10 ms·
This is so crazy. Google invented transformers which is the bases for all these models. How do they keep fumbling like this over and over. Google Docs created i
by DonnyV 3y ago
This is so crazy. Google invented transformers which is the bases for all these models. How do they keep fumbling like this over and over. Google Docs created in 2006! Microsoft is eating their lunch. Google creates the ability to change VM's in place and makes a fully automated datacenter. Amazon and Microsoft are killing them in the cloud. Google has been working on self driving longer than anyone. Tesla is catching up and will most likely beat them.
The amount of fumbles is monumental.
- bradhe 3y agoMicrosoft eating Google's lunch on documents is laughable at best. Not to mention it confuses the entire timeline of office productivity software??
- hot_gril 3y agoIs paid MS Teams is more or less common than paid GSuite? It's hard to find stats on this. GSuite is the better product IMO, but MS has a stronger b2b reputation, and anecdotally I hear more about people using Teams.
- UrineSqueegee 3y agoI worked at many companies in my times and all of them used teams except from one that used slack but all used MS products, none used googles.
- abustamam 3y agoDoes anyone use paid GSuite for anything other than docs/drive/Gmail ? In all companies I've worked at, we've used GSuite exclusively for those, and used slack/discord for chat, and zoom/discord for video/meetings. I know that MS Teams is a more full-featured product suite, but even at companies that used it, we still used Zoom for meetings.
- hot_gril 3y agoGSuite for calendar makes sense too. Chat sucks, and Meet would be decent if it weren't so laggy, but those are two things you can easily not use.
- seaucre 3y agoMy company uses Meet. It works great! I like it more than Zoom.
- tristanb 3y agozoom is horrible. Meet works for me.
- Tistron 3y agoI like meet too, but the inability to send messages to breakout rooms is quite annoying.
- hot_gril 3y agoIt's a lot better than it used to be. In 2020, universities that already had GSuite (which includes Meet) still paid to put their classes on Zoom. Personally I like Zoom more today, mostly because even my high-end laptop can struggle with Meet.
- seanhunter 3y agoCounterpoint: I take probably 3/4 of my meetings on Zoom and 1/4 on meet. So on any given day I'm probably doing at least 1 on meet. If I look back on any day at all the meetings with unaceptable audio lag or very degraded video quality? They are always all "meet". It is just hands-down worse when networks are unreliable. In addition meet insists I click on the same about 4 or 5 different "Got it" feature popups every single call, and every call also insists on asking me if I want to use Duet AI to make my background look shit which just adds to annoyance.
- b112 3y agoTeams will likely still be around in 20 years. I doubt gsuite will exist in 5... or even 1.
- hot_gril 3y agoGSuite has existed since 2006, so it's not like Google lacks focus on it.
- b112 3y agoThat's ancient by google metrics!!!
- WWLink 3y agoKinda. In 2006 they launched "Google Apps for your domain." The name quickly changed to "Google Apps" and then in 2016 it became "GSuite." In 2020 they changed the name to Google Workspace. And of course, in 2022 they tried to kick all of the free "Gsuite Legacy" users off the platform and make them pay for Google Workspace lol.
- bombcar 3y agoNobody pays for Teams, but everyone pays for Office, and if you get Teams for free with it ...
- olyjohn 3y agoThis is how it became so popular so fast. If they had charged for it, all those Teams users would still be using Zoom.
- WWLink 3y agoNot to mention it integrates with Azure365, which damn near certainly the IT department has already standardized on, feels comfortable with, and has been flooded with enough propaganda to believe anything else is massively less secure. Plus Teams has tons of knobs and buttons for managing what your users do with it... and companies love managing their employees lol. Sure, Teams is a steaming pile of crap to use day-to-day as a chat app, the search is slow and vague - and depending on policy, probably links you to messages that no longer exist in the archive lol. Oh you want to download message history? Nah gotta get an admin to do that bruh.
- hot_gril 3y agoI'm in one nonprofit org using MS 365 and Teams, and listening to the guy behind the original decision talk about that ecosystem, I think its popularity really does come from propaganda. I was almost convinced until I actually used it... what a piece of junk. It's ugly for me and borderline unusable for our nontechnical users. I'm in charge now and considering ditching it. The only saving grace is that members who can't deal with it are using local MS Office, which has some integrations with 365, thus making it kinda viable. But I feel like it's still a net negative.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- darthrupert 3y agoGsuite is clearly a lot better product than Office365. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see many institutions make the wrong choice here. I base about 50% of my choice of employer on what they choose in that area.
- addicted 3y agoGSuite is an awful product for an employer. If you have a problem there’s no one available to help you. On the MS side they will literally pull an engineer who is writing the code for the product you have a problem for to help resolve the issue if you’re large enough. The part you see in your browser isn’t the only part of the product a company has to buy. In fact, it’s not even the most expensive bit. If you see the most expensive plans for most SAAS products (ie the enterprise plans) almost the entire difference in costs is driven by support illustrating the importance and value of support. Google unfortunately is awful at this.
- w10-1 3y agoIsn't it always easier to learn from others' mistakes? Google has the problem that it's typically the first to encounter a problem, and it has the resources to approach it (from search), but the incentive to monetize it (to get away from depending entirely on search revenue). And, management.
- rurp 3y agoI don't know if that really excuses Google in this case because it's a productization problem. Google never tried to release a ChatGPT competitor until after OpenAI had. OpenAI has been wildly successful as the first mover, despite having to blaze some new product trails. Even after months of watching them and with near-infinite resources, Google is still struggling to catch up.
- hosh 3y agoOutside of outliers like gmail, Google didn’t get their success with product. The organization is set up for engineering to carry the day, funded by search. An AI product that makes search irrelevant is an existential threat, but I don’t think Google has the product DNA to pull off a replacement product for search themselves. I heard Google has been taken over by more business / management types, but it is still missing product as a core pillar.
- rtsil 3y agoConsiderng the number of messaging apps they tried to launch, if there's at least one thing that can be concluded, it's that it isn't easier to learn from their own mistakes.
- hot_gril 3y agoEngineer-driven company. Not enough top-down direction on the products. Too much self-perceived moral high ground. But lately they've been changing this.
- Slackwise 3y agoUhh, no, not really; quite the opposite in fact. Under Eric Schmidt they were engineer-driven, during the golden era of the 2000s. Nowadays they're MBA driven, which is why they had 4 different messaging apps from different product managers.
- hot_gril 3y agoLack of top-down direction is what allowed that situation. Microsoft is MBA-driven and usually has a coherent product lineup, including messaging. Also, "had." Google cleaned things up. They still sometimes do stuff just cause, but it's a lot less now. I still feel like Meet using laggy VP9 (vs H.264 like everyone else) is entirely due to engineer stubbornness.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI would say that Microsoft's craziness around buying Kin and Nokia, and Windows 8, RT edition, etc etc, was far more fundamental product misdirection than anything Google has ever done.
- hot_gril 3y agoMicrosoft failed to enter the mobile space, yeah. Google fumbled with the Nexus stuff, even though they succeeded with the Android software. But bigger picture, Microsoft was still able to diversify their revenue sources a lot while Google failed to do so.
- robertlagrant 3y agoThat's true, although Pixel seems good as a successor, but the big thing Microsoft did was use what they had to get into new markets. Procuring Azure is a good option for lots of companies because most companies' IT staff know AD and Microsoft in general, and Microsoft's cloud offers them a way to use the same (well, not the same, but it's too late by then) tools to manage their company IT. I'm not disagreeing with its success, but I do think they had a much simpler journey, as to my understanding a lot of it involved cloudifying their locked-in enterprise customers, rather than diversifying into new markets.
- _the_inflator 3y agoI say it again and again: sales, sales. Money is earned in enterprise domains. And this business is so totally different to Google in every way imaginable. Senior Managers love customer support, SLAs - Google loves automation. Two worlds collide.
- hot_gril 3y agoGoogle customer support says "Won't Fix [Skill Issue]"
- ASalazarMX 3y agoGoogle Workspace works through resellers, they train less people, and those people give the customer support instead. IMO Google's bad reputation comes from their public customer support.
- michaelt 3y agoIf you want the kind of support that, when there is a fault with the product, can get the fault fixed - then unfortunately Google Workspace's support is also trash. Good if you want someone else to google the error message for you though.
- rchaud 3y ago> IMO Google's bad reputation comes from their public customer support. Garbage in = garbage out. If Google cannot deign to assign internal resources and staffing towards providing first-party support for paid products, it's not a good choice over the competition. You're not going to beat the incumbent (Office 365) by skimping on customer service.
- mugivarra69 3y ago[flagged]
- sourcegrift 3y agoI was at MS in 2008 September and internally they had a very beautiful and well functioning Office web already (named differently, forgot the name but it wasn't sharepoint if I recall correctly, I think it had to do something with expense reports?) that would put Google Docs to shame today. They just didn't want to cannibalize their own product.
- vitorgrs 3y agoMicrosoft demoed Office Web Apps in 2008 L.A PDC it seems: https://www.wired.com/2008/10/pdc-2008-look-out-google-docs-here-comes-ms-office-for-the-web/ https://www.wired.com/2008/10/pdc-2008-look-out-google-docs-...
- flakiness 3y agoDon't forget they also invented XHR (aka fetch) in 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest
- marcusjt 3y agoKind of, using it became known as "AJAX" and it took many many years (and the addition of promises to JS) before the more sophisticated "Fetch API" became available. Even then usage of AJAX declined rather slowly as it was so established, and indeed even now it's still used by many websites!
- fieldcny 3y agoI assume you mean the decline in the use of the term AJAX as it was now just the standard and you don’t need to use that to describe your site or tool as being capable of being highly interactive and dynamic vs just static. Before the invention of the xmlhttprequest there was so little you could do with JS most dynamic content was some version of shifty tricks with iframes or img tags or anything that could trigger the browser to make a server request to a url that you could generate dynamically. Fetch was the formalization of the xmlhttprequest (hence the use of xhr as the name of the request type ). Jquery wrapped it really nicely and essentially popularized (they may have invented async js leveraging callbacks and the like), the creation of promises was basically the formalization and standardization of this. So AJAX itself is in fact used almost in the entire totality of the web, the term has become irrelevant given the absolute domination of the technology.
- rurp 3y agoWhile it is crazy, it's not too surprising. Google has become as notorious for product ineptitude as they have been for technical prowess. Dominating the fundamental research for GenAI but face planting on the resulting consumer products is right in line with the company that built Stadia, GMail/Inbox, and 17 different chat apps.
- ren_engineer 3y ago>Google Docs created in 2006 tech was based on an acquired company, Google just abused their search monopoly to make it more popular(same thing they did with YT). This has been the strategy for every service they've ever made, Google really hasn't launched a decent in-house product since Gmail and even that was grown using their search monopoly as free advertising >Google Docs originated from Writely, a web-based word processor created by the software company Upstartle and launched in August 2005
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Google really hasn't launched a decent in-house product since Gmail What about Chrome? And Chromebooks?
- holoduke 3y agoThey are an ads company. Focus is never on "core" products.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lern_too_spel 3y agoI was with you until the Tesla hot take. I'd bet dollars to donuts that Tesla doesn't get to level 4 by the end of the decade. Waymo is already there.
- bendbro 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hot_gril 3y agoI agree, but I also bet Waymo doesn't exist by the end of the decade. Not just because it's Google but because it's hard to profit from.
- smat 3y agoI could see that in the coming years the value of Waymo for Google is not actually in collecting revenue from transportation fees but to collect multi modal data to feed into its models. The amount of data that is collected by these cars is massive.
- renegade-otter 3y agoGoogle doesn't know how to do anything else. A product requires commitment, it requires grind. That 10% is the most critical one, and Google persistently refuses to push products across the finish line, just giving up on them and adding to the infamous Google Product Graveyard. Honestly, what is the point? They could just maintain the core search/ads and not pay billions of dollars for tens of thousands of expensive engineers who have to go through a bullshit interview process and achieve nothing.
- lumost 3y agoIf they tried to focus on ads, then they wouldn’t have the talent to support the business. They probably don’t need 17 chat apps - but they can’t start saying no without having other problems.
- Shorel 3y agoThey only hire some talent to prevent other companies to hire them. It's a way to strangle the competition. But also not good for the industry in general.
- vitorgrs 3y agoSundar Pichai should have been out of Google long ago.
- rhuru 3y agoThere is little to no inertia inside google to build and invent stuff. But there is a massive bloat to ship stuff.
- impulser_ 3y agoYou bring up fumbles, but they still have the more products with more than a billion users than any company in the world. This is what Google has always cared about. Bring application to the billions of users. People are forgetting Google is the most profitable AI company in the world right now. All of their products use ML and AI. So who is losing? The goal of Gemini isn't to build a chatbot like ChatGPT despite Google having Bard. The goal for Gemini is to integrate it into those 10 products they have with a billion users.
- dmix 3y agoThis is like critiquing Disney for putting out garbage and then defending them because dummies keep giving them money regardless of quality. Having standards and expectations of greatness is a good thing and the last thing you want is for mediocrity to become acceptable in society.
- x0x0 3y agoSure, but I think Google's commanding marketshare is more at risk than it has been in a long time due to their fumbles in the AI space.
- rchaud 3y ago> All of their products use ML and AI. Is that supposed to be a vote of confidence for the current state of Google search?
- acdha 3y ago> People are forgetting Google is the most profitable AI company in the world right now. All of their products use ML and AI. > So who is losing? The people who use their products, which are worse than they’ve been in decades? The people who make the content Google now displays without attribution on search results?
- Uptrenda 3y agoBig companies are where innovation goes to die.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoIt's reassuring that the biggest tech company doesn't automatically make the best tech. If it were guaranteed that Google's resources would automatically trump any startup in the AI field, then it would likely predict a guaranteed dominance of incumbents and consolidation of power in the AI space.
- suslik 3y ago> Microsoft is eating their lunch. Well, that is trully shocking.
- dbish 3y agoAlso hard to say it’s really true. OpenAI is certainly, is Microsoft without OpenAI’s tech eating Google’s lunch?
- maroonblazer 3y agoGiven MSFT's level of investment in OpenAI, and all the benefits that accrue from it, they're one and the same.
- latency-guy2 3y agoIt is yet to be seen if MSFT has actually gained a benefit. Maybe from marketing perspective it has insane potential to print big bucks, but it is a bit too soon to announce that the efforts to deliver Copilot (all tools+agents) far and wide was/is successful. We'll get a definitive answer in a few years. Til then, OpenAI benefits from the $ value from their end of products, MSFT eats the compute costs, but also gets a stock bump.
- asylteltine 3y agoI can tell you exactly why. It’s because they have a separate vp and org for all these different products like search, maps, etc. none of them talk to each other and they all compete for promotions. There is no one shot caller same thing with gcp. Google does not know products.
- theGnuMe 3y agoA lot of companies have this structure. You have the Doritos line, the Pepsi line for example etc… maybe you find some common synergies but it’s not unusual. What would the ideal setup in your opinion?
- paxys 3y ago> Google Docs created in 2006 Word and Excel have been dominant since the early 1980s. Google has never had a real shot in the space.
- acheron 3y agoYou mean 1990s? I don't think Word and Excel even existed until the late 80s, and nobody[0] used them until Windows 3.1. [0] yes, not literally nobody. I know about the Windows 2.0 Excel or whatever, but the user base compared to WordPerfect or 1-2-3 was tiny up until MS was able to start driving them out by leveraging Windows in the early-mid 90s.
- kamaal 3y ago>>Google Docs created in 2006! Microsoft is eating their lunch. Of all the things, this. I use both Google and Microsoft office products. One thing that strikes you is just how feature rich Microsoft products are. Google doesn't look like is serious about making money. I squarely blame rockstar product managers and OKRs for this. Not everything can be a 1000% profitable product built in the next quarter. A lot of things require small continuous improvement and care over years.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoMicrosoft’s killer product is Excel. I didn’t realize how powerful it was until I saw an expert use it. There are entire billion dollar organisations that would collapse without Excel.
- qingcharles 3y agoI demo'd a full browser office suite in 1998 called Office Wherever (o-w.com). It used Java applets to do a lot of the more tricky functions. Shopped it around VCs. Got laughed out of all the meetings. "Companies storing their documents on the Internet?! You're out of your mind!"
- nar001 3y agoIm curious if the code would be available somewhere? I have to admit I'm curious how it worked!
- qingcharles 3y agoLong lost! Unless Internet Archive has a copy of the site? Never checked! The main domain was officewherever.com.
- Tommah 3y agoNetscape had a feature called LiveConnect that allowed interaction between Java and JavaScript. See http://medialab.di.unipi.it/web/doc/JavaScriptGuide/livecon.htm http://medialab.di.unipi.it/web/doc/JavaScriptGuide/livecon.... for some examples of how it worked. Even though AJAX wasn't available yet in 1998, I think you could have used LiveConnect to achieve the same thing. Java applets had the ability to make HTTP requests to the originating host (the host that served the applet to the browser).
- renegade-otter 3y agoSome things are just too ahead of their times. Globe dot com was basically Facebook, but the critical mass wasn't there. Nor were the smartphones.
- overconfident59 3y agoI agreed until the last bit. Waymo is making continuous progress and is years ahead of everyone else. Tesla is not catching up and won't beat anyone. Tesla plateaued years ago and has no clue how to improve further. Their Partial Self Driving app has never been anywhere near reliable.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoThe difference seems to be the top leadership. Nadella is an all time great CEO. Pichai is an uninspired MBA-type.
- addicted 3y agoNadella is as much of an MBA type as Pichai. Their education and career paths are incredibly similar. The difference is Nadella is a good CEO and Pichai isn’t. Part of it could also be a result of circumstance. Nadella came at a time when MS was foundering and he had to make what appeared to be fairly obvious decisions (pivot to cloud…he was literally picked because of this, and reducing dependence on Windows…which was an obvious necessary step for the pivot to cloud). Pichai OTOH was selected to run Google when it was already doing pretty well. His biggest mandate was likely to not upset the Apple cart. If roles were reversed, I suspect Nadella would still have been more successful than Pichai, but you never know. I’d Nadella introduction to the CEO job was to keep things going as they were, and Pichai’s was to change the entire direction of the company, maybe a decade later Pichai would have been the aggressive decision maker whereas Nadella would have been the overly cautious guy making canned demos.
- onion2k 3y agoNone of that matters. They'll still make heaps of profit long into the future unless someone beats them in Search or Ads. AI is a threat there, but it'd require an AI company to transform the culture of Internet use to stop people 'Googling', and that will require two things: something significantly better than Google Search that's worth switching to, and a company that is willing to reject whatever offer Google makes to buy it. Neither is very likely.
- mejutoco 3y agoI would love to see internal data on volume of search at google. Depending on the interpretation of them chatGPT can meet both of your requirements. Personally, I still search instead of chatGPT mostly, but I have seen other users chatGPT more and more. Also "interesting" to see the if results being SEO spam generated using AI will keep seo search viable.
- Shorel 3y agoIt's the curse of the golden goose. They can't do anything that threatens their main income. They are tied to ads and ads technology, and can't do anything about it. Microsoft had a crisis and that drives focus. Google... they probably mistreat their good employees if they don't work on ads.
- larodi 3y agoErrr sorry what’s the innovation of google docs exactly ? Being able to write simultaneously with somebody else? Ok, so this is what it takes for a top notch docs app to exist? Microsoft been developing this product for ages, Google tried to steal the show, although had little to no experience in producing and marketing office apps… Besides collaborative reuniting is a no feature and there is much more important stuff than this for a word processor to be useful.
- barfingclouds 3y agoTesla will not beat them at self driving simply due to hardware at the very least
- mmanfrin 3y ago> Google has been working on self driving longer than anyone. Tesla is catching up and will most likely beat them. I agree with your general post but I disagree with this. Tesla's FSD is so far behind Google it's almost negligent on the part of Tesla despite having so much more data.