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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better.

I just find these comments to be so strange. You can look at all of the articles in that blog to see all of the feature improvements that have launched in Docs over the past 2 years. It's a lot of stuff.

Maybe they're not features that matter to you, some are available only to paid customers as opposed to free tier, or maybe you just haven't bothered to even notice. But they're there.

It's nothing about Google specifically -- I see people make these comments about so much software, where they assume a project is or has been dead, just because they can't even be bothered to look at the changelog. It baffles me.

It's like, unless it's a radical total UX overhaul, people don't notice the work developers are putting in on actual features. And if it is a radical total UX overhaul, people complain about the change because they assume it's superficial rather than actual features.

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You've both summed up everything wrong with design churn and also justified it. Truly a cursed comment.

I've seen it regress a lot in the last two years.

I have a Google Spreadsheet that I used to track investments I have in various markets. Three months ago Google stopped showing any stock quotes for ETFs in Europe. No explanation, just 'f u, we showed them for years now all your spreadsheet breaks'. I had to help myself with getting some quotes from Yahoo News via script but it's half-baked.[1]

Google doesn't care about it's products and anyone who thinks different hasn't opened their eyes.

Btw their lack of quality and care is not new for Google Docs/Spreadsheets [2] Issues keep popping up but are usually fixed after a while. This time they just stopped bothering.

I wish Google had Product leaders who actually cared about the quality of their products rather than just launching new features that make a splash and then slowly wither on a vine. Fewer features I could actually rely on would go a long way.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/googlesheets/comments/13i2gf6/googl...

[2] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/76403135?pli=1

I just wished they had product people that worked outside the tech bubble. I need a way to write a letter to multiple people without some scripting magic or third-party add-ons.

They don't. They're famous for wanting Product people with engineering backgrounds, which is silly. That's not Product, that's just engineering/project management then. Product is way more all-encompassing and focuses more on people, user's wishes, behaviours, competitor's behaviours etc etc, none of which is relevant to engineering.

As a daily Google Sheet users, I am thankful and amazed by the monthly, or even daily improvement of the product for the past 5 years. Folks will be surprised how many hedge funds and quants use them for quick idea sketch

hedge funds and quants also use pen and paper for quick idea sketch.

I don't know. From what I've seen, a lot software gets built by a small group of people. It becomes wildly popular and the is maintained by a behemoth churning out minor features at a snails pace while everyone frets about the even the smallest product changes.

It's easy to experiment and build when your product is small and few people use it. When you're bringing in real money and most of the Fortune 500 is using your software, it's a lot harder to add anything meaningful for fear of rocking the boat. And note, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the business is doing well, there might not really be a need for many new features.

Well, yeah, because the risk/reward of the decision making changes, purely in terms of dollars/second for an outage, never-mind legal and reputation risk.

Also, the value of features follows a power law. Some features are incredibly valuable to everyone. Some features only a few people care about. And then there’s a long tail.

In a product as old as Google docs, they honestly have all the important features that most people actually care about already. You can save. You can track changes. You can set up custom styles. Or embed images. You can edit docs collaboratively. Or programmatically via their api. Documents look the same on basically everyone’s computer. And they can be in shared folders for teams.

At some point every product runs out of high value, visible features to add that anyone cares about. This isn’t a failure mode. It’s the opposite. This is the final state that most successful software should aspire to reach.

I have a lot more respect for teams that understand this, and let their products find their UX steady state. Fastmail. Git. Vim. WhatsApp. And yes, Google docs.

> In a product as old as Google docs, they honestly have all the important features that most people actually care about already. You can save. You can track changes. You can set up custom styles. Or embed images. You can edit docs collaboratively. Or programmatically via their api. Documents look the same on basically everyone’s computer. And they can be in shared folders for teams.

I think this is pretty interesting, because I don't necessarily agree. If we were starting from a blank slate in a world where a spreadsheet hadn't existed before I suspect the perfect spreadsheet software would look pretty different to Google sheets or excel, but because this software has been around for a long time they're part of the standard interfaces for computers, like a mouse or keyboard. If you deviate too far from the current design people get confused and default back to what they know i.e. excel with all it's quirks.

> If we were starting from a blank slate in a world where a spreadsheet hadn't existed before I suspect the perfect spreadsheet software would look pretty different to Google sheets or excel

I agree with you. But I also think at this point excel and google sheets are past the point where people would tolerate a radical redesign. If google or microsoft want to invent a better spreadsheet, I think it makes more sense to try those ideas out in a brand new product. Excel and Google Sheets are "done".

And yet Microsoft manages to make regular, significant feature additions (and occasional, less nice/useful large changes), despite being a critical software dependency for pretty much all of the Fortune 500.

I looked through these posts for the last three years and there are less than five features that actually pertain Google Docs.

If you use Google Docs daily and even bother to look at the menus, the amount of changes added just the past 2 years is pretty massive. The reason they're in menus is because the dumbest thing Google can do is kill the native user experience.

Just look at how slow Notion is and how snappy Docs is. Yet, a lot of Notion features are now in Google Docs.

Then you missed them or looked at the wrong blog entry tags or something. Over the past 3 years, I wouldn't be suprised if it added up to 100 new changes/features in Docs alone (not including Sheets etc.). There's generally 2-3 new things per month.

Here, go nuts:

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/search/label/Google%...

> But they're there.

They're useless. I've been paying for Google Docs for over a decade. Nothing of note has been added until they finally... FINALLY let me get rid of the concept of "pages" recently.

If you have to look at a changelog to understand what changed, then the stuff that's being shipped isn't making a difference.

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