Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

On the outset, you might think with such ridiculously high compensation there would be an expectation of quality, but I think that's an error.

Google operates as an ad-company that happens to employ ridiculous amounts of exhorbitantly compensated individuals to engage in market and technological research, particularly to open or expand markets for their ads.

They didn't create mail, docs, drive et al in order to create productivity apps, they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same. They don't really care what content is in the browser so long as it is browser-based content the user consumes and not native apps. The more browser time spent, the higher the likelihood of being served Google ads, or providing Google with data, and similar.

Chrome has been deteriorating in performance and power usage - on OSX at least, I recently switched back to Firefox because it was that bad (Safari is a step too far as I want to work on non-Apple platforms). Firefox has slipped from the mainstream and it's very obvious - so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) - the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.

And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation. Implementation is ridiculously inconsistent across OS versions and HW vendors - I was trying to create a WiFi management API for some industrial application that would connect to controller specific networks - Android has 2 layers of terrible and depricated API with documentation that was misleading at best, a new API that only worked on 10+ without backcompat, and the actual implementation was inconsistent across four Android devices we tested. We gave up on the project as the Matrix of features missing and hacks needed for every platform we could find was just not practical to maintain.

This drove me nuts with my Nest Minis until I tried out Apple's Homepod.

People hate on Apple for moving slow in the "connected home" space, but my Homepod sounds great, can distinguish between my wife and I, and can handle BOTH personal and work calendars for the two of us. I'll take the polish over my actual use cases, rather than rough edges around a wider set of uses, most of which I never will use.

And neither of us use iCloud for email! It blows my mind that a Google can offer email/calendars for both personal and work use can tie both to you as an individual, but _somehow_ can't make your "smart" speaker do the same.

You are in for a surprise. Office 365 (at least Excel and Word) looks like a toy compared to the desktop versions. I'm not talking about niche features or VBA, I'm talking about things like naming a table, which is explicitly only supported in the desktop version. Ah, of course! You need the table's name to use it in their Power Automate platform. Microsoft 365 is a mess right now. I hope it improves.

They did. Sundar ran both Android and Chrome, and now he's CEO.

I mostly use YouTube to watch series - PBS Space Time, World War Two, Crash Course etc. YouTube is absolutely horrible at navigating through these series - it is difficult to find where you left, it is difficult to find the next episode, there is absolutely no user comfort.

That is a really strange false equivalency. Not even the slightest bit relevant, yet it reads as if you believe that protesting for social change is a bad thing.

It's like this was a low hanging fruit of finally cleaning up some old mess in Chromium, Google ignored it for years, and MS team just did it.

I don't work at Google these days so I can't offer the exact reasons why, but it shouldn't be surprising then that the two don't play well.

Amazon, on the other hand is not contractually obligated to create this silo. For it, your GSuite account is just another third party account, no different from your GMail account.

Yes this is an undesirable outcome, but when business users choose to buy GSuite services with the assurance that the data won't be available to Google for general purpose learning, this is the price they pay for that privacy.

It's like they develop products just enough to get people using them so they can squeeze out some more meta-data and connect the dots back to a Google account, and then they stop development because it's not going to add more revenue.

And if they can't figure out how to push advertising with it, they drop it.

Our general sense is that whatever MS is using for autoscaling the Sharepoint instances that run the service doesn't work. During busy work days Word loses its connection to the service constantly.

This is totally unnecessary. Striking is a serious matter and not just getting company paid days off for some lazy egineers.

It uses a pseudo-compatible Java 8 subset, with no official roadmap to ever move beyond that, everyone is supposed to move to Kotlin, while they keep fixing the slower developer experience and broken tooling introduced by adding Kotlin support.

NDK requires a great resistance to pain with a development experience that occasionally still makes me miss Carbide/Symbian C++. It took them 10 years to introduce any kind of packaging support for NDK dependencies, there are still no tools to improve the developer experience calling Android APIs, one has to manually write JNI wrappers, or use their unsafe C bindings to APIs that are actually written in somehow safer C++.

I lost count how many stuff introduced as one year amazing IO stuff, is already deprecated the following year. Latest example, all the GUI layout editing tools still being worked on, which will be eventually deprecated when JetPack Composer hits stable.

Critical libraries like Oboe, that are just dumped into Github, instead of having first class support on the SDK and project templates.

Team that puts critical information everywhere on the Internet except on Android's official documentation.

Very small rant, 10 years have a lot of stuff to rant on, so amazing? Not really.

> now word in the cloud kinda works!

is the overstatement of the century. I am stuck with this horrendous product, with its unbelievably bad live collaboration which constantly overwrites what other people are doing, its terrible SSO implementation, its penchant for presenting the least navigable UI I have ever had the misfortune to experience...

Google Docs has stagnated, I agree, Office is light years away from having its seamless sync.

Glad you brought this one up. I had an issue with an enterprise account where I was attempting to access work and code I had contained in a doc I created for the client. I was the owner and creator of the doc, but somehow I got stuck in a loop where I had to request permission from myself.

Google "Support" was basically nonexistent - I had to ask our company adminstrator, who told me only they could get access to speak with a human, and even that wouldn't be able to be done immediately.

I ended up redoing all the work. AWS and Microsoft, in comparison, have had excellent enterprise support.

I get it for free, but g suite is valuable enough to me that I'd pay for it. The thread implies that paying for it wouldn't help.

Which led me to experimenting with migrating off my legacy gsuite, and with the API rate limiting, it seems it would take upwards of 30 days. I can download that data in 10 minutes if it's unhindered.

Personally, I think web based office is something Microsoft wants to drive subscription revenue, but isn’t something customers want. Office is probably the best and most complex fat client app in the world, why sacrifice that?

IMO, Office will embrace add on supplementation and value add to the Office apps.

Like why even doesn't sheets and docs have the exact same table cell formatting options?

Following that, why can't a sheet seamlessly embed to a google doc.

Namely, the things that directly contribute to the ads business.

The Hangouts move is still one of the most infuriating things I've seen in tech anytime in the last decade. Remember how Google was actively contributing to an open and interoperable spec for chat, and then just proceeded to go full Ayn Rand about it?

There's a pretty strong argument to be made that if any major players were still backing XMPP as a standard, we wouldn't all have a bunch of people in our lives who have said some variation of "I would quit Facebook right now if I didn't need Messenger"

What's that got to do with it? Are you suggesting this is the reason things aren't shipping? I saw the "strikes" as another symptom of a company that is now deaf. Employees can't get their voices heard as individuals anymore.

Android / Chrome are providing what is primarily a platform, not a product. That's a very different mindset and way of working.

So tell me again why I would use google products when they are all so interlinked that one affects the other? No thanks

* It's a constant struggle to keep documents in folders so that you can find them easily.

* Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist.

* Moreover, I can't ensure that important documents are reliably stored in folders where everyone else can find them easily as well.

I don't understand why Google does not get how important this is for business documents. It's a breath of fresh air to use Dropbox or Box at this point.

Hey's screener feature shows there's a lot of room to innovate on giving users control of their attention beyond the filters and labels that Gmail has deemed sufficient for more than a decade now. Setting up forwarding to use Hey as a read client for my incoming gmail email has shown me that my address being old and public is not the problem.

Inbox had bundling that was a promising direction, but that seems to have been scrapped when they shut that client down. I'm not a tinfoil hat person and don't really mind being tracked, but it doesn't surprise me that a company that makes its living off monetizing attention would never lead on giving control of it back to users.

Zoom does some kind of active noise-cancelling where it will avoid picking up whatever the person on the other end just said, preventing the echo effect. Meet doesn't, it picks up everything. So if you use a speaker, everything the other person says gets repeated back at them.

When Meet recently announced noise-cancelling, we got really excited, only to be disappointed when they were referring to cancelling of background noises and not of participants.

But because he couldn’t convince corporate to adopt it and when it became a feature it fell under the reliability guidelines, they canned it even though customers liked it.

I'd be surprised if this tendency had anything to do with Google exporting its culture.

I'm not so sure that's the case. It seems like historically certain products are starved of feautures and resources while other products are made a priority, and it also seems like these priorities can shift pretty rapidly.

In the Google+ era for example there was the concept of "more wood behind fewer arrows" and a ton of money and resources went into plus to the detriment of other products (some of which were outright cancelled) and now obviously plus is no longer a priority.

Hangouts was developed (iirc) for plus to attract users for a social network then eventually became Meets which seems to be attached to Google Apps as a business offering to attract paying subscribers. Which on some level makes sense but from the vantage of the actual product leads to some wasted effort and changes that seem arbitrary to users. There doesn't seem to have been a clear incentive to put features into Hangouts/Meet; instead the incentive seems to have been to grow the distinct platforms the product was attached to as a feature of those platforms. (Hence Duo as a separate product, it is attached to yet another platform, Android). Meanwhile Zoom, by staying focused on just the actual product of videoconferencing software, left Google's offering in the dust.

Are there as many people working on features at say Blogger as there were 10 years ago? I doubt it. I'm not even saying that's wrong just that it contradicts the idea that Google can be said to incentivize features in the arbitrary case. I think it's clearly only for blessed products and that set of products that are blessed will change over time.

Outside Google, I've seen plenty of terrible code by people who would fail FizzBuzz.

Within Google, I've seen way more attention paid to code quality and system design than at any other place I've worked at.

Business users want focused things like accurate budget vs. actuals reports where you can flag and fix deviations quickly. There's an overall design--of course--but great enterprise software is the result of attention to very granular features related to specific work practices.

In this case the devil really is in the details.

as always govt has failed everyone by failing to prosecute these big behemoths where the only 'innovation' they do is centralize and capitalize on an already emerging solution from the rise of internet and computing.

what we need is a philanthropic fund that funds startups like craigslist & does it completely open sourced from the getgo.

Let’s imagine a firm, and let’s call it Adobe. Adobe makes Photoshop. Photoshop has a full set of features and is sold for a high price to a market segment comprised of professional users who need the features provided by Photoshop, and are happy to pay the price since it enables them to make a decent living even once the cost of the tool is deducted. Adobe gets a decent revenue that allows it to cover expenses, capital costs, and develop future versions.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have Microsoft. Microsoft ships Paint for free. Paint has very few features, but it covers some (mainly ironic) usage cases, and it gets used by those who wish to manipulate images but have no need for the complex features of Photoshop. Sure, some people who wish to do high-level image manipulation but cannot afford Adobe’s asking price for Photoshop are not well-served by this arrangement, but hardly anybody would argue that Microsoft’s inclusion of Paint would be anti-competitive towards Adobe: it’s not worth adding all the features of Photoshop to Paint only to give it away for free (and the argument that you would give it away for free only long enough to bankrupt Adobe and then start charging for Mega-Paint might be profitable, but it’s uncertain and depends on costs of capital and expected rates or return, plus the costs of an almost certain lawsuit).

Nor can Adobe be anti-competitive against Microsoft: dropping the price of Photoshop to zero just to stop people from using Microsoft’s own free product would be... pointless as it would zero their revenue.

These are two extreme cases, and it’s easy to just think in these dualistic terms and come to the wrong conclusion (or wonder what I’m getting at with this bizarre and apparently off-topic rant).

Now to tie it all together, introduce a middle-ground player such as Affinity. Affinity makes Photo, a product that is midway between Paint and Photoshop both in terms of price and features. People who need the full features of Photoshop (including those not present in Photo) will still choose Photoshop, which might slightly dip Adobe’s revenue. Microsoft’s will however remain stationary at zero. Affinity has captured the market of those who are defined by Paint being unsuitable but who do not wish to pay Photoshop’s full price (because Photos contains all the features they need).

Now, finally, the final step: say Adobe turns a blind eye to piracy of Photoshop. It still gets paid by its professional customers so it’s revenue remains unchanged. However, people who found Paint to be frustrating are now faced with an interesting choice: steal Photoshop (which has all the functions they could possibly want, and is free) or buy Photos (which has all the functions they want, albeit a subset of those offered by Photoshop, but does so for a higher price).

This is one obvious case that comes under the broad rubric of ‘dumping’ (selling at prices that damage one’s own short-term interest in order to damage one’s competitor and increase one’s net long-term advantage) but there’s plenty others where that came from. The tech industry is rife with them. Mainly, lack of successful prosecution is probably due to regulatory capture by way of lobbying.

And yet, Netflix had autoplaying videos at full volume that didn't even show trailers, but some random snippet from the movie/show

For general vocabulary, very likely. I believe Google Translate's competitive edge comes in the form of figuring out translations for jargon, slang, etc. from equivalent-corpus context.

I like to think of Google Translate as a keyword extractor on steroids. It doesn't necessarily give you the right prose, but it does better than anything I know of at giving you the right bag-of-words for indexing a foreign-language document in English.

(I hypothesize this to be Google Translate's real driving purpose, and the reason it still sees regular updates after all these years: it's used to index foreign-language web pages, books, and videos so that there can be a single TF-IDF token in Google's backend for each language-neutral conceptual category rather than distinct token for each language-specific word.)

Edit: thanks for the link though, I'm saving it and trying from time to time, we use translation a ton in my household (everyone is learning English after moving abroad)

- It has only a handful of languages

- No OCR / photo support

- No speech / conversation support.

IMO, as is, it is way inferior to GT. But it is good to have competition in this area as there is still a lot of room for improvement.

https://www.deepl.com/translator#en/ru/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0...

I've often seen GT get the basics dead wrong - for example formal greetings Japanese people have been using in formal correspondence for hundreds of years. When it gets things right it's often fleeting, a week later it gives you something different.

It probably will be like Maps where the first year or two were just a joke and then  Maps became faster, easier to use, and just as good as Google Maps.

  Translation to a single language back and forth seems to be really really good. 

  Although quite impressive, it still suffers from the same problem that most other translator service have if you keep translating the same text between random languages.

  The original text is

The final English text is I wonder if the test they gave me was biased? I guess being an elf, there is a bias in the question. I'm sure the water gnomes would have no problem answering the question of whether the unicorn is wet. ? But the elves.

  Notice how drarfs became gnomes. The last sentence is not a sentence. Various other problems like a "?" by itself etc. 

  Translation to a single language back and forth seems to be really really good.

Then when you have a moment, it's also very satisfying to just go through the screener list in bulk and click thumbs down/up and knowing you'll never see that sender again. Sometimes in GMail, no matter how many times I mark some thing as spam, the mail keeps on coming. Hey is the nuclear option to Gmail's fly swatter.

- Gmail is a very versatile tool, you can configure it to suit your needs and replicate most of the features of Hey. But they're basically hacks, like your bookmark of a search.

- Hey is a workflow and experience that the authors believe is the best, and it works in a clean way.

Another thing I like about Hey is how clean, light and fast it is. I don't need hangout, google meet, task and links to every Google product (but the Contacts page could be more accessible that buried between Photos and Drive!)

And I certainly need a friggin splash screen while my webmail takes 10 seconds to load. What were they thinking? Did they forget what made Gmail so good to start with??

At this point, something that doesn't read my emails, give any bullshit law enforcement request a master key, and doesn't try and abuse the spirit of antitrust laws at every step is worth trying out, even if it's just only workable.

To me, Google has always been a relatively "boring" company, it's just that boring in the early to mid 2000s was a welcome change of pace. There innovations were almost entirely in back-end technology and simplicity, not innovative user experiences. Google docs was meant to be as boring as Microsoft word, because it turns out that most people know exactly what Microsoft Word does and like the single-purposeness of it. I love Notion, but I think the idea that Notion will every be as popular as word or docs is nuts. The vast majority of the market doesn't know what a Kanban board is much less want to embed one in their docs.

Making the argument that Google isn't as innovative as smaller startups is easy. Google is trying to appeal to the masses, not a niche. Saying they blew a ten-year lead is a stretch.

Getting back to Notion and Google Docs, I'd rather use Notion for internal documentation and I'd really, really rather use Google Docs for redlining contracts, which is most often what I'm doing when I'm dealing with .doc/.docx files. In Microsoft's suite I think Notion is an alternative to OneNote, not to Word. So I would agree with the author if the implication was that Google should have a Notion-like tool in addition to Google Docs, but suggesting that Google Docs is bad because it's not Notion-like doesn't make any more sense to me than saying that Gmail is bad because it's not Slack.

I don't get why people need an alternative to Gmail. Email is already decentralized. Just buy a custom domain for a few dollars per year, and then use any email provider you want. You'll own your email address forever.

I currently host my email on Protonmail, but if I ever decide to switch providers, I can do it without having to give people a new email address. I could even go back to Gmail. Worst-case scenario is that I lose the old messages in my inbox that I failed to back up, but that's no big deal.

- Screener: This works well at start but it won't scale well. I still have to see every address for the first time. Google is smart to send spam to spam. I almost never have to check it. I have used other email services and no one comes even close to recognizing and flagging spam well.

- Categorization : Algos work well mostly in Gmail. Auto Categorization works reall well, sure it sometimes mislabels and sends email to a different category. But it is accurate most of the times. I don't have to spend time on these rules.

I might be biased, because I live in one of the cities with the updated maps data, sure, but I find that it handles most of my use cases just as well as Google Maps.

People like to conflate being popular (having large marketshare) with being a monopoly (exclusive control of supply). Being popular in those markets is likely because they do not monetize it directly.

Oh thank you for that trip down memory lane! Ran my own SquirrelMail servers for years...

It would be nice if there was a viable alternative to Google Maps. Apple Maps is apparently not too bad, but I'm using Android and Linux these days.

The other thing I find Google to be good at is account/login security. A gaccount with 2fa is unlikely to be stolen by anything less than a targeted zeroday against the 2fa device; social engineering just doesn't work to the extent that there's a trope of people who have permanently lost access to their accounts because they changed phones, phone numbers, lost recovery codes, etc. Combine that with Domains and I think it's pretty unlikely to lose a domain name registered with them.

For consumer products I completely agree. I use DuckDuckGo as my default, but I still find myself hitting !g a lot to find what I'm looking for.

(I am a big fan of Play Music too but of course they killed it.)

At some point Google seems to have realised that all they needed to do to grow, was just stuff more ads above the fold, and remove all non-Google content (i.e. when you search for travel, you get Google's OTA...when you search for finance news, you get Google's clickjacked articles, etc.). It is far easier to hit earnings that way (and btw, this was the intention...they rolled this out slowly so could they could control the numbers they reported).

In my personal opinion, Google also optimises for hiring bureaucrats. Something has gone wrong with hiring when you are hiring a bunch of "smart" people and your strategy is this weak. Either you are hiring a bunch of people you don't need or you are hiring a bunch of people with the wrong skills (in this case, it is probably both). Google jobs seem like a sinecure...lots of people busily doing nothing...just imo.

It is classic Innovator's Dilemma though (that book is amazing).

People on HN have said that Duck Duck Go is a for profit corporation that doesn't open source or independently validate their privacy claims.

They never dropped 'don't be evil', it's at the end of their code of conduct:

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

Microsoft completely lapped the industry on this with VS Code. It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend in a browser.

Edit: I thought I just read it just got to 53% market share. It was at 18% and growing fast in 2018, so it’s plausible they have majority market share now: https://triplebyte.com/blog/editor-report-the-rise-of-visual...

That said, I've been very excited for Fuchsia for a long time.

So ads it is, and ads it will likely be.

With that said, Google doesn't have to a bad actor to survive with regards to advertisements, as it is relatively safe revenue stream for the foreseeable future.

If Google splits up their various products into separate companies forced to survive on their own without Google's monopoly money to fall back on, we might actually see some quality products and services out of Google for the first time in a long, long time.

Of course, the leadership will have to pull their heads out of their gilded asses for something like that to ever happen.

Google Docs addresses a slightly different use case than Notion. Notion is one document for a lot of people, owned by the organization. Google Docs are docs owned by many people, often duplicated. Notion is much better for building documentation and for storing institutional knowledge.

We still use Google docs for things that we don't need to share widely and don't need to be referenceable to a large number of people.

Keeps things separate and tidy, and I keep Chrome closed as much as I need it to be closed.

I personally feel it's the opposite. I think management, and Google's internal incentives, lead to a lot of their issues.

As one obvious example, the leveling system is totally flawed and creates incentives for their greatest issues, such as releasing many competing projects only to deprecate/ abandon all of them.

That's on management, not the engineers who are explicitly being told "To get a promotion we need you to do this type of work, we don't really care what happens after that".

A little more control for engineers might mean that passion projects can be taken further, can go in directions that management maybe can't see the immediate "promotable" value from. You wouldn't be incentivized to compete as much, but maybe to collaborate - because you wouldn't need to lead a project to get a promotion, just add value and do good work.

If you look at Google's earlier years I think this is evidence. They used to feel a lot more moonshotty, a lot less managery, and perhaps a bit more culty due to the engineering driven culture. There were flops, but it didn't feel quite as ridiculous.

Just my observations though, as an outsider with some colleagues there.

Amazon's not about your wallet. They're frequently more expensive than other sites; they're about convenience and lock-in. If you need a Sprocket, you type sprocket into the search bar, click buy on the Amazon button, and you're done. The result will probably be a pretty good sprocket for an unobjectionable price. You don't need to worry about little details like who sold it to you or whether it's likely to show up functional. It'll probably work, and if it doesn't, you can return it. No need to do research, no need to drive to a store.

Facebook doesn't care about your attention; it just needs your eyes. That sounds like the same thing, but it's very different. If you're just scrolling through without really reading anything, that's absolutely fine with Facebook so long as you keep doing it.

Microsoft is about trying to extract more value from their business customers.

Google Wallet/Pay/Android Pay could have become Stripe, Venmo. Google Hangouts/Meet/Chat could have become Zoom, Slack, Teams, iMessage, etc. Google Finance could have become Robinhood, Mint.

For streaming it already has tough competition by twitch. If twitch manages to improve their stream archive and then take their user base into YouTube's core domain YT might see plausible competition.

I'm afraid your comment breaks the HN guideline against insinuation of astroturfing/shilling/etc. without evidence. It's extremely common (well over 99% of these cases) for people to see something they find incongruent, massively overinterpret it, and jump into the internet to accuse others. We don't allow that here, because it poisons discussion and community. That doesn't mean real astroturfing doesn't exist (I blasted someone for it yesterday [1]). It means that we have to have something objective to go on—and if you have that, you should be letting us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate.

Plenty of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for anyone who wants it. Here's me saying the same thing 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986042.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619453, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619595