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This is also why Google sucks at so many things, despite having the best offering on paper. GCP is honestly great, but a terrible product. Stadia? Zillion chat

This is also why Google sucks at so many things, despite having the best offering on paper. GCP is honestly great, but a terrible product. Stadia? Zillion chat apps? Google Inbox by Gmail by Google? Google wallet pay Android pay wallet? They all work great and would be best in class if they were decent products and you could figure out how to get them to work at all.

threatofrain 4y ago
Why is GCP bad?
- dasz 4y ago
  I think the usual retort is that at any moment and for any inexplicable reason your entire infrastructure can be deleted for some reason you barely know let alone comprehend. This seems to be the case for apps at least. I neither support nor deny this belief but it's an increasingly common impression.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- lokar 4y ago
  GCP tends to be designed for customers that are staffed with mostly Google engineers.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    Source? This comment seems absurd, at best. I am no 'google engineer' (is that supposed to be a bad thing?) and I've been using and loving GCP for well over a decade. Built several extremely successful businesses on it.
    - jack_pp 4y ago
      I suspect that if at some point you had an issue with it you would've been frustrated as hell by your inability to do anything about it and would've sworn them off forever. But you were the survivor that didn't have issues and can't seem to comprehend that as a business it is absurd to rely on a company that can kill you off without reason or recourse because you were the unlucky one that pissed off the algorithm. You're right, it is FUD, but it's not malicious FUD spread by us to spite google, it is actually rational FUD based on real reports that is entirely google's fault
      - latchkey 4y ago
        Shrug, seems like an inherent risk with any SaaS provider. I worked for a large porn company and a web analytics product, we were one of the largest customers of, got sold to a Mormon company. Our account was terminated. I guess I'm lucky that I haven't pissed off the GCP algo yet.
        bruce511 4y ago
        >> seems like an inherent risk with any SaaS provider. If you see risk as binary, then yes there is risk in any SaaS provider, or indeed any part of your company supply chain. Risk though is not binary, it is measured on a scale of 0 to 1. There is risk every time you get in a car. But some cars are safer than others. Some are renowned for putting safety first. The vast majority of people survived their Ford Pinto, no doubt some loved it, but the perceived risk of driving it (rightly or wrongly) was higher than say a Volvo. Google is the Pinto of SaaS. Whatever the actual risks are, they are perceived as being higher risk than other SaaS providers. Thanks to their "no support" policy, the penalty for failure is total extinction. With most SaaS businesses there are humans in the loop who can make human decisions.
        latchkey 4y ago
        > Google is the Pinto of SaaS That's some strong personal opinion... source? GCP has been extremely performant and reliable for me across several different companies. I'm not saying that people have definitely run into issues, which we've all read about here on HN, but this sounds more like squeaky wheel than the norm. > Thanks to their "no support" policy, Their support has been excellent, when I've needed it, which is rare, since it has just worked for me very well for a decade now. Their documentation is also pretty well done too. Just like with any sort of SaaS solution, you should be building a relationship with an account exec. I've had CloudFlare start to put in weird restrictions on my account once I hit a certain size. It showed up with requests being oddly denied and zero notification. I contacted my account manager (called their cell phone!) and the problem was resolved in a few hours. I don't even pay for a business plan, but I did make sure to develop a friendly relationship with them when they originally reached out to me.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Personally I'm real suspicious from the time I was on a project using AppEngine, we got sandwiched between Google deciding "1 year" was an appropriate time to declare AppEngine v1 deprecated, but AppEngine v2 was still in "beta" and was removing a bunch of APIs we depended on, while basically saying "oh yeah, setup something completely different if you want something like this" (appengine datastore or whatever vs. "it's gone, um, redis maybe?") So we were stuck with a product which we were writing against something that the official word was would no longer be supported by the time we launched, while being told to develop against the platform which is "beta" and they don't want to commit to supporting the feature set of - and which plain couldn't be used yet at the time they told us this. This is just a ridiculous way to run a commercial platform offering (aka: why I always tell people to use boring VMs for as long as possible).
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > (aka: why I always tell people to use boring VMs for as long as possible). Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Take whatever nice features you can “for free” as tech debt, and if that api inevitably disappears… push it down the stack and own a bit more of it. If you have to build everything from first principles it’ll take way longer to get going.
- trog 4y ago
  For me it's partially because the interface is insanely slow and painful to use. Maybe this is a "I'm in Australia" problem but it feels like I'm wading through mud to perform the most basic tasks.
osigurdson 4y ago
It feels like someone with great ideas started working on Gmail and quit before it was finished. Whatever they are doing to organize emails in a "smart" way is super confusing. I kind of get it but it just doesn't work. They should either finish it or just revert back to organizing emails by date of arrival.
- bambax 4y ago
  > just revert back to organizing emails by date of arrival You can choose to do that: Settings / General / Conversation view off It's so much better to simply have emails in the order they arrive instead of hunting them down in "conversations".
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I understand that emails can get buried but threaded views are so much better for me (especially at work) than my inbox being buried by conversations/threads that I have zero interest in. My alternative would probably be to more aggressively filter but that would effectively mean I never even saw lots of things I might actually care about.
- sosborn 4y ago
  It always amuses me that we try to complicate things that should just be a simple list ordered by date.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  I was trying to find sent mail and only way I found it was by searching mail where I was the sender. Smart but not obvious.
- singhrac 4y ago
  Gmail quality dropped off a cliff all of a sudden. In particular, many many emails get sent to spam now, including emails sent by Google itself! Notifications about calendar invites regularly get sent to spam at inconvenient times. I can't tell if this is just some sort of temporary spam filter tweaking error and oversight or an emergent property of a content-based filtering system that they won't revert.
samstave 4y ago
Dont forget Goog literally owened the anti spam industry with gmail after their integrating POSTINI purchase in like ~~2006 And now in 2022 any gmailinbox is fn full of spam...
- lstodd 4y ago
  Because you have to support products, esp. antispam, while goog is generaly known for doing the other thing.
  - samstave 4y ago
    Uh, they literally paid MILLIONS for the antispam company POSTINI and thats what the original anti-spam features for GMAIL are based on... in the last 18 months or something, google apparently deleted that tech from their stack, I posted about this when I first started having so much spam inbox my gmail.... So yeah - THEY _supported_ the product by paying millions for it... Then they did "the other thing"
ngrilly 4y ago
You’re cherry-picking examples. Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and Chrome are extraordinarily successful products.
- ThalesX 4y ago
  Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business...
  - Closi 4y ago
    > Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business... Assuming this post is sarcasm, Are we really going to criticise Google Search for not being profitable? Google has an ad business because of these products, not seperate to them.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Google doesn't have an ad-business, it is an ad-business. You can't separate Google from its ad business. All of their major products exist in service of the ad business, search, inbox, even Chrome. If the services don't exist to help build a profile of you, they exist to help build a profile of web traffic and detect ad-fraud, or to simply shape the landscape into one that isn't hostile to google's ads.
    - grey_earthling 4y ago
      I'd say that Google has these products (really, services) because of its ad business, not the other way round. Someone more familiar with Google's oeuvre can probably answer this: all those well-liked services that Google unceremoniously cancelled — were they the ones that didn't help (or harmed) Google's ad business?
- latexr 4y ago
  Depending on one’s point, it can be argued that listing Google’s successful products is the cherry-picking: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

threatofrain 4y ago

Why is GCP bad?

dasz 4y ago
I think the usual retort is that at any moment and for any inexplicable reason your entire infrastructure can be deleted for some reason you barely know let alone comprehend. This seems to be the case for apps at least. I neither support nor deny this belief but it's an increasingly common impression.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lokar 4y ago
GCP tends to be designed for customers that are staffed with mostly Google engineers.
- latchkey 4y ago
  Source? This comment seems absurd, at best. I am no 'google engineer' (is that supposed to be a bad thing?) and I've been using and loving GCP for well over a decade. Built several extremely successful businesses on it.
  - jack_pp 4y ago
    I suspect that if at some point you had an issue with it you would've been frustrated as hell by your inability to do anything about it and would've sworn them off forever. But you were the survivor that didn't have issues and can't seem to comprehend that as a business it is absurd to rely on a company that can kill you off without reason or recourse because you were the unlucky one that pissed off the algorithm. You're right, it is FUD, but it's not malicious FUD spread by us to spite google, it is actually rational FUD based on real reports that is entirely google's fault
    - latchkey 4y ago
      Shrug, seems like an inherent risk with any SaaS provider. I worked for a large porn company and a web analytics product, we were one of the largest customers of, got sold to a Mormon company. Our account was terminated. I guess I'm lucky that I haven't pissed off the GCP algo yet.
      - bruce511 4y ago
        >> seems like an inherent risk with any SaaS provider. If you see risk as binary, then yes there is risk in any SaaS provider, or indeed any part of your company supply chain. Risk though is not binary, it is measured on a scale of 0 to 1. There is risk every time you get in a car. But some cars are safer than others. Some are renowned for putting safety first. The vast majority of people survived their Ford Pinto, no doubt some loved it, but the perceived risk of driving it (rightly or wrongly) was higher than say a Volvo. Google is the Pinto of SaaS. Whatever the actual risks are, they are perceived as being higher risk than other SaaS providers. Thanks to their "no support" policy, the penalty for failure is total extinction. With most SaaS businesses there are humans in the loop who can make human decisions.
        latchkey 4y ago
        > Google is the Pinto of SaaS That's some strong personal opinion... source? GCP has been extremely performant and reliable for me across several different companies. I'm not saying that people have definitely run into issues, which we've all read about here on HN, but this sounds more like squeaky wheel than the norm. > Thanks to their "no support" policy, Their support has been excellent, when I've needed it, which is rare, since it has just worked for me very well for a decade now. Their documentation is also pretty well done too. Just like with any sort of SaaS solution, you should be building a relationship with an account exec. I've had CloudFlare start to put in weird restrictions on my account once I hit a certain size. It showed up with requests being oddly denied and zero notification. I contacted my account manager (called their cell phone!) and the problem was resolved in a few hours. I don't even pay for a business plan, but I did make sure to develop a friendly relationship with them when they originally reached out to me.
XorNot 4y ago
Personally I'm real suspicious from the time I was on a project using AppEngine, we got sandwiched between Google deciding "1 year" was an appropriate time to declare AppEngine v1 deprecated, but AppEngine v2 was still in "beta" and was removing a bunch of APIs we depended on, while basically saying "oh yeah, setup something completely different if you want something like this" (appengine datastore or whatever vs. "it's gone, um, redis maybe?") So we were stuck with a product which we were writing against something that the official word was would no longer be supported by the time we launched, while being told to develop against the platform which is "beta" and they don't want to commit to supporting the feature set of - and which plain couldn't be used yet at the time they told us this. This is just a ridiculous way to run a commercial platform offering (aka: why I always tell people to use boring VMs for as long as possible).
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > (aka: why I always tell people to use boring VMs for as long as possible). Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Take whatever nice features you can “for free” as tech debt, and if that api inevitably disappears… push it down the stack and own a bit more of it. If you have to build everything from first principles it’ll take way longer to get going.
trog 4y ago
For me it's partially because the interface is insanely slow and painful to use. Maybe this is a "I'm in Australia" problem but it feels like I'm wading through mud to perform the most basic tasks.

osigurdson 4y ago

It feels like someone with great ideas started working on Gmail and quit before it was finished. Whatever they are doing to organize emails in a "smart" way is super confusing. I kind of get it but it just doesn't work. They should either finish it or just revert back to organizing emails by date of arrival.

bambax 4y ago
> just revert back to organizing emails by date of arrival You can choose to do that: Settings / General / Conversation view off It's so much better to simply have emails in the order they arrive instead of hunting them down in "conversations".
- ghaff 4y ago
  I understand that emails can get buried but threaded views are so much better for me (especially at work) than my inbox being buried by conversations/threads that I have zero interest in. My alternative would probably be to more aggressively filter but that would effectively mean I never even saw lots of things I might actually care about.
sosborn 4y ago
It always amuses me that we try to complicate things that should just be a simple list ordered by date.
galaxyLogic 4y ago
I was trying to find sent mail and only way I found it was by searching mail where I was the sender. Smart but not obvious.
singhrac 4y ago
Gmail quality dropped off a cliff all of a sudden. In particular, many many emails get sent to spam now, including emails sent by Google itself! Notifications about calendar invites regularly get sent to spam at inconvenient times. I can't tell if this is just some sort of temporary spam filter tweaking error and oversight or an emergent property of a content-based filtering system that they won't revert.

samstave 4y ago

Dont forget Goog literally owened the anti spam industry with gmail after their integrating POSTINI purchase in like ~~2006 And now in 2022 any gmailinbox is fn full of spam...

lstodd 4y ago
Because you have to support products, esp. antispam, while goog is generaly known for doing the other thing.
- samstave 4y ago
  Uh, they literally paid MILLIONS for the antispam company POSTINI and thats what the original anti-spam features for GMAIL are based on... in the last 18 months or something, google apparently deleted that tech from their stack, I posted about this when I first started having so much spam inbox my gmail.... So yeah - THEY _supported_ the product by paying millions for it... Then they did "the other thing"

ngrilly 4y ago

You’re cherry-picking examples. Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and Chrome are extraordinarily successful products.

ThalesX 4y ago
Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business...
- Closi 4y ago
  > Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business... Assuming this post is sarcasm, Are we really going to criticise Google Search for not being profitable? Google has an ad business because of these products, not seperate to them.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Google doesn't have an ad-business, it is an ad-business. You can't separate Google from its ad business. All of their major products exist in service of the ad business, search, inbox, even Chrome. If the services don't exist to help build a profile of you, they exist to help build a profile of web traffic and detect ad-fraud, or to simply shape the landscape into one that isn't hostile to google's ads.
  - grey_earthling 4y ago
    I'd say that Google has these products (really, services) because of its ad business, not the other way round. Someone more familiar with Google's oeuvre can probably answer this: all those well-liked services that Google unceremoniously cancelled — were they the ones that didn't help (or harmed) Google's ad business?
latexr 4y ago
Depending on one’s point, it can be argued that listing Google’s successful products is the cherry-picking: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/