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I used Google Voice when they first acquired it - it was years early and really ahead of things back then. Texting from the web, voice transcription for message

I used Google Voice when they first acquired it - it was years early and really ahead of things back then. Texting from the web, voice transcription for messages, could ring multiple numbers. Then they did nothing with it for maybe seven years? MMS would silently fail so people inviting you to events via group chat or sending you a photo would just think you were ignoring them. Hangouts came and the mess with that and sms was worse. I had nexus phones back then which also had turn by turn navigation before the iPhone did. Huge missed opportunity, years wasted. When the iPhone 5 came out and Apple Maps shipped turn by turn nav and eventually iMessage did everything voice did but better I switched and never went back. Google’s software consumer stack sucks. I also tried to like it - it’s a mostly crappy mix of stuff that gets dropped, ignored, and poorly integrated. At the same time Apple’s stuff has improved year over year. Out of all the large tech companies I’m most bearish about Google’s future - they seem aimless. Deepmind is cool, but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing.

busymom0 5y ago
> At the same time Apple’s stuff has improved year over year. Out of all the large tech companies I’m most bearish about Google’s future - they seem aimless. Deepmind is cool, but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing. As an iOS user, I feel the opposite in most areas except calling/messaging/facetime. I find Apple software to be severely limiting their own hardware. Their iPads are such excellent devices yet severely limited because of iOS. If iOS hadn't done calling/messaging/FaceTime right, I would have completely ditched them.
- fossuser 5y ago
  I agree there’s a lot more potential for iPad hardware UI, but also think they’ve improved year over year. It’ll be interesting to see what they work out for iPad OS to make it more powerful. They’re obviously not willing to just slap a standard PC OS on there. I’d guess they’re going to come up with new stuff from first principles as best they can for it (even if that means limiting it in the short term).
  - busymom0 5y ago
    Based on how MacOS switched app icons to rounded corner similar to iPad and they added extra spacing on menu bar icons, controls (volume/display etc) are all similar to iOS ones, I won't be surprised if they put MacOS on iPad. iPad already has M1 chip too.
    - zeusk 5y ago
      They're closer to putting ipadOS on macbooks
- simonh 5y ago
  As against all the awesome tables OSes and applications on competing devices? I think it's just that growing tablets to be competitive with desktops is either really, really hard or just not reasonable to expect. As a form factor, for all that I love it and you'd have to tear my iPad out of my cold dead hands, it just has inherent limitations to go with it's strengths.
  - rovr138 5y ago
    > As against all the awesome tables OSes and applications on competing devices? Not them, but my argument would be compared against a full desktop OS. I love the form factor and for smaller things, if I had a full blown OS, I would be able to do so much more and not carry both my laptop and my iPad.
    - simonh 5y ago
      I'm glad Apple are putting in better support for keyboards and touch pads in iPadOS. It makes sense that these can improve usability in a lot of use cases. However I don't use those and even if I did iPad apps must always be usable without them. I think that imposes significant limitations. Some of the more powerful apps I use on my iPad have quite fiddly interfaces that would be fine on a desktop, but are really awkward on the tablet. It is getting better, but very slowly as developers figure out how to adapt to the form factor. The new Multitasking interface does look like a big improvement though. Hopefully that will help developers to step up a bit.
roenxi 5y ago
> ... but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing. Right wing governments the world over should be actively talking about how to neuter the political threat of leftists in Silicon Valley. One form that strategy might take on is legal blockades restricting stopping foreign advertisers, which makes sense on a couple of levels and can probably make up a solid coalition. More than half Alphabet's revenue comes in from overseas and that is a tempting target now no matter where in the political spectrum people sit. There has to be a risk there for Google.
- rswail 5y ago
  "should be actively talking about how to neuter the political threat of leftists". That's a lot of bias in just one phrase. I doubt that the libertarians and others in SV consider themselves "leftists". Or that Palantir, JPL, DARPA, which fund a lot of SV work can be considered "leftist". So yes, having Google as a monopoly on search and advertising is a trust-busting issue, but that's not "right/left", it's good government regulation to maintain a free market in those services.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  As we all know, anti-capitalists definitely tend to work for and own mega-corportations. The bay area is more left than right, but leftists are definitely not in control of tech companies. This is also awfully authoritarian of you.
- wffurr 5y ago
  That’s frankly amazing that you can perceive the die-hard techno-libertarian capitalists in Silicon Valley as leftists.
MAGZine 5y ago
It's because Google voice wasn't a Google product, it was an acquisition. It used to be Grand Central. But yes they basically bought it, threw the G on it, and then let it bitrot.
simonh 5y ago
Google has the same problems Microsoft has always had. They have one huge cash cow that funds the entire company, and everything else is peripheral (a first world problem of course). Arguably MS now has more than one, but they've existed twice as long as Google and it's taken many decades to get to that point. It never really mattered if PlayForSure, Zune, Bing, Windows Phone etc were big successes or not, the company was absolutely fine anyway. XBOX is a success, but the massive billon+ write off they suffered back in the day means even now overall it's probably not made a profit, and if so not much. IE has floundered for over a decade. They do have many successful products but most of them could die and it wouldn't matter. It's the same with Google. As long as they're awash in a torrent of search advertising money nothing else matters. Like Micorosoft they do have some successful non-core products. Chrome, Android, GMail, Google Docs, Chromebooks. However all of those could drop stone dead and they'd be A-Okay. This is why Amazon is so impressive to me. Bezos built two world class mega-businsses simultaneously from scratch. I can't think of a single other example of this anywhere.
- maccard 5y ago
  They're not quite at the same scale as amazon, but many of the Korean/Japanese behemoth companies have enormously succesful businesses in multiple areas. Samsung, Sony, Yamaha for example.
  - simonh 5y ago
    The Zaibatsu/Keiretsu took many generations to get where they are now, and relied on heavy political patronage and financial muscle to grow over protracted periods of time. None of their founders built multiple global businesses from scratch in a single lifetime, let alone simultaneously. They're also very much artificial constructs, in the sense at this point they are as much political as economic artefacts. The Chaebol are more recent in their modern form but followed the same model.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  > They have one huge cash cow that funds the entire company Office, windows, Azure/development, Xbox/gaming are all integrated and cash cows.
fauigerzigerk 5y ago
The difference is, when Apple's software and services are disjointed and user hostile, it's because they think it serves their business interests, and they may be right. I'm proof of it. I buy all their hardware in spite of not being able to use FaceTime or iMessage (beyond than SMS functionality) or any of their iCloud and services sharing because my wife and friends are all on Android/Linux/Windows. It's not a big deal because most software I use is on the web anyway. But Google is a mystery to me. I recently tried to subscribe to Youtube Premium, but they wouldn't let me sign up with my Google account because it's a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) account. So if you pay for one of their services you're locked out of others. I don't think this is a business strategy. Google is simply flotilla of rudderless ships.
- AJ007 5y ago
  Compare the CEOs of Google and Apple. The contrast explains everything. Every year I keep thinking Sundar Puchai’s ouster is imminent but it has yet to happen. Which perhaps explains Google’s disfunctionality even more.
vl 5y ago
Google Voice was basically almost de-staffed for few years. Then they started to invest into it again around 2017, I don’t remember exact reason why the strategy changed.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  The original acquisition was simply to get their hands on the mounds of voicemail data so they could train their fancy new speech recognition models. It was a prescient move (the Google assistant is still years ahead of its competitors), but they never really had any interest in nurturing that baby. They got what they want from it and let it wither on the vine. Years later, when Apple neared feature parity, they tried to salvage what was left of it, but it was too little to late. They started creating new messaging apps from scratch that didn't catch on, and now they have a flotilla of pseudo-connected messaging products in various states of abandonment. Ironically, I think Apple is the only entity with the power to guide Google out of this mess. If Apple integrated its (encrypted) iMessage platform with the already-existing (encrypted) RCS standard, it'd suddenly be the closest we've gotten to having an interoperable communication standard since XMPP/Jabber in the mid-aughts. Apple won't ever choose to do this on their own of course, but I'm holding out hope that it sees the antitrust storm clouds forming in the distance and starts to take some drastic pro-consumer measures to neutralize that threat.

busymom0 5y ago

> At the same time Apple’s stuff has improved year over year. Out of all the large tech companies I’m most bearish about Google’s future - they seem aimless. Deepmind is cool, but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing. As an iOS user, I feel the opposite in most areas except calling/messaging/facetime. I find Apple software to be severely limiting their own hardware. Their iPads are such excellent devices yet severely limited because of iOS. If iOS hadn't done calling/messaging/FaceTime right, I would have completely ditched them.

fossuser 5y ago
I agree there’s a lot more potential for iPad hardware UI, but also think they’ve improved year over year. It’ll be interesting to see what they work out for iPad OS to make it more powerful. They’re obviously not willing to just slap a standard PC OS on there. I’d guess they’re going to come up with new stuff from first principles as best they can for it (even if that means limiting it in the short term).
- busymom0 5y ago
  Based on how MacOS switched app icons to rounded corner similar to iPad and they added extra spacing on menu bar icons, controls (volume/display etc) are all similar to iOS ones, I won't be surprised if they put MacOS on iPad. iPad already has M1 chip too.
  - zeusk 5y ago
    They're closer to putting ipadOS on macbooks
simonh 5y ago
As against all the awesome tables OSes and applications on competing devices? I think it's just that growing tablets to be competitive with desktops is either really, really hard or just not reasonable to expect. As a form factor, for all that I love it and you'd have to tear my iPad out of my cold dead hands, it just has inherent limitations to go with it's strengths.
- rovr138 5y ago
  > As against all the awesome tables OSes and applications on competing devices? Not them, but my argument would be compared against a full desktop OS. I love the form factor and for smaller things, if I had a full blown OS, I would be able to do so much more and not carry both my laptop and my iPad.
  - simonh 5y ago
    I'm glad Apple are putting in better support for keyboards and touch pads in iPadOS. It makes sense that these can improve usability in a lot of use cases. However I don't use those and even if I did iPad apps must always be usable without them. I think that imposes significant limitations. Some of the more powerful apps I use on my iPad have quite fiddly interfaces that would be fine on a desktop, but are really awkward on the tablet. It is getting better, but very slowly as developers figure out how to adapt to the form factor. The new Multitasking interface does look like a big improvement though. Hopefully that will help developers to step up a bit.

roenxi 5y ago

> ... but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing. Right wing governments the world over should be actively talking about how to neuter the political threat of leftists in Silicon Valley. One form that strategy might take on is legal blockades restricting stopping foreign advertisers, which makes sense on a couple of levels and can probably make up a solid coalition. More than half Alphabet's revenue comes in from overseas and that is a tempting target now no matter where in the political spectrum people sit. There has to be a risk there for Google.

rswail 5y ago
"should be actively talking about how to neuter the political threat of leftists". That's a lot of bias in just one phrase. I doubt that the libertarians and others in SV consider themselves "leftists". Or that Palantir, JPL, DARPA, which fund a lot of SV work can be considered "leftist". So yes, having Google as a monopoly on search and advertising is a trust-busting issue, but that's not "right/left", it's good government regulation to maintain a free market in those services.
UncleMeat 5y ago
As we all know, anti-capitalists definitely tend to work for and own mega-corportations. The bay area is more left than right, but leftists are definitely not in control of tech companies. This is also awfully authoritarian of you.
wffurr 5y ago
That’s frankly amazing that you can perceive the die-hard techno-libertarian capitalists in Silicon Valley as leftists.

MAGZine 5y ago

It's because Google voice wasn't a Google product, it was an acquisition. It used to be Grand Central. But yes they basically bought it, threw the G on it, and then let it bitrot.

simonh 5y ago

Google has the same problems Microsoft has always had. They have one huge cash cow that funds the entire company, and everything else is peripheral (a first world problem of course). Arguably MS now has more than one, but they've existed twice as long as Google and it's taken many decades to get to that point. It never really mattered if PlayForSure, Zune, Bing, Windows Phone etc were big successes or not, the company was absolutely fine anyway. XBOX is a success, but the massive billon+ write off they suffered back in the day means even now overall it's probably not made a profit, and if so not much. IE has floundered for over a decade. They do have many successful products but most of them could die and it wouldn't matter. It's the same with Google. As long as they're awash in a torrent of search advertising money nothing else matters. Like Micorosoft they do have some successful non-core products. Chrome, Android, GMail, Google Docs, Chromebooks. However all of those could drop stone dead and they'd be A-Okay. This is why Amazon is so impressive to me. Bezos built two world class mega-businsses simultaneously from scratch. I can't think of a single other example of this anywhere.

maccard 5y ago
They're not quite at the same scale as amazon, but many of the Korean/Japanese behemoth companies have enormously succesful businesses in multiple areas. Samsung, Sony, Yamaha for example.
- simonh 5y ago
  The Zaibatsu/Keiretsu took many generations to get where they are now, and relied on heavy political patronage and financial muscle to grow over protracted periods of time. None of their founders built multiple global businesses from scratch in a single lifetime, let alone simultaneously. They're also very much artificial constructs, in the sense at this point they are as much political as economic artefacts. The Chaebol are more recent in their modern form but followed the same model.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
> They have one huge cash cow that funds the entire company Office, windows, Azure/development, Xbox/gaming are all integrated and cash cows.

fauigerzigerk 5y ago

The difference is, when Apple's software and services are disjointed and user hostile, it's because they think it serves their business interests, and they may be right. I'm proof of it. I buy all their hardware in spite of not being able to use FaceTime or iMessage (beyond than SMS functionality) or any of their iCloud and services sharing because my wife and friends are all on Android/Linux/Windows. It's not a big deal because most software I use is on the web anyway. But Google is a mystery to me. I recently tried to subscribe to Youtube Premium, but they wouldn't let me sign up with my Google account because it's a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) account. So if you pay for one of their services you're locked out of others. I don't think this is a business strategy. Google is simply flotilla of rudderless ships.

AJ007 5y ago
Compare the CEOs of Google and Apple. The contrast explains everything. Every year I keep thinking Sundar Puchai’s ouster is imminent but it has yet to happen. Which perhaps explains Google’s disfunctionality even more.

vl 5y ago

Google Voice was basically almost de-staffed for few years. Then they started to invest into it again around 2017, I don’t remember exact reason why the strategy changed.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
The original acquisition was simply to get their hands on the mounds of voicemail data so they could train their fancy new speech recognition models. It was a prescient move (the Google assistant is still years ahead of its competitors), but they never really had any interest in nurturing that baby. They got what they want from it and let it wither on the vine. Years later, when Apple neared feature parity, they tried to salvage what was left of it, but it was too little to late. They started creating new messaging apps from scratch that didn't catch on, and now they have a flotilla of pseudo-connected messaging products in various states of abandonment. Ironically, I think Apple is the only entity with the power to guide Google out of this mess. If Apple integrated its (encrypted) iMessage platform with the already-existing (encrypted) RCS standard, it'd suddenly be the closest we've gotten to having an interoperable communication standard since XMPP/Jabber in the mid-aughts. Apple won't ever choose to do this on their own of course, but I'm holding out hope that it sees the antitrust storm clouds forming in the distance and starts to take some drastic pro-consumer measures to neutralize that threat.