In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
With regard to their Internet service products, their goal seem to be to monetize the user base effectively, while avoiding wasting funds on unnecessary developer time. To that end, many of their products seem to exist as short-term bets or "experiments", ostensibly to give users something great/interesting, but internally justified by the extra data or "research" those products will generate. See Google Voice (angle: voicemails help train Google Assistant), Inbox (angle: research on some email ideas for potential incorporation into GMail), etc.
Google's cultural fixation on decision-making based on data and statistics will bite them eventually. It may help them squeeze the market, but it won't help them care about other people.
The scary part is they will sunset gmail eventually. I know from someone inside “L team” that founders hate how much headache gmail brings for such little return. Initially started at the boom of free email providers with fancy always-updating clock of how many extra megabytes you just got in last few seconds, fastforward today there is no money to be make in providing free email.
As they failed to secure sale for a reasonable amount and on fair conditions, expect eventually they will offer to keep paid accounts and auto forward anyone else to another provider for a year or so and then sunset gmail free only leaving gmail enterprise on.
https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio...
as opposed to the chess-playing variety:
Which actually raises an interesting point. The word data comes from Latin dare for "to give". So, as Rob Kitchin observes, while something like MTurk can be properly described as collecting "data", Google and the vast majority of networked platforms should really be more properly described as collecting "capta", from Latin capere, or "to take".
Sometimes I even wonder about things like GSuite. When does the 2-year sunset period start?
Google has killed off dozens upon dozens more officially launched projects.
not to mention Search itself, Docs has become a fantastic product as has Photos. of course they have killed hundreds of potentially great projects (RIP Reader) but give the company their due - they know how to build products.
Chrome definitely isn't a multi-billion dollar company. There is no revenue stream there. Firefox only exists by selling the search bar and being a non-profit.
Didnt the acquire companies which eventually became docs and photos?
Gmail got popular because it's free (and had large space for a free client). If it wasn't to be outside of Google, it would make an insignificant amount of money through ads, or started to charge (in which case users would flee).
Ditto for Chrome. There are 4-5 free browsers, nobody would use a browser that's not free (a required for it to be a multi-billion dollar company). At best they'd sell their search bar default setting, like FF does, which is less than a billion IIRC.
"the first three would be multi billion dollar companies
outside of Google"
However, "reasonably successful" is not good enough for them.
https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2005/04/google-maps-and-key...
Intermediated by the CIA;
Ads everywhere, google showing things in your face. Nop!
Just stop. Please. Analytics != insight. Meetings should stop being won by whoever prints off the the most tables and visualizations, because gasp sometimes that leads to the wrong decision.
And then taking other users with them.
People's minds are not linear, especially when they make decisions. The only market when you can do well with raw numbers only is cheapest 10%, when all competition is about price, and customers have zero loyalty whatsoever.
Switching between cloud providers is much easier than going from on-prem to the cloud. So, once your systems are "cloud" ready you should be able to avoid vendor lock in naturally.
The learning curve to a Google free life is steeper than many people want to take.
They surely didn't lead any large swaths out of Microsoft and into Linux, for example...
As will their attitude towards the privacy of their users. Everyone keeps the focus on Facebook while failing to realise that Google are probably worse.
It's time for Google to either fix this or get out of providing services and APIs to developers.
Google doesn't seem to put any weight at all on the outcry every time its shutters another service/API.
The trust must be restored.
Google doesn't seem to understand that when they shut service X, that their (potential) customers for service Y (such as Google Compute Engine) become concerned that service Y will be shut down too.
To put a positive suggestion forward, Google could consider giving all services a "sunset guarantee".
A "sunset guarantee" is a commitment that the service will be shut down only with a minimum notice period of say for example 5 years.
The most recent that springs to mind is the ditching of ADO in favour of ODBC which pissed a lot of developers off. There are plenty of other examples.
EDIT: I don't care about downvotes, but if you are going to do it at least leave a comment of why you think I am wrong.
The problem is, at a place like SL, they're not actually your own systems.
> can save you a bundle
It can, and usually does provide at least some savings, but it still comes with both the obvious form of vendor lock-in, and a subtler disadvantage, which is that you're limited by SL's specific hardware and engineering (including network) choices.
The real (performance and/or cost) magic of running ones own servers comes from custom combination of commodity ingredients, not merely lack of virtualization.
You are right, I do prefer colo and EOL hardware for low budget operations. But SL is a step lower than AWS. SL still can give you a punch in the face. But the point I really want is bare metal more than anything.
Also, if you need current gen stuff not owning can be nice because you won't have to repair when they break.
> It can, and usually does provide at least some savings, but it still comes with both the obvious form of vendor lock-in, and a subtler disadvantage, which is that you're limited by SL's specific hardware and engineering (including network) choices.
I advise you never to use vender provided features (that means avoiding AWS features along with depending on SL network topology (which is vlans, nothing special)).
Anybody making a service today should be able to buy a server at any provider, or setup a colo anywhere and join those resources in and get advantage of those resources instantly. All without depending on stacks and software you have no control over.
I hear this as a reason not to own, but I struggle to understand it, given my experience with how reliable modern hardware is (with notable exceptions[1]).
Regardless, you don't have to repair anything broken at all. It may seem preposterous at first, but, for low enough failure rates, on things with low enough replacement cost [2], using warm spares and abandoning in place can be a reasonable strategy. This can work remarkably well for disks in remote locations, especially in non-hot-swap enclosures.
> depending on SL network topology
One doesn't have a choice, though. There's no alternate topology (nor maximum bandwidths) available. Not taking maximum advantage may be premature optimization (optimizing for stability, rather than performance).
> Anybody making a service today should be able to buy a server at any provider, or setup a colo anywhere and join those resources in and get advantage of those resources instantly.
That would be nice, but it's tantamount to asking everyone go "multi-cloud", which removes too much of the "don't have to think/worry about it" purported benefit of cloud/IaaS.
[1] high-density (say, more than 1socket/U) seems to be the worst offenders
[2] by which I mean the current equivalent, including something like half of a server of a quarter of a CPU
2. Softlayer completely f'ed us twice now with down time resulting in a substantial dollar loss.
Amazes me when I see automation stacks with 5x the hardware you need to run the entire production / dev / stage environments
This is a phrase tossed around a lot, and I am challenging it.
If you make the developers part of the process then the software that is produced is forced to keep the entire vertical inline with the business needs.
You do this by giving the developers the budget along with the requirements. Developers are smart, they will figure out how produce the solution with the budget at hand. And when they realize they will be the one getting the call when things go wrong they will ensure systems are robust and fault tolerant by baking those features directly into the software they are building.
But I guess part of the process is there is a big effort to dumb down each segment of building software so people who have no desire to build software can simply use people as pawns in the game of business. It really shocks me that we still have businesses built with the core of people coming form antiquated business schools. Where they have reinforce the notion that a business needs to be swamped with a bunch of people who collect big paychecks for attending meeting after meeting after meeting while the engineers and developers continuously bring real value to organization.
Nobody ever talks about that CEO, CFO, or VP of whatever or Director of what ever as being expensive. Nobody ever talks about how to cut cost at that level. Meanwhile we have all sorts of strategies and cost cutting measures to lower the amount of budget going to the very people who are actually creating the value in a company.
I will tell you what is expansive. Paying some guy 6+ figures to tell you the guys who build the software that the company's revenue comes from is expansive. When was the last time you heard somebody outsourcing the executive team at a company ?
For those enraptures and founders out there, please don't get me wrong. I am not talking about you. I am talking about the people you may hire, or the people that other people say you need to hire.
> 1. AWS saves us money despite the apparent higher costs because our developers spend more time working on our core business than managing infrastructure, and developer time is our most expensive resource.
But in most cases you lose any preserved savings because of the very ease of use and lack of needing to think about the infrastructure management. This is because more often than not problems are solved by just adding another instance, vs actually solving the larger problem.
Also, I would say part of the core business is providing the server, not simply writing the software that is the interface to the service being provided to the end users. E.G. Keeping servers up and and the right number of them in operating is just as important to the core of the business as writing the software / website of the service you are intending on providing. Outsourcing that a 3rd party removes your ability for you to control the entire service that you intend on providing, it is left in the hands of somebody else who may not be aligned to your business needs.
> 2. Softlayer completely f'ed us twice now with down time resulting in a substantial dollar loss.
AWS has f'ed near half the internet before, and probably will do so again.
Service outages are shitty, I get it, but my suggestion for Softlayer was just that, there are others, and my favorite is actually colo with everybody else's cheap EOL servers.
As a anatotal I have seen far to many projects move from bare metal, to AWS or the likes who at a minimum tripple the running cost for less performance. You could say the engineers suck, but I thought they were going to get to spend more time working on core business?
I have ran the numbers many time myself and I can't support AWS for anything other than bootstrapping a well funded startup. After that if you want to lower your cost you are either going to have to jump through hoops and formulate your service to use the cheapest parts all while not focusing on the busness but trying to get that AWS bill down.
Somewhere, you're drawing the line between what you build in-house and what you outsource. Where to draw the line depends on many factors. There's definitely no "right" place, such as never using cloud resources.
For example, I used to work for a solar power company that would install panels on the roofs of big box stores and then sell the power to the stores below grid prices. This company did not manufacture panels -- they bought them at market rate from various suppliers.
The company got acquired by a major silicon wafer manufacturer. One of the things this wafer company made were solar panels -- boom, vertical integration. What a win, right? Well, as it turned out, after about a year, their competitors were able to bring their panel prices down whereas the acquiring company moved a bit more slowly. Thus the wafer company became an albatross around the solar power company's neck. They had to use the parent company's panels, instead of their more cost-effective competitors, and ended up no longer being competitive in the market.
So vertical integration can and often does make sense, but it comes with a loss of agility, and sometimes being nimble is more important.
In your ancedote the buying company seems to be benefit with increased sales for a non competitive product. Ofcourse they are doing at the expense of the eroding target , but they are deriving value not the way you see it perhaps or the best possible one but value nonetheless.
There's also some good integration with PM and IDE software that we use and enjoy.
I look forward to the national election where a politician stops what they're doing to complain every single time someone doesn't vote for them, and interrupt what's happening to demand an explanation.
That isn't how voting works.
"cost a ton more than you realize" - unless you look at the prices for the contract you're agreeing to? Y'know, like you do?
"Should have" - telling someone what their company should have done, without even knowing what their company /is/, let alone what they were trying to achieve and what constraints they had on their available options. Assuming or implying that the cheaper thing is always the more correct thing and no other factors can change that.
Maybe I will agree, or disagree. Maybe I will learn something. But simply downvoting because you don't agree leaves no new information for me or anybody else reading to learn something.
I could be horribly wrong. And the process of being told why somebody thinks I am wrong might inlighten somebody else even if I hold to my initial view.
That being said, the voting system AFAIK on HN is more about being relevant to the topic, and less about agreeing. Although in practice upvotes tend to be more about agreeing and down votes more about being off topic or illrevent.
Not everybody can downvote, so when somebody does it means they have been around long enough to gain enough magical internet points to do so. So they might have some real insight that could help a OP or inlighten others. Along with making a good conversation even if no agreement is made at the end.
> I look forward to the national election where a politician stops what they're doing to complain every single time someone doesn't vote for them, and interrupt what's happening to demand an explanation.
Nobody is a politician here, what does that have to do with anything? This entire site was designed to talk about things, so I am hardly interrupting "what's happening"
> "cost a ton more than you realize" - unless you look at the prices for the contract you're agreeing to? Y'know, like you do?
AWS has public pricing, I can compare them to other publicly priced places. I don't need a contract that simply don't exist in most cases.
> "Should have" - telling someone what their company should have done, without even knowing what their company /is/, let alone what they were trying to achieve and what constraints they had on their available options. Assuming or implying that the cheaper thing is always the more correct thing and no other factors can change that.
I can compare server for server , compute for compute, and all the above. I don't really need to know what our anybody else is doing with a system to understand the raw resources you can get from the services offered and compare them based off that.
And long enough to know that they can write a reply if they want to write a reply, without being prompted.
Nobody is a politician here, what does that have to do with anything? This entire site was designed to talk about things, so I am hardly interrupting "what's happening"
It's illustrative because politicians are the main thing people deal with when 'voting' for something, and the scale of political votes draws attention to the problem. Imagine HN if every comment that got downvoted had a line asking for an explanation - that would be almost every single comment - totally interrupting the flow of the comment threads. Imagine if political votes with millions of voters were stopped by someone demanding an explanation for one or two "down"votes. It would be unworkable. Voting is an aggregate, noisy, large-scale summary. And now this really is dragging it off-topic talking about voting instead, and entreaties to "explain your votes" to people who could have done that if they wanted to, always will tend towards "that's not downvote-worthy", "yes it is", "no it isn't".
AWS has public pricing, I can compare them to other publicly priced places.
Right. So why are you telling other people they are spending "more than they realize"? Either they didn't bother reading the prices, or they don't understand the prices - where's any evidence for either of those? How is it any more than an insult about their inability to understand the public pricing before signing up?
"I can compare server for server , compute for compute, and all the above. I don't really need to know what our anybody else is doing with a system to understand the raw resources you can get from the services offered and compare them based off that."
Indeed you can. What you can't do - or what I disagree with - is you saying "I can get cheaper compute resources here, /so/ that's what your company /should/ have done". It doesn't matter what you started with, who you employ, what skills they have, what constraints you had on timescale or rewriting or redesigning, what your management or investors would support, what discounts you could get, what your future plans are, none of those things matter, only a rudimentary price-per-ghz is enough to tell you that you did the wrong thing and say I know better.
It was in the phrasing, not in some defense of the "Cloud", which is overrated for existing businesses.
But I can see how that phrasing might warrant a down vote.
He got his code running on Elastic Beanstalk in about 2 hours. I spend $40/mo on AWS, but an extra team member would cost me at least $10k/mo.
Never say "never". Many (most) of us would prefer predictable, high infra costs over unpredictable (possibly even higher) payroll.
That would defeat the entire purpose of using voting to manage the signal to noise ratio; in general, if a comment is worthy responding to, it shouldn't be downvoted, and vice versa.
If you upvote, and had to reply saying the same thing because you agree no new information is presented. Thus simply upvoting is needed.
But if you downvote, that means somebody has a differing opinion. Leaving it at a downvote only lets us know somebody disagrees and no new dialog can be had about what other ways something could be viewed.
That being said I think we mostly use the upvote and downvote feature on HN wrong but I could be wrong because I never really looked it up.
I think the intent is a upvote and downvote marks relevance, not agreement, but we often use it for agreement when upvoting. And downvotes seem to happen for both relevance and disagreements.
For example, replying to a post about what hosting provider is best with "I like chocolate ice cream", and "Rackspace is a good option" could both be downvoted for very difference reasons. One for being off topic, OR not liking chocolate ice cream" and the other for simply hating Rack Space.
So if you find you are downvoting something that has no comments that cover your settlement and the post is on topic then it would be helpful for many who may not share your sentiment if you explain why. I don't think that is too much to ask for.
No, it doesn't.
Downvote means “this post is not a productive contribution to the discussion”.
Disagreement may be a reason for that, but it's far from the only reason.
> Leaving it at a downvote only lets us know somebody disagrees and no new dialog can be had about what other ways something could be viewed.
If a comment presents a productive platform for on-topic dialog, then comment and don't downvote.
Downvoting is for things that don't do that.
You may have gotten confused by this clickbait TechCrunch headline, which does not match the article content: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/29/google-steps-back-from-run...
Disclosure: I’m executive director of CNCF which hosts Kubernetes.
Some companies have to care what developers think. (Few, to be frank; developers overestimate their importance.) Many companies have to care what "influencers" think.
But not all, and Google is not part of that "most". Google doesn't have to give a shit because everyone uses Google. They are literally market-saturated at this point. They have no competition and the only material threat in the medium run is a powerful country with a salty antitrust division.
And on your other point, the idea that a company like Google should care about the rounding error of people who care about some B2C thing like Reader shutting down (while many totally-fine alternatives exist) being so personally put out that that colors their analysis of B2B offerings is more than a little silly. If you decide on GCP based frustrations over Google Reader or Google Inbox, you probably aren't clear-headed enough to be making decisions for your company and it's probably a good thing that you are a rounding error besides.
(I use some Google services; I don't use GCP for a variety of reasons completely unrelated to babyraging over a B2C shutdown.)
Google fairly obviously is not doing that.
What sort of blowback do conglomerates see for this? Do railroad executives balk at buying GE locomotives because their GE refrigerators fail?
This is the key. Google has my "business," but I'm also sick of it. The moment there's a really valid competitor - and these days, I'm starting to look at protonmail - I'm gone. The same stickiness that kept me with them will keep me gone.
I really don't think I'm alone in that.
There was one guy who actually seriously suggested Google offering. Idea got dropped as EVERY other person in discussion said NO. Azure it will be. Over life of that project I am guessing google lost something like 1-2mil USD minimum. Obviously chump change by their standard but still.
Main reasoning for me was always the absolutely atrocious customer support, no fucking way in hell I will ever give 1c to them if I can avoid it.
I used to be a 100% Google products user, but my faith that it is fundamentally a good and ethical company has been systematically destroyed in the past years.
I'd honestly even settle with something like a program where users can choose to enroll in these programs in some sort of test phase. Maybe put some kind of marker in the name or even on the logo that clearly informs and denotes "this product might not last long, it might go into production, it may die after 3 years, you have been warned".
There's a word for this but for some reason it eludes me (and apparently eludes google as well). At least it'd soften the blow when they inevitably roll things up on one of these so designated services.
Beta? Developer Preview?
Google (mis)uses both already. Heck Gmail was in Beta for years (5? Not sure, but that seems the right ballpark).
Playing devil's advocate, what happens when the trust doesn't become restored?
The company loses ad revenue?
Developers flee in mass droves to...Yahoo and Microsoft?
Look what happened when people "lost trust" in Facebook. Shares are down 4% relative to a year ago. Is the company permanently crippled? Are people revolting and moving to alternate forms of social media? Fewer of the people immediately connected to your local graph are probably using Facebook. But that local loss of users gets completely offset by the new users they grow internationally.
Ultimately, these companies are beholden to their boards and shareholders.
Unless Inbox users clicked enough ads to make a dent in revenue, the organization has every reason to deprioritze competing products, and continue down the path of creating free A/B tests, and then merging the winner into a hybrid/better product.
Take a look at Fuchsia.
Or Dart and Flutter.
Or Hangouts and Talk.
An easy heuristic here might be, "Lose trust in the few in order to benefit the many." It sounds really sad, but it is the reality numerous companies live by.
Just 51% of US individuals aged 13 to 17 say they use Facebook – a dramatic plunge from the 71% who said they used the social network in Pew’s previous study in 2015, when it was the dominant online platform.
In this year’s study reported Facebook use was, according to Pew, “notably lower” than the percentage of teens who said they used YouTube (85%), Instagram (72%) or Snapchat (69%). In the previous study, just 52% of teens said they used Instagram, while 41% said they used Snapchat.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/01/facebook-...
Being a social media user is age-independent, whereas one's teens is something they grow out of.
So, not only existing teens grow out of being teens (and eventually Snapchat users), but new teens won't necessarily grow into it to replace them.
Unlike older people, who value utility and what they already know more, new teens are just entering the social media field (and thus are more open to whatever might come next), and they are all about what's cool (so when a service loses it's cool it abandoned MySpace-like fast).
Not too far fetched given that DJT is presidente.
The idea that because things are some way now they will be forever thusly hasn't panned out historically.
Once dominant IT companies are now dust. The same thing can happen to any company, including FB and Google is they piss enough people off.
And that's incremental. Today's annoyances matter.
Once all-mighty 99% of the Desktop Microsoft now has the more lucrative 5% of the desktop eaten by Apple, and is irrelevant on mobile and web services (search, mail). If they had gathered goodwill back then (like they strive to do now) things would have been different.
I'm not refuting (because I don't really know) but questioning this statement.
Technological progress is a confounder, apart from that I think people and organizations behave as they always have. Okay, enslaving and murdering people has become harder - in the "modern" parts of the world at least. The "system" still favors not paying too much attention to the human side, and to do whatever you can get away with regardless of cost to society, I think.
This discussion (and thus the quip about "things being the same forever") is not about human nature, though. It's about consumer choices, and whether Google is really secure long term.
"More than 1 in 4 American users have deleted Facebook, Pew survey finds"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/05/more-th...
And is there really a generation of new users ready to take their place? I'm not sure:
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
No tech company of this size dies overnight. And they might be diversified enough to be fine for a very long time (WhatsApp, Instagram) but these are very real problems for facebook.
Section 7:
7.2 Deprecation Policy. Google will announce if it intends to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to the Services specified at the URL in the next sentence. Google will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate those Services versions and features identified at https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation without these changes for at least one year after that announcement, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment):
(i) required by law or third party relationship (including if there is a change in applicable law or relationship), or
(ii) doing so could create a security risk or substantial economic or material technical burden.
Also they don't have any feedback / bug report channels - these are also important if you plan to support your own stuff (I know you can monitor a lot but it's still not the same level of customer support)
Pivoting is seen as a tremendously good thing in the startup community. If you have a product that isn't working and isn't getting users, you do something different or your company dies. You simply cannot keep throwing developer time at such a product.
Google has a lot more money than a startup and can afford to waste developer time, but it still isn't good. "We tried this thing out and it didn't get a lot of users" is an absolutely reasonable argument for killing a product. Google just gets known for killing products because they are so big and therefore start so many new products.
What's good for the startup community is not the same for the entrenched behemoth community.
>. If you have a product that isn't working and isn't getting users, you do something different or your company dies. You simply cannot keep throwing developer time at such a product.
Google however can. But instead of developing their product further, they announce it as the next thing, get millions of users, and then forget about it, don't update it, don't promote it anymore, and eventually close it pissing off all those users and failing to attract more users due to their own inaction.
(See the ex-googler's comment above about how this process goes).
Killing a thriving service is not the same as pulling the plug on one that no one uses.
What exactly do they owe you?
Not enough people were using Inbox. It was an experiment and now they're moving on.
MS is probably supporting XP in the embedded world. If you are not selling to consumers you have to be prepared to do that
* I meant the SLA for notice of deprecation not the lifetime of the productWhen companies launch experiments and features that people actually like and then take them away, they piss some people off.
The bad PR they are getting from this means they didn't make it clear they were going to discontinue the service in 2020 (or something like that) and make it super easy to transition.
It's pretty weird they wouldn't just keep their Inbox service up and running and minimize maintenance costs.
Seems to suggest they want to make big changes to the underlying data storage and don't want to worry about backward compatibility.
This is oversimplified. Google makes products expecting something in return: users provide it data and ad revenue. More directly, users invest time and thought into learning it and integrating it into their lives. Google invited people to depend on it, and after they did, it killed the product. That's real hours wasted for real people. It's not irrational for them to feel betrayed.
Yes, Google has the right to kill a product, just as you have the right to tell a party guest to leave your house. But don't expect them to love you afterward.
> Not enough people were using Inbox. It was an experiment and now they're moving on.
Why weren't enough people using Inbox? Speaking personally, I never tried it because I expected exactly this. I don't want to waste my time on things that will be shuttered.
Google seems to think that each product is an independent experiment. But it seems more likely that each "experiment" they end contributes to the failure of subsequent ones.
Google doesn't owe people products. But people don't owe Google goodwill, either. And without goodwill, it can't launch new products.
The bottom line is that Google is so big and important that other companies just have to put up with Google's behavior. Until that changes there won't be a migration away from Google's APIs.
I've never understood why. Google presumably has lots of data and feedback from people using Inbox, and determined that it wasn't useful enough or widespread enough to justify ongoing investment. Why is this surprising or shocking? This happens all the time in commercial and open source software.
The internet is great, but unfortunately has the ability to agglomerate individual moments of otherwise transient irritation into a pyroclastic flow of outrage.
* if the maintainer is no longer able to take the project further, the code is still there an can be used as is, maybe with a few bugfixes. (ala, thunderbird). The code does not disappear overnight. r.
* All the associated data is still yours and available. So no information is lost.
* If it is very critical, you can develop it yourself further
I am not an user of Inbox, but I can understand the outrage. When a service is offered for free by such a mammoth of a company, it gives a false sense of security and permanence. It crushes most competition and development of open source alternatives. Then one fine day, the rug is pulled from under your feet and there is no recourse.
The most ironic aspect is you no longer have access to your pinned emails, bundles and such. Yet, somewhere in google's distributed data storage, it will continue to reside for a long long time. The information asymmetry is outrageous.
It's the UI interactions (plus some metadata), and those are gone.
This is the aspect, above all the others, that bothers me. Apple is guilty of this too. As soon as a project or tool is released free or as part of the OS or whatever, it drives any competing version out of business. Does it matter if the implementation is shitty? No, because it will still be "good enough" for enough users to make that competition unviable. Does it matter if the implementation stops being developed and eventually gets pulled? No, because the competition has already been driven out.
If somehow the big company that pulls this (Google, Apple, etc) were to seriously commit to maintaining the project, hm, ok, fine I guess. But of course they've repeatedly shown that they won't do that.
Luckily, GDPR and it's predecessor allows you to download that data... Getting it into another program is a bigger challenge, of course.
I think it's not the same for Google, or other large companies. Products going away are something that happens a lot - you're right. But in many cases, it's a startup folding because their idea wasn't profitable / worth continuing. In case of a single service, the company will often fight to keep it alive, will try to improve and maybe increase the prices.
It's different for the huge enterprises. They just decide at some point to kill the product - it could be because they're not profitable (but is Gmail profitable?), it could be because of staffing assignment, it could be due to management shift, it could be because of internal conflicts.
It's easier to take "we tried and just can't succeed with this" than "management decision, deal with it".
I must admit I love the way that you phrased this.
To make a bad analogy (sorry) in response to your "lots of data and feedback", what Google repeatedly does is the equivalent of walking out into a crowd and yelling "HEY FREE HOT DOGS AT 1600 AMPHITHEATER PARKWAY" only one single time, and then concluding a week later that, even though initially the people who heard about the free hot dogs came by last week, since nobody is coming by for hot dogs anymore that people don't want free hot dogs. Remember Duo? Allo? Even Hangouts Chat from earlier this year is probably unknown to most people because google's stopped yelling in crowds about it.
There seems to be nobody at the top enforcing a consistent product vision.
This is how Android ended up having several text messaging apps at the same time a few years ago. Apple certainly would not have done that, and I doubt even Microsoft would have allowed that state of affairs to exist.
And in the same time, they had (open for a couple of years) a bug about Android default app sometimes randomly send SMS to wrong recipient.
Because if I got positive emotions from using inbox what is so unexpected about getting negative emotions when google kills it? Fuck them.
Huh?
Edit: Aha! This might be a reason to try Thunderbird 60 out.
It's alright, the app works well enough on iOS. No complaints so far really.
Then DuckDuckGo for search. You can use !g to switch to google search but I rarely do anymore.
Then Weblock and uBlock origin as ad blockers for phone and desktop respectively to prevent some data harvesting.
And I only browse in incognito, I just log in everytime I need to use something.
Then Apple Maps to replace maps.
I do still have a gmail account so no quite totally off google. And Apple Maps has gotten a lot better over time but is undeniably the worse product of the two.
But it works well enough.
If you mean the site you could use youtube-dl on desktop and NewPipe on Android. If you mean the service, I don't think there's anything. YouTube is pervasive for non-porn videos.
Want to watch a talk from that conference last month? It's only on YouTube.
Want to learn how to rebuild a V8? The best information is on YouTube.
The only thing I know of that isn't on YouTube is gun videos, and only because Google banned their accounts.
The algorithmic purpose seems to be, “hey you like X, maybe you’d like an insane or hateful tangent to X? Would that keep you clicking?”
Organic my ass.
I’m glad that you’ve had better luck with using it for discovery though, any tips on how how to get that to work?
Except YouTube ranks very well in DDG, Bing, and Yahoo too.
> any tips on how how to get that to work?
1) I don’t sign into YouTube unless I am uploading a video and I sign out when done.
2) I almost always search for something of a technical nature.
3) If I search for something “main stream popular” on YouTube, I usually do it in an incognito window.
What really annoys me is how woven Google has now become to our working day processes. It's all very well having open-source alternatives for private use, but many (I included) used Inbox for work where we are obligated to use Gmail. This feels like a step backwards in many regards.
Practically free!? Google Apps for domains is either $5 or $10+ a month per user, depending on feature set. That’s roughly the same price as most other commercial email providers. I don’t know for sure, but my guess is they make a profit on every account just on those monthly fees.
Sources:
https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-busine...
https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-busine...
https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-busine...
O365 Enterprise E1 is $8/month
O365 Enterprise E3 is $20/month
O365 Enterprise E5 is $35/month
GSuite Enterprise is $25/month
So none of O365’s Enterprise editions are double the price and in fact all but one edition is cheaper than GSuite Enterprise.
It's actually rather frightening for the open web. Kids can't get away from Youtube. Even on mobile devices, so many searches promote Google products over anything else. Try looking for an address on an iPhone. You can't even copy/paste the address or open it in Apple Maps. it automatically brings up Google Maps and prompts you to install it.
I ended up switching to Bing on my iPhone because I got so sick of Google's invasive tactics. On my device.
- I've decided I'm going to switch back to FireFox.
- I switch to an iPhone for the first time ever this year.
- I've looked hard into switching to https://www.fastmail.com. I've gone as far as backing up all my emails. (Funnily enough, I was looking into switching to Inbox.)
- I switched over to Dropbox.
- I literally only talk to one person on hangouts now.
- I primarily use Dialpad now. (from the makers of Uber Conference)
- I've been using duckduckgo.com more and more. I tried it as a daily driver for a bit but eventually went back.
Use hooktube (and Hooktube Redirector) on desktop and mobile and NewPipe on mobile. Favour apps from F-Droid. Install uBlock Origin on desktop and mobile.
My next moves are to get my calendars out of Google (my wife and I have several calendars we've shared for years) and into Fastmail. I need to get a couple of years' worth of photos out of Google Photos and back into Flickr. (They probably have a brighter future now that they've been rescued from oblivion by Smugmug - though Ipernity is probably another decent option for a classic Flickr experience.) `rclone` will probably be a lifesaver there.
I need to find a solution for hosted files and docs; I've not found Nextcloud to be convincing. I use B2 for offsite backups. I've yet to install a pi-hole, though I already have a pi doing DHCP and name resolution for my home network. I often use sshuttle if I want to become opaque to my ISP. I have a PIA VPN account but it's consistently terrible - could be my ISP mucking with the traffic.
It's going to be a multi-month project. I look at what I've done and have yet to do to evade constant casual surveillance and I strike myself as sounding like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist - but I'm not. I'm just a rational citizen, attempting to recover for myself some of the human rights I took for granted a decade ago.
YouTube => Deleted
Google plus => Deleted
Gmail => Deleted, switched to Soverin [0], works great, less than $4 per month for 25gb email hosting
Drive => Deleted, moved to iCloud
Docs => Deleted, use iWork for docs and Bear [1] for text
Search => Duck Duck Go, getting better all the time
Chrome => Safari, excellent battery life, good tracking protection
Google Photos => Deleted, moved to Apple photos
Next project is to move my website off of Google Analytics.
I’d love to fully switch to Apple Maps as it’s getting better but don’t know if I fully trust it yet. Google Maps is the gold standard.
[1] https://bear.app
My email may not be 100% safe (what is?), but at least it’s not being used to sharpen an ad-targeting algorithm.
I'm using a Pixel 2 XL now and while Google's services are indeed quite good, Apple's own suite of apps worked quite well, too. I like that the image recognition for photos was done on device instead of some remote servers.
Ruthless spam filtering without false positives is Gmail’s “killer app”, with insane scale and network effects protecting that lead.
A few years ago, when I was using gmail my address got used as the sender on a spam campaign and I was overwhelmed for weeks. Had nothing like that so far.
Maybe I’ve been lucky.
My wife’s company use Exchange and I haven’t had any trouble there.
I'm a Firefox/DDG/Dropbox+OneDrive/Outlook.com guy. No social media.
I just suffer with whatever battery loss I get on my laptops with Firefox. But I do think it draws less than Chrome. I tell people to just use native browsers that are already installed on their laptops for power/performance reasons, with a note that the only other browser that's customizable and powerful enough to be worth sacrificing battery efficiency for is Firefox. I love the features of Firefox and if it weren't so vastly customizable and superior to Edge/Safari I'd use and recommend native browsers only.
I do tend to prefer Apple and Microsoft over Google but that's a long held bias of mine. I didn't care for Google when they were popular with everyone in the early days of Chrome's release. Hated Google before it was cool, hipster Google hater.
What I'm trying to say is your data will be accessible by Google servers regardless of which email service you use -- so why the paid switch?
The things that rub me the most seem to be problems I think from the way the hire people. The average stay at google is like 2.5 years, so most of the things I loved were created by people who are no longer there ( I am sure there are some staples that stay there, but ... )
They tend to higher young and fresh out of school people who know algorithms but seem to lack a strong foundation in computer history. Not just normal computer history (the why things are the way they are) but they lack even the historical history with the products they are working on. You can see this in the way their products have changed and either lost features, or changed features in a fundamental way that break them.
I think many of the problems created area also created from the altitude that "they are the best and brightest so whatever they think must be right". I know this generalization does not hold true in all cases. This sort of attitude can be seen most recently in the way they are handling "www" and "m" domains, and then even suggesting that they would somehow just make the change and then assume they could push a standard on the rest of the internet. There are other cases but don't have the time or will to detail every one of them.
The google today is not the google many of us fell in love with.
This. That attitude will also result in an almost total inability to take valid feedback. If you incorrectly and arrogantly think your the best and brightest, why would you listen to the plebs when they tell you you're making a mistake.
Then you get the plebs who buy into the best and brightest myth. They falsely assume whatever decision Google, Apple, or Facebook makes must be backed by air-tight reasoning, understanding, and skill; then praise turds to the heavens out of ignorance.
> You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain
Wave died. G Suite has succeeded. Chrome succeeded. Reader died. Google+ is in a coma. Hangouts and Google Photos which came out of the ashes looks like they will stay, though what they are doing with their chat tools is a real mystery. In hardware, Chromecast succeeded, Nexus faded away as did a bunch of other stuff. Among the ones i am a little worried about : Google Keep - which i am using more and more. I hope it does not die. Also, Google wifi which i am using now - hope it stays. I tried Inbox and liked it, but I did not invest a lot in it.
The ones you can be certain won't go away are the ones with a billion+ users : Gmail, Android, Chrome, Maps, Search, Youtube, Google Drive (almost 1B) and Google Photos (500M+) should be fine as well.
But Google does not owe me anything. And I don't owe them. I don't have to use any of their products if I don't want to.
Hint: they steal your data
They had a strategic priority a while back to 'make mail good on mobile' ... whereas now they are folding it all back into the gmail umbrella because the overall strategic impetus would be to be gmail founded.
So, short term strategy now important with the longer term issues of product portfolio. Collapse the 'good bits' of inbox into Gmail and move forward.
You have to consider it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have two email products at the same time.
The real problem is the new Gmail is not very good.
It still blows my mind how companies with billions of dollars to burn get UI wrong. Like the first Windows 10.
I can actually see a shade of rationality in 'metrics driven design' i.e. 'picking the colour blue' on the web page. Small change in hue = difference. But beyond that - you need to trust your designers.
If they are set up with the right philosophy and don't let their aesthetic aspirations get out of hand ... you need them.
You don't just phase that sort of thing out in favor of some upstart that came along three years ago. You can't. A category 5 shitstorm would ensue. Few people have the stomach for that.
Fine you say, can't Inbox and Gmail at least co-exist? There again the answer is no. The usurper must eventually be vanquished. The situation is not long-term sustainable.
> You don't just phase that sort of thing out
Things that "just can't be done" end up being perfectly feasible in the hands of a leader with some boldness and tolerance for organizational pushback. Often, all that's required to achieve the politically impossible is for an absolute authority to say "do it".
This is a huge deal.
Searching for stuff in my business inbox is important. If you can't trust search, then you have to manually walk through those emails.
And because Gmail 'clusters' threads together, it's often impossible to find something.
This has disrupted me on a few occasions.
If you can't trust your email ...
Gmail team: make 'search' by default more inclusive. Err on the side of including stuff. It's kornballs that you don't do this already.
How do you expect search to work?
It's much harder to build a UI that a billion people like than one that a hundred people like.
Startups have the luxury of being able to pick their customers. They can (and should) make the UI really, really tailored to their initial customers, because that's all they've got. Nail that and the initial customers evangelize the product, and bring new customers in.
Big companies do not have that luxury. Most peoples' desires are contradictory; some people like things one way, other people like it another way, some people want it configurable just the way they want it, most people get confused and leave if you put in too many knobs and configuration options. When you're doing UI design for a billion-dollar company, you have to shoot for the middle-ground that will piss off the fewest people. That's invariably something that doesn't make people all that excited either.
I was involved in 4 UI redesigns for Google Search, one as the first engineer, two as a tech lead, and one as a consultant. Usually the version we launched was a pale shadow of some of the cooler ideas that the UI designers came up with, and made nobody particularly excited, including the people who designed it. But that's the reality of serving over a billion people. Every feature cut was cut because it would make the design unusable for some fraction of the userbase; every misfeature added was added because somebody really wanted it, and in most cases we had the metrics to prove it.
As for Google Search, why can't they just offer features for those who want them? I wan't long pages of results, not short, I want inverted colours, don't want search results that don't include a term etc..
Heh. I am intimately familiar with the road that leads down...
My first project at Google was the Search Options panel [1]. This was a collapsible left-nav with a bunch of additional tools that you could use to help refine, visualize, or otherwise improve your search results. Many of these tools were very useful to certain populations (one that I worked on was called Wonder Wheel [2] and was very popular with teachers, reporters, and advertisers) and virtually useless to everyone else. Why was this panel collapsible? So that we could offer these features to just those who wanted them without cluttering the UI for everyone else.
Many of these tools got very low usage despite rave reviews. Why? Well, when we interviewed users, they didn't know they existed. On Hacker News discussions I'd direct-link people to a specific tool like custom date range or verbatim mode, and they'd be like "Wow, this is so useful. I had no idea this existed. You guys should make this obvious in the UI."
So my 3rd project at Google, a visual redesign of all of Search [3], included an always-open left nav.
After an initial bump, though, usage numbers for all the tools started dropping off. One interesting effect that you find out, if you do enough metrics-based UI design, is that people become blind to features they don't use. These tools were special-purpose enough that the majority of searchers - who just want to get to their result as fast as possible - were becoming blind to the whole left nav. So the order came down that we needed to hide most of the tools, and only show the ones that we could predict would be likely to be used on the particular query.
Well, we did that, but another principle of UI design is that controls should appear in a predictable order and not move around, so that people can build habits around their use. Changing the set of tools displayed per query violates that principle.
Eventually, after a few more redesigns, the left nav moved to the top nav and most of the tools were discontinued anyways. Many of the features you want actually exist, and I bet you don't know about them. You can get long results through Settings -> Search Settings -> Results per page, for example, and you can prevent Google from inferring what you really mean via Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim. But that sorta proves my point, right? You can't really please everyone - even if you build the features they need, there's no guarantee they'll know about them.
[1] https://searchengineland.com/up-close-with-google-search-opt...
[2] https://www.ppchero.com/how-to-use-google-wonder-wheel-and-r...
[3] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis...
I still miss Reader, it had all my favorite websites back in the day.
What alternative is there to gmail/inbox? Unlike an RSS reader, I think it's much more difficult to make an email service that's close to being as good as gmail/inbox while having the same level of features, especially across platforms.
On that note, it boggles my mind that no startup has simply coppied google reader's features yet.
Also, "sort by magic" provided an excellent feed of articles to me in Reader, and all of the alternatives I tried either didn't have a comparable algorithm or their userbase was too small to train it.
This is not true. You can still align KPIs to stuff like that... The problem is looking at 'vanity metrics' or one-size-fits-all metrics like pure user growth, without proper segmentation of high-value and high-engagement users.
Or worse marketing/positioning failing to pull its weight and blaming the product. Or giving it a half-hearted attempt, limited resource/talent-wise, and then comparing the results 1-to-1 with other successful products which were heavily prioritized.
There's plenty of opportunity to miss the boat. Aligning metrics with business goals is a dynamic process, not one-size-fits-all, which is lost on many business in the big data world.
I was happy to oblige to using pins when I transitioned from Gmail -> Inbox. Stars were replaced with pins but there is no direct mapping. But now that Inbox is dead, the years of pinned emails are effectively useless when they should've been starred in Gmail. It's a frustrating experience for users especially when this is not the first time for Google.
This is why as an Android Developer, I'm in the majority community opinion believing that Dart/Flutter/Fuschia shouldn't be trusted. These products/dev tools are going to be in perpetual beta and not worth taking the risk of going to prod with.
I'm really going to miss inbox :(
While Gmail still lacks some of the other email intelligence features that I will miss, like the Trips bundle, I have a feeling they will emerge in Gmail shortly.
There isn't much competition to email. It's likely that other products were prioritized (like ARCore) due to competition from Apple, etc.
I think I'll switch back to Thunderbird on desktop for the time being, given that the hassle (and delays) of having several POP3 accounts configured on the Gmail website isn't really worth the effort without Inbox.
I doubt Google would be committed to keeping both Gmail and Inbox around forever.
Either Gmail would be merged into Inbox, or Inbox features would be merged into Gmail. Both of those choices would outrage a large group of users. Frankly it seems that getting rid of Inbox involves pissing off far fewer people than getting rid of Gmail.
Any suggestions for an email client that has decent android support, and offers a snooze function?
When google killed greader, Feedly, The old Reader and other products rose up to the challenge. They felt there was market, and they launched (or just changed and marketed better) their product.
What is stopping you from doing the same now?
There are 2 Types of Gmail users, gmail.com and G Suite.
I think Google prefer maintaining two types of backends, rather than two types of front-ends.
I think in the end, Google doesn't want more than one email service. If Inbox showed enough growth to someday replace Gmail, it might have had a chance.
Another annoying side note. Google recently forced the switch from hangouts to meet, and meet video chat doesn’t work in Safari.
It's amazing to me that a company with close to 90 000 employees and that attracts top talent can't find a way to support their services longer than a few years. How much does a handfull of indian engineers and space in their own datacenter cost?
So far it seems to be like this.
1) Have a big spin up in the US. Create a new product in 1 year or less. 2) Stabilize the product over the 2nd year. 3) Slowly lay off US engineers and support teams in favor for guys in India.
Don't get me wrong, I have no issue with Indian engineers. The problem seems to be management cares about headcount and not quality. It would be one thing if we were being replaced by better engineers, but that is not the case.
Was great to have it. I'll miss it. I hope someone picks up where they left off. I'm unsure whether I'll be willing to pay for it if someone does.
Gmail is still fairly incredible overall, but it's simply par now rather than the revelation it once was.
My least favorite thing about Inbox was the low-density UI. I want side-bars. I want to be able to have a high-density list view. Inbox never integrated my hangouts transcripts. I'm fine with going back to a much-evolved GMail.
I also tried to switch to Gmail in preparation, and it's a lot worse IMO.
Between dead, Google Plus and only available on Android.
it is strange for us people because we know 1000s who care for those products/features
And no whataboutism please, this deprecarion event is about Inbox, not some other product.