7 ms·

It's interesting to read the comments and then look at Slack vs Microsoft Teams. Slack was the clear leader in at-work group messaging, people thought it was a

by asim 4y ago

It's interesting to read the comments and then look at Slack vs Microsoft Teams. Slack was the clear leader in at-work group messaging, people thought it was a run away success and then Teams basically obliterated it. Google has huge scale distribution on all levels. When the time comes they'll put out the right product and it will scale to millions upon millions of users within a very short time span. The quality of the experience will also be vastly superior. Google's at a stage where they're not about making speculative moves or putting out half baked products because it's just not worth it. That's the nature of big companies with a brand, reputation and scale. Look at Apple, you're not seeing terrible product launches, they take their time and do it right. Honestly, I don't think this is a one horse market, many players will be in the game, just like other markets. They don't need to be #1 and probably won't be, but it will be a quality product that either drives a new search format or a revenue stream for other things e.g plugs into services you already use, increases usage, adoption and costs. Could they acquire an OpenAI competitor, maybe, but anti-trust is a pretty big problem right now. It's most likely that we're just going the route of everyone copying the form factor and whoever has the best experience/data and speed of response wins.

Oras 4y ago
Google made lots of half baked products before and terminated them when they didn't work as expected (https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/). I agree with some of your points regarding scalability and add the fact that Transformer architecture (which GPT-3 was trained on) was created at Google. They also have all the data in the world to train a better model. Interesting to see what Google will come up with.
- bilbo0s 4y ago
  Google made lots of half baked products before and terminated them when they didn't work And how many of those new products cannibalized their current cash cow? Let's not act like ChatGPT is not a completely different sort of threat than game streaming on Stadia or some dumb product like that.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    You mean like Google+ coming to the rescue google ads in the social space which was shutdown.. would never happen.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      If you look at the history of companies that failed to adapt to new technology then you see that it is mostly when the new technology requires a significantly different organisation. For example, digital cameras are a very different beast from old analogue cameras. For Google+, that isn't Googles expertise either. Google is full of scientists and algorithm nerds, creating engaging experience or understanding social was never their strong suit. In Google and ChatGPT's case, a chat bot that functions like an answering machine needs almost exactly the same kind of people, infrastructure and workflows as their current search team. Google could at anytime decide to make those work on a ChatGPT clone, and that would be supported by all of their search pipelines and data models and release workflows they designed for search. Will chat make less money than search? Probably. But search isn't such a large part of Google, worst case Google will have to kill some more side projects.
koheripbal 4y ago
Slack is time sink because it's not task focused. MS Teams users' approach of creating mostly small dedicated or task-related adhoc chat groups is a better format, even if the tool itself doesn't have all the bells and whistles of slack. Chat isn't designed for project management, but your average slack user thinks that if everyone vents their opinions that somehow a consensus will develop - but more often than not, nothing gets done.
- nickpeterson 4y ago
  Teams is Conway’s law in action. It’s like SharePoint vs wiki. Everyone here should be thankful for ms teams, it lets one quickly gauge whether or not a business is an actual threat.
  - adamdennis 4y ago
    Thank you for referencing Conway’s law here. My favourite infodrawing: http://scrumbook.org.datasenter.no/images/ConwaysLaw_Head.png http://scrumbook.org.datasenter.no/images/ConwaysLaw_Head.pn...
  - brmgb 4y ago
    How people comment about MS Teams on HN basically tell you if they have always been a developer or if they have experience with the rest of a company. MS Teams won because it brings collaborative editing to Office. It’s ressource hungry and annoying but a lot more useful than Slack ever was.
    - 1123581321 4y ago
      Teams is probably the better pan-company tool if interested in preventing cross-company discussions and a new culture from forming. I wouldn’t say that everyone with experience has a preference for that kind of operation.
bilbo0s 4y ago
All true. HN people see politics behind everything these days, which is sad, because in this instance the business reasons are so obvious that it makes these comments sound like 4chan rants. ChatGPT is slowing down at its current scale. The scale on day one for Google or Apple will be elephantine compared to the scale at ChatGPT right now. Someone has to engineer a credible solution to those issues. Then there's legal. And don't even get me started on UX and monetization. For Google, there has to be some way to monetize this before you butcher your market. And believe me, Google has a lot of very smart people searching for a monetization model. It really is just not as easy as people are making it out to be. Ex: "Sure, I can answer that question! [But first, were you aware that 9 out of 10 americans surveyed prefer Fruit of the Loom brand underwear? We weren't! That's why we sent our designers undercover in public restrooms to yada yada yada for 4 more sentences. Click here to learn more!] Now, on the question of sigmoid vs relu, [Remember to watch Last of Us! Now streaming on HBO Max! blah blah blah] in most back propaga.... <User opens new tab to ChatGPT or Siri+>
- tlogan 4y ago
  > And believe me, Google has a lot > of very smart people searching > for a monetization model Nope. The entire hiring system was not to hire people like that. They need some “street smarts” / “cowboys” - but these people did not pass Google interviews. Or they were not able to prosper at Google.
  - Sai_ 4y ago
    With no actual experience of having worked at Google, this is exactly my sense. They hire tons of engineering and other talent but not enough people who can figure out how to build something the market wants. Or even if such people are hired, they aren’t empowered to the extent that they can impact the company. It’s an engineers playground and it shows.
- amelius 4y ago
  Online advertising in its current form will die, because it will be easier to detect an ad than it is to hide it.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
Teams is atrocious and it sells only because companies go all in on M$. I don't think expect Google to provide something better than openai, they will likely provide something just because everyone else is doing it, but I think openai will keep a technological edge, purely because of the people they have
- haswell 4y ago
  > Teams is atrocious and it sells only because companies go all in on M$. But this is the point. The technically superior product doesn’t necessarily get the market share due to factors like the Teams distribution model. It’s not hard to imagine similar strategies from the existing big players.
matwood 4y ago
> Slack was the clear leader in at-work group messaging, people thought it was a run away success and then Teams basically obliterated it. Giving it away as a part of something many already pay for let an inferior product like Teams gain marketshare. The problem in this case with Google, is their main monetization method doesn't fit nicely with a ChatGPT like interface.
- zwily 4y ago
  It would be pretty easy to include ads in ChatGPT output. Either interspersed among the generated text, or as part of the text itself!
  - matwood 4y ago
    I agree, but why haven't they then... I can only assume there is some non-obvious challenge that I'm not aware.
    - zwily 4y ago
      Probably cause OpenAI isn’t really in desperate “find revenue” mode. They’re growing like crazy and have plenty of funding.
dougmwne 4y ago
Consider the possibility that Google is politically incapable of launching an advanced AI that disrupts its only real cash cow, search. If they were to launch this perfected GPT clone, what if their Adsense revenues dropped by 10x? Monetizing GPT at Google level is a complete unknown and it may never be as profitable as adsense.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  I think it's unknown in the sense that its unknown what it will look like in principle. But some kind of thorough monetization is inevitable. Those GPUs don't pay for themselves! And it's not that hard to imagine at all: ChatGPT as it is shows how much coercing out and baking in certain things into a model can create a pretty serious product--the whole thing is honestly begging for ad injections. In general we live very far away from a world where these things aren't immediately going to be bastardized for profit, however well it "works" to do that. Even if this was all truly revolutionary, it wouldn't be worth it if it doesn't extract money from consumers, it wouldn't even count as "revolutionary" in the way we use that word these days. There is no hope for a non-adsensed ChatGPT, thinking otherwise is like wondering if the sun will rise tomorrow. Maybe it wont be OpenAI, or Google, but whatever it is, it will rise to the top. In general, there will never be a technology in our world that can achieve much through solely its own merits, it can only ever succeed by virtue of how efficiently it can turn around money. We are in a small honeymoon right now, but don't forget the rules!
acdha 4y ago
> Slack was the clear leader in at-work group messaging, people thought it was a run away success and then Teams basically obliterated it. Google has huge scale distribution on all levels. When the time comes they'll put out the right product and it will scale to millions upon millions of users within a very short time span. The quality of the experience will also be vastly superior. That is certainly what happened for Google Plus – who even remembers Facebook now? Google hasn’t shipped a big success since the 2000s, with G+ and the Reader shutdown marking the end of the period when they built things which were good for users rather than what their executives wanted to sell ads. It’s possible that this could be the big reversal but given how much worse search has become I’m skeptical that they can do so without different managers at ggd top.
- flatiron 4y ago
  Android
  - majormajor 4y ago
    That's an example of what the poster you're replying to is saying: Android shipped in the 2000s before Google Plus.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Work started in the mid-2000s, announced publicly in 2007, and the first device launched in 2008. Google Plus launched in 2011. I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that 2008 is also when they bought Double Click.
  - vb-8448 4y ago
    Gmail, Drive, Docs ...
    - mikymoothrowa 4y ago
      All late 2000s stuff before their endless rebrandings
  - zirgs 4y ago
moomoo11 4y ago
Teams won because like you said, MSFT was able to bundle it into their existing products and make it almost free vs slack which is expensive at like 12 plus dollars per user. However it is not a superior product to Slack. It has a lot of basic issues. However Google could probably do better. My hope is they add it to G cloud. I want to have a simpler way to deploy infra without needing to fuck with yaml and know a million AWS specific things. Gcloud is already a decent experience compared to AWS, and maybe it can be even better if spinning up instances can be made so easy that a product manager can just ask to have a build ready to have feature demo for a customer without needing engineers to do anything prior . Let them focus on building and have Gcloud robust enough to handle it well.
- asim 4y ago
  You're speaking of the holy grail for cloud. I think it sort of comes and goes. Google won't deliver they layer but someone on top might.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> and then Teams basically obliterated it With the "worse" product Would they have obliterated it if Microsoft wasn't already in bed with all of these corporations?
- skrowl 4y ago
  I guess by "in bed" here you mean "they're already buying office 365 to get legit Word, Excel, Outlook licenses"?
jostiniane 4y ago
OpenAI went for the lowest hanging fruit and got a lot of credit (and money) for it. Creating a competing large deep neural network isn't hard and I guess it will soon be too available because of Google. Remember when OCR was the hottest thing and we got the best version of it for free in Google docs.
supergirl 4y ago
google failed at just about every product except selling ads, so I really doubt they will produce anything lasting in this area

by asim 4y ago

Oras 4y ago

Google made lots of half baked products before and terminated them when they didn't work as expected (https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/). I agree with some of your points regarding scalability and add the fact that Transformer architecture (which GPT-3 was trained on) was created at Google. They also have all the data in the world to train a better model. Interesting to see what Google will come up with.

bilbo0s 4y ago
Google made lots of half baked products before and terminated them when they didn't work And how many of those new products cannibalized their current cash cow? Let's not act like ChatGPT is not a completely different sort of threat than game streaming on Stadia or some dumb product like that.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  You mean like Google+ coming to the rescue google ads in the social space which was shutdown.. would never happen.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    If you look at the history of companies that failed to adapt to new technology then you see that it is mostly when the new technology requires a significantly different organisation. For example, digital cameras are a very different beast from old analogue cameras. For Google+, that isn't Googles expertise either. Google is full of scientists and algorithm nerds, creating engaging experience or understanding social was never their strong suit. In Google and ChatGPT's case, a chat bot that functions like an answering machine needs almost exactly the same kind of people, infrastructure and workflows as their current search team. Google could at anytime decide to make those work on a ChatGPT clone, and that would be supported by all of their search pipelines and data models and release workflows they designed for search. Will chat make less money than search? Probably. But search isn't such a large part of Google, worst case Google will have to kill some more side projects.

koheripbal 4y ago

Slack is time sink because it's not task focused. MS Teams users' approach of creating mostly small dedicated or task-related adhoc chat groups is a better format, even if the tool itself doesn't have all the bells and whistles of slack. Chat isn't designed for project management, but your average slack user thinks that if everyone vents their opinions that somehow a consensus will develop - but more often than not, nothing gets done.

nickpeterson 4y ago
Teams is Conway’s law in action. It’s like SharePoint vs wiki. Everyone here should be thankful for ms teams, it lets one quickly gauge whether or not a business is an actual threat.
- adamdennis 4y ago
  Thank you for referencing Conway’s law here. My favourite infodrawing: http://scrumbook.org.datasenter.no/images/ConwaysLaw_Head.png http://scrumbook.org.datasenter.no/images/ConwaysLaw_Head.pn...
- brmgb 4y ago
  How people comment about MS Teams on HN basically tell you if they have always been a developer or if they have experience with the rest of a company. MS Teams won because it brings collaborative editing to Office. It’s ressource hungry and annoying but a lot more useful than Slack ever was.
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    Teams is probably the better pan-company tool if interested in preventing cross-company discussions and a new culture from forming. I wouldn’t say that everyone with experience has a preference for that kind of operation.

bilbo0s 4y ago

All true. HN people see politics behind everything these days, which is sad, because in this instance the business reasons are so obvious that it makes these comments sound like 4chan rants. ChatGPT is slowing down at its current scale. The scale on day one for Google or Apple will be elephantine compared to the scale at ChatGPT right now. Someone has to engineer a credible solution to those issues. Then there's legal. And don't even get me started on UX and monetization. For Google, there has to be some way to monetize this before you butcher your market. And believe me, Google has a lot of very smart people searching for a monetization model. It really is just not as easy as people are making it out to be. Ex: "Sure, I can answer that question! [But first, were you aware that 9 out of 10 americans surveyed prefer Fruit of the Loom brand underwear? We weren't! That's why we sent our designers undercover in public restrooms to yada yada yada for 4 more sentences. Click here to learn more!] Now, on the question of sigmoid vs relu, [Remember to watch Last of Us! Now streaming on HBO Max! blah blah blah] in most back propaga.... <User opens new tab to ChatGPT or Siri+>

tlogan 4y ago
> And believe me, Google has a lot > of very smart people searching > for a monetization model Nope. The entire hiring system was not to hire people like that. They need some “street smarts” / “cowboys” - but these people did not pass Google interviews. Or they were not able to prosper at Google.
- Sai_ 4y ago
  With no actual experience of having worked at Google, this is exactly my sense. They hire tons of engineering and other talent but not enough people who can figure out how to build something the market wants. Or even if such people are hired, they aren’t empowered to the extent that they can impact the company. It’s an engineers playground and it shows.
amelius 4y ago
Online advertising in its current form will die, because it will be easier to detect an ad than it is to hide it.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

Teams is atrocious and it sells only because companies go all in on M$. I don't think expect Google to provide something better than openai, they will likely provide something just because everyone else is doing it, but I think openai will keep a technological edge, purely because of the people they have

haswell 4y ago
> Teams is atrocious and it sells only because companies go all in on M$. But this is the point. The technically superior product doesn’t necessarily get the market share due to factors like the Teams distribution model. It’s not hard to imagine similar strategies from the existing big players.

matwood 4y ago

> Slack was the clear leader in at-work group messaging, people thought it was a run away success and then Teams basically obliterated it. Giving it away as a part of something many already pay for let an inferior product like Teams gain marketshare. The problem in this case with Google, is their main monetization method doesn't fit nicely with a ChatGPT like interface.

zwily 4y ago
It would be pretty easy to include ads in ChatGPT output. Either interspersed among the generated text, or as part of the text itself!
- matwood 4y ago
  I agree, but why haven't they then... I can only assume there is some non-obvious challenge that I'm not aware.
  - zwily 4y ago
    Probably cause OpenAI isn’t really in desperate “find revenue” mode. They’re growing like crazy and have plenty of funding.

dougmwne 4y ago

Consider the possibility that Google is politically incapable of launching an advanced AI that disrupts its only real cash cow, search. If they were to launch this perfected GPT clone, what if their Adsense revenues dropped by 10x? Monetizing GPT at Google level is a complete unknown and it may never be as profitable as adsense.

beepbooptheory 4y ago
I think it's unknown in the sense that its unknown what it will look like in principle. But some kind of thorough monetization is inevitable. Those GPUs don't pay for themselves! And it's not that hard to imagine at all: ChatGPT as it is shows how much coercing out and baking in certain things into a model can create a pretty serious product--the whole thing is honestly begging for ad injections. In general we live very far away from a world where these things aren't immediately going to be bastardized for profit, however well it "works" to do that. Even if this was all truly revolutionary, it wouldn't be worth it if it doesn't extract money from consumers, it wouldn't even count as "revolutionary" in the way we use that word these days. There is no hope for a non-adsensed ChatGPT, thinking otherwise is like wondering if the sun will rise tomorrow. Maybe it wont be OpenAI, or Google, but whatever it is, it will rise to the top. In general, there will never be a technology in our world that can achieve much through solely its own merits, it can only ever succeed by virtue of how efficiently it can turn around money. We are in a small honeymoon right now, but don't forget the rules!

acdha 4y ago

> Slack was the clear leader in at-work group messaging, people thought it was a run away success and then Teams basically obliterated it. Google has huge scale distribution on all levels. When the time comes they'll put out the right product and it will scale to millions upon millions of users within a very short time span. The quality of the experience will also be vastly superior. That is certainly what happened for Google Plus – who even remembers Facebook now? Google hasn’t shipped a big success since the 2000s, with G+ and the Reader shutdown marking the end of the period when they built things which were good for users rather than what their executives wanted to sell ads. It’s possible that this could be the big reversal but given how much worse search has become I’m skeptical that they can do so without different managers at ggd top.

flatiron 4y ago
Android
- majormajor 4y ago
  That's an example of what the poster you're replying to is saying: Android shipped in the 2000s before Google Plus.
- acdha 4y ago
  Work started in the mid-2000s, announced publicly in 2007, and the first device launched in 2008. Google Plus launched in 2011. I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that 2008 is also when they bought Double Click.
- vb-8448 4y ago
  Gmail, Drive, Docs ...
  - mikymoothrowa 4y ago
    All late 2000s stuff before their endless rebrandings
- zirgs 4y ago

moomoo11 4y ago

Teams won because like you said, MSFT was able to bundle it into their existing products and make it almost free vs slack which is expensive at like 12 plus dollars per user. However it is not a superior product to Slack. It has a lot of basic issues. However Google could probably do better. My hope is they add it to G cloud. I want to have a simpler way to deploy infra without needing to fuck with yaml and know a million AWS specific things. Gcloud is already a decent experience compared to AWS, and maybe it can be even better if spinning up instances can be made so easy that a product manager can just ask to have a build ready to have feature demo for a customer without needing engineers to do anything prior . Let them focus on building and have Gcloud robust enough to handle it well.

asim 4y ago
You're speaking of the holy grail for cloud. I think it sort of comes and goes. Google won't deliver they layer but someone on top might.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> and then Teams basically obliterated it With the "worse" product Would they have obliterated it if Microsoft wasn't already in bed with all of these corporations?

skrowl 4y ago
I guess by "in bed" here you mean "they're already buying office 365 to get legit Word, Excel, Outlook licenses"?

jostiniane 4y ago

OpenAI went for the lowest hanging fruit and got a lot of credit (and money) for it. Creating a competing large deep neural network isn't hard and I guess it will soon be too available because of Google. Remember when OCR was the hottest thing and we got the best version of it for free in Google docs.

supergirl 4y ago

google failed at just about every product except selling ads, so I really doubt they will produce anything lasting in this area