Comment by newobj
4 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)
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.
How are Google products anything but outstanding in their categories? What are you comparing to?
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."
16 replies →
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.
7 replies →
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.
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
1 reply →
> Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding
They were at the time.
8 replies →
Google Cloud is great, compared to legacy and fragmented AWS
3 replies →
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.
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.
What's wrong with Maps?
5 replies →
Ok. Apparently you missed the question from OP.
What are you comparing to?
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.
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.
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.
1 reply →
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/
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.
Interesting. My pixel experience has been the opposite; very polished and pleasant. 10A. Wonder why the variance?