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Google builds well polished products that work well. The issue is that their product strategy is bad due to the company’s culture. For example stadia as a techn

Google builds well polished products that work well. The issue is that their product strategy is bad due to the company’s culture. For example stadia as a technology and product usage wise was great. However the product placement, market growth strategy, and pricing strategy was crap.

luckylion 4y ago
> Google builds well polished products that work well. The basic tech, I agree, like Youtube is great for watching videos, it barely buffers and you have billions of videos at your disposal and can watch each one and it just works. But polished? The search is atrociously bad. "Set your location" basically doesn't work. Comments under videos are a mess, half of them are deleted, but you can still see "10 replies", only nothing will load, creators will say "I didn't delete it, Youtube did". Shorts? Oh, the ability to upload TikTok clips and then get them presented in a way that's worse than random and actually makes you want to stop scrolling? I don't know Stadia, but I had a similar experience with a lot of Google services. It works, the fundamentals are solid, but the UX leaves much to be desired.
- ablatt89 4y ago
  A lot of these issues are quality issues but Google outsources QA and testing. Apple hires people from retail to do manual QA and testing. Automation is often not good enough since coverage is slow and triaging of results is long and tedious and very few engineers want to triage test results all day.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Are they? I mean, it's not like they have a million features and some of them haven't been tested thoroughly. Search, Comments and Shorts are central, and they suck. It's like when apple had that reception issue in their iphones, only that this is like ... "oh and you also can't read the display properly, and the speakers cut out every 30 seconds". I can't imagine them being totally ignorant and believing that their product is working great.
    - ablatt89 4y ago
      There's definitely testing but it's not at the level that it should be. That is, there's presubmit and postsubmit testing, but who is triaging the results? In addition, how often do we see people design tests to pass instead of design tests to fail and catch issues? I can't speak for Youtube, but some regression can be perhaps attributed to what management claims is lower productivity for new grads and mid levels, who are often assigned things like writing tests and automation (everyone in every company just wants to work on features). I think manual QA is highly underrated in general in the industry and catches so many bugs that automation just can't, and my guess is the manual QA efforts has decreased, and the discrepancy in output from seniors and juniors/mid-levels might be causing some quality issues (just my guess).
      - 56friends 4y ago
        What do you mean by who is triaging the results? Pre-submit failure will block your PR from landing, post-submit (e.g. integration test suite) failure will result in an incident and a likely deploy pause/rollback.
      - fidgewidge 4y ago
        Yeah totally. They never had much manual QA. I once worked at Google and part of my job was in a rotation doing server pushes. As part of the push process I'd quickly check out the one paragraph of release notes from the releng guy which would note any new user visible features, and go and play with them on a canary server. The frequency with which new features point blank did not work at all just blew me away. The problem 100% of the time was that some dev had written a feature given a bug ticket, written some unit tests that covered the code, but never actually brought the serving stack up and played with it themselves. They thought QA meant some test with lots of mocks, not, ya know, actually testing the feature as a user would see it. It was painful to run the servers locally so they just didn't bother a lot of the time.
  - foogazi 4y ago
    > A lot of these issues are quality issues Can’t separate that from the product - as a user I care about the whole thing
- whstl 4y ago
  > But polished? The search is atrociously bad Funny. I don't disagree, but I find Youtube's search much better than Google Search itself lately. Apart from the "barely related" videos interspersed with real results, it actually shows results related to the keywords I typed.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    It's hit and miss, I guess. I find Google's search also worse than a few years ago, but it'll often find Youtube videos better than YT's search will. To me, YT search looks like the most naive search implementation using some synonyms and then ranking by channel popularity and upload date range, and it's getting flooded by Spam Channels (that you cannot flag and hide, because that would be an obviously good idea, and Google can't have those).
influx 4y ago
YouTube Kids is awful It locks up regularly, such that I have to kill the app and restart it. They helpfully put a parental lock button right where a child would hold a phone, so they are constantly hitting the button, and bringing up a bright red screen interrupting the video. Seems like no one really gives a shit about it, I don’t know?
- taeric 4y ago
  This seems endemic to all parental things in tech. I swear most of them seem to be done with no user acceptance testing at all. Worse, I think most of them are built by people that don't use them. The general attitude seems to be that they can take the "build it, and they will come" approach. Who cares what people want, when you can build what you want them to want?
  - irrational 4y ago
    I do wonder if they are being built by developers who have never had kids of their own.
    - taeric 4y ago
      Had this complaint with kindle's time limits. They have it by "weekend" and "weeknight." But... as a parent, I want "school night" versus "non-school night." And those aren't the same thing at all.
  - jchw 4y ago
    After that whole debacle with YouTube and the COPPA, I sort-of wonder if YouTube Kids has to do with anything anyone actually wants, or if it's pretty much just there to serve some kind of purpose for their optics.
    - taeric 4y ago
      My take is that it is what they want. That is, they want parents to put in a fair bit of effort to get their kids engaged. This is backwards from what parents typically want, as managing another stream of content is obnoxious.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>Google builds well polished products that work well. lol, I nearly choked on my spit laughing at this. The way Google Home spectacularly fails to work on my Android phone without throwing any error message, would beg to differ. In fact, most recent Android releases have been buggy nightmares for many users pushing them to switch to iPhones in masses. Google has some products that work very well. The others feel like abondonware in beta stages.
foobiekr 4y ago
Most google products are crap. Google docs in particular can't handle documents the size of things I'd routinely edit on an 8088. Some are outstanding. Search was outstanding, I'm not sure what it is now.
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  Google Docs is great for what it is, the problem is Google's insistence on building everything as a web app regardless of that decision's technical merit. Until the point where the web app architecture wets itself and gives up Docs has a reasonably good UI and the collaborative editing was/still is best in class. That said, the speed with which the product evolves is glacial these days. OK I'm only a lite user but other than non-paged mode I'm struggling to recall what they've really added even in the last 5 years.
hulitu 4y ago
> Google builds well polished products that work well No titlebar, no scrollbar, big logos using a big part of the screen, automatic updates, warning or error messages obstructing other GUI elements without a close or cancel button, etc.

luckylion 4y ago

> Google builds well polished products that work well. The basic tech, I agree, like Youtube is great for watching videos, it barely buffers and you have billions of videos at your disposal and can watch each one and it just works. But polished? The search is atrociously bad. "Set your location" basically doesn't work. Comments under videos are a mess, half of them are deleted, but you can still see "10 replies", only nothing will load, creators will say "I didn't delete it, Youtube did". Shorts? Oh, the ability to upload TikTok clips and then get them presented in a way that's worse than random and actually makes you want to stop scrolling? I don't know Stadia, but I had a similar experience with a lot of Google services. It works, the fundamentals are solid, but the UX leaves much to be desired.

ablatt89 4y ago
A lot of these issues are quality issues but Google outsources QA and testing. Apple hires people from retail to do manual QA and testing. Automation is often not good enough since coverage is slow and triaging of results is long and tedious and very few engineers want to triage test results all day.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Are they? I mean, it's not like they have a million features and some of them haven't been tested thoroughly. Search, Comments and Shorts are central, and they suck. It's like when apple had that reception issue in their iphones, only that this is like ... "oh and you also can't read the display properly, and the speakers cut out every 30 seconds". I can't imagine them being totally ignorant and believing that their product is working great.
  - ablatt89 4y ago
    There's definitely testing but it's not at the level that it should be. That is, there's presubmit and postsubmit testing, but who is triaging the results? In addition, how often do we see people design tests to pass instead of design tests to fail and catch issues? I can't speak for Youtube, but some regression can be perhaps attributed to what management claims is lower productivity for new grads and mid levels, who are often assigned things like writing tests and automation (everyone in every company just wants to work on features). I think manual QA is highly underrated in general in the industry and catches so many bugs that automation just can't, and my guess is the manual QA efforts has decreased, and the discrepancy in output from seniors and juniors/mid-levels might be causing some quality issues (just my guess).
    - 56friends 4y ago
      What do you mean by who is triaging the results? Pre-submit failure will block your PR from landing, post-submit (e.g. integration test suite) failure will result in an incident and a likely deploy pause/rollback.
    - fidgewidge 4y ago
      Yeah totally. They never had much manual QA. I once worked at Google and part of my job was in a rotation doing server pushes. As part of the push process I'd quickly check out the one paragraph of release notes from the releng guy which would note any new user visible features, and go and play with them on a canary server. The frequency with which new features point blank did not work at all just blew me away. The problem 100% of the time was that some dev had written a feature given a bug ticket, written some unit tests that covered the code, but never actually brought the serving stack up and played with it themselves. They thought QA meant some test with lots of mocks, not, ya know, actually testing the feature as a user would see it. It was painful to run the servers locally so they just didn't bother a lot of the time.
- foogazi 4y ago
  > A lot of these issues are quality issues Can’t separate that from the product - as a user I care about the whole thing
whstl 4y ago
> But polished? The search is atrociously bad Funny. I don't disagree, but I find Youtube's search much better than Google Search itself lately. Apart from the "barely related" videos interspersed with real results, it actually shows results related to the keywords I typed.
- luckylion 4y ago
  It's hit and miss, I guess. I find Google's search also worse than a few years ago, but it'll often find Youtube videos better than YT's search will. To me, YT search looks like the most naive search implementation using some synonyms and then ranking by channel popularity and upload date range, and it's getting flooded by Spam Channels (that you cannot flag and hide, because that would be an obviously good idea, and Google can't have those).

influx 4y ago

YouTube Kids is awful It locks up regularly, such that I have to kill the app and restart it. They helpfully put a parental lock button right where a child would hold a phone, so they are constantly hitting the button, and bringing up a bright red screen interrupting the video. Seems like no one really gives a shit about it, I don’t know?

taeric 4y ago
This seems endemic to all parental things in tech. I swear most of them seem to be done with no user acceptance testing at all. Worse, I think most of them are built by people that don't use them. The general attitude seems to be that they can take the "build it, and they will come" approach. Who cares what people want, when you can build what you want them to want?
- irrational 4y ago
  I do wonder if they are being built by developers who have never had kids of their own.
  - taeric 4y ago
    Had this complaint with kindle's time limits. They have it by "weekend" and "weeknight." But... as a parent, I want "school night" versus "non-school night." And those aren't the same thing at all.
- jchw 4y ago
  After that whole debacle with YouTube and the COPPA, I sort-of wonder if YouTube Kids has to do with anything anyone actually wants, or if it's pretty much just there to serve some kind of purpose for their optics.
  - taeric 4y ago
    My take is that it is what they want. That is, they want parents to put in a fair bit of effort to get their kids engaged. This is backwards from what parents typically want, as managing another stream of content is obnoxious.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>Google builds well polished products that work well. lol, I nearly choked on my spit laughing at this. The way Google Home spectacularly fails to work on my Android phone without throwing any error message, would beg to differ. In fact, most recent Android releases have been buggy nightmares for many users pushing them to switch to iPhones in masses. Google has some products that work very well. The others feel like abondonware in beta stages.

foobiekr 4y ago

Most google products are crap. Google docs in particular can't handle documents the size of things I'd routinely edit on an 8088. Some are outstanding. Search was outstanding, I'm not sure what it is now.

fidgewidge 4y ago
Google Docs is great for what it is, the problem is Google's insistence on building everything as a web app regardless of that decision's technical merit. Until the point where the web app architecture wets itself and gives up Docs has a reasonably good UI and the collaborative editing was/still is best in class. That said, the speed with which the product evolves is glacial these days. OK I'm only a lite user but other than non-paged mode I'm struggling to recall what they've really added even in the last 5 years.

hulitu 4y ago

> Google builds well polished products that work well No titlebar, no scrollbar, big logos using a big part of the screen, automatic updates, warning or error messages obstructing other GUI elements without a close or cancel button, etc.