabs, and is consuming maybe 0-1% of my CPU. This is... very surprising. Are you sure you're accounting for the resources each tab is taking up? They may be listed separately from the core Chrome process in the task manager. I just opened my very boring and nearly empty Google Calendar and that tab alone eats 275MB of memory and idles bouncing around(!) between 0.2 and 1% of a CPU core (which is a lot to be doing nothing, and the way it bounces around tells me timers or WebSockets or some other unfortunate-technology-to-have-added-to-Javascript is involved) [EDIT] for reference, loading an HN page spikes to 100-150MB of memory, then frees memory down to 40-75MB over tens of seconds, and idles around 0.0% of CPU when I'm not interacting with it. That's approximately the base cost of rendering anything and the (mostly memory) overhead of isolating tabs so they can crash independently. Calendar stays at ~275MB and constantly uses some CPU, and I bet if I watched it over time that memory use would grow. [EDIT EDIT] basic HTML gmail hangs out around 170MB but keeps allocating then de-allocing 10-20MB more memory, bouncing up then returning to about 170MB. Then when I click on the link in the footer to load "standard" gmail instead, it spikes to 700MB(!!!) then drops to "merely" about 490MB and hangs out there indefinitely, using 0.4% CPU constantly and spiking to 2.5% periodically, while the tab is backgrounded. You are definitely not looking in the right place for your browser's total resource use.
dijit 5y ago
Never underestimate the power of an incumbent. Teams is not the best messaging/videoconferencing program by a country mile, yet it shows the most growth YoY [citation needed]. I worked for a few companies who dipped a toe into the Microsoft waters and their products drowned everything else out; this was not because the offering was technically superior or cheaper.
- hellomyguys 5y ago
  To be fair, Google "work" products seem to be a tier below Microsoft's even, and Google doesn't iterate as quickly to improve them either.
  - znpy 5y ago
    Indeed. Outlook is not my preferred email client but having. Used it on both windows and Mac OS as groupware tool, it's still better than most things by Google. It's just snappier, because it's native code. And outlook on Mac OS used to be gorgeous. Excel is a jewel and a marvel of software engineering. Google sheets is good for doing just 2+2. And so on. When it comes to office stuff, Microsoft software is just better. Sadly, because it's all proprietary software, but it is was it it.
    - Tostino 5y ago
      Google's is all proprietary too if it's any consolation lol.
    - toast0 5y ago
      > It's just snappier, because it's native code. And outlook on Mac OS used to be gorgeous. I've been forced into using Outlook on Windows and Mac and snappy has never been my impression, although I seem to recall it being somewhat more usable on Windows. Not that GMail is snappy either, but a browser based client isn't necessarily slower than Outlook. Although an actually fast native client would be hard to beat.
      - 5y ago
realmod 5y ago
GSuite is downright horrible compared to alternatives and its only saving grace is GMail. And its the same with GCloud which makes doing the most basic things slow and annoying. It really feels like most of those GSuite products are there JUST so that Google can say they have it.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  >GSuite is downright horrible compared to alternatives and its only saving grace is GMail. I've personally never found a better alternative to Google Meet.
  - camgunz 5y ago
    What attracts you to Google Meet? I prefer Zoom personally (despite the privacy concerns), as I can have a meeting with someone without the fans on my 2017 MBP 13" going into liftoff, and the video feeds of the participants never freeze. Legitimately every Google Meet I've ever been a part of has either completely drained my battery, or frozen the video feeds of multiple participants, or both, even if there's just 1-2 other people. Plus I kind of resent Google Calendar not having reasonable plugins for other video services (Jitsi, Zoom, etc.); feels anti-trusty to me.
    - lazide 5y ago
      The issue I personally have with zoom (besides all the historic security concerns) is that it is typically incredibly complicated to use - too many bells and whistles to do even basic things. Meet generally ‘just works’, and has been better performance wise than Zoom on my hardware. Zoom does seem to do better overly severely degraded connections (and surfaces that It is happening). The experience is still pretty bad though.
      - camgunz 5y ago
        Oh yeah that's totally fair. I was hosting a meeting the other day and one of my participants wanted to share their screen, and I still haven't found where to do that. I just made them host. Their UI is hot garbage.
polote 5y ago
> That feeling is no more. Yep, and I'm building something to sit on top of google Drive, to manage files, and make it easier to collaborate as a team. That's not something new, similar, to what Confluence, Notion are offering, ... The reality is that google sucks at B2B, everything they do don't work. There are a few exception like google Workspace because Gmail was number 1 in B2C and they were the first to get Words and Excel in the browser and Google Analytics. The reality is that, innovation for a big company is hard, Microsoft was able to build Teams from scratch to compete with Slack and managed to it, and that's an amazing achievement, not something that we are used to seeing.
- amelius 5y ago
  > The reality is that, innovation for a big company is hard Then why is Apple innovating more than anyone else?
  - polote 5y ago
    Because it is hard it is not impossible.
    - amelius 5y ago
      That still doesn't make much sense if innovation is supposedly easier for small companies.
  - Infinitesimus 5y ago
    That statement is very hard to quantify even within the same industry. Apple makes and will continue to make great products for a specific subset of uses because they are willing to make big investments and are very opinionated about optimal user experience. The end result of that is the often great experience of their ecosystem today. They obviously also employ tactics to lock out competition too (see the purchase of AuthenTec, Dark Sky and a few other small purchases of best in class companies explicitly demanding that they don't work with anyone else). Innovation in reality is "improving things" and many many companies suck at defining what an improvement is and who the improvement is for. Too many focus on improving revenue numbers and that's it instead of improving user experience, reliability, security, privacy, etc. All things Apple cares deeply about* * Again, Apple's decisions are only an improvement to a subset of users but that's really all that matters to them. Happier users means more use of Apple products which is a win.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
j4yav 5y ago
You aren’t really competing on quality when you go up against these kinds of products though, you are competing against “free and good enough” which is actually quite compelling in a lot of cases. If you’ve ever been up against Microsoft in a deal for example they just ignore your product and keep throwing more unrelated free stuff into the enterprise agreement until the client acquiesces.
- Arcanum-XIII 5y ago
  Yep, but workspace is not free. Or good for that matter. It’s maybe cheap, but with so many asterisks that I, and lot of other, starts to be unwilling to commit to anything Google
  - agentdrtran 5y ago
    sure, but when a business is paying for it it becomes"paying extra for a better product that covers something that works OK with what we already have"
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Presumably there's space for both "free and good enough" and "paid and actually good" in a lot of market though.
  - rorykoehler 5y ago
    There is space as long as you don’t have unicorn sized delusions of grandeur.
WYepQ4dNnG 5y ago
> Finding documents in Google drive is hard to impossible This! I can't wrap my head around on how impossible is to search for things in drive.
- mattkevan 5y ago
  I found it was easier and quicker to message the person who shared a doc with me and get them to resend the link than it was to use the Drive search. Staggeringly bad for, you know, a search company.
  - WYepQ4dNnG 5y ago
    yes, and that's what I normally do as well. I also bookmark docs that I know I am gonna access in the future. I just don't trust I will be able to find it again.
  - anoncake 5y ago
    Google Search itself has become staggeringly bad so it fits.
- yuters 5y ago
  I mean it's Google. You'd think they'd have nailed the concept of "searching" by now. :) But I have found a weird workaround for this. After installing Google Drive File Stream locally and searching for things with the file explorer, it doesn't seem that bad all of a sudden.
- dmje 5y ago
  Highly recommend https://slapdash.com https://slapdash.com which does a bunch of things - among which is finding files in gdrive insanely fast...
- hliyan 5y ago
  Same here. 100-slide decks open without a problem for our entire org. And drive search is spot on 99% of the time. There are other issues, but these aren’t it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 5y ago
out of curiosity, what kind of machine are you using ? I expect it's not network io causing the slowdowns, but i'm curious if even latest machines can't handle google apps
- vtail 5y ago
  I’m using a 2020 MacBook Pro 16” with 32GB of RAM. I’m WFH, but don’t notice any slowdowns on any other task.
inthewoods 5y ago
I don't have this experience at all - first, I have slide decks that have 100s of slides and it works fine. I have no issue finding documents either - however I do struggle with the invites to documents inside of Gmail.
what_ever 5y ago
> and good luck keeping track of comments or tasks assigned to you in multiple unrelated documents Try searching for "followup:actionitems" in drive. Disc:Googler.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  Sure, but what kind of disaster ux that?
cwkoss 5y ago
Switching to MS Teams made me much more accepting of Google suite's deficits. Its clunky and annoying in so many ways.
tiz_io 5y ago
Don't be afraid to compete with Google on anything short of products like ads and YouTube. You shouldn't be afraid to compete with them unless their product is making billions of dollars. They'll kill a highly profitable product without hesitation if it looks like it won't win them the NBU (Next Billion Users). They're smart cookies, but their ethos is win big or fuggedaboutit. They have very little stamina or patience for middling products. Next perfectly viable Google product on the chopping block: Stadia

by vtail 5y ago

runawaybottle 5y ago

It makes you wonder if they really do have the best people working on stuff. Is this really the same team that made gmail/maps?

vtail 5y ago
People use to laugh at PMs (disclaimer: I’m a PM), but making right product decisions in a big Corp, with multiple parties to align with that had competing interests, is hard. I’m sure Google has high quality engineers working more or less on every product. It’s just the solution space of products with big surface area and many interdependencies is really large. When you are more steps removed from your customers, and can’t move fast (comparing to a small nibble team), finding the optimum becomes a very non-trivial exercise. Most successful products at big corps have laser-focused teams with highly influential leaders. Anything else results on mediocrity.
- derefr 5y ago
  Why is it, then, that Google products with ~N users tend to be less good than equivalent open-source projects in the same verticals with ~N users, when those open-source projects mostly don’t even have access to effective product management?
  - vtail 5y ago
    That’s a good question, even if I disagree slightly about the premise, as random large open-source products targeting consumers (as opposed to infrastructure projects like Linux kernel) can dramatically vary in quality. My hypothesis: devs are much closer to users, as they are often users themselves, and have more freedom to work on fixing broken experiences, as opposed to just rolling new features.
    - ItsMonkk 5y ago
      Exactly. Linus was able to out-compete a team of hundreds of Microsoft Engineers who spent years building a Source Control system by himself within a span of 10 days when he built git. You can't take Microsoft Source Control, add a few stories, and end up with git in a Sprint. You can't split that work up between different teams. The essence of git is in a unified design that matches the essential complexity of source control requirements. When you play the game of telephone from user to sales to program manager to project manager to architect to lead developer to UX designer to DB modeler, each step along the path introduces errors. Those errors made the system harder to design for, harder to scale, and harder to use. Linus was able to cover every element of those to a passable degree himself. You need to empower your developers. If they don't use the product, if they are not dogfooding, you have no chance to compete against those that are.
      - belval 5y ago
        IMO Linus is a very unique, one in a million, engineer building a proto git in 10 days is really not a common feat and is the result of a mix of passion and focus that is very hard to replicate. That being said, I agree with the general point that having vision and trusting your developers with their vision can be a winning strategy.
        lfairy 5y ago
        I think it's less "passion" and "focus", more his position as the Linux lead giving him first-hand experience with change control at scale. He didn't need a product manager to gather requirements, because he already knew them. That's basically what ItsMonkk is saying, but I think it's worth making it more explicit. Because a one-in-a-million engineer is not replicable, but a deep understanding of your users' needs is.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- debacle 5y ago
  Making the right decision is easy. Winning the internal political battles to nurture that decision to production is sisyphean, especially when the alternative is falling in line, not taking risks, and collecting a paycheck.
jerf 5y ago
I'd lay money it's not the engineers, but management. If management doesn't put performance as a top-tier requirement, there's no way to stuff enough features into a program for something like an office suite (already half-crippled by having to run in a browser) and keep the performance high. It's too much work for even the engineers who care to take it on in the cracks & edges around their other projects... it has to be something management prioritizes. Seems like this is how all "enterprise-grade" software becomes a pain to use. Usability and performance get short shrift below getting the next 100 bullet-point-features and before you know it the only computers in the world that can run it decently are the developer's, where it still is frankly only on the edge of usability and far from where it would be a joy to use.
- lazide 5y ago
  There is another factor with enterprise software - people build workflows around it that are business critical (think checklists and HOW-TO guides), and taught to folks that just want to turn the crank and get things done, not mess around with the latest changes (in general). UX changes (usually what people mean when they say ‘usability) are problematic because they often require disruptive changes, retraining people, and breaking someone’s business for awhile if they can’t know this is coming and stage it out properly. That is a good way to lose customers. Performance improvements over unlocking some major business area with a feature are not as high priority - because an extra .5% in cost to an existing customer is usually not as important as unlocking another 10% of sales. Over time it can of course kill the product if not addressed. It’s easy to see how the incentives lead people there though. And for an enterprise, they already pay people to do things they aren’t excited to do every day - why should they care the software is motivating when people already clean toilets, deal with retail customers, and mop floors without any of those being exciting either? As long as it works, it works.
  - jerf 5y ago
    "why should they care the software is motivating when people already clean toilets, deal with retail customers, and mop floors without any of those being exciting either?" Efficient. I'm not looking to enterprise software to provide personal affirmation in life, but if it takes me 5 minutes of staring at loading screens to do something I ought to have been able to do in 15 seconds, that's that much lost productivity, and it multiplies over days, months, years, and across employees. Moreover, while supermegaultra performance tuning may be expensive, many performance improvements can be had for much less than the cost of time they are losing people, and many others can be obtained relatively cheaply if they are simply something that is kept in mind at all parts of the design process rather than completely ignored until it can't possibly be ignored any more. To a large degree, I'm not asking for these companies to make a moon shot to make me slightly happier... I'm asking for them to pick the freaking low-hanging fruit that is right in front of them, and, ideally, to do so on an ongoing basis. Computers are pretty fast nowadays, you don't really have to try that hard to put something on the screen in less than 30 seconds.
shadowgovt 5y ago
In general, it is not. The people who made Gmail are either still working on Gmail, working somewhere else, or working on a pet project because they bought the proof-of-competence to choose their project. Google's management structure basically doesn't have anything that says "Hey, you were successful at X, can you work on (thing adjacent to X)?" and incentivize the employee to do that if the employee wants to do something else. There's no reason to assume the people working on Slides, Spreadsheets, Drive, Docs, &c started particularly overlapped (though I'm sure there's consolidation these days). Similarly with GCloud; all the pieces of GCloud started as independent initiatives (App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Compute Engine, &c). All of these started separate and only began using consolidated resources / providing consolidated UX frontends and APIs as they were forced to by a management chain ad-hoc'd together after Google decided "Cloud" was a space they wanted to do business in as an organized front.
JustFinishedBSG 5y ago
Are we using the same Gmail ? GMail is TRASH for me. It's the slowest, most ressoruce intensive site/app I've ever had the "pleasure" of using. I'm using Fastmail now and it's mindblowing how slow Gmail is in comparison.
- josefresco 5y ago
  > Are we using the same Gmail ? Right back at you. I've used Gmail daily since it's launch and have never experienced "slow" unless I was on a slow/poor connection. How many tabs /instances are you opening? Are you using ancient hardware?
  - handrous 5y ago
    Google Fiber, powerful MacBooks for the last decade-plus (currently an Apple Silicon machine). Normal gmail takes longer to do its AJAX requests than full-page loads on "basic HTML" gmail, consistently. Lots longer. It also likes to eat 400-500MB of memory and all the processor cycles it can get, sitting in the background. Inbox was even worse, but I think they fattened up Gmail to match it after Inbox folded so the Inbox-loving people wouldn't suffer from increased performance when they had to switch back. On the plus side they drove me to finally start using real, native mail clients again, so... I guess I can thank them for that.
    - josefresco 5y ago
      Maybe it's a Mac thing? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm on PC and don't experience any of these issues. My Chrome is using <400 MB of memory with two instances of Gmail, G Drive, Google Calendar, Google Ads and a couple more tabs, and is consuming maybe 0-1% of my CPU. I routinely have 4 separate Gmail inboxes open each in their own tab. Compose windows is instantaneous. Opening /viewing email is also nearly instantaneous. Same for search, and navigating between labels/folders.
      - handrous 5y ago
        > My Chrome is using <400 MB of memory with two instances of Gmail, G Drive, Google Calendar, Google Ads and a couple more tabs, and is consuming maybe 0-1% of my CPU. This is... very surprising. Are you sure you're accounting for the resources each tab is taking up? They may be listed separately from the core Chrome process in the task manager. I just opened my very boring and nearly empty Google Calendar and that tab alone eats 275MB of memory and idles bouncing around(!) between 0.2 and 1% of a CPU core (which is a lot to be doing nothing, and the way it bounces around tells me timers or WebSockets or some other unfortunate-technology-to-have-added-to-Javascript is involved) [EDIT] for reference, loading an HN page spikes to 100-150MB of memory, then frees memory down to 40-75MB over tens of seconds, and idles around 0.0% of CPU when I'm not interacting with it. That's approximately the base cost of rendering anything and the (mostly memory) overhead of isolating tabs so they can crash independently. Calendar stays at ~275MB and constantly uses some CPU, and I bet if I watched it over time that memory use would grow. [EDIT EDIT] basic HTML gmail hangs out around 170MB but keeps allocating then de-allocing 10-20MB more memory, bouncing up then returning to about 170MB. Then when I click on the link in the footer to load "standard" gmail instead, it spikes to 700MB(!!!) then drops to "merely" about 490MB and hangs out there indefinitely, using 0.4% CPU constantly and spiking to 2.5% periodically, while the tab is backgrounded. You are definitely not looking in the right place for your browser's total resource use.

dijit 5y ago

Never underestimate the power of an incumbent. Teams is not the best messaging/videoconferencing program by a country mile, yet it shows the most growth YoY [citation needed]. I worked for a few companies who dipped a toe into the Microsoft waters and their products drowned everything else out; this was not because the offering was technically superior or cheaper.

hellomyguys 5y ago
To be fair, Google "work" products seem to be a tier below Microsoft's even, and Google doesn't iterate as quickly to improve them either.
- znpy 5y ago
  Indeed. Outlook is not my preferred email client but having. Used it on both windows and Mac OS as groupware tool, it's still better than most things by Google. It's just snappier, because it's native code. And outlook on Mac OS used to be gorgeous. Excel is a jewel and a marvel of software engineering. Google sheets is good for doing just 2+2. And so on. When it comes to office stuff, Microsoft software is just better. Sadly, because it's all proprietary software, but it is was it it.
  - Tostino 5y ago
    Google's is all proprietary too if it's any consolation lol.
  - toast0 5y ago
    > It's just snappier, because it's native code. And outlook on Mac OS used to be gorgeous. I've been forced into using Outlook on Windows and Mac and snappy has never been my impression, although I seem to recall it being somewhat more usable on Windows. Not that GMail is snappy either, but a browser based client isn't necessarily slower than Outlook. Although an actually fast native client would be hard to beat.
    - 5y ago

realmod 5y ago

GSuite is downright horrible compared to alternatives and its only saving grace is GMail. And its the same with GCloud which makes doing the most basic things slow and annoying. It really feels like most of those GSuite products are there JUST so that Google can say they have it.

Hamuko 5y ago
>GSuite is downright horrible compared to alternatives and its only saving grace is GMail. I've personally never found a better alternative to Google Meet.
- camgunz 5y ago
  What attracts you to Google Meet? I prefer Zoom personally (despite the privacy concerns), as I can have a meeting with someone without the fans on my 2017 MBP 13" going into liftoff, and the video feeds of the participants never freeze. Legitimately every Google Meet I've ever been a part of has either completely drained my battery, or frozen the video feeds of multiple participants, or both, even if there's just 1-2 other people. Plus I kind of resent Google Calendar not having reasonable plugins for other video services (Jitsi, Zoom, etc.); feels anti-trusty to me.
  - lazide 5y ago
    The issue I personally have with zoom (besides all the historic security concerns) is that it is typically incredibly complicated to use - too many bells and whistles to do even basic things. Meet generally ‘just works’, and has been better performance wise than Zoom on my hardware. Zoom does seem to do better overly severely degraded connections (and surfaces that It is happening). The experience is still pretty bad though.
    - camgunz 5y ago
      Oh yeah that's totally fair. I was hosting a meeting the other day and one of my participants wanted to share their screen, and I still haven't found where to do that. I just made them host. Their UI is hot garbage.

polote 5y ago

> That feeling is no more. Yep, and I'm building something to sit on top of google Drive, to manage files, and make it easier to collaborate as a team. That's not something new, similar, to what Confluence, Notion are offering, ... The reality is that google sucks at B2B, everything they do don't work. There are a few exception like google Workspace because Gmail was number 1 in B2C and they were the first to get Words and Excel in the browser and Google Analytics. The reality is that, innovation for a big company is hard, Microsoft was able to build Teams from scratch to compete with Slack and managed to it, and that's an amazing achievement, not something that we are used to seeing.

amelius 5y ago
> The reality is that, innovation for a big company is hard Then why is Apple innovating more than anyone else?
- polote 5y ago
  Because it is hard it is not impossible.
  - amelius 5y ago
    That still doesn't make much sense if innovation is supposedly easier for small companies.
- Infinitesimus 5y ago
  That statement is very hard to quantify even within the same industry. Apple makes and will continue to make great products for a specific subset of uses because they are willing to make big investments and are very opinionated about optimal user experience. The end result of that is the often great experience of their ecosystem today. They obviously also employ tactics to lock out competition too (see the purchase of AuthenTec, Dark Sky and a few other small purchases of best in class companies explicitly demanding that they don't work with anyone else). Innovation in reality is "improving things" and many many companies suck at defining what an improvement is and who the improvement is for. Too many focus on improving revenue numbers and that's it instead of improving user experience, reliability, security, privacy, etc. All things Apple cares deeply about* * Again, Apple's decisions are only an improvement to a subset of users but that's really all that matters to them. Happier users means more use of Apple products which is a win.

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j4yav 5y ago

You aren’t really competing on quality when you go up against these kinds of products though, you are competing against “free and good enough” which is actually quite compelling in a lot of cases. If you’ve ever been up against Microsoft in a deal for example they just ignore your product and keep throwing more unrelated free stuff into the enterprise agreement until the client acquiesces.

Arcanum-XIII 5y ago
Yep, but workspace is not free. Or good for that matter. It’s maybe cheap, but with so many asterisks that I, and lot of other, starts to be unwilling to commit to anything Google
- agentdrtran 5y ago
  sure, but when a business is paying for it it becomes"paying extra for a better product that covers something that works OK with what we already have"
nicoburns 5y ago
Presumably there's space for both "free and good enough" and "paid and actually good" in a lot of market though.
- rorykoehler 5y ago
  There is space as long as you don’t have unicorn sized delusions of grandeur.

WYepQ4dNnG 5y ago

> Finding documents in Google drive is hard to impossible This! I can't wrap my head around on how impossible is to search for things in drive.

mattkevan 5y ago
I found it was easier and quicker to message the person who shared a doc with me and get them to resend the link than it was to use the Drive search. Staggeringly bad for, you know, a search company.
- WYepQ4dNnG 5y ago
  yes, and that's what I normally do as well. I also bookmark docs that I know I am gonna access in the future. I just don't trust I will be able to find it again.
- anoncake 5y ago
  Google Search itself has become staggeringly bad so it fits.
yuters 5y ago
I mean it's Google. You'd think they'd have nailed the concept of "searching" by now. :) But I have found a weird workaround for this. After installing Google Drive File Stream locally and searching for things with the file explorer, it doesn't seem that bad all of a sudden.
dmje 5y ago
Highly recommend https://slapdash.com https://slapdash.com which does a bunch of things - among which is finding files in gdrive insanely fast...
hliyan 5y ago
Same here. 100-slide decks open without a problem for our entire org. And drive search is spot on 99% of the time. There are other issues, but these aren’t it.

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agumonkey 5y ago

out of curiosity, what kind of machine are you using ? I expect it's not network io causing the slowdowns, but i'm curious if even latest machines can't handle google apps

vtail 5y ago
I’m using a 2020 MacBook Pro 16” with 32GB of RAM. I’m WFH, but don’t notice any slowdowns on any other task.

inthewoods 5y ago

I don't have this experience at all - first, I have slide decks that have 100s of slides and it works fine. I have no issue finding documents either - however I do struggle with the invites to documents inside of Gmail.

what_ever 5y ago

> and good luck keeping track of comments or tasks assigned to you in multiple unrelated documents Try searching for "followup:actionitems" in drive. Disc:Googler.

hiptobecubic 5y ago
Sure, but what kind of disaster ux that?

cwkoss 5y ago

Switching to MS Teams made me much more accepting of Google suite's deficits. Its clunky and annoying in so many ways.

tiz_io 5y ago

Don't be afraid to compete with Google on anything short of products like ads and YouTube. You shouldn't be afraid to compete with them unless their product is making billions of dollars. They'll kill a highly profitable product without hesitation if it looks like it won't win them the NBU (Next Billion Users). They're smart cookies, but their ethos is win big or fuggedaboutit. They have very little stamina or patience for middling products. Next perfectly viable Google product on the chopping block: Stadia