Comment by dijit
3 days ago
> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much
Ok, I mean this sincerely.
You must never have used Microsoft tools.
They managed to get their productivity suite into schools 30 years ago to cover UX issues, even now the biggest pain of moving away is the fact that users come out of school trained on it. That also happens to be their best UX.
Azure? Teams? PowerBI? It's a total joke compared to even the most gnarly of google services (or FOSS tools, like Gerrit).
I do agree with you. Teams are a cancer and Azure UI sucks too. I do not use much MS products since essentially Win7 I have mainly used Linux as my work environment. But one thing MS used to be good at at least, was the documentation. If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support. With google its like...not even that.
With continuous delivery and access to preview and beta features, the documentation is fragmented and scattered and half of it technically is for the previous version of the product with a different name but still mostly works because microsoft can't finish modernizing most software...
And the customer support is not great until you start really paying the big bucks for it.
There was also MSDN. But it was also a different world at the time.
> If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support.
But even then, contemporaries outclassed Microsoft by a lot.
It was culture back then to provide printed user manuals, I still have some from Sun Microsystems because it was the best resource I found to learn how storage appliances should work and the technical trade-offs of them.
Fair enough, everyone delivered software in boxes and with 500 page manuals. I still maintain MS did invest a lot in the quality of their documentation and they cared about developers - otherwise the Petzold series would have never happened (or the MS Press for that matter).
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I hate Microsoft with the passion of a thousand burning stars, yet even I still think Google products have worse UX than their Microsoft counterparts.
MS Teams is definitely terrible. But I’d take that over Google Meets.
Google Docs isn’t even remotely as good as Office 365.
And Azure, for all its many faults, is still less confusing than GCP.
Thankfully I seldom have to touch either other these companies half-baked UIs.
> I’d take [teams] over Google Meets
What? Why?
Honestly your entire comment is almost exact polar opposite to how I feel.
GCP Makes total sense if you know anything about systems administration, Google docs is limited for things like custom fonts (IE; not gonna happen) but it's simple at least and I can give people a link to click and it's gonna look the same for them.
But, honestly, the Teams one is baffling. I can't think of a single thing Meet does worse than Teams.
Yeah that seriously whiplashed me too, I'm genuinely confused. Google Meets has always worked completely fine for me, good performance, works well on mobile, Firefox, etc. Nothing special but it works. Probably my favorite of all the meeting apps.
Teams meanwhile is absolutely my least favorite, takes forever to load, won't work in Firefox, nags me to download the app, confusing UI. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they like teams.
Because it’s a low bitrate micky mouse toy.
MS Teams might have its issues (and let’s be clear, i agree there are a great many issues) but it has most, if not all, of the Enterprise features you need from a video conferencing suite.
Whereas Google Meets feels more like a cut down toy you’d give to your grandparents.
It’s the same thing with Google Docs. They’re technically impress for the era they were launched, but they’re stuck in the 2010s. Doing anything outside of the basics quickly becomes far far more frustrating than using O365.
Microsoft might write a lot of terrible software with some questionable design choices, but they understand enterprise uses far better than Google.
Even Google Workspaces is severely limited once your business grows beyond 50 people.
I guess if you only work in startups then Google might seem like an easy win. But for any business that’s more established, you just constantly run into huddles with Googles suite of software.
As for GCP, I’ve been burned too many times with their support processes. 7 days to approve a GPU quota. Account managers literally trying to steal business secrets (when I worked for an AI start up and Google were stagnating in the AI space). And so on and so forth. Though I’ve not been hugely impressed with Azure either; they constantly break managed services and ballsup scalability promises and then refuse to admit it until we present them with empirical evidence. It really feels like the best cloud engineers have left Microsoft (or maybe never joined?).
I've used Meet a few times for video calls and I was amazed at how poorly it worked given the amount of resources Google has at their disposal. I've never had a good video call on Meets. I've had a few Meet calls where over time the resolution and bitrate would be reduced to such a low point I couldn't even see the other person at all (just a large blocky mess). Whereas Teams (for all its flaws) normally has no major issues with the video quality. Teams isn't without its flaws and I do occassionally fall back to ZOom for larger group video calls but at the end of the day Teams video calling sort of just works fine. Not great but not terrible either. YMMV of course.
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