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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

> Google My Business is the worst, full of bugs and piss poor 3rd world country support staff.

This I simply don't understand. Google Maps would be nothing against their competition if it wasn't for almost every single business being on there. But then the support and UX for actually being a business on Google Maps is absolutely horrific, and I think they simply stopped caring about it. As you say, it's full of bugs and every upgrade to the UX seems to make it worse for us as well. Not sure what's going on in Google's brain, but I'm afraid they have run out of lamp oil.

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As a business, you just have to use it. Whether it sucks is irrelevant as that does not affect the reason why you're there. I've given up on thinking GMaps is in any way accurate anyway, since even if the business owner somewhat cares, they won't remember to update it immediately.

Outside of some core products, Google software simply accumulates cruft and bugs and, I think, is rarely updated at all. They'd rather release a new product than make an existing one better.

This sounds painfully familiar.

By core products, you mean Search, Gmail and YouTube?

Let's see.. Search these days seems to have given up on SEO blocking, Gmail has given up on any kind of UX improvements, and YouTube has given up on being a decent platform for either creators or viewers.

I think the CRU's of the issue is Search is so big, and despite getting progressively worse, brings in so much money, that eventually people at Google realised it doesn't matter whether their products improve or not. After that, its just path of least resistance.

> As a business, you just have to use it.

Thanks, I'm aware of this...

> Whether it sucks is irrelevant as that does not affect the reason why you're there.

No, it is not at all irrelevant. I'm much less likely to use it well and maintain up-to-date information if the UI and UX is so terrible that it makes it easy to make mistakes and hard to find the thing I'm looking for. Not sure why it sucking would be irrelevant, I'm a user of it, of course I don't want it to suck...

> They'd rather release a new product than make an existing one better.

I don't think this is true either. Google updates old products all the time. The updates they do frequently makes the software worse though. The willingness to make things better is there, it's just that their execution of these updates is poor as fuck

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