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I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively. They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (

I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively. They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something) and then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce. This is precisely what Microsoft did to Google. They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money. Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply. One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop. Now, with deals such as this, Microsoft will have more data to tune their engine while Google is left on the sidelines. Let's just hope that the AI driven search revolution does not produce a monopoly.

chickenpotpie 3y ago
ChromeOS and Google Docs?
PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
> just buy Canonical or something Canonical doesn't really make any things that are considered part of a desktop OS. Ubuntu is just a package (and some argue a bad one) of things made by other people. There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon. You're probably best re-inventing the wheel if you want a Windows competitor, like Google did with ChromeOS.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  They surely do, its reason to fame is being the best distribution supporting OEM devices without religion regarding open source drivers.
  - lillecarl 3y ago
    They're using a package manager that a lot of people are comfortable with, they give away their packages without subscriptions and they work with some OEMs. But in reality, the hardware support is in the kernel, so any distro with a more up2date kernel would fare at least as good. As for the software Canonical produces, I'm not great friends with anything. Snap is crap, Netplan is just a renderer to systemd-networkd or networkmanager, MAAS is a pile of garbage, Juju never caught on, upstart failed, Unity failed etc... We're running a lot of Canonical at work and I'm not particularly impressed.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Nope in what concerns proprietary drivers and FOSS drama. There is a reason why Canonical was the first option when Microsoft introduced WSL.
- asddubs 3y ago
  A canonical engineer did fix a kernel bug that prevented my laptop from booting on newer kernel versions. And they do develop their own software, too. Saying that they are "just a package" is not giving them enough credit.
- sho_hn 3y ago
  > There's very little value in the Linux desktop There's a tremendous amount of value in the Linux desktop. It's used to do amazing things every day. What you mean is that it's very hard to turn it into a business model, which I'd agree with. But these are not the same in the world.
  - eldaisfish 3y ago
    To you and me, sure, there is value in a linux desktop. To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop. Where it works, it is the exception, not the norm. Taking linux and turning it into a business model can be done - see valve and the steam deck. Granted, that is gaming-only but it can be done. The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop and things break far too often.
    - sho_hn 3y ago
      > To you and me, sure, there is value in a linux desktop. "You and me" is actually not a small or meaningless demographic. It includes my thousands of colleagues at Mercedes-Benz who use Linux desktops to do engineering work, and millions of other developers. It means a lot of scientists, for example at NASA and CERN. It means a lot of school students and government employees in educational and other municipal deployments. A lot of the places where Linux is used is for roles that act as multiplicators, e.g. in the development and production of end-user products, or research/science/RD that will lead to new ones, or in educating the people who will one day make new ones. All of this is a lot of value if you sum it up. There may be no single shining CEO and his shareholders getting rich off of the Linux desktop in the way we're used to fawning over in the tech hustle news cycle. But the world at large almost certainly is. I submit that's a fine success metric. > To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop. For many users it's today more reliable than contemporary Windows. Ten years ago, the Linux desktop experience for a non-technical user was death by a thousand papercuts. Today there are still some gaps in HW support that can create unsolvables, but if your machine is well-supported, things work just fine. What's mainly keeping it back is many other factors, from channel availability to software availability. > see valve and the steam deck :-) I worked on the Steam Deck as CTO of one of Valve's contractors on the project. Glad you like it.
- eastbound 3y ago
  > There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon Only because no-one has disrupted the market. Typical case of “Who would pay for a Mantis open-source bugtracker”, then Jira appear and companies purchase it. What you mean is, who would pay for Ubuntu. But I’d pay for an open-source macOS, with online backups, video editing and SSO for my IT fleet, anything that doesn’t look like Ubuntu.
- murdoze 3y ago
  I see no value in the Windows desktop. For my tasks.
garganzol 3y ago
> better desktop OS > Google It wouldn't be an OS, it would be a casino full of flashy ads. The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never. They get away with Android because it's mostly a consumer market.
- rob74 3y ago
  Did you use Windows recently? https://uk.pcmag.com/migrated-3765-windows-10/132748/how-to-remove-the-most-annoying-ads-in-windows-10 https://uk.pcmag.com/migrated-3765-windows-10/132748/how-to-...
  - dboreham 3y ago
    Was about to post the same thing. Windows is infuriating for me not because I dislike ads per se, but it triggers all sorts of ADD behavior in my brain -- try to open an application, and "ohh, what's Tom Cruise up to today?!".
- colanderman 3y ago
  Windows is already crapped up with flashy ads; it's a pretty damn low bar.
- indymike 3y ago
  Having deployed Chromebooks into corporate and education, there's less ad content there than on a Windows machine... by oodles. In fact, the only place a stock Chromebook has ads is on websites, in the browser and I believe on a personal install it tries to sell you a subscription to Google's cloud service for extra storage. Once you start installing apps, well, your mileage will vary. Having used Android as my daily driver since Android 1.3, again, the default experience is pretty much ad-free. I've even used Android in "desktop mode" where you connect a display, keyboard and mouse and used windowed Android apps. When you start installing apps, or if you buy a device with non-default apps installed (i.e. the mobile carrier install as infested crap). In that case you can disable or uninstall that app and move on. > The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never. While Google does have a history of cancelling some well-loved products (like Reader), Google Apps (Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentations, etc...) has been solid for a decade. The live, multiuser, real-time editing and versioning is a wonderful feature for collaboration. Also, Google has been very reasonable on pricing, and after six years of running three companies on Google Worplace/Apps, I'm very impressed with the reliability of Google Workplace (what they are now calling Apps).
Zigurd 3y ago
Desktop market share moves very slowly. A 1% shift per year is a big move last I looked. ChromeOS is doing about as well as possible gaining share.
- unloco 3y ago
  ChromeOS is only in the market because they have cheap laptops that schools bought up. And not a single student I know would ever use one outside of school.
  - gehwartzen 3y ago
    Which is kind of depressing. I get public schools have budgetary needs and I suppose Chromebooks are perfectly appropriate for Elementary and (maybe) Middle Schoolers (my kid has one, he's in 2nd grade and its fine) but they should really consider supplying real laptops to the High Schoolers so they learn on hardware and software used in the real world.
  - TchoBeer 3y ago
    cornering the market on educational computers is nothing to sneeze at.
    - Zigurd 3y ago
      Also "worst gaming device" is a feature, not a bug in that market.
gaogao 3y ago
Where do you see ChromeOS and Google Office as falling flat in that regard? Desktops are pretty smaller in market size compared to laptops these days.
- ant6n 3y ago
  Desktop = Laptop
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    God, I wish that were true. Ask me how many times I've effed up the battery and sleep configuration upgrading Linux on a desktop vs a laptop. Relative to desktops, laptops tend to be quirky little things because the heavy constraints of form factor, power, and weight result in engineering trade-offs and outright hacks that aren't necessary in the desktop ecosystem.
    - KyeRussell 3y ago
      Okay. You’ve immediately alienated all but the smallest minority of users to draw a distinction that most people just flat out don’t experience.
      - ajmurmann 3y ago
        It's not invalid though. Those are the reasons I stopped trying to use Linux on a laptop.
        edgyquant 3y ago
        Linux is not relevant to the discussion.
- DrThunder 3y ago
  By desktop app they don't mean an app that runs on desktop computers only. They mean an app that runs locally and not web-based. Office 365 desktop vs Office 365 web portal. Google doesn't offer anything but web based.
esprehn 3y ago
I can't tell if your sarcasm is top notch, but isn't Chromebooks and GSuite (docs, sheets, slides) exactly the thing you describe?
- dheera 3y ago
  That's a stripped down OS running only a web browser and a bunch of webapps, not a real OS. Another one of those Google fantasies that failed to understand normal people.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    What do you think Joe Sixpack runs on his computer these days? There are tons of people out there who do nothing but browse websites and use the "apps" as provided on those sites. They have no use for native Windows apps nor all the extra baggage that comes with it.
    - ajmurmann 3y ago
      I wonder if it's more the fear of needing a desktop app one day again that you haven't started in years than the actual need for desktop apps.
    - bflesch 3y ago
      That's a stupid over-generalization. There's always one shitty app you need for some weird use case which is not in the official stores. And to rule that out 100% by purchasing a chromebook is a hassle people don't want to worry about.
      - warner25 3y ago
        Yeah, most people shouldn't need more, but you're right. For example, to update the maps in our minivan's navigation system, I need to install some (crappy) Windows-only desktop application, "Garmin Express."
      - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
candiddevmike 3y ago
Why hasn't Canonical been acquired yet?
- asddubs 3y ago
  maybe shuttleworth is not interested in selling?
Xelbair 3y ago
>google >making any product that lasts that's a tough chance for OS. it wouldn't hit growth targets after n-th year and would be remotely disabled by google worldwide.
the_snooze 3y ago
>Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce. Microsoft Office has a lot of network effect surrounding it. Organizations use MS Office because the people who pay them (e.g., government or large corporations) use MS Office. I've tried switching away to LibreOffice or Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, and those are very likely to mangle layout and formatting when saving to DOCX/XLSX/PPTX. Not worth the hassle trying to troubleshoot why my government program managers aren't seeing what I'm seeing on the document I sent them.
illnewsthat 3y ago
> They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money. Maybe a nitpick, but I think Bing has been profitable on its own for a while now. (2015) https://time.com/4084975/microsoft-bing-search-engine-profitable/ https://time.com/4084975/microsoft-bing-search-engine-profit...
- moufestaphio 3y ago
  Yeah, Bing has been consistently profitable for a long time. People mock it because its not bringing in obscene amounts that google search does, but it's revenues have consistently been growing for years: https://fourweekmba.com/bing-revenue/ https://fourweekmba.com/bing-revenue/ $11.59B is pretty damn good revenue for a 'laughing stock'. Especially Consider that gaming 'only' was $16.23B.
  - TrueSlacker0 3y ago
    That link shows revenue not profit.
_fat_santa 3y ago
They kinda did that with ChromeOS + Google Docs with offline mode. The problem for Google is that while it was a solid investment for MS to persue cloud services to compete with Google, I don't think it would have been a good investment the other way around. Chrome is really the only desktop product that makes sense for Google because it pushes people into their ecosystem online. Creating something like a standalone OS or a standalone office software would have gone in the "wrong direction" for Google, taking people off their site rather than taking people there. Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.
- hrunt 3y ago
  > Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed. If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed. That's how much impact the ChatGPT integration had for Bing -- overnight.
  - tough 3y ago
    Well that and a 10B investment right?
  - birdyrooster 3y ago
    I’ve used bing with gpt and it’s way worse than ChatGPT idk what you mean. I’d just as well use Google tbh. It wasn’t impressive.
    - rmbyrro 3y ago
      The thing is: Google is threatened for the first time in its decades of history. It might not be better, yet, but it definitely is a real and existential threat to Google.
      - visarga 3y ago
        Google is threatened by MS and OA, OA is threatened by Stable Diffusion and MiniGPT-4. We are wondering if there will still be developer work in 10 years. Everyone is threatened.
qikInNdOutReply 3y ago
Somewhere some shareholders are whispering to stage a culture revolution in the G.
pmlnr 3y ago
>One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop ??? PageRank. It was PageRank, and the fact that they didn't rely on the lies put into <meta> tags. There was no feedback loop at that point.
collaborative 3y ago
I created AISearch.vip but honestly I am now going to open source it and make it a locally run stand-alone AI search engine because it's absurd having to call OpenAI APIs in the backend when I can let the user run it with their own API keys There's no moat in anything AI, but MS gets OpenAI access at a discount and therefore will win
bachmeier 3y ago
> Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply. It's more like Google has to change from optimizing for next week's revenue numbers to optimizing for user experience. People have been saying for years that their search results are trash. That we haven't seen a response from Google may be an indicator that they aren't able to return useful search results.
- ChildOfChaos 3y ago
  'People have been saying for years that their search results are trash'. Have they? I hear people say this on Hacker news but i've never heard it anywhere else, people seem to be using the internet just fine with Google as there main search engine, what is the alternative? Bing? It's still trash and Bing Chat is like a worse version of ChatGPT, I don't see it replacing Google currently.
  - pteraspidomorph 3y ago
    Bing Chat was better but after three months of very hard work Microsoft successfully managed to remove all the good parts.
    - kccqzy 3y ago
      How naïve of Microsoft! They clearly didn't have enough experience to know that they have to remove the good parts and make it bland in order to make the product viable.
  - rurp 3y ago
    FWIW, many of the non-tech people I know gripe about the same user facing issues that come up on HN, including poor Google search results. They just don't post about it on the internet and might not even know that there are alternatives. I would bet that a good chunk of users don't know that you can change the default browser or search engine, or at least don't think to do so. They might not like the UX, but they have other things occupying their focus and muddle through a bad experience with their phone or PC, just like they do with many other mediocre interfaces throughout the week.
pibechorro 3y ago
We will only see a monopoly if there is protectionism. Regulations, licensing, do not compete patents, etc.
delfinom 3y ago
>They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something) Ah yes, Canonical, land of people attempting to fork the Linux ecosystem and getting shot down by everyone and doubling down. Would be a perfect fit for Google.
deleted 3y ago
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andsoitis 3y ago
> They should have tried to make a better desktop OS Desktop OS's are not the long term future of computing, is it? But they were astute in acquiring Android. Meanwhile, Microsoft thought that a mobile OS is just a desktop OS squished onto a smaller screen.
GeekyBear 3y ago
> I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively. I've always been shocked that Google didn't face antitrust action over using their internet video monopoly to kill Windows Phone. They wouldn't create a Youtube app for Windows Phone, nor would they allow Microsoft to create one themselves.
- JustLurking2022 3y ago
  I had a Windows phone and android simultaneously - I actually liked the UI on the windows phone but I think I may have been the only person on earth that did because I virtually never saw another one. From that perspective, I can understand choosing not to build for the platform.
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    I can understand not wanting to build an app yourself, but when you hold a monopoly on internet video and you won't allow your platform competitors to build an app on their own dime, that really should have triggered antitrust action. I can remember Google taking similar actions to lock out Amazon's Echo Show. https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-youtube-amazon-echo-show https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-youtube-a... If anything, Google has been too aggressive.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Is this really about AI and ChatGPT? Google search just sucks now. I actually get better results from Bing and Duck Duck Go. > then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop With their inferior products? Not a chance. Google's apps are so far away from even competing with Microsoft's it's not even funny. Google Sheets doesn't even have proper tables. I wouldn't even be surprised if they cancelled it.
- Rastonbury 3y ago
  The fact that big corps have moved to Gsuite always surprises me and credit to Google salespeople. But they will never meaningfully breach Office, people at Microsoft fight tooth and nail when renewals are up and Google is in the picture
  - thebytefairy 3y ago
    As someone who's worked at both gsuite and office shops, I would pick gsuite every time. After the first place where I used gsuite I used to try to figure out which I'd have to use before applying somewhere new.
    - Rastonbury 3y ago
      Depends on use case, I regularly use sheets with 20k+ rows, experience is night and day
rchaud 3y ago
A Google desktop OS wasn't going to win against Windows in PC gaming compatibility. Nor was it going to displace MS Office + Active Directory at the enterprise level. With ChromeOS, they took the route available to them, which was to enter the school market and try to build something from there.
taylodl 3y ago
Google's whole raison d'être was internet computing - computing at scales never before seen. Think "BigFiles" and the original Google search. They were able to leverage that technology in creating AdSense, which is their huge money-maker. Google's challenge has been finding ways to monetize their internet compute technologies. But now that it's 25 years later and more and more people have internet-scale computing available to them it appears Google is losing their edge. What used to be their "special sauce" has now become a commodity. It's a story as old as business.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  Increasingly people don't need this kind of special sauce to run a big Internet service. Everything that's challenging has been outsourced to public clouds. Just pay more and those special sauce comes to you. Admittedly Google still has some special sauce left, but in my opinion those special sauce only improves efficiency; it doesn't enable one to do something that's impossible otherwise. (I've been reading about some public research reports about Google's special sauce: they range from special user space networking to new congestion control to custom TPUs etc.)
  - taylodl 3y ago
    I'd say it another way - everything that's challenging has been commoditized and is available from your choice of public cloud providers. You've identified new special sauce opportunities for Google, the question is can these new opportunities generate as much revenue as they'd been enjoying?
hintymad 3y ago
> They should have tried to make a better desktop OS Wouldn't office suite be a better target? Everyone uses it. Lots of low hanging fruits. Easy to win the heart of geeks. Ample opportunities to integrate with other enterprise services.
wslh 3y ago
If Microsoft's 48-year history has shown anything, it is that they can produce subpar products, experience numerous failures, make poor investments and acquisitions, and even ruin products (e.g., Skype), yet they remain resilient and successful! As for Google, I am uncertain whether they were prepared for this competition because, firstly, the business terms offered by Microsoft might have been quite strategic, and secondly, the Google search engine has not experienced significant innovation or improvement since PageRank, at least from a user experience perspective rather than complexity. I will regale my descendants with stories of a time when I searched for something and found at least one relevant result among the top 20.
- brokencode 3y ago
  That to me is the big difference between Google and Microsoft. Microsoft is willing to slowly build on something for years before it goes anywhere. They maintain their products for incredible amounts of time, such as how IE11 was only killed off like a decade after its release. Google on the other hand is always chasing the next big thing. It just doesn’t have the institutional attention span to do anything really big. If a project isn’t an explosive hit right away, Google moves on to the next big idea.
ignoramous 3y ago
> ...Google Office for Desktop They did one better and made Chrome so good that its the OS for most, for all intents and purposes, now.
Macha 3y ago
What would a Google office for desktop do that the current Google docs doesn't? Even MS is moving office to being cloud based, so it's not clear business users value local document availability that much - rather the opposite, I've worked in places that like cloud services because locking out their data from a disgruntled or departed employee is one button away.
- layer8 3y ago
  There are worlds of difference between MS Office and Google Docs in terms of features and abilities. There’s actually a risk for MS to lose their edge by moving to the cloud with a reduced feature set.
  - Macha 3y ago
    Would Google Docs have more features if they had to maintain more platforms? I'd expect the opposite.
SecretDreams 3y ago
Have people used BING lately? It's still not good - but maybe it will improve. Google search has just gotten worse and is more ad prone. It's still better, but not golden age google - not even close.
yusufnb 3y ago
Google did encroach. Google office/docs is much better than Microsoft. Chrome OS is a better OS for most non-tech jobs. The browser is the operating system for most people, and Chrome is leading in that. They won on mobile as well with Android. Google Workspace, in my opinion, is much better than Microsoft. It's their outdated search bringing everything else down it seems.
- batiudrami 3y ago
  Google Docs is not anywhere close to as powerful or as performant as Microsoft Office. I don’t really see how someone familiar with both forward suites could think that is the case.
  - DangitBobby 3y ago
    Pretty much the only notable advantage MSO for my use is excel, which is better for "advanced" spreadsheet workloads. For collaborative work and 99% of documents and spreadsheets, Google docs is the superior option. I haven't opened a MS product in years and my life is better for it. Their Mac product lineup is particularly lackluster.
Haga 3y ago
[dead]

chickenpotpie 3y ago

ChromeOS and Google Docs?

PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago

> just buy Canonical or something Canonical doesn't really make any things that are considered part of a desktop OS. Ubuntu is just a package (and some argue a bad one) of things made by other people. There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon. You're probably best re-inventing the wheel if you want a Windows competitor, like Google did with ChromeOS.

pjmlp 3y ago
They surely do, its reason to fame is being the best distribution supporting OEM devices without religion regarding open source drivers.
- lillecarl 3y ago
  They're using a package manager that a lot of people are comfortable with, they give away their packages without subscriptions and they work with some OEMs. But in reality, the hardware support is in the kernel, so any distro with a more up2date kernel would fare at least as good. As for the software Canonical produces, I'm not great friends with anything. Snap is crap, Netplan is just a renderer to systemd-networkd or networkmanager, MAAS is a pile of garbage, Juju never caught on, upstart failed, Unity failed etc... We're running a lot of Canonical at work and I'm not particularly impressed.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Nope in what concerns proprietary drivers and FOSS drama. There is a reason why Canonical was the first option when Microsoft introduced WSL.
asddubs 3y ago
A canonical engineer did fix a kernel bug that prevented my laptop from booting on newer kernel versions. And they do develop their own software, too. Saying that they are "just a package" is not giving them enough credit.
sho_hn 3y ago
> There's very little value in the Linux desktop There's a tremendous amount of value in the Linux desktop. It's used to do amazing things every day. What you mean is that it's very hard to turn it into a business model, which I'd agree with. But these are not the same in the world.
- eldaisfish 3y ago
  To you and me, sure, there is value in a linux desktop. To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop. Where it works, it is the exception, not the norm. Taking linux and turning it into a business model can be done - see valve and the steam deck. Granted, that is gaming-only but it can be done. The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop and things break far too often.
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    > To you and me, sure, there is value in a linux desktop. "You and me" is actually not a small or meaningless demographic. It includes my thousands of colleagues at Mercedes-Benz who use Linux desktops to do engineering work, and millions of other developers. It means a lot of scientists, for example at NASA and CERN. It means a lot of school students and government employees in educational and other municipal deployments. A lot of the places where Linux is used is for roles that act as multiplicators, e.g. in the development and production of end-user products, or research/science/RD that will lead to new ones, or in educating the people who will one day make new ones. All of this is a lot of value if you sum it up. There may be no single shining CEO and his shareholders getting rich off of the Linux desktop in the way we're used to fawning over in the tech hustle news cycle. But the world at large almost certainly is. I submit that's a fine success metric. > To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop. For many users it's today more reliable than contemporary Windows. Ten years ago, the Linux desktop experience for a non-technical user was death by a thousand papercuts. Today there are still some gaps in HW support that can create unsolvables, but if your machine is well-supported, things work just fine. What's mainly keeping it back is many other factors, from channel availability to software availability. > see valve and the steam deck :-) I worked on the Steam Deck as CTO of one of Valve's contractors on the project. Glad you like it.
eastbound 3y ago
> There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon Only because no-one has disrupted the market. Typical case of “Who would pay for a Mantis open-source bugtracker”, then Jira appear and companies purchase it. What you mean is, who would pay for Ubuntu. But I’d pay for an open-source macOS, with online backups, video editing and SSO for my IT fleet, anything that doesn’t look like Ubuntu.
murdoze 3y ago
I see no value in the Windows desktop. For my tasks.

garganzol 3y ago

> better desktop OS > Google It wouldn't be an OS, it would be a casino full of flashy ads. The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never. They get away with Android because it's mostly a consumer market.

rob74 3y ago
Did you use Windows recently? https://uk.pcmag.com/migrated-3765-windows-10/132748/how-to-remove-the-most-annoying-ads-in-windows-10 https://uk.pcmag.com/migrated-3765-windows-10/132748/how-to-...
- dboreham 3y ago
  Was about to post the same thing. Windows is infuriating for me not because I dislike ads per se, but it triggers all sorts of ADD behavior in my brain -- try to open an application, and "ohh, what's Tom Cruise up to today?!".
colanderman 3y ago
Windows is already crapped up with flashy ads; it's a pretty damn low bar.
indymike 3y ago
Having deployed Chromebooks into corporate and education, there's less ad content there than on a Windows machine... by oodles. In fact, the only place a stock Chromebook has ads is on websites, in the browser and I believe on a personal install it tries to sell you a subscription to Google's cloud service for extra storage. Once you start installing apps, well, your mileage will vary. Having used Android as my daily driver since Android 1.3, again, the default experience is pretty much ad-free. I've even used Android in "desktop mode" where you connect a display, keyboard and mouse and used windowed Android apps. When you start installing apps, or if you buy a device with non-default apps installed (i.e. the mobile carrier install as infested crap). In that case you can disable or uninstall that app and move on. > The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never. While Google does have a history of cancelling some well-loved products (like Reader), Google Apps (Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentations, etc...) has been solid for a decade. The live, multiuser, real-time editing and versioning is a wonderful feature for collaboration. Also, Google has been very reasonable on pricing, and after six years of running three companies on Google Worplace/Apps, I'm very impressed with the reliability of Google Workplace (what they are now calling Apps).

Zigurd 3y ago

Desktop market share moves very slowly. A 1% shift per year is a big move last I looked. ChromeOS is doing about as well as possible gaining share.

unloco 3y ago
ChromeOS is only in the market because they have cheap laptops that schools bought up. And not a single student I know would ever use one outside of school.
- gehwartzen 3y ago
  Which is kind of depressing. I get public schools have budgetary needs and I suppose Chromebooks are perfectly appropriate for Elementary and (maybe) Middle Schoolers (my kid has one, he's in 2nd grade and its fine) but they should really consider supplying real laptops to the High Schoolers so they learn on hardware and software used in the real world.
- TchoBeer 3y ago
  cornering the market on educational computers is nothing to sneeze at.
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    Also "worst gaming device" is a feature, not a bug in that market.

gaogao 3y ago

Where do you see ChromeOS and Google Office as falling flat in that regard? Desktops are pretty smaller in market size compared to laptops these days.

ant6n 3y ago
Desktop = Laptop
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  God, I wish that were true. Ask me how many times I've effed up the battery and sleep configuration upgrading Linux on a desktop vs a laptop. Relative to desktops, laptops tend to be quirky little things because the heavy constraints of form factor, power, and weight result in engineering trade-offs and outright hacks that aren't necessary in the desktop ecosystem.
  - KyeRussell 3y ago
    Okay. You’ve immediately alienated all but the smallest minority of users to draw a distinction that most people just flat out don’t experience.
    - ajmurmann 3y ago
      It's not invalid though. Those are the reasons I stopped trying to use Linux on a laptop.
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        Linux is not relevant to the discussion.
DrThunder 3y ago
By desktop app they don't mean an app that runs on desktop computers only. They mean an app that runs locally and not web-based. Office 365 desktop vs Office 365 web portal. Google doesn't offer anything but web based.

esprehn 3y ago

I can't tell if your sarcasm is top notch, but isn't Chromebooks and GSuite (docs, sheets, slides) exactly the thing you describe?

dheera 3y ago
That's a stripped down OS running only a web browser and a bunch of webapps, not a real OS. Another one of those Google fantasies that failed to understand normal people.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  What do you think Joe Sixpack runs on his computer these days? There are tons of people out there who do nothing but browse websites and use the "apps" as provided on those sites. They have no use for native Windows apps nor all the extra baggage that comes with it.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    I wonder if it's more the fear of needing a desktop app one day again that you haven't started in years than the actual need for desktop apps.
  - bflesch 3y ago
    That's a stupid over-generalization. There's always one shitty app you need for some weird use case which is not in the official stores. And to rule that out 100% by purchasing a chromebook is a hassle people don't want to worry about.
    - warner25 3y ago
      Yeah, most people shouldn't need more, but you're right. For example, to update the maps in our minivan's navigation system, I need to install some (crappy) Windows-only desktop application, "Garmin Express."
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

candiddevmike 3y ago

Why hasn't Canonical been acquired yet?

asddubs 3y ago
maybe shuttleworth is not interested in selling?

Xelbair 3y ago

>google >making any product that lasts that's a tough chance for OS. it wouldn't hit growth targets after n-th year and would be remotely disabled by google worldwide.

the_snooze 3y ago

>Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce. Microsoft Office has a lot of network effect surrounding it. Organizations use MS Office because the people who pay them (e.g., government or large corporations) use MS Office. I've tried switching away to LibreOffice or Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, and those are very likely to mangle layout and formatting when saving to DOCX/XLSX/PPTX. Not worth the hassle trying to troubleshoot why my government program managers aren't seeing what I'm seeing on the document I sent them.

illnewsthat 3y ago

> They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money. Maybe a nitpick, but I think Bing has been profitable on its own for a while now. (2015) https://time.com/4084975/microsoft-bing-search-engine-profitable/ https://time.com/4084975/microsoft-bing-search-engine-profit...

moufestaphio 3y ago
Yeah, Bing has been consistently profitable for a long time. People mock it because its not bringing in obscene amounts that google search does, but it's revenues have consistently been growing for years: https://fourweekmba.com/bing-revenue/ https://fourweekmba.com/bing-revenue/ $11.59B is pretty damn good revenue for a 'laughing stock'. Especially Consider that gaming 'only' was $16.23B.
- TrueSlacker0 3y ago
  That link shows revenue not profit.

_fat_santa 3y ago

They kinda did that with ChromeOS + Google Docs with offline mode. The problem for Google is that while it was a solid investment for MS to persue cloud services to compete with Google, I don't think it would have been a good investment the other way around. Chrome is really the only desktop product that makes sense for Google because it pushes people into their ecosystem online. Creating something like a standalone OS or a standalone office software would have gone in the "wrong direction" for Google, taking people off their site rather than taking people there. Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.

hrunt 3y ago
> Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed. If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed. That's how much impact the ChatGPT integration had for Bing -- overnight.
- tough 3y ago
  Well that and a 10B investment right?
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  I’ve used bing with gpt and it’s way worse than ChatGPT idk what you mean. I’d just as well use Google tbh. It wasn’t impressive.
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    The thing is: Google is threatened for the first time in its decades of history. It might not be better, yet, but it definitely is a real and existential threat to Google.
    - visarga 3y ago
      Google is threatened by MS and OA, OA is threatened by Stable Diffusion and MiniGPT-4. We are wondering if there will still be developer work in 10 years. Everyone is threatened.

qikInNdOutReply 3y ago

Somewhere some shareholders are whispering to stage a culture revolution in the G.

pmlnr 3y ago

>One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop ??? PageRank. It was PageRank, and the fact that they didn't rely on the lies put into <meta> tags. There was no feedback loop at that point.

collaborative 3y ago

I created AISearch.vip but honestly I am now going to open source it and make it a locally run stand-alone AI search engine because it's absurd having to call OpenAI APIs in the backend when I can let the user run it with their own API keys There's no moat in anything AI, but MS gets OpenAI access at a discount and therefore will win

bachmeier 3y ago

> Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply. It's more like Google has to change from optimizing for next week's revenue numbers to optimizing for user experience. People have been saying for years that their search results are trash. That we haven't seen a response from Google may be an indicator that they aren't able to return useful search results.

ChildOfChaos 3y ago
'People have been saying for years that their search results are trash'. Have they? I hear people say this on Hacker news but i've never heard it anywhere else, people seem to be using the internet just fine with Google as there main search engine, what is the alternative? Bing? It's still trash and Bing Chat is like a worse version of ChatGPT, I don't see it replacing Google currently.
- pteraspidomorph 3y ago
  Bing Chat was better but after three months of very hard work Microsoft successfully managed to remove all the good parts.
  - kccqzy 3y ago
    How naïve of Microsoft! They clearly didn't have enough experience to know that they have to remove the good parts and make it bland in order to make the product viable.
- rurp 3y ago
  FWIW, many of the non-tech people I know gripe about the same user facing issues that come up on HN, including poor Google search results. They just don't post about it on the internet and might not even know that there are alternatives. I would bet that a good chunk of users don't know that you can change the default browser or search engine, or at least don't think to do so. They might not like the UX, but they have other things occupying their focus and muddle through a bad experience with their phone or PC, just like they do with many other mediocre interfaces throughout the week.

pibechorro 3y ago

We will only see a monopoly if there is protectionism. Regulations, licensing, do not compete patents, etc.

delfinom 3y ago

>They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something) Ah yes, Canonical, land of people attempting to fork the Linux ecosystem and getting shot down by everyone and doubling down. Would be a perfect fit for Google.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

andsoitis 3y ago

> They should have tried to make a better desktop OS Desktop OS's are not the long term future of computing, is it? But they were astute in acquiring Android. Meanwhile, Microsoft thought that a mobile OS is just a desktop OS squished onto a smaller screen.

GeekyBear 3y ago

> I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively. I've always been shocked that Google didn't face antitrust action over using their internet video monopoly to kill Windows Phone. They wouldn't create a Youtube app for Windows Phone, nor would they allow Microsoft to create one themselves.

JustLurking2022 3y ago
I had a Windows phone and android simultaneously - I actually liked the UI on the windows phone but I think I may have been the only person on earth that did because I virtually never saw another one. From that perspective, I can understand choosing not to build for the platform.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  I can understand not wanting to build an app yourself, but when you hold a monopoly on internet video and you won't allow your platform competitors to build an app on their own dime, that really should have triggered antitrust action. I can remember Google taking similar actions to lock out Amazon's Echo Show. https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-youtube-amazon-echo-show https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-youtube-a... If anything, Google has been too aggressive.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

Is this really about AI and ChatGPT? Google search just sucks now. I actually get better results from Bing and Duck Duck Go. > then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop With their inferior products? Not a chance. Google's apps are so far away from even competing with Microsoft's it's not even funny. Google Sheets doesn't even have proper tables. I wouldn't even be surprised if they cancelled it.

Rastonbury 3y ago
The fact that big corps have moved to Gsuite always surprises me and credit to Google salespeople. But they will never meaningfully breach Office, people at Microsoft fight tooth and nail when renewals are up and Google is in the picture
- thebytefairy 3y ago
  As someone who's worked at both gsuite and office shops, I would pick gsuite every time. After the first place where I used gsuite I used to try to figure out which I'd have to use before applying somewhere new.
  - Rastonbury 3y ago
    Depends on use case, I regularly use sheets with 20k+ rows, experience is night and day

rchaud 3y ago

A Google desktop OS wasn't going to win against Windows in PC gaming compatibility. Nor was it going to displace MS Office + Active Directory at the enterprise level. With ChromeOS, they took the route available to them, which was to enter the school market and try to build something from there.

taylodl 3y ago

Google's whole raison d'être was internet computing - computing at scales never before seen. Think "BigFiles" and the original Google search. They were able to leverage that technology in creating AdSense, which is their huge money-maker. Google's challenge has been finding ways to monetize their internet compute technologies. But now that it's 25 years later and more and more people have internet-scale computing available to them it appears Google is losing their edge. What used to be their "special sauce" has now become a commodity. It's a story as old as business.

kccqzy 3y ago
Increasingly people don't need this kind of special sauce to run a big Internet service. Everything that's challenging has been outsourced to public clouds. Just pay more and those special sauce comes to you. Admittedly Google still has some special sauce left, but in my opinion those special sauce only improves efficiency; it doesn't enable one to do something that's impossible otherwise. (I've been reading about some public research reports about Google's special sauce: they range from special user space networking to new congestion control to custom TPUs etc.)
- taylodl 3y ago
  I'd say it another way - everything that's challenging has been commoditized and is available from your choice of public cloud providers. You've identified new special sauce opportunities for Google, the question is can these new opportunities generate as much revenue as they'd been enjoying?

hintymad 3y ago

> They should have tried to make a better desktop OS Wouldn't office suite be a better target? Everyone uses it. Lots of low hanging fruits. Easy to win the heart of geeks. Ample opportunities to integrate with other enterprise services.

wslh 3y ago

If Microsoft's 48-year history has shown anything, it is that they can produce subpar products, experience numerous failures, make poor investments and acquisitions, and even ruin products (e.g., Skype), yet they remain resilient and successful! As for Google, I am uncertain whether they were prepared for this competition because, firstly, the business terms offered by Microsoft might have been quite strategic, and secondly, the Google search engine has not experienced significant innovation or improvement since PageRank, at least from a user experience perspective rather than complexity. I will regale my descendants with stories of a time when I searched for something and found at least one relevant result among the top 20.

brokencode 3y ago
That to me is the big difference between Google and Microsoft. Microsoft is willing to slowly build on something for years before it goes anywhere. They maintain their products for incredible amounts of time, such as how IE11 was only killed off like a decade after its release. Google on the other hand is always chasing the next big thing. It just doesn’t have the institutional attention span to do anything really big. If a project isn’t an explosive hit right away, Google moves on to the next big idea.

ignoramous 3y ago

> ...Google Office for Desktop They did one better and made Chrome so good that its the OS for most, for all intents and purposes, now.

Macha 3y ago

What would a Google office for desktop do that the current Google docs doesn't? Even MS is moving office to being cloud based, so it's not clear business users value local document availability that much - rather the opposite, I've worked in places that like cloud services because locking out their data from a disgruntled or departed employee is one button away.

layer8 3y ago
There are worlds of difference between MS Office and Google Docs in terms of features and abilities. There’s actually a risk for MS to lose their edge by moving to the cloud with a reduced feature set.
- Macha 3y ago
  Would Google Docs have more features if they had to maintain more platforms? I'd expect the opposite.

SecretDreams 3y ago

Have people used BING lately? It's still not good - but maybe it will improve. Google search has just gotten worse and is more ad prone. It's still better, but not golden age google - not even close.

yusufnb 3y ago

Google did encroach. Google office/docs is much better than Microsoft. Chrome OS is a better OS for most non-tech jobs. The browser is the operating system for most people, and Chrome is leading in that. They won on mobile as well with Android. Google Workspace, in my opinion, is much better than Microsoft. It's their outdated search bringing everything else down it seems.

batiudrami 3y ago
Google Docs is not anywhere close to as powerful or as performant as Microsoft Office. I don’t really see how someone familiar with both forward suites could think that is the case.
- DangitBobby 3y ago
  Pretty much the only notable advantage MSO for my use is excel, which is better for "advanced" spreadsheet workloads. For collaborative work and 99% of documents and spreadsheets, Google docs is the superior option. I haven't opened a MS product in years and my life is better for it. Their Mac product lineup is particularly lackluster.

Haga 3y ago

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