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> Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership. I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15
by panarchy 2y ago
> Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.
I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.
Search peaked in like 2009
Maps has only become slower and less informative (I remember when it use to actually display everything that was in a location and not just the popular/paid for stuff) since 2009
Google Docs was incredibly impressive... in 2006 and now almost 20 years later there's been a few QoL improvements, but nothing wow worthy.
And it seems everything else they've done has been shuttered and/or wasn't all that innovative in the first place and usually just trying to copy someone else work but in an uninspired way.
- viraptor 2y ago> can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years Android is getting genuinely better. Also AndroidAuto.
- askvictor 2y agoIf, by better, you mean more locked down, and with incremental tweaks, sure. I would much rather have Android from 5 years ago, and the ability to make it work how I want, than what there is now.
- viraptor 2y agoYou still can have seen Android from 5 years ago experience. There's lots of custom ROMs for that. On the other hand, for an average person, I believe Android is better today in most ways.
- Eavolution 2y agoThey exist but I can't use them because I need my bank apps to work, and magisk can only trick some of them.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- askvictor 2y agoMost of the 'new' features in Android over the past 5 years have been available in custom ROMs during that entire time. While there are, indeed, minor improvements for the average user, it's been very minor, and leaves you wondering why they didn't have it in the first place (or it's exclusive to Pixel or some shit like that). And the average person won't even notice most of the new features/improvements; perhaps the biggest one is the camera, and that's all done in hardware or AI these days, which is not Android per-se than a photography app (which, again, is usually a Pixel exclusive)
- tim333 2y agoI don't know about deep level impressive but I'm finding the new Google Lens thing built recently into Chrome pretty cool and useful. You click it and highlight part of the page and then it figures what the image is or ocr's text in it and optional translates or searches it. I use it multiple times per day. Also just being able to do that was a bit sci-fi 15 years ago. Deep level impressive but maybe just by a company owned by Google is the Deepmind stuff like AlphaFold which recently got a nobel prize and AlphaGo and MuZero. Also you may have heard of the chatgpt/llm stuff that's trendy now, all based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning_architecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning_arc...
- Uhhrrr 2y ago+1 for Lens - It can translate manga in near-real time.
- franze 2y agoGoogle Photos
- dageshi 2y agoGoogle photos is awesome. I genuinely love it, I've been uploading my old travel photos to it and every few days my phone reminds me of some old memories.
- viraptor 2y agoHas anything serious changed about photos in the last 15 years? I've used it before then and can't really think of anything apart from embedding search and random reminders. But those are really small features.
- dmoy 2y agoWell Google photos wasn't released 10 years ago, so ... that at least? Unless you're thinking of Picasa, which is a whole different conversation lol
- jazzyjackson 2y agoI mean, afaik the standout feature of Picasa was shared web albums where you could invite people to add photos and permissions were managed via Google accounts, so, it's easy to confuse the two. From memory the only thing that changed when moving from Picasa to Photos was that I no longer had a desktop app where to keep photos on disk + Picasa had a neat map of geolocations (maybe Photos caught up or can you still not view photos on a map? I know apple does this, I just use ACDSee now and keep it offline) Sunsetting blog from 2016 for good measure: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html?m=1 http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-pica...
- viraptor 2y agoYeah, I'm treating Picassa as Photos 1.0. Apart from the stand-alone app it's basically a continuation with data migrated by default.
- tensor 2y agoHard disagree, I used Android for years but after they removed feature after feature that I found useful, and replaced them with features that shovelled ads at me, I finally gave up and switch to iOS. I think the last straw was when I was forced to replace the stock launcher just to avoid the built in unblockable google search ads. That made me consider why I bothered with Google at all anymore if all I do is hacks to work around their crappy ad filled UI.
- jasonvorhe 2y agoYou mean the Google sidebar in the Pixel launcher with Google News that replaced Google Now? Yeah, that was awful. But you could disable it in either the launcher settings or the Google app itself. I'm glad I'm on GrapheneOS now.
- mbarr 2y agoI recommend Microsoft's Launcher, it's simple and gets out of your way. Similarly, Edge's search widget just launches a browser and executes your search. This really should be the stock behaviour that Google should provide.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoThe number one feature I use Google Assistant for (and probably most people's most common usage) is to say "Hey google, set a timer for X minutes". If I dare do anything else with my phone during it's reply of "OK, five minutes, starting now" I risk the timer just... disappearing. If I can't count on it for one of the most commonly used tasks for phones I have zero faith for other things and don't even bother to figure out how to use it as more than an internet access terminal/music player.
- sabbaticaldev 2y ago> Android is getting genuinely better. that’s really something you don’t read often
- lancesells 2y agoThey bought that though.
- hulitu 2y ago> Android is getting genuinely better At what ? Stealing user data ? They are still not able to arrange some widgets on the screen and to underestand that, if an app does not have microphone permission, you don't need a bloody microphone widget on the screen.
- asah 2y ago[flagged]
- saghm 2y agoSome of that stuff is impressive, but I think you might be stretching a bit with lyrics and calculator. They're nice quality of life improvements, but I don't think I'd classify them as "impressive".
- askvictor 2y agoDocs and Sheets are still so much better than Word and Excel, except that there doesn't seem to be a way to, from the desktop, launch a .csv into Sheets (or .doc into Word). Though I think that, for every minor improvement, I could name a regression or product shut-down.
- sirjaz 2y agoDocs and Sheets would only be impressive if they actually released a native desktop app for MacOS and Windows
- qwerpy 2y agoMaps may have had lots of improvements but they keep relentlessly cramming more and more ads and sponsored content into it. I now actively avoid using it as much as possible. Which is directly relevant to the topic being discussed here. Engineers work hard to make real improvements but the product as a whole is sabotaged with the never ending pressure to monetize more.
- mksreddy 2y agoGoogle photos is an Amazing product.
- stocknoob 2y agohttps://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/press-release/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/press-relea...
- jebarker 2y agoI'm guessing lots of people would argue Google doesn't really get credit for that.
- pimlottc 2y agoGoogle Docs has gotten much slower now that they render everything in a canvas [0]. It’s fine for some things but for large docs it’s painful. 0: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Based-Rendering-Update.html?m=1 https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...
- crazygringo 2y agoI haven't noticed any slowdown at all, and it wouldn't depend on the document size anyways. In fact, I remember Docs slowing down on 30-page files a decade ago, whereas now it handles 100 pages just as fast as 1. Only the visible portion of the document is rendered (previously in HTML, now in Canvas). Everything before/after is just the document data. Maybe you started working on longer docs coincidentally around the same time Docs switched to canvas?
- FridgeSeal 2y agoMy “favourite” part about google docs is where if you scroll marginally faster than glacial, large sections of the page just give up and disappear. You then have to wait for docs glacial performance to catch up and re-render things again. It’s genuinely garbage and the “live collaboration” features go unused most of the time.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- N3Xxus_6 2y agoThey invented the transformer architecture that powers GPT and other llms.
- manquer 2y agoBell labs and Xerox PARC did great impactful work long after their parent companies were relevant and still do . The fact Google did the initial work on transformers but only OpenAI was able to productize is an indictment of their stagnation more than an achievement.
- gjvc 2y agoBell Labs and Xerox PARC were great improvements on their successors.
- dageshi 2y agoOr they recognised the fundamental problem which is that LLM's will kill the motivation for people to upload new information to feed the LLM's with. If websites can't earn a living through ads because LLM's don't send them any traffic anymore, where do the LLM's ingest new information from? The web continues to deteriorate because of this and nobody has solved this problem.
- pfannkuchen 2y agoI’m pretty sure they were just terrified of the PR impact of another “humans classified as gorillas” type incident.
- mu53 2y agoAnd they ended up with "put elmers glue on pizza" type incident. AI is messy
- lazide 2y agoIt’s fundamental, IMO. LLMs have to have something ‘true’ (or at least statistically probable) to validate against for training. Taking the output from it and feeding it back into itself is, essentially, an Ouroboros. Or like locking a human in solitary. The more/longer it happens, the more deranged it’s going to get.
- shepherdjerred 2y agoYouTube, Google Maps, Google Photos, Android, Gemini, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Google Chrome, Go, Bazel, Google Fiber, Google Fi
- bigfatkitten 2y agoThey've been enshittifying YouTube since they bought it, and Maps is following the same road. Gemini is Google saying "look at me, I can jump on the AI bandwagon too." Android has had a bunch of facelifts, but from a user perspective isn't much different to what it was a decade ago. Same for Google Photos. Google Fiber is dead and all but buried. Google Fi is just another MVNO.
- shepherdjerred 2y agoI won’t comment on Google ruining products, only that they have produced impressive things in the last 15 years.
- bigfatkitten 2y agoThey have, but those things are almost all incidental to their products.
- araes 2y agoI think you may have rose tinted glasses on historical Youtube. Youtube used to be a wasteland of horrible insulting comments closer to 4chan in politeness and quality. Near constant spammy meanness. Youtube has issues, yet when the Baltimore bridge collapsed, the live view on the bridge was almost constantly polite, curious, and respectful commentary. The text summaries are actually a nice change so that if you don't want to sit through some annoying drawn out video, that often ends up using a robot voice anyways, you can just read the text summary. A feature that I was personally interested in a long time ago when almost every article became a video instead. Same reason https://neuters.de/ https://neuters.de/ is one of the best ways to read Reuters News. Part of the issue with Youtube is not Youtube specifically, it's humanity. A lot of the 90% is annoying spammy BS, and it's difficult to filter away the constant "first post", "you so hot girl", "me too", "like like", "rofl wtf bbq" nonsense. Part of what ended up making FB almost unreadable. Even small town groups are deluges of spammy, copypasta, upvote trolling. Scrolled through Youtube front page to find a "random" video and landed on a Half Life 2 documentary. Comments were either polite, informative, or opinion without being especially flamebait. There's a lot of the world wide web that's not nearly such high quality these days. The others issues would probably be multiple pages of commentary, having tried to be an Android developer. "The function you're searching for is deprecated, move to ... a function that is also deprecated."
- ffsm8 2y ago> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years. I find that hard to fathom. I think what you meant to say is "an impressive right that actually got made into a b2c product". Otherwise you'd have to ignore that they kinda pioneered llms, until OpenAI poached their tech, polished into a (for a consumer) breathtakingly functional "AI" They also kept researching self driving via weymo etc On the business side they've also made a significant mark on the programming world via k8s, golang and angular2 among other things But I'd completely agree with the sentiment that they completely dropped the ball wrt their original target demographic. Beyond the improvements to android, I can't really think of anything since 2010 either that really improved things.
- hulitu 2y ago> They also kept researching self driving via weymo etc A lot of other companies do this. Nothing special about Google.
- beaugunderson 2y ago> Maps has only become slower and less informative (I remember when it use to actually display everything that was in a location and not just the popular/paid for stuff) since 2009 "Ground Truth" is truly dead... we've been to 25 states in the last year and the speed limits displayed in Maps were correct about 10% of the time.
- pixl97 2y agoEh, were you going to? If say it's accurate about 80% of the time and with in 10mph all of the time. About the only time it gets really confusing is when you're on stacked highways/interchanges.
- beaugunderson 2y agoMaybe in or near a large city… In the vast majority of the country it’s not even close (55 in a 25 recently, many hundreds of miles where it won’t even show a speed limit even on major freeways in Florida)
- yencabulator 2y agoAreas with multi-million populations get updated maybe every few months, and might import and manually fix up data from the official sources, e.g. city planning. Areas with tens of thousands of residents get updated on a multi-year schedule; a year-long construction related speed drop might remain in place for years after the construction ends. Truly remote areas are batch imported from other systems, traced out from satellite images, or some such. Mountain and desert roads are rough suggestions at best. This seems to have always been true of Google Maps.
- adrianmsmith 2y agoArguably Google Docs has done the best. It hasn't changed much, whereas all the other things you mentioned have got significantly worse.
- dijit 2y agoMeet is also an outlier. It doesnt have all the features in the world but it has some technically impressive ones, least of all the “I can tell you’re all in a meeting room, so I am going to selectively increase the audio where people are speaking and prevent echo from all the speakers”. I’d love more love for screen sharing, but meet is the only product I see that is getting materially better over time.
- bengale 2y agoMeet is actually surprisingly brilliant tbh.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bayindirh 2y ago> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years. Meet team ported advanced audio processing, environmental noise cancelling and camera effects to Firefox, and they work really well. It's not impressive of course, but interesting enough to notice.
- everfrustrated 2y agoGlad to hear this has changed. For many years Meet did everything they could to detect Firefox and block running on it, even when Firefox supported the underlying standards/apis.
- bigfatkitten 2y ago> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years. When you hire an ex McKinsey CEO and get the guy who destroyed Yahoo Search to run your search business, this is what happens.
- ksec 2y agoSorry who is that or am I missing something here?
- matchamatcha 2y agoI think they're talking about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
- nitwit005 2y ago> Google Docs was incredibly impressive... in 2006 and now almost 20 years later there's been a few QoL improvements, but nothing wow worthy. Give the product owner a raise then. Any time Microsoft tries to radically change Office, everyone just gets annoyed, and searches like "where is the print button in excel?" will suddenly skyrocket for a month or two.
- wibblewobble125 2y agoDocs came from a series of acquisitions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs#History
- nitwit005 2y agoThat doesn't appear to relate to my statement. They can change it after the acquisition.
- crazygringo 2y ago> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years. They invented the technology behind LLM's. So whether you use Gemini or ChatGPT, that was pretty impressive. Also, Waymo is crazy impressive. If you're considering Alphabet as a whole (which there's no reason not to, it's all under the same stock ticker). Those are two industry-changing things, so I think Google's doing OK.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deanCommie 2y agoA perfect example that illustrates the problem. The difference to me between whether a company is able to do something amazing vs. a person working at that company does, is whether they're able to productize it/do something with it or not. Google is famous for hiring the smartest people in the world, and has been for 20 years. That's good. It hires those people and gives them permission to do whatever they want. That's good too! (maybe not for the sharesholders, as we come to see, but for the world of technology and for humanity) But if all of the authors of the Transformer paper end up having to leave Google and each start competing startups, that shows that the only impressive thing Google has done is managed to hire those people to do the research. That's it. They had a goldmine and they wasted it.
- crazygringo 2y ago> They had a goldmine and they wasted it. What are you talking about? They launched Gemini. They didn't waste anything. And you can't force employees to stay. Employees leaving to compete is as old as Silicon Valley. Google was just being more conservative about launching it until their hand was forced by OpenAI. And for good reason too, considering all the hallucinations. But then they launched. They didn't "waste" anything.
- mountainriver 2y agoNo they weren’t nearly as invested in it which is why OpenAI won and Gemini still isn’t great. They had a massive lead which they squandered
- fragmede 2y agoThat Waymo thing is pretty cool. Transformers seem like pretty foundational work, even if they weren't the ones that ultimately popularized it in the market.
- onetokeoverthe 2y agoYes maps is really bad. No street addresses. Very few named locations. When google required hosting blogspot content on their servers instead of self hosting that was the end of the freedom there. 2009.
- ruraljuror 2y agoGo was designed in 2009 as well; so another case in point.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- intunderflow 2y agoKubernetes
- _blk 2y agoFlutter is pretty cool. Maybe not as impressive as some last achievements, but darn useful to save money on Android+iOS development.
- mycall 2y ago> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years. The Transformer.
- ksec 2y ago>> Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership. >I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years. It is strange to see how the "narrative" of Google unfolds. If parents and grand parents said this in 2015 or 2005 it would perhaps be an extremely unpopular opinion. Or I doubt both would have that opinion in 2015 or 2005. But >complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership > has been a thing since 2003 - 2004 during their IPO. None of their problems happening now is really new. Their "Dont be Evil" BS, their WiFi privacy issues in 2006 - 2007 before Steve Jobs take a jab on stage in 2008. That was before most people thought about privacy. Not developing a browser against Firefox and then Chrome. It took some Firefox developers some 10+ years before they realise may be Chrome and Google isn't what they thought. They basically earn more money than they know what to do with it and had zero discipline on what, how and where to use it. They continue to pay $10 - $20B a year to Apple as default search engine. Apple is very good at extracting value out of Google. While it seems no one at Google cares about it. Needless to say I have been ringing the alarm bell on google for 20 years. I wished Mozilla take notes earlier. But they have their own sets of problems. If there is one thing other than search that Google has achieved was they managed to lift up the salary of the whole Tech industry. They single handedly pulled the average salary of programmers up 10% YoY for many years since IPO. To the point in ~2018 - 2022 many really thought Google's starting salary for a new Junior Dev is $200K.
- klooney 2y agoI think Meta deserves more credit for the salary growth- they weren't a part of the cartel of companies colluding to keep salaries down, and them poaching from Google helped to force Google to defect.
- ksec 2y agoI agree. But Meta is still much of a forbidden word on HN. I believe we had this discussion on HN people dont want their salary rise to be attributed to Meta ( then Facebook ) in 2014 - 2016.
- throwaway2037 2y agoAlphaFold, which helped to win the Nobel prize for chemistry, is not enough for you?
- pdimitar 2y agoFor 20 years? No.
- makeitshine 2y agoThe HN community seems split between people who want simple products that do one thing well, and others that want continual feature churn and additions. What was Google Docs need exactly to be better? It seems to work perfectly for the targeted users.
- clown_strike 2y agoThey don't want features added to it, they want to see new revolutionary products similar to it. I remember the magic of early Google, delivering products and features that actually solved problems. Gmail offered 1GB storage while Yahoo acted like giving you 15MB was generous. Ironically I think the dearth of innovation is related to consumers having been rendered too passive since 2010. Nobody has "needs" for Google to address anymore; now we are told what we should want (clear indication that advertising execs now run the show), usually under protest as they forcibly reshape industry standards and kill beloved products. The infantilization of AI and the subsequent hilarity of Gemini blackwashing white historical figures says all it needs to about the culture shift. Search is also censored to an embarrassing degree. Queer theory is treated as irrefutable fact and you'll find infinite dubious content promoting it, while conspiracy theory and anything critical of Israel is downranked or delisted altogether. Early Google gave us lightsabers [for "free"]. Now they sell lefthanded safety scissors and insist nothing has changed. All stars burn out eventually.
- gdubs 2y agoWhen I started at Google it has a very Montessori-like atmosphere. Really brilliant people there who were given a lot of autonomy to go and figure things out. By the time I left, almost nine years later, the culture was dominated by fear and conflicting top-down directives — and the autonomy was gone.
- fire_lake 2y agoWhere can this culture be found in 2024?
- mountainriver 2y agoGo and Kubernetes are both impressive? But I generally agree with the sentiment
- peutetre 2y ago> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years. The open sourcing and open patenting of VP8, and the work done on VP9 and AV1 were genuine public goods from Google.
- araes 2y agoThe launch was technically pre-2009, yet Streetview meets my personal criteria. Streetview was OK for many years, yet now borders on the miraculous. The other day I virtually drove to Seattle just to see what the capabilities were and whether Google was capturing the downtown homeless encampment situation. Visited near Covid and the tent quantity was disturbing. Found out Seattle's response was to wall off the entire park downtown where homeless were gathering. [1][2] However, far as Streetview, hundreds of miles of continuous highway where you can click yourself along the entire way to any location in America. The week after, upon finding The Trace's - Gun Violence Map [3] I wanted to check whether East side Washington DC was really that much of a danger zone. Seemed difficult to believe right next to so much political money and visibility. Ended watching the Google car have a gun pulled on them in the rear view by drug dealers and watching a different Google car drive right into a police raid. Mission accomplished. East side Washington DC is kind of sketchy. [1] Seattle, City Hall Park, 2021, July: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6017717,-122.33027,3a,75y,12.83h,81.45t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1s1cLjXCqawJdEUB7SqRmZYg!2e0!5s20210801T000000!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D8.545742270322293%26panoid%3D1cLjXCqawJdEUB7SqRmZYg%26yaw%3D12.832823417349616!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTIwNC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6017717,-122.33027,3a,75y,12... [2] Seattle, City Hall Park, 2023, February: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6017076,-122.3302728,3a,75y,12.83h,81.45t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sUCC8Qseqr49AFARE30iJhw!2e0!5s20230201T000000!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D8.545742270322293%26panoid%3DUCC8Qseqr49AFARE30iJhw%26yaw%3D12.832823417349616!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTIwNC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6017076,-122.3302728,3a,75y,... [3] https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-shootings/ https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...
- yencabulator 2y ago> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years. The stupid thing is that, for example, ChromeOS is genuinely technically very impressive. Wayland over virtio to securely expose GUIs from untrusted virtual machines is brilliant technology. I want that, reimplemented by someone who cares about an open source ecosystem. It's just a dead product.