5 ms·

How are Google products anything but outstanding in their categories? What are you comparing to?

saltamimi 4mo ago
The Pixel series outside of security (to which their own flavor of Android doesn't even take advantage of like we see with GrapheneOS) doesn't have any particular outliers that would make it any more or less enticing than another company's phone. Their ChromeOS hardware was nice but had lackluster software and by the time it was EoL'd, never got the love of ChromeOS-present. Google TV generally gets outpaced by onn (Walmart's brand) on cost and value proposition. And also the fact they have shown time and time again that they just kill products over and over again.
- vmasto 4mo ago
  Ah, hardware products.
- danudey 4mo ago
  A big part of why Stadia was cancelled is because it didn't get traction, and a big part of why it didn't get traction was because of how many people assumed it was just going to get cancelled.
spott 4mo ago
Which products are outstanding in their categories? Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding. They are all pretty par for the course. Google used to be outstanding... but I'm not sure of a single product they have that is outstanding (def: significantly better than the competition) anymore. On the other hand I rarely use any google products these days, so maybe I'm not the one to be judging.
- BeetleB 4mo ago
  What's wrong with Maps?
  - anjel 4mo ago
    After 20 years of consumer GPS goog offers Sub-Garmin quality navigation service, and a generous helping of UI non-intuitives.
  - stevesimmons 4mo ago
    ... 20 years of not remembering that I only ever want to see distances in km
  - Auracle 4mo ago
    I find Apple's Maps directions to be slightly better, nowadays. They're more intuitive.
  - deathanatos 4mo ago
    It's … okay … but it still falls down in a fair few areas? It's crap at finding restrooms. Finding a stop on the road is also difficult, as it seems like it just defaults to a basic radial search, when as a driver you want things down-route, not radially out. All the AI in the world can't seem to figure out when I'm looking for gas or food that closed businesses are not results I want to see. It eats enough CPU to melt phones, such that Android now has built-in support for this?!¹. Attempting to report things often goes in vain². Some of the notifications need work ("object in road ahead" … I'd kill for what lane! this one is just anxiety in a notification), and it'd be nice to see the lane designations ahead of time (it only shows them once you're like <1mi out). I've never gotten the AI-home detection to work. Attempting to navigate to the house of anyone with an Irish name gets me a bar, and the forced-voice-navigation when in a car means I have to be able to pronounce the destination. Google does not seem to grok that sometimes … there's a person in the car who is designated navigator. They can type, it's fine. Some turn directions could be better if you incorporate more precise language into them³. Some directions could be abbreviated "Navigate to I-4 North": I live here, I don't need step-by-step hand-holding to the interstate, but I'd like to plug in the destination before the car is rolling. ¹literally, phones can now demand you put them in A/C b/c they're dying ²I reported once that a jetway was 3D modeled as being like 8 stories high. Google couldn't confirm that, and closed the request. I reported a business as not being present, while my GPS showed me as being at the alleged address, that also couldn't be confirmed. My GPS trace would have seen me walk the whole block, twice! ³as designated navigator in my relationship, I can tell her "leftish" or "rightish", and she understands what I mean. Where I live a lot of the intersections' designs appear as if a civil engineer was given artistic license, and so sometimes the direction is "5-way intersection, left-ish". "Left" is a bad direction when there are two lefts. Of course … me & her have developed a fairly extensive lexicon over years of long road trips, too.
- rvnx 4mo ago
  Google Cloud is great, compared to legacy and fragmented AWS
  - dijit 4mo ago
    I agree, but it’s definitely getting worse. It’s a lot less focused than it was.
  - tcoff91 4mo ago
    Yeah it's great until they absolutely destroy you like Unisuper or Railway. Support is part of the package when it comes to product and their support SUCKS. I would absolutely NEVER use GCP for any business I was in charge of. Google cannot be trusted.
    - rvnx 4mo ago
      I tend to agree :/
- BigTTYGothGF 4mo ago
  > Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding They were at the time.
  - dijit 4mo ago
    I think that is very much GPs point.
  - adi_kurian 4mo ago
    Is there a better Maps app? I guess those gaussian splats on Apple Maps could be p. neat.
    - SllX 4mo ago
      No. I just switched away from Apple Maps too when they added ads. If I’m dealing with adware either way, may as well use the best.
    - cadamsdotcom 4mo ago
      Apple Maps is - or soon will - show ads. A trillion dollar company that charges thousands for the device. So that’s out. OsmAnd’s UI really doesn’t suit me, and there are a few others that I personally liked even less. But Organic Maps ticks enough boxes to come close. I’ve been using Organic Maps on iOS for driving, and it’s tolerable. And for offline mapping it’s a godsend.
    - HDBaseT 4mo ago
      Bing still has maps, although I wouldn't say its better.
    - HypnoticOcelot 4mo ago
      I've been using Magic Earth, which is paid, but has worked pretty well for me so far.
  - 7tythr33 4mo ago
    Time moves on …
- xp84 4mo ago
  I'm not a fan of Google, and also not attached to Apple or Microsoft, so this isn't me trying to stan for Google, but I'd like to request that you give examples of what competing products are categorically better (and, by what metric(s) you're judging - code quality? stability? robust set of features?) -- for Gmail, Docs/Drive/etc, Google Calendar, Maps, Classroom, YouTube. As far as I can tell, if judged by the marketplace (and breaking ties with which product I like better), Google has run away with the ball on all of those, and Gemini seems to at least be competitive. The only major product I'd say they've sunk below acceptability on is Search, which is demonstrably dogshit now...though I suspect it's more that they have changed their definition of what Search is for, from "helping users efficiently find other websites that are useful to them" to "A convenient on-ramp to, many times per day, capture the current user intent and steer them toward something that earns Google some ad revenue."
  - xahrepap 4mo ago
    I think it’s a major feature gap that Gmail (paid or free) cannot create filters on headers. I also can’t do wildcard filters on “to” or “from”. For example, in my GApps I have it set up to route all emails not associated with a specific user to my primary user. So that it’s easier to make throwaway emails. I want to filter all to:`X.X@domain.tld` to a certain folder. No can do. It just feels restricted.
    - rustystump 4mo ago
      This so much this. Gmail overall is pretty meh and then it has these stupid footguns that make it awful.
    - no-name-here 4mo ago
      > I want to filter all to:`X.X@domain.tld` You can filter based on the to: field, yes. For many years I’ve been creating filters on free Gmail for to:, from:, subject:, etc. I set them up on desktop web. Perhaps there is something more specific you’re trying to do? > a major feature gap that Gmail (paid or free) cannot create filters on headers. You can create filters on header fields like from:, to:, and subject:, so I am guessing you mean something different than “cannot create filters on headers”?
- Hammershaft 4mo ago
  Has hacker news lost it? Maps & Gmail & Search all have plenty of accumulating flaws... but they also completely defined their product category and today are among the most popular software products ever made.
  - wil421 4mo ago
    Garmin was and is better than Google Maps and Mapquest was better than Google Maps when you needed to print directions. If Google didn’t have Android would maps matter as much? Apple Maps and Waze is better for directions. Apple has better CarPlay integration and HUD. Google Maps is way better at searching for things like restaurants or local businesses but not as much the nav part.
  - Dylan16807 4mo ago
    "defined their product category" means it used to be outstanding, not that it currently is outstanding. "among the most popular" doesn't need either of those to be true.
    - stouset 4mo ago
      As a concrete example, Windows defined the product category. And it is still the most popular desktop operating system in the world by far. Few here would argue that it’s an outstanding product.
      - pigeons 4mo ago
        More than plenty of people (including me) would argue that Windows is an awful product, but a quite significant number of people (maybe even including me) would argue that its an outstanding product.
        coldtea 4mo ago
        >but a quite significant number of people (maybe even including me) would argue that its an outstanding product. Are those people in the room with us now?
- oytis 4mo ago
  Search has degraded for sure, but still better than anything else? Maps - I guess you mean Apple ones are better? Can't tell, I am not on Apple, but if you don't use Apple products, there are not many alternatives to Google maps
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
    MapBox[0] does a good job. I think they use OSM maps. I don’t think it has a public interface, though. It’s really a developer resource. [0] https://mapbox.com https://mapbox.com
- reddozen 4mo ago
  Ok. Apparently you missed the question from OP. What are you comparing to?
- jstummbillig 4mo ago
  All of these are outstanding! In so far they are not singular or new anymore, well... If for the past ~20 years nobody has come up with something clearly better, then I would say that speaks to how outstanding the product that are being copied are to this day.
- antonvs 4mo ago
  I think you’re talking about consumer products. At the enterprise level, if you know of something better than Bigquery, please let me know. Similarly, Kubernetes and Kubeflow are both outstanding - and Licenses Kubernetes has no meaningful competition for what it does - but Google did everyone a solid by making them open source, so you can get them from other sources than Google. But the Google managed versions are certainly extremely good. As for the idea that Gmail, search, and Maps aren’t outstanding, an easy way to refute that is to ask what the outstanding alternatives are. I doubt there’s a single list that many people would agree on.
- fortran77 4mo ago
  I'm no google fanboy, but gmail is a very good web-based email, and google maps is a very good web-based map program. I would say "outstanding" with no reservations.
- neonstatic 4mo ago
  What is better than Google Maps? It's the only Google product I don't see myself abandoning any time soon. I agree on everything else.
ramijames 4mo ago
Have you tried to admin a large team using Google's admin? :(
- danudey 4mo ago
  Do they have any supported way to export a user's account (e-mail, calendars, etc) for offline archiving yet? I used to have to reset their password, disable their 2FA, log in as their user, initiate a 'Takeout' request to export their account data into an archive, wait until the request was done (between minutes and days depending on the account), download it manually (often in chunks if it was large enough), store it somewhere, and then delete it and delete the account. I can't imagine that no other 'Google Workspace' organizations want to actually save their employee data rather than irrevocably delete it forever.
shit_game 4mo ago
Arguably, "exceptional" products are not ones that can vanish on a whim, like a great, great many of Google products have. Or they actually compete with other products in the same space, like a great, great many of Google products have not. Also, one would argue a good product is not one that is bought out and then deliberately destroyed to prevent its expansion into or development of a market for itself. Google is an advertising company with tremendous reach because of a handful of very aggressive and very fortunate business decisions that successfully exploded. It now uses its massive influence to exert market pressure, but the market does not always bend to its whim because sometimes it does things wrong, some of those products it pushes fail, and I can only assume some products are slaughtered because of projections on their performance regardless of their quality or utility. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
dist-epoch 4mo ago
The about 7 different text chat applications they had? At some point GoogleTalk was one of the leading global text messengers, and then it was basically destroyed by Google itself.
- chuckadams 4mo ago
  > The about 7 different text chat applications they had? All of them named "Hangouts" no doubt.
- danudey 4mo ago
  Depending on what you mean by 'chat', Google has had a lot, but this list includes a lot more than 7 text chat services. https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googles_messaging_products/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googl...
otikik 4mo ago
Maybe you are not counting the products they kill.
- danudey 4mo ago
  A lot of the products they killed were promising, it's just that Google just has no stomach for investing in anything for the long haul if it's not going to either capture the entire market or prevent someone else from capturing the entire market.
7tythr33 4mo ago
An email client (Gmail app) that is 500mb? What’s _outstanding_ about that? Almost everything Google makes now is terrible. Try some alternatives.
- robotresearcher 4mo ago
  Honest question: what's a candidate for better? The search needs to be really good, as that was always a strong point for Gmail.
  - josephg 4mo ago
    I really like Fastmail. It’s just - clean and lightweight. It loads much faster. Has all the features you actually need. No mystery meat. And the UI doesn’t churn every few years for no reason.
  - 7tythr33 4mo ago
    You're probably not going to like my answer — I swapped to Hey shortly after it came out, and I'm very happy with it. I check my choice every now and then; recently taking a look at Tuta and Proton. Tuta just isn't there yet, and Proton is just Gmail but in Switzerland. Meh.
shevy-java 4mo ago
Outstanding? Well ... https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
deathanatos 4mo ago
I think both can be true. Google has a history of annoying churn while still being good enough (or just … being large enough) that switching to competitors is still too high a cost for most. For example, their "chat" app has churned 3? 4? times now? Their assistant app has churned from whatever the OG assistant was to now Gemini. Wave churned to "+" in the social category, and that's dead now. The default placement in Android probably helps a lot, or other things, like forced signups into adjacent products (e.g., like + was doing for a while).
- nerdsniper 4mo ago
  > For example, their "chat" app has churned 3? 4? times now? I believe they’ve had at least 58 different products with chat / messaging. https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googles_messaging_products/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googl...
adastra22 4mo ago
Other than search, in its heyday of the early 00’s, every google product success was either a 20% time project (e.g. Gmail) or an acquisition (YouTube) or a direct clone of someone else’s working product (android).
elorant 4mo ago
Search for one is absolutely horrendous. It used to be great, but not so in the last years. Nowadays it’s filled with spam sites that they don’t seem to be able to filter out. And don’t get me started on the crappy AI overview that hijacks all queries. Just today I tried a query for water filters and 1/3 of the results were ads. The other third were product pictures, or businesses in close proximity based on my ip. Then there was a box with related products/services, which was completely irrelevant to my needs, a second box with places, yet more product images and so on and so forth. Practically 70% of the real estate of the page was occupied by things I didn’t ask for. All I want is a list of relevant sites to go there and judge for myself. I don’t want Google to spoon feed me.
majormajor 4mo ago
Most of their best products are VERY old. Gmail, Search, Docs/Drive, Maps, Street View, Chrome, all solid but old consumer apps. A lot of early entrants/market defining products, too! Most of them are still very good. Calendar is... fine. Gmail/Calendar as corporate products in some ways feel like downgrades compared to the functionality of the older Office desktop suite, but they integrate nicely into a lot of things. The bad rep Google gets now is because while they've polished their nice money machine very well, they haven't done much to pioneer new segments and the old stuff is pretty stagnant. When's the last time Gmail gained a must-have feature? Maps? Ok but maybe those old products are just mature and there's not much room for product innovation? Even if we assume that's the case (though there are third party email and calendar apps that I use instead of Google's first-party ones on my phone), let's look at some newer stuff: Android was a copy of Blackberry that turned into a copy of Apple before being launched. It's done well numbers-wise, particularly in lower-cost markets, but hasn't got a lot of novel product stuff going on in the last decade or more. Less luck as a tablet platform. A lot of the nifty novel stuff in mobile space (wireless earbuds, "find my" stuff, mobile payments, magnetic wireless charging) was done first by Apple. Meet vs anything else - well, Meet is cheap if you're already on Gsuite, at least. Voice/Hangouts/Chat/Duo/Whatever - whole lotta abandonware or dead attempts. Google Plus - famously mis-targeted product. Google Assistant - Siri copycat then with Alexa copycat hardware. Didn't do anything novel. Chromecast - nice novel product, caught on decently well, lost the market to a combo of set-top boxes (Roku, Apple) and native-TV integrations. Tried doing Google TV as that native platform with a copycat pivot vs the original Chromecast, no particular success. Stadia - abandoned quickly, never set itself apart from the things it was copying. Smart home hardware (like alarms and smoke alarms) - dramatically scaled back and now pretty unambitious. Gemini - copycat of ChatGPT which is particular damning since so much of the original research came from Google in the first place!

The Pixel series outside of security (to which their own flavor of Android doesn't even take advantage of like we see with GrapheneOS) doesn't have any particular outliers that would make it any more or less enticing than another company's phone. Their ChromeOS hardware was nice but had lackluster software and by the time it was EoL'd, never got the love of ChromeOS-present. Google TV generally gets outpaced by onn (Walmart's brand) on cost and value proposition. And also the fact they have shown time and time again that they just kill products over and over again.

vmasto 4mo ago
Ah, hardware products.
danudey 4mo ago
A big part of why Stadia was cancelled is because it didn't get traction, and a big part of why it didn't get traction was because of how many people assumed it was just going to get cancelled.

spott 4mo ago

Which products are outstanding in their categories? Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding. They are all pretty par for the course. Google used to be outstanding... but I'm not sure of a single product they have that is outstanding (def: significantly better than the competition) anymore. On the other hand I rarely use any google products these days, so maybe I'm not the one to be judging.

BeetleB 4mo ago
What's wrong with Maps?
- anjel 4mo ago
  After 20 years of consumer GPS goog offers Sub-Garmin quality navigation service, and a generous helping of UI non-intuitives.
- stevesimmons 4mo ago
  ... 20 years of not remembering that I only ever want to see distances in km
- Auracle 4mo ago
  I find Apple's Maps directions to be slightly better, nowadays. They're more intuitive.
- deathanatos 4mo ago
  It's … okay … but it still falls down in a fair few areas? It's crap at finding restrooms. Finding a stop on the road is also difficult, as it seems like it just defaults to a basic radial search, when as a driver you want things down-route, not radially out. All the AI in the world can't seem to figure out when I'm looking for gas or food that closed businesses are not results I want to see. It eats enough CPU to melt phones, such that Android now has built-in support for this?!¹. Attempting to report things often goes in vain². Some of the notifications need work ("object in road ahead" … I'd kill for what lane! this one is just anxiety in a notification), and it'd be nice to see the lane designations ahead of time (it only shows them once you're like <1mi out). I've never gotten the AI-home detection to work. Attempting to navigate to the house of anyone with an Irish name gets me a bar, and the forced-voice-navigation when in a car means I have to be able to pronounce the destination. Google does not seem to grok that sometimes … there's a person in the car who is designated navigator. They can type, it's fine. Some turn directions could be better if you incorporate more precise language into them³. Some directions could be abbreviated "Navigate to I-4 North": I live here, I don't need step-by-step hand-holding to the interstate, but I'd like to plug in the destination before the car is rolling. ¹literally, phones can now demand you put them in A/C b/c they're dying ²I reported once that a jetway was 3D modeled as being like 8 stories high. Google couldn't confirm that, and closed the request. I reported a business as not being present, while my GPS showed me as being at the alleged address, that also couldn't be confirmed. My GPS trace would have seen me walk the whole block, twice! ³as designated navigator in my relationship, I can tell her "leftish" or "rightish", and she understands what I mean. Where I live a lot of the intersections' designs appear as if a civil engineer was given artistic license, and so sometimes the direction is "5-way intersection, left-ish". "Left" is a bad direction when there are two lefts. Of course … me & her have developed a fairly extensive lexicon over years of long road trips, too.
rvnx 4mo ago
Google Cloud is great, compared to legacy and fragmented AWS
- dijit 4mo ago
  I agree, but it’s definitely getting worse. It’s a lot less focused than it was.
- tcoff91 4mo ago
  Yeah it's great until they absolutely destroy you like Unisuper or Railway. Support is part of the package when it comes to product and their support SUCKS. I would absolutely NEVER use GCP for any business I was in charge of. Google cannot be trusted.
  - rvnx 4mo ago
    I tend to agree :/
BigTTYGothGF 4mo ago
> Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding They were at the time.
- dijit 4mo ago
  I think that is very much GPs point.
- adi_kurian 4mo ago
  Is there a better Maps app? I guess those gaussian splats on Apple Maps could be p. neat.
  - SllX 4mo ago
    No. I just switched away from Apple Maps too when they added ads. If I’m dealing with adware either way, may as well use the best.
  - cadamsdotcom 4mo ago
    Apple Maps is - or soon will - show ads. A trillion dollar company that charges thousands for the device. So that’s out. OsmAnd’s UI really doesn’t suit me, and there are a few others that I personally liked even less. But Organic Maps ticks enough boxes to come close. I’ve been using Organic Maps on iOS for driving, and it’s tolerable. And for offline mapping it’s a godsend.
  - HDBaseT 4mo ago
    Bing still has maps, although I wouldn't say its better.
  - HypnoticOcelot 4mo ago
    I've been using Magic Earth, which is paid, but has worked pretty well for me so far.
- 7tythr33 4mo ago
  Time moves on …
xp84 4mo ago
I'm not a fan of Google, and also not attached to Apple or Microsoft, so this isn't me trying to stan for Google, but I'd like to request that you give examples of what competing products are categorically better (and, by what metric(s) you're judging - code quality? stability? robust set of features?) -- for Gmail, Docs/Drive/etc, Google Calendar, Maps, Classroom, YouTube. As far as I can tell, if judged by the marketplace (and breaking ties with which product I like better), Google has run away with the ball on all of those, and Gemini seems to at least be competitive. The only major product I'd say they've sunk below acceptability on is Search, which is demonstrably dogshit now...though I suspect it's more that they have changed their definition of what Search is for, from "helping users efficiently find other websites that are useful to them" to "A convenient on-ramp to, many times per day, capture the current user intent and steer them toward something that earns Google some ad revenue."
- xahrepap 4mo ago
  I think it’s a major feature gap that Gmail (paid or free) cannot create filters on headers. I also can’t do wildcard filters on “to” or “from”. For example, in my GApps I have it set up to route all emails not associated with a specific user to my primary user. So that it’s easier to make throwaway emails. I want to filter all to:`X.X@domain.tld` to a certain folder. No can do. It just feels restricted.
  - rustystump 4mo ago
    This so much this. Gmail overall is pretty meh and then it has these stupid footguns that make it awful.
  - no-name-here 4mo ago
    > I want to filter all to:`X.X@domain.tld` You can filter based on the to: field, yes. For many years I’ve been creating filters on free Gmail for to:, from:, subject:, etc. I set them up on desktop web. Perhaps there is something more specific you’re trying to do? > a major feature gap that Gmail (paid or free) cannot create filters on headers. You can create filters on header fields like from:, to:, and subject:, so I am guessing you mean something different than “cannot create filters on headers”?
Hammershaft 4mo ago
Has hacker news lost it? Maps & Gmail & Search all have plenty of accumulating flaws... but they also completely defined their product category and today are among the most popular software products ever made.
- wil421 4mo ago
  Garmin was and is better than Google Maps and Mapquest was better than Google Maps when you needed to print directions. If Google didn’t have Android would maps matter as much? Apple Maps and Waze is better for directions. Apple has better CarPlay integration and HUD. Google Maps is way better at searching for things like restaurants or local businesses but not as much the nav part.
- Dylan16807 4mo ago
  "defined their product category" means it used to be outstanding, not that it currently is outstanding. "among the most popular" doesn't need either of those to be true.
  - stouset 4mo ago
    As a concrete example, Windows defined the product category. And it is still the most popular desktop operating system in the world by far. Few here would argue that it’s an outstanding product.
    - pigeons 4mo ago
      More than plenty of people (including me) would argue that Windows is an awful product, but a quite significant number of people (maybe even including me) would argue that its an outstanding product.
      - coldtea 4mo ago
        >but a quite significant number of people (maybe even including me) would argue that its an outstanding product. Are those people in the room with us now?
oytis 4mo ago
Search has degraded for sure, but still better than anything else? Maps - I guess you mean Apple ones are better? Can't tell, I am not on Apple, but if you don't use Apple products, there are not many alternatives to Google maps
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
  MapBox[0] does a good job. I think they use OSM maps. I don’t think it has a public interface, though. It’s really a developer resource. [0] https://mapbox.com https://mapbox.com
reddozen 4mo ago
Ok. Apparently you missed the question from OP. What are you comparing to?
jstummbillig 4mo ago
All of these are outstanding! In so far they are not singular or new anymore, well... If for the past ~20 years nobody has come up with something clearly better, then I would say that speaks to how outstanding the product that are being copied are to this day.
antonvs 4mo ago
I think you’re talking about consumer products. At the enterprise level, if you know of something better than Bigquery, please let me know. Similarly, Kubernetes and Kubeflow are both outstanding - and Licenses Kubernetes has no meaningful competition for what it does - but Google did everyone a solid by making them open source, so you can get them from other sources than Google. But the Google managed versions are certainly extremely good. As for the idea that Gmail, search, and Maps aren’t outstanding, an easy way to refute that is to ask what the outstanding alternatives are. I doubt there’s a single list that many people would agree on.
fortran77 4mo ago
I'm no google fanboy, but gmail is a very good web-based email, and google maps is a very good web-based map program. I would say "outstanding" with no reservations.
neonstatic 4mo ago
What is better than Google Maps? It's the only Google product I don't see myself abandoning any time soon. I agree on everything else.

ramijames 4mo ago

Have you tried to admin a large team using Google's admin? :(

danudey 4mo ago
Do they have any supported way to export a user's account (e-mail, calendars, etc) for offline archiving yet? I used to have to reset their password, disable their 2FA, log in as their user, initiate a 'Takeout' request to export their account data into an archive, wait until the request was done (between minutes and days depending on the account), download it manually (often in chunks if it was large enough), store it somewhere, and then delete it and delete the account. I can't imagine that no other 'Google Workspace' organizations want to actually save their employee data rather than irrevocably delete it forever.

shit_game 4mo ago

Arguably, "exceptional" products are not ones that can vanish on a whim, like a great, great many of Google products have. Or they actually compete with other products in the same space, like a great, great many of Google products have not. Also, one would argue a good product is not one that is bought out and then deliberately destroyed to prevent its expansion into or development of a market for itself. Google is an advertising company with tremendous reach because of a handful of very aggressive and very fortunate business decisions that successfully exploded. It now uses its massive influence to exert market pressure, but the market does not always bend to its whim because sometimes it does things wrong, some of those products it pushes fail, and I can only assume some products are slaughtered because of projections on their performance regardless of their quality or utility. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

dist-epoch 4mo ago

The about 7 different text chat applications they had? At some point GoogleTalk was one of the leading global text messengers, and then it was basically destroyed by Google itself.

chuckadams 4mo ago
> The about 7 different text chat applications they had? All of them named "Hangouts" no doubt.
danudey 4mo ago
Depending on what you mean by 'chat', Google has had a lot, but this list includes a lot more than 7 text chat services. https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googles_messaging_products/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googl...

otikik 4mo ago

Maybe you are not counting the products they kill.

danudey 4mo ago
A lot of the products they killed were promising, it's just that Google just has no stomach for investing in anything for the long haul if it's not going to either capture the entire market or prevent someone else from capturing the entire market.

7tythr33 4mo ago

An email client (Gmail app) that is 500mb? What’s _outstanding_ about that? Almost everything Google makes now is terrible. Try some alternatives.

robotresearcher 4mo ago
Honest question: what's a candidate for better? The search needs to be really good, as that was always a strong point for Gmail.
- josephg 4mo ago
  I really like Fastmail. It’s just - clean and lightweight. It loads much faster. Has all the features you actually need. No mystery meat. And the UI doesn’t churn every few years for no reason.
- 7tythr33 4mo ago
  You're probably not going to like my answer — I swapped to Hey shortly after it came out, and I'm very happy with it. I check my choice every now and then; recently taking a look at Tuta and Proton. Tuta just isn't there yet, and Proton is just Gmail but in Switzerland. Meh.

shevy-java 4mo ago

Outstanding? Well ... https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

deathanatos 4mo ago

I think both can be true. Google has a history of annoying churn while still being good enough (or just … being large enough) that switching to competitors is still too high a cost for most. For example, their "chat" app has churned 3? 4? times now? Their assistant app has churned from whatever the OG assistant was to now Gemini. Wave churned to "+" in the social category, and that's dead now. The default placement in Android probably helps a lot, or other things, like forced signups into adjacent products (e.g., like + was doing for a while).

nerdsniper 4mo ago
> For example, their "chat" app has churned 3? 4? times now? I believe they’ve had at least 58 different products with chat / messaging. https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googles_messaging_products/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googl...

adastra22 4mo ago

Other than search, in its heyday of the early 00’s, every google product success was either a 20% time project (e.g. Gmail) or an acquisition (YouTube) or a direct clone of someone else’s working product (android).

elorant 4mo ago

Search for one is absolutely horrendous. It used to be great, but not so in the last years. Nowadays it’s filled with spam sites that they don’t seem to be able to filter out. And don’t get me started on the crappy AI overview that hijacks all queries. Just today I tried a query for water filters and 1/3 of the results were ads. The other third were product pictures, or businesses in close proximity based on my ip. Then there was a box with related products/services, which was completely irrelevant to my needs, a second box with places, yet more product images and so on and so forth. Practically 70% of the real estate of the page was occupied by things I didn’t ask for. All I want is a list of relevant sites to go there and judge for myself. I don’t want Google to spoon feed me.

majormajor 4mo ago

Most of their best products are VERY old. Gmail, Search, Docs/Drive, Maps, Street View, Chrome, all solid but old consumer apps. A lot of early entrants/market defining products, too! Most of them are still very good. Calendar is... fine. Gmail/Calendar as corporate products in some ways feel like downgrades compared to the functionality of the older Office desktop suite, but they integrate nicely into a lot of things. The bad rep Google gets now is because while they've polished their nice money machine very well, they haven't done much to pioneer new segments and the old stuff is pretty stagnant. When's the last time Gmail gained a must-have feature? Maps? Ok but maybe those old products are just mature and there's not much room for product innovation? Even if we assume that's the case (though there are third party email and calendar apps that I use instead of Google's first-party ones on my phone), let's look at some newer stuff: Android was a copy of Blackberry that turned into a copy of Apple before being launched. It's done well numbers-wise, particularly in lower-cost markets, but hasn't got a lot of novel product stuff going on in the last decade or more. Less luck as a tablet platform. A lot of the nifty novel stuff in mobile space (wireless earbuds, "find my" stuff, mobile payments, magnetic wireless charging) was done first by Apple. Meet vs anything else - well, Meet is cheap if you're already on Gsuite, at least. Voice/Hangouts/Chat/Duo/Whatever - whole lotta abandonware or dead attempts. Google Plus - famously mis-targeted product. Google Assistant - Siri copycat then with Alexa copycat hardware. Didn't do anything novel. Chromecast - nice novel product, caught on decently well, lost the market to a combo of set-top boxes (Roku, Apple) and native-TV integrations. Tried doing Google TV as that native platform with a copycat pivot vs the original Chromecast, no particular success. Stadia - abandoned quickly, never set itself apart from the things it was copying. Smart home hardware (like alarms and smoke alarms) - dramatically scaled back and now pretty unambitious. Gemini - copycat of ChatGPT which is particular damning since so much of the original research came from Google in the first place!