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But is Google actually that good at services besides a few great products? I'm considering moving away from Google Apps, because besides GMail, most apps are a

But is Google actually that good at services besides a few great products? I'm considering moving away from Google Apps, because besides GMail, most apps are a weak and seem to have become stagnant. Google Drive, which we had been waiting for for half a decade, is still buggy, clunky and unreliable. And don't get me started on the UI and the complete inconsistency between various apps. Yes, Apple has been consistently shite when it comes to online services, and Microsoft entered the game way too late. But I don't think Google has such a major advantage in anything else but search.

jmduke 14y ago
Google Apps is a blip: the vast majority of consumers have no idea what it is, what it does, or why it matters. Google Drive has its flaws, but it's infinitely better than iCloud. GMail and Search, Google's largest and oldest offerings, dominate their verticals. I'm pretty much an Apple hardware devotee (iPhone, iPad, MBA) but their services are terrible. iCloud is Kafkaesque; iTunes Match is essentially a scam. I agree that Google is by no means a paragon of great services (I'd actually argue that Amazon is poised to be the service king, except AWS is such a narrow vertical) but they're leaps and bounds past Apple and Microsoft.
- nirvana 14y ago
  How is iTunes match a "scam"? It accepts my music downloaded from the pirate bay as proof of purchase then gives me access to it on all my devices. The hugest advantage is not having to manage all of that music on all the machines in our house. We just have one backup somewhere in case we need it, and then everyone syncs with iTunes Match just the music they want on their personal device.
  - jmduke 14y ago
    'Scam' was a bad choice of words, but its ridiculously buggy (it accepts your music downloaded from TPB, but will only take half of an album which I legally bought and ripped to disk) and iOS playback is horrendous (both on and off WiFi.)
    - nirvana 14y ago
      Interesting. I'm using ~24,800 of my 25,000 available tracks. About %90 of that is actually CDs that I ripped (I'm not really much of a pirate). I had a problem where it wouldn't accept one of them at all, and I ended up pirating that one to get it to work. The rest I was able to import ok, so my CD collection going back to the 1980s when I first started buying them I was able to import. I have no trouble with playback on iOS. But I don't tend to stream, I tend to sync the songs I want to the device and then play them. The one time I did have problems with iTunes match was a period where we rented a house in rural mexico. We were using some sort of fly-by-nite mexican ISP, and iTunes match had a lot of difficulty. It was really inconsistent and it sounds like this is what you experienced. I suspect the issue there is that certain ports were being blocked, or that the ISP couldn't keep a consistent connection (Though loading web pages was fine, longer streaming connections like watching video were not.) I think iTunes match is probably sensitive to needing specific ports open and isn't great at falling back when they are blocked, or isn't great at handling frequent interruptions in the net connection (even if they are short.)
nirvana 14y ago
This is an area where we can do direct comparison. Mail- Google has gmail, Apple has iCloud mail. Both have "web 2.0" UI's. I think here Apple wins hands down. Apple's support of sproutcore (what became ember.js) has given it a great lead in the ability to do great web apps. And apple's iCloud.com mail app is a good example of this. Google "Office" vs. Apple Works - Apple wins again here in my opinion. Numbers, Pages and Keynote are much better experiences than using google's products thru the web, simply because they are native and can take advantage of better APIs. Both products provide ubiquitous storage of your data, so you can access your documents from your iPhone or your laptop. I wouldn't say Google is ahead on services there, but before Apple released iCloud they were. I really don't think Apple has done a bad job with online services. Certainly not when compared to google. IF you look at iTunes Store-- which is actually an web service-- it is larger than anything google has, except maybe google search, depending on what metrics you use. It's been stable and robust and usable with great UI since the store was first launched. It's certainly sold more goods than google and made more profit than amazon, I bet. Apple took the lead with web development way back when it was NeXT with webobjects which was the first modern web development framework. They again have had the best product with sproutcore, dashcode, etc, though they've been a bit inconsistent. Its only recently that google's really tried to produce web development tech, and while go is a good attempt at a language it is written by people who felt comfortable enforcing a religious design choice on every programmer! (namely where the brackets go. I'm fine with people putting them in the "wrong place", I can still read their code. Let them do as they like, but forcing me, at the language level, to do as the language designers like? Well, that's just being assholes, and I won't use the language because of that (not to mention its crap design in some key areas.) Where google's clearly winning? Ideological propaganda. The whole "open vs. closed" campaign has people actually believing that Google is good and Apple is evil. Apple which has never spied on its users or sold them out to advertisers.
- terminus 14y ago
  > Where google's clearly winning? Ideological propaganda. The whole "open vs. closed" campaign has people actually believing that Google is good and Apple is evil. Apple which has never spied on its users or sold them out to advertisers. Umm, iAds?

jmduke 14y ago

Google Apps is a blip: the vast majority of consumers have no idea what it is, what it does, or why it matters. Google Drive has its flaws, but it's infinitely better than iCloud. GMail and Search, Google's largest and oldest offerings, dominate their verticals. I'm pretty much an Apple hardware devotee (iPhone, iPad, MBA) but their services are terrible. iCloud is Kafkaesque; iTunes Match is essentially a scam. I agree that Google is by no means a paragon of great services (I'd actually argue that Amazon is poised to be the service king, except AWS is such a narrow vertical) but they're leaps and bounds past Apple and Microsoft.

nirvana 14y ago
How is iTunes match a "scam"? It accepts my music downloaded from the pirate bay as proof of purchase then gives me access to it on all my devices. The hugest advantage is not having to manage all of that music on all the machines in our house. We just have one backup somewhere in case we need it, and then everyone syncs with iTunes Match just the music they want on their personal device.
- jmduke 14y ago
  'Scam' was a bad choice of words, but its ridiculously buggy (it accepts your music downloaded from TPB, but will only take half of an album which I legally bought and ripped to disk) and iOS playback is horrendous (both on and off WiFi.)
  - nirvana 14y ago
    Interesting. I'm using ~24,800 of my 25,000 available tracks. About %90 of that is actually CDs that I ripped (I'm not really much of a pirate). I had a problem where it wouldn't accept one of them at all, and I ended up pirating that one to get it to work. The rest I was able to import ok, so my CD collection going back to the 1980s when I first started buying them I was able to import. I have no trouble with playback on iOS. But I don't tend to stream, I tend to sync the songs I want to the device and then play them. The one time I did have problems with iTunes match was a period where we rented a house in rural mexico. We were using some sort of fly-by-nite mexican ISP, and iTunes match had a lot of difficulty. It was really inconsistent and it sounds like this is what you experienced. I suspect the issue there is that certain ports were being blocked, or that the ISP couldn't keep a consistent connection (Though loading web pages was fine, longer streaming connections like watching video were not.) I think iTunes match is probably sensitive to needing specific ports open and isn't great at falling back when they are blocked, or isn't great at handling frequent interruptions in the net connection (even if they are short.)

nirvana 14y ago

This is an area where we can do direct comparison. Mail- Google has gmail, Apple has iCloud mail. Both have "web 2.0" UI's. I think here Apple wins hands down. Apple's support of sproutcore (what became ember.js) has given it a great lead in the ability to do great web apps. And apple's iCloud.com mail app is a good example of this. Google "Office" vs. Apple Works - Apple wins again here in my opinion. Numbers, Pages and Keynote are much better experiences than using google's products thru the web, simply because they are native and can take advantage of better APIs. Both products provide ubiquitous storage of your data, so you can access your documents from your iPhone or your laptop. I wouldn't say Google is ahead on services there, but before Apple released iCloud they were. I really don't think Apple has done a bad job with online services. Certainly not when compared to google. IF you look at iTunes Store-- which is actually an web service-- it is larger than anything google has, except maybe google search, depending on what metrics you use. It's been stable and robust and usable with great UI since the store was first launched. It's certainly sold more goods than google and made more profit than amazon, I bet. Apple took the lead with web development way back when it was NeXT with webobjects which was the first modern web development framework. They again have had the best product with sproutcore, dashcode, etc, though they've been a bit inconsistent. Its only recently that google's really tried to produce web development tech, and while go is a good attempt at a language it is written by people who felt comfortable enforcing a religious design choice on every programmer! (namely where the brackets go. I'm fine with people putting them in the "wrong place", I can still read their code. Let them do as they like, but forcing me, at the language level, to do as the language designers like? Well, that's just being assholes, and I won't use the language because of that (not to mention its crap design in some key areas.) Where google's clearly winning? Ideological propaganda. The whole "open vs. closed" campaign has people actually believing that Google is good and Apple is evil. Apple which has never spied on its users or sold them out to advertisers.

terminus 14y ago
> Where google's clearly winning? Ideological propaganda. The whole "open vs. closed" campaign has people actually believing that Google is good and Apple is evil. Apple which has never spied on its users or sold them out to advertisers. Umm, iAds?