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Google Docs has been going strong for almost 2 decades, longer than the iPhone. NotebookLM is another way to read your Google Docs, with LLM assistance. If Note

Google Docs has been going strong for almost 2 decades, longer than the iPhone. NotebookLM is another way to read your Google Docs, with LLM assistance. If NotebookLM gets killed off, you still have your Google Docs and can read them with your eyeballs or some other LLM. HN loves to shit on Google for their loose trail-and-error approach to product releases, but Google Docs is evidently not one of those loose products.

thefourthchime 3y ago
I think everybody used to love Google. Around 2012, they were just making one hit after another. Google Docs, Google Maps, Gmail, they revolutionized search! What have they done in the last 10 years? Jack shit, except, launch a bunch of things that might have been cool, but then just killed it. How many messenger apps have they had? Google Stadia? I mean, come on, the list is incredible.
- pphysch 3y ago
  The idea of "stanning/hating" a megacorporation, one of the most powerful entities on the planet, is a priori absurd in the vein of Bryan Cantrill's "don't anthropomorphize Oracle". Apple spends billions of dollars promoting its global brand as a culture and way of life; this does not mean we need to apply this framework to other brands. Spewing negativity (or positivity) about Google in this context is a self-own, because it signals that you have fallen for the "brand loyalty" cantrip.
  - Angostura 3y ago
    Why are you replying to a comment about the lack of recent innovation at Google and product positioning missteps with a comment talking about 'stanning/hating. That's not what the commmenter is doing.
    - pphysch 3y ago
      Reread the first sentence of that comment. Besides, this discussion isn't about "innovation", it's about Google killing products. Google is possibly the most innovative tech megacorporation precisely because of their experimental approach to product releases.
JimDabell 3y ago
> Google Docs has been going strong for almost 2 decades I have to disagree here. There have been long stretches of time where it’s appeared to be a mothballed project with virtually no user-visible changes happening to it. Here’s the official changelog: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9228272 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9228272 Barely anything happened mid 2019–2021. It looked like a product in maintenance mode for years. Take July 2019 to July 2020, for instance. In over a year, the only changes of note were: editing headers and footers, an accessibility fix, word count, page numbers, and dark mode on Android. Does that sound like a flagship product from a trillion dollar multinational “going strong”? Or does it sound like a paralysed project with a few interns keeping things ticking over? And it was worse in the times before that changelog started. That’s hardly “going strong”, that’s surviving on life support. Sure, they never actually killed it and they restarted development once alternatives like Notion started becoming popular, but Google have completely lost interest in Google Docs before and they could do it again – they don’t have the two decade track record you are making them out to have.
- mattzito 3y ago
  For whatever its worth, I worked near docs during that time, and that support note elides a lot of the launches that happened. The big focus during that time was on Office compatibility, and so there were a lot of investment in things that were not end-user visible, but allowed for better coexistence in mixed environments. A massive launch in terms of impact and usage was the ability to directly edit word documents in docs instead of converting. This also extended to sheets and slides, and so was a major focus. So - totally agree that there were not a lot of shiny user-facing features during that time, but there was a huge engineering investment going on based on a particular strategy that just didn't show itself sirectly in the UI.
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    Fair enough. But from an end-user perspective, I’ve been in multiple conversations where a topic was “can anybody remember the last time Google Docs launched a new feature?” and everybody was completely stumped and nobody could think of a single thing launched in years. When the company in question is Google that’s a very strong signal not to rely on that product being around much longer, which is why the state of Google Docs has been so confusing – clearly lost all momentum yet surprisingly not killed.
noduerme 3y ago
One major difference being that Google does not read or incorporate the contents of your docs (or at least, we hope not). Once your docs are hooked up to an LLM, consider them both training data and readable to whatever minions are training the AI.

thefourthchime 3y ago

I think everybody used to love Google. Around 2012, they were just making one hit after another. Google Docs, Google Maps, Gmail, they revolutionized search! What have they done in the last 10 years? Jack shit, except, launch a bunch of things that might have been cool, but then just killed it. How many messenger apps have they had? Google Stadia? I mean, come on, the list is incredible.

pphysch 3y ago
The idea of "stanning/hating" a megacorporation, one of the most powerful entities on the planet, is a priori absurd in the vein of Bryan Cantrill's "don't anthropomorphize Oracle". Apple spends billions of dollars promoting its global brand as a culture and way of life; this does not mean we need to apply this framework to other brands. Spewing negativity (or positivity) about Google in this context is a self-own, because it signals that you have fallen for the "brand loyalty" cantrip.
- Angostura 3y ago
  Why are you replying to a comment about the lack of recent innovation at Google and product positioning missteps with a comment talking about 'stanning/hating. That's not what the commmenter is doing.
  - pphysch 3y ago
    Reread the first sentence of that comment. Besides, this discussion isn't about "innovation", it's about Google killing products. Google is possibly the most innovative tech megacorporation precisely because of their experimental approach to product releases.

JimDabell 3y ago

> Google Docs has been going strong for almost 2 decades I have to disagree here. There have been long stretches of time where it’s appeared to be a mothballed project with virtually no user-visible changes happening to it. Here’s the official changelog: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9228272 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9228272 Barely anything happened mid 2019–2021. It looked like a product in maintenance mode for years. Take July 2019 to July 2020, for instance. In over a year, the only changes of note were: editing headers and footers, an accessibility fix, word count, page numbers, and dark mode on Android. Does that sound like a flagship product from a trillion dollar multinational “going strong”? Or does it sound like a paralysed project with a few interns keeping things ticking over? And it was worse in the times before that changelog started. That’s hardly “going strong”, that’s surviving on life support. Sure, they never actually killed it and they restarted development once alternatives like Notion started becoming popular, but Google have completely lost interest in Google Docs before and they could do it again – they don’t have the two decade track record you are making them out to have.

mattzito 3y ago
For whatever its worth, I worked near docs during that time, and that support note elides a lot of the launches that happened. The big focus during that time was on Office compatibility, and so there were a lot of investment in things that were not end-user visible, but allowed for better coexistence in mixed environments. A massive launch in terms of impact and usage was the ability to directly edit word documents in docs instead of converting. This also extended to sheets and slides, and so was a major focus. So - totally agree that there were not a lot of shiny user-facing features during that time, but there was a huge engineering investment going on based on a particular strategy that just didn't show itself sirectly in the UI.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  Fair enough. But from an end-user perspective, I’ve been in multiple conversations where a topic was “can anybody remember the last time Google Docs launched a new feature?” and everybody was completely stumped and nobody could think of a single thing launched in years. When the company in question is Google that’s a very strong signal not to rely on that product being around much longer, which is why the state of Google Docs has been so confusing – clearly lost all momentum yet surprisingly not killed.

noduerme 3y ago

One major difference being that Google does not read or incorporate the contents of your docs (or at least, we hope not). Once your docs are hooked up to an LLM, consider them both training data and readable to whatever minions are training the AI.