Comment by newobj
10 hours ago
Google is historically terrible as a product company (and has succeeded in spite of that) As their technical innovations become less of a moat (we're already there) they won't be able to win on engineering alone (they are no longer winning on engineering alone)
But Kubernetes, being a former Google project whilst donated to CNCF, is still one of the mainstream container orchestrator if not the biggest one (I believe we need to go over to supercomputers for that). Nomad is kind of dead and Apache Mesos is basically dead. Leaving Kubernetes as a natural moat, plus Google employees are still seemingly actively maintaining it.
And also Go. While I'm not a Go guy (speaking as a C# and Rust guy, I did wrote a good amount of Go before) it has a huge dominance in Cloud-Native application. For one, Zitadel, an alternative to Keycloak, is written in Go and only takes a fraction of what Keycloak needs.
Flutter/Dart is catching up, but the ecosystem is still relatively weak.
Kubernetes and Go are not moats of any sort; Google doesn't make any money off of them, and they doesn't get them any useful user data like Gmail, Docs, etc. do.
Honestly, Kubernetes has no moat. Give me a better, more simple alternative any day.
Please, Kubernetes is the Chlamidya of infrastructure software. Ever hear of a large K8s migration going well? No, because it needs to be completely re-implemented under the hood for anything halfway serious. Mesos was pain in the ass to use, but was mature when K8s arrived. Nomad was cool though.
Dart is also complete shit: Speed of javascript with verbosity of Java. Who the hell though that was a good idea?
I've seen lots of successful large k8s installs. This same argument from the nomad crowd comes up constantly. There's a reason why nomad lost, and it's not because it's better.
> Ever hear of a large K8s migration going well
...well, AI infra stacks are more or less k8s/cloud native, especially on the inference side. Nvidia GPU operator plus KubeFlow makes deploying models easy, and I did that manually as well using just the ollama, llama.cpp containers and especially vllm operator. I'm not sure about what's the measuring notation of "large" is, but OpenAI had a blog post about how to manage 7500+ nodes Kubernetes (https://openai.com/index/scaling-kubernetes-to-7500-nodes/). That's 5 years ago and I speculate it will only be even more.
> completely re-implemented under the hood for anything halfway serious
...an example please? I'm building a platform to deploy hundreds of open source apps on Kubernetes, you know, the boring thing you can do with a VPS and maybe use Docker Compose to start -- with an ergonomic twist. I relied on so many features of what Kubernetes and its ecosystem provided, especially with persistent volume, volume snapshot, CRDs and cron job, and all of it is just composed from open source and cloud native software...I'm not sure if that sounds "half way serious" to you.
I know those boring monolithic apps can be done with a VPS, as I exactly came from that background, and I know what the shitty points of having just a VPS are. You don't have a clean control plane, you don't have HA, you don't have distributed storage, and you have to be super aware of the apps that you are deploying with Docker Compose.
What you would think "completely re-implemented under the hood for anything halfway serious", perhaps it means that you don't want to get in the fuzz to manage the complexity and prefer to trade for a far simpler but more primitive solution, and that's totally fine.
Pro tip: Codex seems to love generating great Helm charts so much for some reason unknown. I tried GPT-5.4 high in codex and it easily beats Opus 4.7 max on my own internal helm chart generation benchmark evaluation, which measures HA, deployment and app-specific probes. I've given source code to both Codex and Opus and research about the app config structure, and Codex did so well to just generate secret key-value and convert it to JSON and environ, while Opus insisted on using a dynamic generator at runtime.
> Nomad was cool though
Ahem. I used to deploy Nomad too, but I found it too underwhelming, especially with the networking side of thing.
Consul is perhaps one of the most hated thing in my entire career that I would call it bullshit. I know that later Nomad has its own Raft mode, but the Consul brain rot to me is already very sickening such that I don't want to touch Nomad no more. Vault is fine though, but I prefer OpenBao now.
> Dart is also complete shit: Speed of javascript with verbosity of Java
I don't get where the "speed of javascript" is from. Dart/Flutter is JIT on dev mode, and AOT compiled on production, is that you didn't get the compiler options right?
As a person who gets paid to make Chrome (CEF really) do its bidding, I would say Chrome is really as close to an OS as it can get, as in I've found API or service typically an OS or an external tool would provide, that wasn't built into Chrome.
The Chromium source code is used to build ChromeOS so you're spot on.
People say this but it is wishful thinking. What are some actual metrics here we can use. Let’s compare google’s products with others.
lmao this is a terrible take. Google is the only company with AI deployed in every market where AI can exist, and _all_ of their products in those segments gush money.
?
On a semi-related note, I bought a Pixel phone about a month ago, and I'm shocked by how unpolished it is. I've had so many little annoyances pop up, issues I never had on other android phones. Keyboard hiding/appearing when it's not suppose to, bluetooth dropping, WiFi dropping, network switching taking forever, screen becoming unresponsive... It's mostly all small things, but they really start to add up after a while.
Same. I was excited for a Pixel (assuming a much better Android experience) but had same experience as you
Interesting. My pixel experience has been the opposite; very polished and pleasant. 10A. Wonder why the variance?
How are Google products anything but outstanding in their categories? What are you comparing to?
Most of their best products are VERY old. Gmail, Search, Docs/Drive, Maps, Street View, Chrome, all solid but old consumer apps. A lot of early entrants/market defining products, too! Most of them are still very good. Calendar is... fine. Gmail/Calendar as corporate products in some ways feel like downgrades compared to the functionality of the older Office desktop suite, but they integrate nicely into a lot of things.
The bad rep Google gets now is because while they've polished their nice money machine very well, they haven't done much to pioneer new segments and the old stuff is pretty stagnant. When's the last time Gmail gained a must-have feature? Maps?
Ok but maybe those old products are just mature and there's not much room for product innovation? Even if we assume that's the case (though there are third party email and calendar apps that I use instead of Google's first-party ones on my phone), let's look at some newer stuff:
Android was a copy of Blackberry that turned into a copy of Apple before being launched. It's done well numbers-wise, particularly in lower-cost markets, but hasn't got a lot of novel product stuff going on in the last decade or more. Less luck as a tablet platform. A lot of the nifty novel stuff in mobile space (wireless earbuds, "find my" stuff, mobile payments, magnetic wireless charging) was done first by Apple.
Meet vs anything else - well, Meet is cheap if you're already on Gsuite, at least.
Voice/Hangouts/Chat/Duo/Whatever - whole lotta abandonware or dead attempts.
Google Plus - famously mis-targeted product.
Google Assistant - Siri copycat then with Alexa copycat hardware. Didn't do anything novel.
Chromecast - nice novel product, caught on decently well, lost the market to a combo of set-top boxes (Roku, Apple) and native-TV integrations. Tried doing Google TV as that native platform with a copycat pivot vs the original Chromecast, no particular success.
Stadia - abandoned quickly, never set itself apart from the things it was copying.
Smart home hardware (like alarms and smoke alarms) - dramatically scaled back and now pretty unambitious.
Gemini - copycat of ChatGPT which is particular damning since so much of the original research came from Google in the first place!
Which products are outstanding in their categories?
Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding.
They are all pretty par for the course. Google used to be outstanding... but I'm not sure of a single product they have that is outstanding (def: significantly better than the competition) anymore. On the other hand I rarely use any google products these days, so maybe I'm not the one to be judging.
I'm not a fan of Google, and also not attached to Apple or Microsoft, so this isn't me trying to stan for Google, but I'd like to request that you give examples of what competing products are categorically better (and, by what metric(s) you're judging - code quality? stability? robust set of features?) -- for Gmail, Docs/Drive/etc, Google Calendar, Maps, Classroom, YouTube.
As far as I can tell, if judged by the marketplace (and breaking ties with which product I like better), Google has run away with the ball on all of those, and Gemini seems to at least be competitive.
The only major product I'd say they've sunk below acceptability on is Search, which is demonstrably dogshit now...though I suspect it's more that they have changed their definition of what Search is for, from "helping users efficiently find other websites that are useful to them" to "A convenient on-ramp to, many times per day, capture the current user intent and steer them toward something that earns Google some ad revenue."
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What is better than Google Maps? It's the only Google product I don't see myself abandoning any time soon. I agree on everything else.
Has hacker news lost it?
Maps & Gmail & Search all have plenty of accumulating flaws... but they also completely defined their product category and today are among the most popular software products ever made.
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All of these are outstanding! In so far they are not singular or new anymore, well... If for the past ~20 years nobody has come up with something clearly better, then I would say that speaks to how outstanding the product that are being copied are to this day.
> Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding
They were at the time.
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Search has degraded for sure, but still better than anything else? Maps - I guess you mean Apple ones are better? Can't tell, I am not on Apple, but if you don't use Apple products, there are not many alternatives to Google maps
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Google Cloud is great, compared to legacy and fragmented AWS
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What's wrong with Maps?
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I think you’re talking about consumer products.
At the enterprise level, if you know of something better than Bigquery, please let me know.
Similarly, Kubernetes and Kubeflow are both outstanding - and Licenses Kubernetes has no meaningful competition for what it does - but Google did everyone a solid by making them open source, so you can get them from other sources than Google. But the Google managed versions are certainly extremely good.
As for the idea that Gmail, search, and Maps aren’t outstanding, an easy way to refute that is to ask what the outstanding alternatives are. I doubt there’s a single list that many people would agree on.
Ok. Apparently you missed the question from OP.
What are you comparing to?
I'm no google fanboy, but gmail is a very good web-based email, and google maps is a very good web-based map program. I would say "outstanding" with no reservations.
The Pixel series outside of security (to which their own flavor of Android doesn't even take advantage of like we see with GrapheneOS) doesn't have any particular outliers that would make it any more or less enticing than another company's phone.
Their ChromeOS hardware was nice but had lackluster software and by the time it was EoL'd, never got the love of ChromeOS-present.
Google TV generally gets outpaced by onn (Walmart's brand) on cost and value proposition.
And also the fact they have shown time and time again that they just kill products over and over again.
A big part of why Stadia was cancelled is because it didn't get traction, and a big part of why it didn't get traction was because of how many people assumed it was just going to get cancelled.
Ah, hardware products.
Other than search, in its heyday of the early 00’s, every google product success was either a 20% time project (e.g. Gmail) or an acquisition (YouTube) or a direct clone of someone else’s working product (android).
I think both can be true. Google has a history of annoying churn while still being good enough (or just … being large enough) that switching to competitors is still too high a cost for most.
For example, their "chat" app has churned 3? 4? times now? Their assistant app has churned from whatever the OG assistant was to now Gemini. Wave churned to "+" in the social category, and that's dead now.
The default placement in Android probably helps a lot, or other things, like forced signups into adjacent products (e.g., like + was doing for a while).
> For example, their "chat" app has churned 3? 4? times now?
I believe they’ve had at least 58 different products with chat / messaging.
https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googl...
Have you tried to admin a large team using Google's admin? :(
Do they have any supported way to export a user's account (e-mail, calendars, etc) for offline archiving yet? I used to have to reset their password, disable their 2FA, log in as their user, initiate a 'Takeout' request to export their account data into an archive, wait until the request was done (between minutes and days depending on the account), download it manually (often in chunks if it was large enough), store it somewhere, and then delete it and delete the account.
I can't imagine that no other 'Google Workspace' organizations want to actually save their employee data rather than irrevocably delete it forever.
Arguably, "exceptional" products are not ones that can vanish on a whim, like a great, great many of Google products have. Or they actually compete with other products in the same space, like a great, great many of Google products have not. Also, one would argue a good product is not one that is bought out and then deliberately destroyed to prevent its expansion into or development of a market for itself. Google is an advertising company with tremendous reach because of a handful of very aggressive and very fortunate business decisions that successfully exploded. It now uses its massive influence to exert market pressure, but the market does not always bend to its whim because sometimes it does things wrong, some of those products it pushes fail, and I can only assume some products are slaughtered because of projections on their performance regardless of their quality or utility.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
An email client (Gmail app) that is 500mb? What’s _outstanding_ about that? Almost everything Google makes now is terrible. Try some alternatives.
Honest question: what's a candidate for better? The search needs to be really good, as that was always a strong point for Gmail.
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Search for one is absolutely horrendous. It used to be great, but not so in the last years. Nowadays it’s filled with spam sites that they don’t seem to be able to filter out. And don’t get me started on the crappy AI overview that hijacks all queries.
Just today I tried a query for water filters and 1/3 of the results were ads. The other third were product pictures, or businesses in close proximity based on my ip. Then there was a box with related products/services, which was completely irrelevant to my needs, a second box with places, yet more product images and so on and so forth. Practically 70% of the real estate of the page was occupied by things I didn’t ask for. All I want is a list of relevant sites to go there and judge for myself. I don’t want Google to spoon feed me.
Maybe you are not counting the products they kill.
A lot of the products they killed were promising, it's just that Google just has no stomach for investing in anything for the long haul if it's not going to either capture the entire market or prevent someone else from capturing the entire market.
The about 7 different text chat applications they had?
At some point GoogleTalk was one of the leading global text messengers, and then it was basically destroyed by Google itself.
Depending on what you mean by 'chat', Google has had a lot, but this list includes a lot more than 7 text chat services. https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googl...
> The about 7 different text chat applications they had?
All of them named "Hangouts" no doubt.
Outstanding?
Well ...
https://killedbygoogle.com/