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The team behind Takeout genuinely care about making it easy to export and transfer your data out of Google. The problem is that team doesn't control any of the
by cloudking 2y ago
The team behind Takeout genuinely care about making it easy to export and transfer your data out of Google. The problem is that team doesn't control any of the underlying services and resources that Takeout needs to pull data from. Every product at Google is run by a separate team, and essentially is a separate business unit within Google, with their own resources and priorities. Making sure that their products work reliably with Takeout is not a high priority for most teams, integrating is more of a compliance checkbox, and once it's "done" they will move engineering resources onto other features. That's why Takeout can be unreliable.
- dmix 2y agoWhat do you think the implications of this are on Google's AI strategy? Not so much this particular data but the structure of Google as isolated units.
- voiceblue 2y agoAI is a top priority company-wide at Google right now, so it’s relatively easy to get a ball rolling.
- lolinder 2y agoI'd be less concerned about them getting a ball rolling than them getting one ball rolling in one direction. If AI goes anything like most things Google then in short order I expect them to have 2-3 different AI strategies that are all in conflict with each other.
- voiceblue 2y agoMore rolling balls means more wins and more promotions all around!
- cloudking 2y agoI think this problem exists for any feature that needs to span multiple Google products, the organizational structure inherently makes it difficult for these features to be reliable and successful. Regarding the AI strategy, you can see it already causing challenges as each team is integrating Gemini technology into their products separately, instead of being a cohesive top-down vision and strategy. It's why Gemini can't access data from all the Google products, and each product that does support it has it's own integration. I will caveat that though, I am bullish on Google and AI in general given the incredible talent and vast amount of data Google has access to. I think eventually they will make a technological breakthrough that puts them back in the leader position - they had it with transformers and just didn't know how to turn it into a product.
- CuriouslyC 2y agoGoogle has shown that they lack product vision and a cohesive strategy. The engineering is top notch though, and the GCP hugging face/AI training integration is for real, if they can build community trust GCP will absolutely eat AWSs lunch as AI apps proliferate. As for a breakthrough to leadership, Demis' approach of using successively more complex video game environments to develop AGI is absolutely the right path, so I wouldn't be surprised if DeepMind generates a prototype "AGI" first, but I would be VERY surprised if goog successfully capitalized on that.
- tomcam 2y agoI tried to use GCP for about 10 years and never found it to be robust enough for my business. I enjoyed it far more than AWS
- CuriouslyC 2y agoGKE and Cloud Run are very robust at this point, and I consider them best in class. Cloud SQL is fairly mature but I still prefer AWS RDS.
- 23B1 2y agoSo what you're saying is, Google's own internal structural incompetence means they cannot be trusted with data of any type. Huh!
- arp242 2y agoAny organisation of this size with so many different products will have these kind of problems. This is not really a "Google problem". That's probably a good reason to avoid organisations of these sizes unless you have a good reason not to, but ... that applies to any organisation of comparable size.
- benterix 2y agoI agree to some extent only. Any big organization faces this issue, so you're right this is not just Google problem. However, they way they approach it varies considerably, and I'd expect Google engineers to address it in a way that minimizes problems resulting from, say, changes in product A causing problems in product B. I'd bet some work on that has already been done because these folks aren't stupid but apparently that's not enough.
- 23B1 2y agobandwagon fallacy
- DaoVeles 2y agoIt is a shame it works like this. For any service my first questions is "How easy is it to get out?"
- bentcorner 2y agoI agree, IMO it's this kind of integration that really allows products from organizations to feel like a complete offering. Some companies do this really well and some don't. This is where company leadership can make a real difference.
- Waterluvian 2y agoI can only imagine the office politics going on when the Takeout team has to beg, borrow, and steal access, docs, etc.
- Flimm 2y agoMy issue with Google Takeout is that it is very difficult to download the generated archives on a normal Internet connection. If a download gets interrupted for any reason, I cannot resume the download, I have to re-enter my Google credentials and start again. It can take days to finish downloading a 10GB download, as I constantly monitor the downloads, restart them and re-enter connections. That would take me a couple of hours using BitTorrent, with no manual interventions required. This problem cannot be blamed on other teams within Google.
- Dah00n 2y agoWhat connection are you downloading over? It sounds very annoying.
- bmacho 2y agoI am almost sure that downloads are resumable using wget. I'll probably check it in the following days
- jimbobthrowawy 2y agoWeb browsers' and wget use the same HTTP features for resuming downloads (range-requests) so if it works in one it should work in the other. I've never had enough data in a google takeout that it would fail partway though.
- bmacho 2y agoIn my experience web browsers don't use range requests for resuming downloads, but just start downloads over. Or at least I don't know how to make them resume.
- kwanbix 2y agoIf they are, they failed miserably. For once, there is no way to use a download manager.