Comment by danudey
11 hours ago
The major differentiating factor that Google has had in every product category is that their products are free and you have to deal with ads (and they monitor your behavior for profiling you and your interests).
GMail and Google Maps were revolutionary when they came out, sure, but the vast majority of Google's products now are... fine? at best? And a lot of their "big products" were acquisitions that they absorbed in order to further the core goal of the business - to organize all the world's information and use it to serve ads to people.
Meanwhile, Google has a litany of products they've started internally, launched, ran for a while, and then let stagnate or canned entirely; anecdotally I've heard that this is because your bonuses at Google hinge on your ability to launch a product and not your ability to support a product, so it's beneficial to get something launched and then immediately leave to go launch another project rather than polish the one you just launched into something to be proud of.
I'm not sure if that's true, but it would certainly explain a lot; if Google launches something and it's bad or it doesn't click, they just give up on it. Google Wave, a half-dozen chat apps that I can think of, Stadia, and dozens of others. Things that Google launched, which had problems or didn't hit mass adoption instantly, and then just petered out and were retired with all of the time and energy and money put into them arguably wasted - products that people wanted, and wanted to succeed, but which weren't revolutionary successes at launch so they weren't worth further investment.
Meanwhile, they (and most of the industry) are pushing AI for some reason despite the fact that almost no one actually wants AI to be the only way that people interact with information.
This all reinforces what I've been saying about Google for decades: they're not creating things that users want to use, they're creating things that they want users to use. Sometimes those things align, but when they don't then it's not worth further investment (except, apparently, AI).
I just don’t think your opinion is shared by most people.
Gmail is the most popular email service in the world, people are always telling me how they prefer Google Docs over everything else and their only competition is Microsoft.
Yes it’s free but there is no other service that I rather switch to, and I actually pay for additional storage.
> Gmail is the most popular email service in the world
That's because it's been around for quite a while, and for a long time it was the best webmail service. It's also free, unlike most alternatives. And switching to a new provider means a new email address, unless you're using a custom domain with Google Workspace (or whatever they call it these days), which is a small minority of personal accounts.
(I gave up on Gmail a few years ago and switched to Fastmail, and like it much more than Gmail. But I'm the rare person who is willing to pay for email, and had been using a custom domain with Gmail, so my non-monetary switching costs were minimal.)
You're absolutely right that Gmail was the best webmail service when it launched, and for some time afterwards. How many people now commenting on HN remember when Gmail launched? Remember how revolutionary it was at the time? Every other email webapp, when you clicked on an email, would refresh the page. Gmail, when you clicked on an email, did not cause a browser navigation. It simply replaced the page contents with the contents of the email.
We're so used to setting webapps do this that we take this for granted, but Gmail was the first email webapp to do this. It's possible it was the first webapp, period, to do this; I feel like Gmail's use of XmlHttpRequest was innovative at the time.
Fast forward twenty years, and what about Gmail is innovative today? Nothing that I can think of. It's mediocre (there are lots of filtering improvements they could make that they aren't making, for example), and everything that made it good has been copied by other webmail clients. There's no particular reason except momentum to stay on Gmail.
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You can’t beat free. The Fastmail web interface is snappier than gmail. And you can’t beat dedicated mail clients like thunderbolt in terms of workflow.
Google doc is wordpad level with very good collaboration (but that’s mostly what people need). People were fine with typewriters, so they are fine with a word processor like google doc. But it’s not at the level of even Libreoffice or Apple’s page in terms of features.
By any definition of good usability, Gmail is not good and Google Docs are not far behind. It’s not that they are functionally bad, just really poor UX.
That's hyperbole. They have flaws, but at the very least, when they were launched, they were arguably best in class. I'm not sure how much me sticking with them is due to familiarity and muscle memory but I know they won we over purely on merit in the beginning.
We probably talk to different sets of people, as I don't even know anybody who ever used Google Docs.
I've been at multiple companies where Google Drive and Docs/Sheets are the only thing people use.
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That's really surprising to me.
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> GMail and Google Maps were revolutionary when they came out, sure, but the vast majority of Google's products now are... fine? at best?
Is that... good? I mean take maps -- what more can possibly be done to that product that wouldn't just make it worse? It's done. The fact that's the default choice for mapping and just works is fantastic really. There aren't any competitors doing anything revolutionary either because there isn't anything revolutionary to be done.
Maps is far from done. At the very least it's still riddled with usability issues. One bug-bear I have in particular: when I zoom into a very specifically chosen area, search for a Chinese restaurant, and it zooms out to half the state. Maddening. And it's rife with problems like this.
I’ve never experienced that issue - which platform/what location? I just tested and I was unable to replicate that issue.
I worked at google for 3 years and can confirm what you've heard. Obviously, every org is somewhat different.