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I still enjoy youtube, drive, translate, maps, android, android auto, and google login.

Godel_unicode 4y ago
Also Gmail and google photos are both amazing.
blagie 4y ago
Of those, only Youtube feels like best-of-breed. The others feel legacy. For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. It's dumb. I remember streaming postage-stamp sized video on a 200MHz Pentium. You'd think that would work reliably in 2022. I can think of a half-dozen other sites which work okay, and many (including very well-resourced ones) which just fail a lot of the time.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. Scale. YouTube (Google) can encode an uploaded video into a number of codecs and store those encoded bitstreams all over the world in data centers. All the backhaul goes over their private backbones. Hot videos will stream from edge caches topologically close to clients. Because YouTube infrastructure is Google infrastructure it gets the same scale as the rest of Google. Other video hosts have similar technical architecture/topology but at vastly smaller scale than Google.
- smeagull 4y ago
  Youtube is mostly best-of-breed due to being the incumbent with network effects. They couldn't even compete well with Twitch or Spotify for their respective niches. > For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. I can think of a market with say 6 or so major players that all stream video in HD and even 4K very well across the world.
  - corrral 4y ago
    > I can think of a market with say 6 or so major players that all stream video in HD and even 4K very well across the world. I suppose that market is lucrative enough that they've never been tempted to spin off a mainstream version. Else they'd absolutely be the front-runners to beat Google at that game, I'd think. Come to think of it, they should also have a pretty good corpus (ha, ha) to launch a variety of machine-learning products that might well outdo Google in certain areas.

Also Gmail and google photos are both amazing.

Of those, only Youtube feels like best-of-breed. The others feel legacy. For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. It's dumb. I remember streaming postage-stamp sized video on a 200MHz Pentium. You'd think that would work reliably in 2022. I can think of a half-dozen other sites which work okay, and many (including very well-resourced ones) which just fail a lot of the time.

giantrobot 4y ago
> For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. Scale. YouTube (Google) can encode an uploaded video into a number of codecs and store those encoded bitstreams all over the world in data centers. All the backhaul goes over their private backbones. Hot videos will stream from edge caches topologically close to clients. Because YouTube infrastructure is Google infrastructure it gets the same scale as the rest of Google. Other video hosts have similar technical architecture/topology but at vastly smaller scale than Google.
smeagull 4y ago
Youtube is mostly best-of-breed due to being the incumbent with network effects. They couldn't even compete well with Twitch or Spotify for their respective niches. > For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. I can think of a market with say 6 or so major players that all stream video in HD and even 4K very well across the world.
- corrral 4y ago
  > I can think of a market with say 6 or so major players that all stream video in HD and even 4K very well across the world. I suppose that market is lucrative enough that they've never been tempted to spin off a mainstream version. Else they'd absolutely be the front-runners to beat Google at that game, I'd think. Come to think of it, they should also have a pretty good corpus (ha, ha) to launch a variety of machine-learning products that might well outdo Google in certain areas.