Comment by asah
16 hours ago
But then we'd complain about Google being a slow moving dinosaur.
"Move fast and break things" cuts both ways !
(ex-Google tech lead, who took down the Google.com homepage... twice!)
16 hours ago
But then we'd complain about Google being a slow moving dinosaur.
"Move fast and break things" cuts both ways !
(ex-Google tech lead, who took down the Google.com homepage... twice!)
Its not a new problem though, and its not just billing. The UI across Gemini just generally sucks (across AI Studio and the chat interfaces) and there's lots of annoying failure cases where Gemini will just timeout and stop working entirely midrequest.
Been like this for quite a while, well before Gemini 3.
So far I continue to put up with it because I find the model to be the best commercial option for my usage, but its amazing how bad modern Google is at just basic web app UX and infrastructure when they were the gold standard for such for like, arguably decades prior.
[dead]
We are talking here about the most basic things- nothing AI related. Basic billing. The fact that it is not working says a lot about the future of the product and company culture in general (obviously they are not product-oriented)
My first thought was this is the whole thing about managers at Google trying to get employees under other managers fired and their own reports promoted -- but it feels too similar to how fucked up all the account and billing stuff is at Microsoft. This is what happens when you try to "fix" something by layering on more complexity and exceptions.
From past experience, the advertising side of the business was very clear with accounts and billing. GCP was a whole other story. The entire thing was poorly designed, very confusing, a total mess. You really needed some justification to be using it over almost everything else (like some Google service which had to go through GCP.) It's kind of like an anti-sales team where you buy one thing because you have to and know you never want to touch anything from the brand ever again.
There’s nothing basic about billing.
Given how many paid offerings Google has, and the complexity and nuance to some of those offering (e.g. AdSense) I am pretty surprised that Google don't have a functioning drop in solution for billing across the company.
If they do, it's failing here. The idea of a penny pinching megacorp like Google failing technically even in the penny pinching arena is a surprise to me.
It is basic in the sense that it is difficult to run a business where billing doesn’t work. It’s not basic in the „easy“ sense.
I mean this problem has been solved. Nothing new to it. You just take a few weeks and implement it properly. No surprises will come up.
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this way is better. Burn in public, burn much faster.