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Which opensource product do you believe has 1 billion users like Gmail does?

• derefr 5y ago
  None? Google has ~3 well-managed products that everyone loves and uses, such that nobody even bothers to try to compete with them. These products are the exceptions. They may as well not be Google products, because they aren't representative of Google's product-management philosophy at all. You can't set up a new team at Google and talk to them about doing things "the Google way" and have them to understand that to mean "like Gmail does." Google has 1000+ badly-managed products. Google's actual product-management philosophy, is reflected in how these products are created, managed (into the ground), stagnated, and usually eventually killed. My post was about those. It's very easy to beat the complete lack of product-management in your average FOSS project, by just having one full-time product manager with vision for where the product should go. See, for example, what this guy (https://www.youtube.com/c/Tantacrul https://www.youtube.com/c/Tantacrul) has to say about various pieces of FOSS DAW software, where all the flaws usually come down to a pure lack of product management on the FOSS projects' part. The problems he points out could all easily be fixed by having one person with vision submit bug-reports about workflow issues, and having those bug-reports get taken seriously by the engineers. (And he's now doing exactly that, as PM, for Audacity.) Google should easily be able to hire guys like him, and put them on projects like the ones I listed in my sibling comment. But they just... don't... seem to have it in them.