
Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead - secondbreakfast
https://secondbreakfast.co/google-blew-a-ten-year-lead
======
thoraway1010
No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The
google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My
Alexa device can easily.

The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is
crazy.

They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after
the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely.

I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business
partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink,
hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are
stuck on zoom.

We were making the move to docs and sheets, but it's basically stuck. Now it
looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel
type needs. For those of us who are older this is totally incredible - Office
was so anti-linux / cloud it was incredible, and now word in the cloud kinda
works!

And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state
machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some
kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.

Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of
shipping everything? Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on
"strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).

~~~
rubber_duck
>Android / Chrome are amazing

Chrome has been deteriorating in performance and power usage - on OSX at
least, I recently switched back to Firefox because it was that bad (Safari is
a step too far as I want to work on non-Apple platforms). Firefox has slipped
from the mainstream and it's very obvious - so many sites I use on a daily
basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth
popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling
on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) -
the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.

And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design
quality, poor documentation. Implementation is ridiculously inconsistent
across OS versions and HW vendors - I was trying to create a WiFi management
API for some industrial application that would connect to controller specific
networks - Android has 2 layers of terrible and depricated API with
documentation that was misleading at best, a new API that only worked on 10+
without backcompat, and the actual implementation was inconsistent across four
Android devices we tested. We gave up on the project as the Matrix of features
missing and hacks needed for every platform we could find was just not
practical to maintain.

~~~
eitland
> the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.

I've been preaching this for a while:

\- Chrome is dominant line IE was.

\- Chrome - like IE - doesn't care about the standards because they know
developers will adapt to them.

\- Chrome - like IE - is starting to fail.

Unfortunately, meanwhile Mozilla has been busy tearing apart a number of the
things that made Firefox shine, especially the extension API. They've also
been busy trying to destroy the massive trust many of us had in them by doing
stupid things like injecting a silly ad extension and lying (IIRC) about the
Pocket thing (nothing against Pocket, they just shouldn't have lied about it,
many of us are looking for ways to fund FF development.)

Edit: I still use and recommend Firefox. For me it is still the best browser
out there in more than one way, I just feel it could have been so much better.

~~~
rorykoehler
Have you tried Brave?

~~~
Gollapalli
Brave is basically just Chrome with an adblocker, just like edge is chrome
with a reskin. Obviously that's a bit of an exaggeration, but they are all
chromium at heart.

~~~
rorykoehler
It's a pretty big distinction don't you think. FWIW I also use FireFox...

------
loughnane
I get the desire to abandon google services, and have done so myself for email
and search, but there isn't much to this article.

An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old
than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just
starting a new email address.

Airtable has some nice functionality, but I don't think it's head-and-
shoulders above sheets and this article doesn't give me any reason to change
my mind.

Same things goes for Meet vs Zoom.

Honestly, despite Google's history of trashing projects I'd put my money on
gmail/docs outliving hey/notion and so he might just be planting the seeds of
a painful switch later. When I switched my email I did it with a domain I own
so that I can avoid the same fate.

That's not to say google doesn't have problems. Privacy aside, ads as a
primary source of revenue can have a negative effect on usability of their
products (like search), but I wouldn't call that "squandering a 10-year lead",
it's more like "failure to find a second golden goose"

~~~
hodgesrm
The article rings completely true to me. One simple example: folders in Google
Drive.

* It's a constant struggle to keep documents in folders so that you can find them easily.

* Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist.

* Moreover, I can't ensure that important documents are reliably stored in folders where everyone else can find them easily as well.

I don't understand why Google does not get how important this is for business
documents. It's a breath of fresh air to use Dropbox or Box at this point.

~~~
SenHeng
> _Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live.
> But I can 't find docs if I don't know that they exist._

To illustrate this point more. I used to work in a company where everyone had
to submit their timesheet via docs. And if you did not keep a link or copy or
whatever they call it of your own sheet, it's essentially impossible to search
for it, because now there are 1000s of identically named documents.

It also happens when legal tries to share a generically named file with you
and you lose the link, so you search for it and find a file that looks like
it, only to realise that is HR's own special copy.

~~~
hodgesrm
This. I wish I had thought of your example first.

We have service agreements that go through revisions. We copy the whole
directory when there's a new release to ensure we don't lose old templates. At
that point search on service agreements brings up a bunch of identically named
documents in a listing that does not distinguish the directory location. It's
actually caused us to send the wrong doc on several occasions.

Google if you are listening please fix this. Just do what everyone else does.
You don't have to be creative.

~~~
inakarmacoma
Docs has revision history.

For several of the concerns listed, I'm surprised to see how people are using
the app.

Similar for asking every employee of a company to track their time in same
name documents?

Perhaps poor processes and poor tool-to-solution matches contribute?

~~~
BeatLeJuce
Arguably then, the documentation needs improvement. Most people learned the
ropes on MS Word, and never bothered to unlearn habits/explore whatever else
docs has to offer. So whenever docs has a feature that isn't present in word,
I wouldn't expect people to know it's there

------
abc_lisper
It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new
features than maintaining them and keeping users happy. May be this is just a
natural outcome of that. This is one of the most damaging things Google and
the people it influenced did to programming profession. There is a generation
of programmers now who can do very well on leetcode, but god help those who
maintain that code after them - I know this from personal experience working
on projects left behind by people who ended at Google

~~~
EthanHeilman
All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of
incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture
territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no
longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when
organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the
cult of incremental improvement is always hard.

~~~
abc_lisper
This may be true, but there have been articles in public since 2010s if not
longer, that show general contempt for having clean code and code maintenance,
like having clean code is what lesser engineers worry about. I’m saying that
thinking seeped into universities where smart kids, who generally imitate the
smart professionals in their profession first. Google may not be the only
company guilty of it, there are places like Uber where backend code is held by
so much duct tape , 3m shares rose up as a result.

~~~
throwawaygler
That doesn't match my experience at all. If anything, Google suffers from the
opposite problem: engineering teams spend enormous resources on migrations and
rewrites that make their systems cleaner/simpler/more general, but have little
or no business value. There are tons of teams that could be making incremental
user-facing improvements, but are instead spending their cycles on projects
that are mostly about internal development velocity.

~~~
nostrademons
I think it's changed, dramatically. I was there from 09-14 and then just
rejoined last week. In 09-10 there was a huge problem of "launch and run" \-
people would launch, they'd get promoted, then they'd be reassigned to other
higher-priority projects to get them launched too, and their previous project
would get shut down rather than maintained. Nowadays there seems to be a lot
more emphasis on stability and long-term code-health, people are getting
rewarded for internal cleanups rather than launches, and many people have
multi-year tenures on the same team rather than lots of single-quarter
launches.

~~~
foobiekr
are they getting _promoted_ though. successful promo packet for sustaining
work would be a very big change.

~~~
iknowpromo
I've seen a bunch of successful promo packets for work on code health, system
reliability, etc. - including promos to L6.

The "trick" to successful L5 and L6 promos (and above) for this sort of work
is to have credible estimates of the actual impact of your work. _Way_ too
many engineers spend quarters or years refactoring or rewriting systems, and
then go for promo with a case that's basically: "System X was kludgy, crufty,
and engineers complained about it. I designed and lead implementation of a
clean-up effort, and now people say it's nicer."

That's generally not going to cut it. You might get lucky, or you might get
bailed out by a peer reviewer that provides solid data about the impact of
your work, but you can't count on this, and you should be doing the legwork
yourself.

You need impact estimates. That generally means you need some measurements,
although the measurements don't have to be perfect. What metrics measure the
pain that the existing system is causing? Some examples might be:

\- Average # of hours required to push a release

\- Average SWE-days/SWE-quarters/etc. required to develop a representative
feature change

\- Average monthly user-reported bugs

Spend some time actually measuring this stuff. Write some queries, run an
internal survey of the developers on affected teams, etc. Take it seriously.
Ideally, do all this before you've actually started work on the cleanup you
want to do. Write a proposal doc, get it reviewed by others, and make sure
they find your estimates credible. If the numbers are smaller than you
expected, reconsider whether the clean-up is worth the time you're considering
investing in it.

After you've completed your project, measure again. If your project is
amenable to an experiment-style launch, that's ideal, but pre- and post-
measurements are fine too. Share the stats - advertise your team's success!
Package them up in a nice doc you can link to in your promo case.

"How am I supposed to find the time to do this while I'm doing my normal job?"
This _is_ your normal job. The opportunity cost of your time is $XXXk/quarter.
The opportunity cost of your team's time is $X million-$XX million/quarter.
The single most important thing you can do is make sure that time is being
invested in a high value way. In your personal life, you would look for a lot
of data before you invested that kind of money - you should be doing the same
at work.

In general, as you move up you should expect to spend a higher percentage of
your time figuring out _what problems you 're going to work on_. As a result,
the fraction of your time that you spend actually designing and implementing
the solutions to those problems will decrease, but it's still a net win
because you and your team will be focused on tackling the really important
problems.

In summary, it's possible to be really successful and quickly move up the
ladder by doing "sustaining work". The catch is that you have to be rigorous
about choosing the specific "sustaining work" to spend your time on.

~~~
dlubarov
Another ex-Googler here. This seems like a viable strategy, but it seems
rather inefficient for the organization, don't you think? E.g.

> Write some queries, run an internal survey

> Write a proposal doc, get it reviewed by others

Even if one could convincingly claim a causal effect on those noisy metrics,
that sounds like quite a bit of overhead. IMO the majority of cleanup or bug
fixing work shouldn't require any sort of formal planning or justification. At
other companies, we would just go ahead and do the work. Then if an IC's work
shows a pattern of code quality improvements, the manager should take notice
and make sure it's considered in any promotion decisions.

Moreover, the strategy you mention requires a concerted effort to improve the
quality of a particular component in a short period of time. Ideally one
should evaluate bugs and quality issues as they arise, and most of them should
be fixed promptly. But if a Googler is optimizing for promotions, it seems
better to let code rot for months or years, then fix many issues in a short
sprint to create a nice dip in the metrics.

------
tengbretson
It boggles my mind to imagine how many verticals in the technology space have
been kneecapped because of google. There could be so many companies that could
offer amazing services but they just can't compete with a half-assed "free"
service made by Google, which is just a temporary cost center for all the ad
revenue they don't know what to do with.

~~~
alexpetralia
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_price](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_price)

~~~
ciarannolan
>A limit price (or limit pricing) is a price, or pricing strategy, where
products are sold by a supplier at a price low enough to make it unprofitable
for other players to enter the market.

>It is used by monopolists to discourage entry into a market, and is illegal
in many countries.[1] The quantity produced by the incumbent firm to act as a
deterrent to entry is usually larger than would be optimal for a monopolist,
but might still produce higher economic profits than would be earned under
perfect competition.

------
mrbonner
There was some point in the past year I read a comment here about the problem
with Google is that when people wants to get promoted at Google to a senior or
Staff (PE?) position they need to invent those big changes or projects. It
results in adding bloat into existing software or abandon one. I am having
that feeling at this point in my career. Without a moonshot project I wouldn’t
expect to get pass an assessment committee. It’s sad.

One of my colleagues working for Netflix tells me that they don’t have any
fancy titles except senior SDE there. They pay you more if you’re that worthy,
though. I can’t stop wondering what if tech companies follow this practice.
Then, people would just focus on making stuff better instead of chasing the
carrots waved in front of them.

~~~
dmitriid
> Then, people would just focus on making stuff better

And yet, Netflix had autoplaying videos at full volume that didn't even show
trailers, but some random snippet from the movie/show

~~~
nostromo
I actually close Netflix because of this.

However, Netflix is full of smart people, so I have to assume that they've
tested it and it increases engagement. Perhaps we're the outliers.

~~~
x2f10
FYI: You can turn it off in settings.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
But it took them a long long time to add that setting.

------
PhearTheCeal
For Google Translate you should check out DeepL
[https://www.deepl.com/translator](https://www.deepl.com/translator)

It's absolutely insane, blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy.

~~~
lakis

      Translation to a single language back and forth seems to be really really good. 
    
      Although quite impressive, it still suffers from the same problem that most other translator service have if you keep translating the same text between random languages.
    

I translate the following text from English to various other languages
(without going back to english) 6 times and then I went back to English.

    
    
      The original text is

I wonder if the test you gave me was biased. My belief is that because I'm an
elf, some questions are inherently biased. Water dwarfs would not have a
problem answering the question: Are unicorns wet? But elves do.

The final English text is I wonder if the test they gave me was biased? I
guess being an elf, there is a bias in the question. I'm sure the water gnomes
would have no problem answering the question of whether the unicorn is wet. ?
But the elves.

    
    
      Notice how drarfs became gnomes. The last sentence is not a sentence. Various other problems like a "?" by itself etc. 
    
      Translation to a single language back and forth seems to be really really good.

~~~
markkanof
This could be considered a "feature" if used for comedic effect. Anyone who
has young children that are into Disney movies should check out this video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bVAoVlFYf0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bVAoVlFYf0).
This woman runs "Let It Go" from the movie Frozen through Google Translate a
bunch of times and then sings the result.

------
jedberg
The author mentions switching to hey for email. Given all the press it's
gotten recently, I decided to check it out.

I don't get the hype. This is how my gmail already works. I use priority
inbox. New senders get high priority until I mark them as low priority, and
then they don't. Gmail already has a snooze button so I can reply later (and
also I have a reply-later tag that's easy to do with keyboard shortcuts).

You can do this search in gmail to replicate their sorted inbox: [is:updates
in:inbox -l:important]. I just have a bookmark for that.

Finding attachments is easy. You just do [has:attachment]. I don't want all
the attachments without their emails. The email provides context. Also, I can
usually find it faster because I usually know who sent it or at least some
words that were in the email.

What am I missing about hey.com? Why do people love it so much?

~~~
Androider
When you open the Hey inbox, it _only_ has the important stuff in it, not the
messages of whoever decided to reach out to you today. It's a subtle
difference but I love it.

Then when you have a moment, it's also very satisfying to just go through the
screener list in bulk and click thumbs down/up and knowing you'll never see
that sender again. Sometimes in GMail, no matter how many times I mark some
thing as spam, the mail keeps on coming. Hey is the nuclear option to Gmail's
fly swatter.

~~~
jedberg
> When you open the Hey inbox, it only has the important stuff in it,

So does my gmail. It only shows things marked important.

> Sometimes in GMail, no matter how many times I mark some thing as spam, the
> mail keeps on coming

That happens to me occasionally, but I just click on "filter messages like
this" and then set it to never mark as important (or straight to spam).

------
crazygringo
Google's been improving G Suite a _ton_ , but just not "innovating" in the way
the author wants.

What Google _hasn 't_ been doing is blowing up how word processors and
spreadsheets work, like a "Google Wave" re-envisioning or something of them.
Why? Because people _understand_ how Word and Excel and Docs and Sheets work
and _don 't want change_.

What Google _has_ been doing over the past ten years centers around 1)
interoperability, 2) business needs, 3) intelligence and 4) performance.

For example, interoperability: you can use Google Drive File Stream to access
your Drive files like a local filesystem. Or being able to comment in PDF's,
or edit Office files directly without first making a copy in Docs or Sheets.

Or business needs: Google Classroom lets you use Docs with your students. Or
things like document diffs and approvals. These things don't seem
"innovative"... but they're necessary.

Intelligence? Look at how Sheets will automatically analyze your data to try
to produce meaningful graphs. Or how Docs now fixes your spelling mistakes as
you type, vastly better than e.g. autocorrect on iOS.

And performance is mainly with Sheets -- it's _much_ better at handling large
amounts of data than it used to be.

But yes, Google's been focused on giving users the features they actually
need, rather than capital-I "Innovation". Because that's what users actually
want.

I _don 't_ want Google trying to reimagine word processing and shoving it in
my face or something.

~~~
amohn9
90% of the time, Sheets's recommended graph is exactly what I wanted, and is
in general a much cleaner and enjoyable experience than Excel. Pivot tables
too are much more obvious and usable to non-power users in Sheets than Excel

------
jeffbee
Most of the stuff in the article is not really central to Google's business,
in my view. Google's business is dirt-cheap high-performance computing. They
are well ahead of everyone in this line of endeavor. They use their ads
revenues to fund R&D in hardware and software and build out capacity so they
can opportunistically enter new lines of business. Usually these are
businesses that nobody else could profitably execute, like YouTube. Or they
are businesses that are technically unique, like Cloud Spanner, to which I see
no competitors.

So when I look at Google's health I look at the research they are doing to see
if they seem to be staying on the cutting edge. Stuff like Snap/Pony or TPUs
makes me think they are. It's possible that the capabilities Google is
developing won't lead to any new profitable businesses, but their success in
geospatial data and other computationally-expensive products like machine
vision and translation are examples of their abilities. The latent ability to
just jump into a new line of business is a strength of Google's, and products
they developed more than a decade ago, like Docs and Sheets, aren't really
that important to their future.

------
eugenekolo
I'm sure these alternatives work for some, but I really don't find "Hey" a
suitable alternatives to Gmail, nor "Notion" to Google Docs.

I think the innovation and updating in those Google products has stagnated a
lot, but they're still better for actual work and business than the new hip
things.

~~~
mikkergp
I don't know the name for it, but this seems like a "the market leader doesn't
know what it's doing" fallacy. While I will concede that Google is not the
market leader in many of these areas, It's Microsoft, not Airtable that's
leading the way.

To me, Google has always been a relatively "boring" company, it's just that
boring in the early to mid 2000s was a welcome change of pace. There
innovations were almost entirely in back-end technology and simplicity, not
innovative user experiences. Google docs was meant to be as boring as
Microsoft word, because it turns out that most people know exactly what
Microsoft Word does and like the single-purposeness of it. I love Notion, but
I think the idea that Notion will every be as popular as word or docs is nuts.
The vast majority of the market doesn't know what a Kanban board is much less
want to embed one in their docs.

Making the argument that Google isn't as innovative as smaller startups is
easy. Google is trying to appeal to the masses, not a niche. Saying they blew
a ten-year lead is a stretch.

~~~
MagnumOpus
Google was the oppositive of boring:

\- GMail with "unlimited" (never-seen-before 1GB) of storage when everyone had
10MB quotas was a "holy shit" moment, and fast web mail was a fresh breath of
air

\- Google Maps, yet another "holy shit" experience when you used Mapquest
before

\- Google Translate, so much better than everything that came before

\- Google search - OK that's late 1990s but I remember the "aha" moment of
trying the Google beta after needing to become a power user of
lycos/altavista/askjeeves

You notice that all of these were more than a decade ago before their IPO.
Larry and Sergei have gotten old and lazy, and so have their CxOs and VPs. No
goals, no focus, no discipline because who cares if all the execs already have
their private jets.

~~~
jldugger
> You notice that all of these were more than a decade ago before their IPO.

I don't, and neither does wikipedia:

Gmail: April 1, 2004

IPO: Aug 19, 2004

Maps: February 8, 2005

Translate: April 28, 2006

~~~
projektfu
GP is probably confusing the creation of Alphabet, Inc. with the IPO of
Google.

------
franze
I had the "pleasure" to work with Ex-Googlers which had "Project Managers at
G" in their resume. Honestly, I do not wonder anymore why Google nowadays s#ck
as hard as they do.

They made great presentations and a grand plans using some project management
saas tools. But both of them neither understood the basics of
projectmanagement (Who does what when and what do they need when?) nor could
react when challenged.

Both of them were lower to middle management, but sure as hell anything that
you hand them would end in total mediocrity if not fail at all.

On the other hand one of the most capable front end engineers I knew joined
Google for 2 years. Where he spent most of his time - with a whole team -
working on .... fold in and fold out animations (for a single mobile product)

He quit. Google now is one of his customers. His work has gotten much more
interesting.

Google / Alphabet - the organization - did not scale well. My bet: There will
be a huge crisis soon. Lots of G-people will loose their jobs.

~~~
jldugger
You tell a nice story with the data, but I cannot dismiss the potential
selection bias: perhaps these PMs were not up to Google's standards and were
invited to leave?

~~~
franze
yes, i am aware of it. on the other hand which PR-ides itself with one of the
hardest hiring selection process on the market it might be a statement about
this process.

~~~
jldugger
Does Google's project manager interview panel have a reputation for rigor, or
is this just the engineering panel reputation rubbing off?

~~~
bagacrap
I imagine it must be harder to hire PMs without making decision mistakes given
that their job skills are harder to test for in an interview setting.

------
tengbretson
> It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them.

They appear to me to have begun monetizing google maps. And it is awful.

~~~
jtbayly
What are the four monopolies?

~~~
jcranmer
I just want to say that I love how the response to this comment is several
lists of 4, with search being the only one present in all of them.

~~~
secondbreakfast
The 4 I was thinking of:

Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube

Chrome is arguably a monopoly if you segment desktop web traffic, but iOS
Safari is such a large percentage that Safari can't be ignored.

People will disagree with email - but I challenge you to go look at email
threads you're on and see what % of the emails are @gmail.com - not to mention
G Suite addresses you don't know are Gmail. Outside of enterprise, there's no
alternative.

Not bad either that Android and Chrome are duopolies at this point.

------
edw
My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning,"
whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the
show. Chrome was the same thing, though the competitor was Microsoft. Google
Docs? Same thing, Microsoft again.

Google is good at building things 90% as good as they could be. For Gmail that
90% was leaps and bounds better than the web mail alternatives of 2004 which
included…SquirrelMail.

Does Google care that you're switching to Hey or Safari or whatever has
replaced Google Sheets? No. Are they going to buckle down at finish the last
10% of all of these products? No. Is that an opportunity for all of us reading
this story? Yes.

One way to think of Google's products as the equivalent of Microsoft Write —
or Apple's iWork. Google's platform is not Windows or Mac OS or iOS: it is the
Internet. Google's products come free in the shrink-wrapped box when you drive
to Egghead Software pick a copy of "Internet" up off the shelf.

~~~
an_d_rew
> ... SquirrelMail ...

Oh thank you for that trip down memory lane! Ran my own SquirrelMail servers
for _years_...

~~~
edw
Me too! It was bundled with OS X server, which I was running on the G4 Cube
that got relegated to utility box status when I went all-in on laptop life.

------
searchableguy
I am getting tired of these google articles. I know how this will go, users
will pat themselves for using duckduckgo, open street maps, firefox and
fastmail anytime now.

~~~
ancarda
I've never met anyone who uses OSM. I have just shy of 500 edits on OSM
because I kept going to use it, finding it didn't have what I was looking for,
and making improvements.

It would be nice if there was a viable alternative to Google Maps. Apple Maps
is apparently not too bad, but I'm using Android and Linux these days.

~~~
searchableguy
well, I use osmodroid. I am sure you can find many here. I do want to
contribute more after I have other things sorted. Wish you didn't have to
worry about being poor.

I agree with you that HN is a _bubble_ which is what I meant by my comment. We
need to do something to take it mainstream than patting ourselves here over
and over again. Talk about how ways we can do that. I don't like google
articles because we waste time giving them feedback rather than to all the
cool open source projects that deserve it.

~~~
ancarda
>Wish you didn't have to worry about being poor.

What? Are you suggesting I don't use iOS and macOS because I can't afford
Apple's hardware?

I have multiple Macs and iPhones in the house - I recently switched because I
don't like Apple's direction. Not because I can't afford their products.

~~~
searchableguy
No. you are wildly misunderstanding me. I mean I can't devote more time to
contributing to open street maps or other open source projects because of the
worry.

~~~
ancarda
Oh I see, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope things will improve for you soon.

It's understandable you would be focused on more important things. Lately I
have been wondering if more people would get into open source if they didn't
have bigger things to worry about like poverty and climate change.

I suppose I am privileged enough to do OSM contributions in my spare time. I'm
not sure how to feel about that...

~~~
searchableguy
> I suppose I am privileged enough to do OSM contributions in my spare time.
> I'm not sure how to feel about that...

You should feel proud and good imo. At least, I am proud of you that you
choose to spend time contributing to something valuable.

------
whoisjuan
Google is only good at search. The only reason why I use everything else they
create is because of their massive distribution, market penetration and inter-
operability.

Thankfully there are solid alternatives in certain areas like fore example
using iPhone instead of Android.

But for everything else I don't see a massive migration happening any time
soon. Notion, Hey.com, DuckDuckGo are all niche products. My dad has Gmail and
I can assure that's going to be the case for ever. He is never going to find
out what Hey.com is. Even if he does he is not even going to consider it.

Google didn't blew a ten-year lead on anything.

~~~
Godel_unicode
Sounds like they're also good at interoperability, market penetration, and
distribution. Do you not think they're good at video streaming, security
research, email, or cloud hosting?

~~~
whoisjuan
I think you missed my point. Of course saying that they are only good at
search is a catch-all statement. They are probably good at many things but
their relevance is tied exclusively to their search product. Products like
YouTube are what they are because of Google's search expertise.

Also let's not forget that AdWords either subsidizes or leverages everything
that Google builds. So I would add that they are also great at selling ads.

~~~
Godel_unicode
I understood your point, I just think it's incorrect. For instance, I don't
think search is even close to the hardest problem YouTube is solving. I would
say that magically streaming a crazy volume of video at the best possible
resolution is a pretty tough technical problem, and totally unrelated to
search. Ditto security research for the most part, modulo some of the work TAG
does on finding 0days in the wild.

This is a common trope about Google; they're only a search company, only an ad
company. It's simply not the case.

Edit: if you wanted to make a broad sweeping statement, I would say that
they're only good at hard technical challenges. That's why they succeeded at
e.g. search and YouTube, and failed at chat and social.

------
ogre_codes
The adage "If you aren't paying for it, then you are the product" is a bit
trite and worn out, but it in Google's case "If you aren't paying for it, you
_aren 't_ the customer" is entirely accurate. While individual Google
engineers are almost certainly motivated to do great things for end users, the
company as a whole has little incentive to make a great consumer experience.

Google feels like it's in a very awkward "You can't get there from here"
position. I think they'd like to move more towards having a direct financial
relationship (Google Pixel, YouTube's ad-free service, are good examples) with
their customers but can't quite figure out how to get there. Pivoting a free
product like Docs into a for-fee product often creates a ton of bad feelings
for a company.

------
yt-sdb
DuckDuckGo's rise feels like textbook "Innovator's Dilemma" stuff. By
prioritizing privacy, something Google can't do because all the institutional
values are misaligned with that goal, DDG were able to make headway into a
niche market. Now they're established, and their results are getting better
and better, even in the broader market. For example, I use DDG mostly because
their results are visually easier to parse. It remains to be seen if they'll
ever beat Google at their own search game, but Google certainly feels
vulnerable for the first time in many years.

~~~
three_seagrass
How do you know Duck Duck Go actually prioritizes privacy though?

People on HN have said that Duck Duck Go is a for profit corporation that
doesn't open source or independently validate their privacy claims.

~~~
yt-sdb
(1) From a branding perspective, I don't know how much it matters. (2) e.g. If
they're using my location data, they're terrible at it.

~~~
RMPR
FWIW Searx is actually a pretty decent alternative, plus it's open source.

------
burtonator
Imagine being a VC and hearing the pitch by Elasticsearch that you were going
to make massive inroads in search (when they were early of course). I imagine
most laughed at them like "How are you going to beat Google" ...

Imagine if they answered "we expect Google to just completely abdicate their
role in search."

Google right now has a few wins but most of their projects fall flat. AWS is
crushing it ...

------
sireat
Google is famous for half-assing and then abandoning promising projects.
(insert comparison vs other tech companies).

One example of a half forgotten project is something called Google Classrooms
- for teachers and students.

It is missing so many basic features.

For example there is no way to automatically take attendance when students log
in.

You can hack around it but for a project aimed at teachers it shouldn't be so
painful.

While I am ranting: I am still thankful(/s) to Google for abandoning Google
Hangouts integration with Youtube live streaming.

This forced me onto OBS full time and is actually a good thing.

EDIT: I speculate that this frequent failure of integrating between various
Google properties must be because there is a strong silo effect by now at
Google just like any other big corporation.

~~~
jankiehodgpodge
You can't take attendance in Google classroom because schools use MIS/SIS
software to track attendance/assessment data etc. Without links back to the
schools MIS data it gets held in a Google silo where it's not useful to
anyone.

~~~
sireat
Thank you! Chesterton's fence strikes again. There had to be a reason for this
misfeature.

Then the question is why would schools use Google classroom at all then if
they have their own MIS/SIS.

As I was teaching to adults I was puzzled on how to effectively use Google
Classroom.

------
aphroz
They also lost the trust of their users. They didn't drop the "don't be evil"
for nothing..

~~~
Kiro
Is that actually true though? I've seen more and more regular people outside
tech circles dismiss Facebook but Google? Not so much. In fact, outside of HN
I haven't seen many complaints at all.

~~~
laichzeit0
I've switched to Brave and duckduckgo. They are evil and I try avoid them at
all costs. AMP is a good enough reason.

~~~
searchableguy
Why would you switch to brave but not firefox?

Genuinely curious given the amount of shenanigans they have pulled out and
said oops. Most recent one -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027)

~~~
zackees
Firefox fired their CEO because he donated to a Christian group. So this guy
went and forked the Chrome browser into Brave.

If you think Chrome is better than Firefox, then you'll think Brave is also
better than Firefox.

------
AndrewKemendo
_The mobile Google results page is so cluttered that I switched my iPhone’s
default search to DuckDuckGo. The results are a tad worse, but I’m never doing
heavy-duty searches on the go. And now I don’t have to scroll past 6 ads to
get the first result._

I use DDG as default search on my phone and it's measurably worse than google
for the majority of searches I do and there are absolutely ads on ddg. I
inevitably switch for at least half of my searches.

~~~
lhopki01
I use Firefox with uBlockOrigin on my phone to avoid all the ads. It works
great.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I assume you're on Android. Is there a way to use uBO on iOS? Last I checked
there wasn't.

~~~
magnio
I think your best option is AdGuard.

------
_jal
I find it interesting how much of that article talks about features, but is
about fashion and brand identification.

------
obulpathi
They actually pushed ChromeOS and web services (GMail, Inbox, Docs, Sheets,
... ) pretty hard and realized that its not the way to go forward. While for
lightweight tasks (like emailing and docs) it works pretty well, for heavy
tasks (like video editing) and most importantly, as a development platform,
chrome os din't do well.

So they pivoted to Fuchsia OS. A new OS to provide seamless experience across
several devices (in home or in vehicle while commuting. Some of the resource
can be living in cloud). Its a sort of networked OS. Streaming music to your
Google Home, let me fetch that music form the Fuchsia Desktop's cache and
stream it to Google Home, rather than fetching it all the way from Cloud.

With out applications, OS is not much of use. Here comes Flutter. Let the
developers make apps for Android and iOS in Flutter (currently over 50k apps
on Google Play store) and have them run the same app on Fuchsia OS. I believe
it will take probably another year or two for Google to bring in Fuchsia to
Pixelbook. Let's hope so! I would like an OS as open as Linux, with macOS like
user experience.

~~~
hedora
> _and most importantly, as a development platform, chrome os din 't do well_

Microsoft completely lapped the industry on this with VS Code. It has a mode
where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend in a browser.

Edit: I thought I just read it just got to 53% market share. It was at 18% and
growing fast in 2018, so it’s plausible they have majority market share now:
[https://triplebyte.com/blog/editor-report-the-rise-of-
visual...](https://triplebyte.com/blog/editor-report-the-rise-of-visual-
studio-code)

~~~
smabie
> It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend
> in a browser.

You mean like X? Which was created in 1984 and at the canonical version (11)
in 1987?

~~~
hedora
Yeah, but (presumably) much more latency tolerant.

I didn’t mean to imply they were the first do build a development environment
using a thin client.

I meant they are way ahead on in-browser / on tablet IDE’s, which is
surprising, since Google had a 10 year lead on the office suite side of
things.

------
gokhan
_" Then something happened at Google. I’m not sure what. But they stopped
innovating on cloud software."_

Google desperately iterates on multiple side-projects to find an additional
revenue stream comparable to ads, that's all. Whenever the new toy can't
deliver enough it gets nixed, we all know the practice.

I believe they know how vulnerable they are. An unexpected virus may shutter
their ads business, this quarter results may be first of a kind in their
history. They don't have the iron grip on marketplace on Android as tight as
Apple. They know that cloud business will most likely be a Coke vs Pepsi
market. I believe their monopoly on browser market feeds the status quo in
ads, but what if Edge steals enough market share and comes default with ad
blocking? What if the new the new Apple chip shifts desktops and laptops to
Apple more and they need to seek permission of a hostile Safari to show ads?

Ads, their main source of income, is not something the end user wants. That's
Google's problem.

------
shadowtree
Big Sur made me switch to Mail and Calendar (away from GMail and GCal in
Safari).

Oh my god is it fast and snappy.

GChat within GMail kept me in the browser, but they ruined it. Now I use the
standalone Chat "app", which is some webframe crap, but hey, corporate
standard.

Big Sur is like iPadOS and I always use native apps on iPadOS/iOS.

Can't imagine what a truly native Figma, Slack, JIRA would be like.

~~~
joshmarinacci
You've switched to Big Sur because it's snappy? I just installed the beta and
it's super buggy with periodic pauses for no reason. Are you using it every
day now?

~~~
shadowtree
Yes, on my main work machine. MBP13, 2018.

Once you don't use browsers for everything, the machine is cooler and more
responsive.

Seriously feels as if I bought new hardware.

I close Safari when not using it, same for all other browsers (have Brave,
Chrome, ...).

~~~
smabie
Yeah, I'm not sure why the author was so excited about web apps. I have a 12
core Ryzen 3900x and all web apps are slow pieces of shit. I want native apps
for everything and no, electron doesn't count.

It's crazy how people all the time say on HN that performance doesn't matter
and how optimizing code is a waste of time while I'm simultaneously frustrated
about how slow the majority of software I use is.

------
addicted
One of the problems with Google is that it’s hard to evangelize their products
anymore.

I used to evangelize Macs with my friends and family, since the mid 2000s
(before the iPhone revolution) and it served me and the people I pushed it to
well. At least until a few years ago with the whole new MBP fiasco with the
touchbar and butterfly keyboard and no ports and a minimum price in the mid
2000s. But it’s hardware and people can continue using what they already own
for the most part till Apple fixed a lot of those issues.

But with Google I have been burnt. A lot. I got my family on Picasa to share
photos, and Google stopped supporting it. Personally, Google Reader always
stings. And whatever google did with GChat and Hangouts, which I pushed on all
my friends, was embarrassing.

At least I gave up on recommending Google products before Allo and Duo. My
friends who did that turn red when they are mentioned to this day.

And then there’s GSuite. A clients company switched wholesale on my
recommendation right at the beginning. They’ve been using it for almost its
entire existence (right from the days when it was Google Apps? and the first
10 users were free). They’ve been spending a ton of money on it for so long,
but they couldn’t get a Google rep to offer them a discount on 5 accounts
(basically they wanted tiered access and did not want to bring everyone onto
the most expensive plans because a few users were not full time employees and
using it for very basic purposes). It was a matter of a few hundred dollars a
year, but between the fact that they could hardly get a rep to talk to them,
and when they did the reps had absolutely no flexibility, MS reps swooped in,
offered tiered access, discounts, and a full time rep and within a couple of
months they were a complete O365 shop.

They still miss their email search, but overall it’s been completely worth it.

It’s still mind boggling to me how Google’s managed to screw this up.

------
newshhh
Google has an Engineer-driven gene that is a double-edge sword. This enabled
them to utilize worlds' most brilliant minds to solve some of the most
technically challenging problems. But at the same time, the best engineers
lose their interests and quickly move away from "plain and easy" problems,
which in fact the consumers face everyday. And the straight-forward logical
engineering mindset is often naive in understanding and solving deep human and
societal problems. This is why Google has been notoriously good at solving
technical problems like search and massive distributed systems, but bad at
designing and improving consumer and social products. On the contrary, Apple
has been relentless about improving even the tiniest thing in the user
experience like a round corner on an icon. Google's lack of drive on
delivering the best user experience will eventually bite them hard.

------
justin66
_Microsoft has a new clear mission: The Cloud._

That's a clear mission?

~~~
shadowgovt
Good question, but it's clear enough that it's also Google's mission.

------
TrackerFF
Credit where credit is due: I think Google colab is fantastic. I've used
Repl.it for a coupe of years now, but for the past year it's been Colab pretty
much 100% of the time.

Whenever I have to set up a new machine with dev. environment, I get a
impending sense of doom. I get the "I really, really don't want to be doing
this" feeling.

The fact that you can open up your browser, and start coding in just mere
seconds, is just an incredible feeling.

In February I had to set up an older laptop with Python - I did this via
Conda, which is usually a pretty smooth process. But I ended up spending 3
hours tracking down some persistent and conflicting DLL errors, which made
numpy crash. Turns out some other applications on the computer caused this
error.

------
jorblumesea
They were too busy grinding leetcode and focusing on "playing the game" and
not growing or hiring innovators. The Max Howell incident is a perfect
example. Creates legitimately useful software that everyone loves, can't
invert a binary tree (because we do this all day right? this question is
highly relevant to the job /s) so you can't work here.

Maybe at one point edit distance questions were useful in identifying the 2%
of CS grads that actually paid attention in class, but now it just produces
code bots.

Google gamified the interview, and in the process, became beholden and
captured by its own madness.

------
krtkush
[Shameless plug] For anyone who uses DuckDuckGo but finds themselves using !g
too and is curious how much their DDG vs !g search distribution is - I have
made a small FOSS add-on for Firefox called DDG Stats[1].

I am planning on a Chrome port too (though, I would always recommend Firefox
over chrome).

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-
stats/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/)

------
Supermancho
I can use photoshop for free now, on the web. I do that.
[https://www.photopea.com/](https://www.photopea.com/) \- The world is very
different.

My family can use office for free now, on the web. We do that.
[https://www.office.com/](https://www.office.com/)

Most of my family uses facebook.

We all use maps, youtube, google search, gmail (not me, although I have an
account).

------
gnramires
I believe it's their corporate culture. Google just hires problem solvers,
good engineers. It's a sort of dual of Apple, that prioritizes design and
marketing.

The result is you get things that Just work (and nothing else). While Apple
gets you things that Just works.

I don't see real vision in their products those days. None of them have real
vision (Apple is too design centric and afraid to try new things, Google lacks
creativity).

------
tehjoker
Google has reached the mature phase of the corporate lifecycle. They have
economic dominance and are putting the screws in to extract more money. The
writing was on the wall when they got an ex-Goldman Sachs CFO, but it has
become more and more externally obvious over the past few years.

[https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/fi...](https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/finance/business-
life-cycle/)

The mature phase can last a long time so long as they keep buying the
competition or use their position to shut others out. Or they can screw up and
start to lose their grip to another company or group of companies that slice
off their market share one service at a time.

In any case, Google was never actually trying to help the world, their
marketing was extremely good though. Hopefully the advertising economy
collapses as people realize the ads don't work and we have to find a model
(such as public funding of essential services) that actually works.

------
jbaker1
This article comes off as woefully naive towards the average user and frankly
quite elitist.

You're forgetting that Google does not optimize for power users like yourself.
Instead, they are just interested in adding the most amount of people into
their ecosystem. Free, easy-to-use, and familiar products like Docs and Sheets
will no doubt garner the most amount of users.

------
ksec
I went through most of the comment and something I thought hasn't been
mentioned yet.

May be those product should not have been built with Javascript in the first
place?

I remember when Chrome OS was launched, people like the blog post author were
all over it. It was the future!. And I was surprised he was an Apple user. I
thought Apple users cared way more, and way beyond some high level abstraction
convenience at the expense of quality.

I have been working with dozens if not hundreds of companies, and none of them
use Google Sheet for anything serious. It is on Excel, and if it is on the web
the trend is now Excel 365.

If you demand quality, there isn't even a single App built with Web Technology
that is A Class. This may change when WASM is a thing. But for now there is
simply no replacement.

Lots of educations were initially switching to ChromeOS and Google. They later
switched back to iPad. Why is that? There is something about Google and
ChromeOS's quality that is not up to standard. And the users knows it, they
just couldn't explain it. But it was crap, at least compare it to their iPad.
And it has performance hit on its user. Because they were not satisfied.

This isn't to say ChromeOS cant be Good. But Google, generally speaking has
absolutely no taste on quality. They are even worst than Microsoft. In
Microsoft you could still see a glimpse of product person fighting with (
sorry HN ) idiotic geeks solution and then came out with a compromise. And MS
Product person isn't anywhere as good as Apple's in the first place. But you
see ZERO User product design in Google. It is as if a product is designed by
geeks, built by geeks, marketed by geeks, and feed into their own echo chamber
how great it is.

And Android now is no different to Windows in the 90s.

I never took a serious look into Google's financial, but I am surprised they
are a trillion dollar company while Apple is only worst 50% more.

------
peteyPete
Not sure I want everything to be rewritten to run on a browser. How
unoptimized is that..

Not all comparisons are equal there. Like youtube vs twitch? Talking about
livestreaming? replays? I don't go to twitch to look up peoples vlogs, how
to's, etc. Apples / oranges even though you can livestream on both.

Gmail clogged? Unsubscribe to some stuff or adjust your filters. I've had my
gmail account since gmail became available and I have no issues keeping a
clean inbox. Spam folder is massive, but I guess its doing its job.

I get what you're saying.. But thats how the industry works. Giants can't move
as quick when they have billions of users that rely on 100% uptime and
backwards compatibility. You can't upend your stuff all the time. Startups are
scrappy and can do crazy stuff. But notice how many crazy things don't last.

------
rushabh
The biggest problem with Google is that they became so successful in search
and ads. It confuses the hell out of the company who their real customer is.

What if instead of monetizing via ads, they had gone with premium accounts
with personal search history and enterprise search products? That would have
forced them to innovate on their core expertise and kept them empathetic to
the end user. Right now, all they care is about usage stats.

Also Google never had a good design ethic right from the beginning. Early
products like Chat, Groups were badly designed and very inconsistent. They
cared more about scale and performance at that point.

The Google we see today is probably because of those early decisions made on
the backs of runaway ad revenue. I hope the management has a change of heart,
because I can see other companies chipping away at Google otherwise.

------
Siira
This article doesn't say anything worth hearing. It can be summarized as,
"Google has not done visibly big consumer innovation." Which is not that true
either. Their "cluttered" search is adding a lot of value. Their main
innovation has also been in AI, mobile and the cloud.

------
HeavyStorm
Google never had a ten year lead, that's pretty naive. Google had a ten year
_lag_. Microsoft already had office when Google appeared, and while fans have
numerous reasons to like Google docs & friends, they were never better or
bigger than Office.

Chrome OS has a tremendous lag on windows and Mac.

It's really hard to innovate once you start to be compared to a established
brand. Go ask Bing.

Unless duck duck go becomes larger than Google, they never blew any lead, only
were defeated in places opponents were stronger.

------
Ericson2314
> I’m a long shareholder of Google. It’s amazing how they have four monopolies
> and only monetize one of them. I’m confident they have a bright future
> ahead.

What? Name me a company to make a comeback on the R&D-is-dead-slowly-killing-
bussines front?[1]. Clearly Google (and Intel) are on the IBM train now, with
only a lack of anti-trust possibly keeping them barely sentient in a few
years. [I say "sentient" because they could continue to rent-seek into their
feeding tube way after.]

And clearly this person is letting their investment guide their thinking
rather than vice-versa. You almost get it, just a bit more!

[1]: Don't say MS, yet, they have embraced tons of web-era trappings and
culture, but are they actually pushing the envelope or still assimilating?

------
aazaa
Google's main liability is that they can never, under any circumstances,
prioritize user privacy.

The reason the products listed by the author have rough corners is that those
products don't contribute much to the bottom line.

Google is an advertising company that happens to use technology. The problem
is that too many people view it as a technology company that happens to be
into advertising.

As browsers adopt ad-blockers by default, Chrome will be the lone holdout. As
smaller companies and startups realize that you can "monetize" products by
charging a price and adopting stringent privacy policies, Google will be stuck
with its "free" business model.

Nothing Google will try to do in the years ahead will change the basic
equation.

~~~
zaphar
Google has the best software development tooling in the business internally.
Their problems are not around technology. Their problems are product focus,
commitment and follow through. Google is in fact primarily a technology
company. They struggle with being a "product" company.

------
xnx
Google has minimal interest in "apps" (which many companies can do an OK job
at) and much more interested in planet-scale data/machine-learning/AI (which
is much much harder and something that Google is still very far ahead of
everyone at).

------
franze
Another micro example of how bad Google is nowadays:

The sitemap.xml API is deliberately broken for 1 1/2 years by now. The
response does no longer deliver an indexed value back other than 0 or a frozen
number form years ago. After I found out about it a few months later there was
a tweet and blogpost about it.

The documentation was never updated ...
[https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/search-
console...](https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/search-console-api-
original/v3/sitemaps#resource)

My guess, there is no one responsible anymore, hey it just is a 200k people
company ...

------
justinhj
I feel like sheets and docs not changing for years is a feature not problem. I
don't like innovation in these kind of apps. It's far too common,
historically, for people to add all kinds of useless crap like Mr Clippy and
rearrange the toolbars and whatnot. Once you're familiar with the tools the
interface is consistent across docs, sheets and slides as well as over time.
The programmability is also really good. I actually built an app for a friend
using just sheets and its automation features to implement a web form for
their national poetry contest.

------
muddi900
I ran a whole business for years with Google Sheets API and Python front end.
I agree that sheets is slow and lumbering, but the API works perfectly.

I did a small layman's demo here recently[1].

[1][https://medium.com/@muddi900/use-google-sheets-as-a-
database...](https://medium.com/@muddi900/use-google-sheets-as-a-database-
with-python-30-days-of-
blog-4-1d288c614163?sk=32ea57e789e2b4de396240a750c7f674)

------
the_black_hand
The new office online surprisingly works really great. Funny enough, office
365 works better online than desktop. I do thing Web OS is the future. User's
are now spending 90% of their time in the browser. Basically browser === os.
Apps like electron, react are proving that point. Chrome OS was maybe a start
(I've never personally used it because I've never really felt the need to make
such a huge OS transition), but at the present business incentives were weak.
Why would someone pay (not monetary, but by opportunity cost) for just a
browser?

------
t0mmyb0y
This is google in a nutshell.

I lived near google for many years and knew many employees and this drives
them crazy. In order to have innovation and support for a particular product,
google allows engineers to do what they want until nobody wants to touch the
bloated pos and everyone walks away.

Gmail has thousands of hidden functions. To get gmail built they allowed each
engineer to add what they wanted...and most of it was for them personally.
Remember the gmail2 thteat from a number of years ago? They couldn't figure
out how to force every user into a new platform.

------
uniqueid
I'm surprised the author doesn't spend more time discussing Google's search
engine.

I've been using DDG as my primary search for a while, because Google Search
has been returning increasingly bad results already for quite some months.

For the past couple days I've tried Google's Search again, and, oh wow!, it is
hilariously bad now, just laughable! It now entirely ignores search terms, and
the AI and ad-based results work against me, not for me.

Google didn't blow a ten year lead, they blew a 20 year lead. AltaVista was
better than this.

~~~
mav3rick
Yes, the entire world is raving about DDG results.

~~~
uniqueid
Let's revisit the topic three months from now. The change to which I refer
probably occurred less than a month ago. Not that Google results hadn't
already been going downhill for months prior, but it became dramatically worse
at some point over the past month.

------
api
I've personally backed way off when it comes to putting everything in the
cloud. I know some people love the convenience and I get that, but I spend a
lot of time and energy creating what I create and I want to actually have some
control over it. I also don't trust cloud companies at all when it comes to
either privacy or continuity.

For similar reasons I've started data hoarding again. When I find an
interesting video or podcast I tend to mirror and stash it on a NAS. Things
disappear from the cloud quite regularly.

------
k__
Google Docs/Sheets is pretty crappy compared LibreOffice. But its
collaboration features are really good and everyone has a Google account, so
working together remote works like a charm.

------
machinehermit
Not to mention they lucked out that DuckDuckGo is called DuckDuckGo.

I just can't believe such smart people could believe that is good branding.

What exactly were the brand names they rejected to go with DuckDuckGo?

------
zarkov99
This is exactly right. You see the flashes of brilliance and the incredible
untapped value in GDocs. But its slow, disorganized and stagnant. Google could
be making its money the honest way, by providing genuine value, making people
more productive and and collaborative. Its heartbreaking to see them instead
massively profiting through spying and manipulating their users. They
destroyed their brand and surely they are no longer an appealing place to work
for those who can afford to have a conscience.

------
rvz
> In 2010, I predicted that by 2020 Chrome OS would be the most popular
> desktop OS in the world. It was fast, lightweight, and $0.

Sounds like your crystal ball malfunctioned on that forecast. I'll recalibrate
it for you but will forecast it for this decade:

In 2020, I predict that by 2030, Fuchsia OS would be one of the most popular
desktop and mobile OSes in the world and will replace Chrome OS and Android.
It was fast, lightweight, and $0.

There you go. That makes much more sense according to my crystal ball.

------
cocktailpeanuts
The choice of "alternatives" mentioned in the article, like "Hey", "Notion",
"AirTable", etc. actually does more harm to the credibility to the article
than good, because I can't think of any normal person using all these startup
products for important tasks.

Hell, I think the only demographic who would have switched all their workflow
tools to these would be people who live in Silicon Valley, just helping each
other out.

~~~
walljm
My team (I am the director of software at my company) switched to Notion from
Google Docs a little more than a year ago and I'm very happy with the change.

Google Docs addresses a slightly different use case than Notion. Notion is one
document for a lot of people, owned by the organization. Google Docs are docs
owned by many people, often duplicated. Notion is much better for building
documentation and for storing institutional knowledge.

We still use Google docs for things that we don't need to share widely and
don't need to be referenceable to a large number of people.

------
numbers
This post is a summary of how I feel about a lot of google products as well.
Especially email, yes google has amazing AI to figure out spam but the UX of
gmail just feels like I'm still in 2012 or 2015 with email. I've been using
Hey for about a week as well and wow, checking and responding to email feels
less of a burden and having the Feed, Paper Trail, and Imbox is actually a
good way to separate types of emails sent nowadays.

------
awinder
“At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats for macOS Big Sur. It reminded me how much
Chrome makes my machine go WHURRRRRR. Yesterday, I made Safari my default
browser again.”

I talk to developer friends in my circles and I’m pretty sure I’m on a crazy
list for running safari, but I really do think it’s the best Mac browser.
Chrome is just an absolute hog and until there’s some Camino-like renaissance
for Firefox/Mozilla on Mac it’s not going to work for me.

~~~
jasonv
I use Safari for personal surfing, and separate Chrome accounts for my various
business/work related surfing.

Keeps things separate and tidy, and I keep Chrome closed as much as I need it
to be closed.

~~~
secondbreakfast
I like this idea a lot. I've been using Station to stay logged in to all my
various work web apps, and then Chrome (now Safari) for personal.

~~~
jasonv
I use Mailplane for when I want to see all my email accounts, and Spark when I
want to deal with all email accounts together.

Each work Chrome profile has a pinned Gmail and, maybe, a Slack.

So I can be universal, or targeted, where I want to spend my time.

That said, I'm also spread across too many endeavors, but that's a totally
different problem.

------
johnnydoe9
Seems to be their modus operandi to me, there have been some talks ranging
from light ribbing to full on bashing regarding the new iOS update cause they
have added features that have existed in Android for decades now. But what
have they done with widgets in all this while other than letting it rot? Even
Google services themselves don't bother with making a good widget and now
Apple will do the same, possibly better.

------
neixidbeksoxyd
Google is a classic case of "show me the incentives and I'll show you the
outcome". Google's performance reviews and promotions are based on building
shiny complex things, not on simple but grungy work that solves real problems.
So they constantly come up with things nobody uses or cancel products that
many use but aren't shiny enough to get a bunch of people promoted so no
leaders want to own them.

------
haolez
I have a Chromebook and I'm really found of it, but the Android and Linux
parts seem half-baked and a depart from the Chromebook's initial proposition.

I really like this setup where my computer is just a thin client to my
infrastructure. In the case of ChromeOS, this is all a closed/proprietary
environment managed by Google, but nothing prevents challengers from
implementing this setup based on open standards and user freedom.

------
smellsdonkey
Here's a free idea for Google that would make my life better... you know these
voice assistant thingys? I would love if they could tell me when things happen
instead of having to ask them if something is currently happening. For
example, "Hey Google, tell me when XXX announces a concert in town." or "tell
me when YYY is on sale" etc.

Having to look these things up all the time really sucks.

------
rkagerer
I had an early Chromebook (from I/O) and was never very impressed. I always
felt the lackluster support for local storage would hold it back from ever
seriously competing with my PC.

I saw its value as more of a dedicated device for people who do limited things
on their laptop (e.g. sales team using only a handful of web apps), and even
in that niche it had to compete with iPads, etc.

------
sbmthakur
I can relate a bit. I have been trying to 'degooglify' my life for sometime.
Made these couple of shifts in the last two years:

* Chrome --> Firefox

* Google search --> DuckDuckGo

These are in pipeline:

* YouTube --> Newpipe (which is YouTube minus ads and tracking)

* Drive --> Mega.nz

* Gmail --> Protonmail

* Playstore --> F-droid (whenever possible)

At the same time, I have been using Google's Photos and Podcasts a tad more
lately. Need to find good alternatives to these.

------
mcot2
Not sure why he called it “TheFacebook”. That was an early name used way prior
to even 2005. ChromeOS was released in 2010/2011.

~~~
petepete
Figma was released in 2016. The author must be some kind of prophet.

------
poulsbohemian
And yet the stock is at $1400+ this morning. I wonder if you did a survey and
described Google without using the name Google, IE: single line of business
responsible for 90%+ of revenue, limited switching costs for consumers,
regularly kills products consumers like, would anyone think this is a stock
worth holding? What weird times we live in.

------
jcims
Google is an experiment in what happens when you give a bunch of smart people
a 6-7 figure UBI (funded, of course, by search).

------
mmargerum
Couldn't happen to nicer company. I've been disentangling my personal stuff
and company's I host for from the google hive for less woke options. Hit em
where it hurts.

When the people you pay start threatening to walk out because they don't like
what you are working on you know you have a systemic problem.

------
DannyB2
Google had (or still has) perverse incentives.

No incentive to do the boring work of maintaining and improving existing
products.

Lots of incentive to create new things -- even if they overlap functionality
of existing things -- which then must be phased out to make room for the
awkward new things. Even if everyone preferred the old things.

------
mark_l_watson
I can't totally agree with this. It may be true that Google Docs and Sheets
get updated slowly, but they are functional and as long as they are maintained
properly, I am a happy consumer.

Also, on Chromebooks having Microsoft Office 365 available as web apps
provides higher level tools when you need them.

------
Analemma_
Someday, Google will be a business school case study on the dangers of a)
having all your money come from one cash cow and b) having too many self-
directed engineers with no management vision. Google is a car with a 1,000
horsepower engine but which can't drive in a straight line.

~~~
darepublic
Seems like it is easier for a smaller group of capable people to make a big
change than a giant org of diverse talented people from different backgrounds

~~~
paulsutter
A small focused team of diverse talented people from different backgrounds,
can make the biggest-impact.

Focus=speed. Focus is what's missing at Google, and why they have such a
sprawling staff and politics.

~~~
darepublic
You're right, diversity is fine, it's the lack of focus I suppose... but even
with 'focus' I think the small size aspect is still important.

------
luord
I've always cared about the privacy issues regarding Google's applications way
less than I should, probably, but he definitely makes a good point regarding
how increasingly outdated they're feeling.

I'm most likely gonna start switching out too.

------
Peteris
The author is forgetting that Google is a search monopoly.

AI was (and continues to be) the biggest threat to their success in search so
they invested heavily in that (it was called ML back then).

Clearly they are still doing well even with subpar cloud software, so this has
proven out.

------
marban
To Quote SJ: "The only problem with Microsoft is, they just have no taste"

Repeat that for Google.

------
bookmarkable
The future does not belong to Google and Facebook. Data privacy is too
important to allow massive grow in ads, and they are not companies organized
around selling software. As the article points out, we can live without both.
It isn’t 2009.

------
thenoblesunfish
"Then something happened at Google. I’m not sure what."

Occam's Razor would say that what happened is that they couldn't figure out
how to make much money from these tools, and therefore directed fewer
resources to them :(

------
MR4D
Someone once described the big tech companies this way:

Google is about solving tough/new engineering problems;

Microsoft is about building software;

Apple is about the consumer;

Facebook is about your attention span;

Amazon is about your wallet.

I thought that summed up their personalities pretty well so thought I’d share.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
I agree with you for Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but I disagree about Amazon
and Facebook.

Amazon's not about your wallet. They're frequently more expensive than other
sites; they're about convenience and lock-in. If you need a Sprocket, you type
sprocket into the search bar, click buy on the Amazon button, and you're done.
The result will probably be a pretty good sprocket for an unobjectionable
price. You don't need to worry about little details like who sold it to you or
whether it's likely to show up functional. It'll probably work, and if it
doesn't, you can return it. No need to do research, no need to drive to a
store.

Facebook doesn't care about your attention; it just needs your eyes. That
sounds like the same thing, but it's very different. If you're just scrolling
through without really reading anything, that's absolutely fine with Facebook
so long as you keep doing it.

------
julianeon
There's a strange cognitive dissonance in how Google is both the most
prestigious company that can employ you, and a maker of crappy, second-rate
software. It seems like they can't both be simultaneously true.

------
joshocar
I'm still annoyed that they screwed up the release of Google Wave. The mistake
was to make it a separate service instead of building it into Gmail and making
it another "type of email" you can send.

------
vsareto
>I’m a long shareholder of Google. It’s amazing how they have four monopolies
and only monetize one of them.

Okay, but we don't want Google as a monopoly... or do we?

Breaking up the monopoly means throwing away the ten-year lead.

~~~
haberdasher
I think OC's point is that they're breaking up their own monopoly with a
complete lack of product vision.

Google Wallet/Pay/Android Pay could have become Stripe, Venmo. Google
Hangouts/Meet/Chat could have become Zoom, Slack, Teams, iMessage, etc. Google
Finance could have become Robinhood, Mint.

------
Touche
> Then something happened at Google. I’m not sure what. But they stopped
> innovating on cloud software.

What happened was they were printing money on the cloud software they already
had. Classic innovators dilemma.

------
classics2
Google is dying under the pressure to make everything they do connect to and
be dominated by their ad sales. Google is what happens when you let he
accounts start running the ship.

------
raldi
I can't believe it's whatever year this is and Google Sheets can't remember
that I just told it a particular sort range has a header row, or just figure
it out by itself.

------
mberning
Also in that timeframe the privacy landscape and people’s sensitivity to it
have changed a great deal. It’s a much bigger concern amongst normies than it
was 10-15 years ago.

------
jaimex2
And it all coincides with Larry and Sergei stepping down. Google is very much
just a cash cow being milked, zero innovation - just products rusting away.

------
lwhi
I don't understand how Notion can be used to replace a fully fledged word
processor. Am I missing something?

------
awinter-py
love the cross-outs section

youtube remains un-crossed, but it will be replaced by better offerings in
core categories: vloggers, how-to / structured / lego, and music / covers

love that this person is privacy-conscious but is making 'purchase' decisions
based on the fact that the products just suck now

~~~
jsf01
Privacy conscious yet uses Zoom. Hmm

~~~
bitcharmer
Zoom is now offering e2e encryption for all users. What exactly do you have
problem with?

~~~
jsf01
They have a history.

\- running a secret local server on client machines (which incidentally led to
several vulnerabilities including the one that enabled attackers to gain
webcam and audio access, as well as login credentials)

\- lying about e2e encryption (or if you give them the benefit of the doubt,
at the very least being disingenuous about it)

\- routing all calls through servers in China

\- not being explicit about the many conditions that disabled encryption (such
as having a participant call in from a phone, recording the session, etc)

\- widespread data collection for targeting purposes

\- sharing said data with Facebook

\- automatically reinstalling the client after you have tried to delete it

\- a shady installer that uses preinstall scripts to install the app without
the user ever having to click “install”

\- gaining root access in their installer

\- overriding the password prompt message to make it seem like the system is
requesting admin rights and not Zoom itself

Many of these have been patched, to Zoom’s credit, and others have been
explained away. But you can’t look at a company with a history like that and
say that Zoom would knowingly be the app of choice for a privacy conscious
user.

------
A7med
So because you started using other services that's mean Google is behind, what
kind of logic is that

------
inthewoods
This article brings to mind the saying "A poor craftsman blames his tools".

------
OOPMan
Thank goodness ChromeOS didn't take over.

I'd like for my computer to be more than a toy.

------
josefresco
This article was weird. I started about ChromeOS and I was expecting a deep
dive or interesting viewpoint on the OS market. Then it veered into
"alternatives to Google" land, with a side promotion of HEY (of all things).
It left me wanting, for an article about Google's OS strategy.

------
softwaredoug
Still can’t copy a folder full of docs in google drive and it’s so
frustrating.

------
askjdlkasdjsd
I am starting to think everything is an ad for Hey on hacker news these days.

------
flerchin
Owning the software they build doesn't seem to scale.

------
mrlatinos
This feels like an ad for HEY more than anything else...

------
roland35
I'm still upset they shuttered inbox and reader!

------
siddarthd2919
The same article will fit well for Waymo as well.

------
mafia303
You lost me at tiktok

------
nailer
Google hasn't had any major new products for 10 years.

~~~
tsak
Stadia?

~~~
nailer
Stadia is a cloud gaming platform. Like Nvidia Shield, Microsoft xCloud, Sony
PS Now, OnLive, and the rest.

Gmail, maps, page-rank based search, and other pre-2010 Google tech were
category makers. Every competitor has to massively step their game up to make
something as good.

Stadia is not a category maker. There's no massive competitive advantage or
leading position for anyone else to catch up to. It's nowhere near the
pre-2010 Google products.

~~~
mav3rick
This is getting old now.

Tensorflow, TPUs, Spanner, Photos, Waymo. Just keep shifting the goal posts.

~~~
nailer
I've never spoken to you before and goalposts have always been. You just think
every product is major. No, Spanner is not equivalent to Google Maps or
Search.

------
snird
(This comment grew so much, I actually posted it too
[https://snir.dev/blog/google-10-years-
lead](https://snir.dev/blog/google-10-years-lead) )

Initially, I thought this is because Google targets only big business
customers, competing with Microsoft 365. Other product innovations do not
scare them, they still offer a package with mail, video conferencing, docs,
sheets, drive, etc' etc'. Great for big business collaboration tools. They
just don't care for things like Notion or HEY. It's not their target and they
don't make money from it.

But then I thought, this is an example targeted against Microsoft with a
similar offering. What about Google Cloud? What about Android? They are both
innovative. What happened there?

Then I saw it. Google consistently follows the market preventing its
competitors from achieving market control. And in Google's case, "the market"
is Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook.

We'll start with Microsoft since they were the first. And beating them down
took place ~10 years ago, that's why it seems like the tech from back then
never progressed much. Because the hit already strike.

Microsoft dominated the corporate world with its mail software Outlook, and
with its Office suite, Word, Excel, etc'. Google is native to the web and they
leveraged their position to slowly hit Microsoft in this spot. Gmail first,
then Google Drive, and then Chrome to kill IE as a final strike. And it was
successful.

Amazon got big into the tech business through AWS. Google went out to a fight
through Google Cloud. Not only the offering is cheaper, it also provided
technologies you can't explain any other way than just to hit AWS. Kubernetes
as an open platform is against any business textbook to lock in customers. But
it will allow for an easy way out of AWS in the long run, preferably to GCP
but it can be any other cloud provider that provides Kubernetes service as
well. It is strategically more of a hit to the front runner, Amazon, then a
benefit to GCP.

These priorities order of first hit the front runner, then everything else is
also seen with the Apple case. Android came after the iPhone. It has a much
larger market share, and yet, it generates far less revenue to Google then the
iPhone is to Apple. That's because the main goal is to prevent Apple from
winning the market. And in that, it is successful.

Google Buzz. Ouch. Google Plus. Double ouch. Google spent so much effort into
hitting Facebook as hard as they can. They were not successful here, but from
the history of things it is obvious how Google try to hit Facebook. They did
not try to create a new social platform, no. Otherwise they would come up with
something that is not.. well, exactly like Facebook.

Google home initially released at 2016. Amazon Alexa in 2014.

I have so many more examples that comes to mind as I write, but the point is
already clear.

On a final note, I'll say, Google is not only trying to bend down competitors.
Google Glass is one new product market they tried to create. The self-driving
cars initiative is another example the comes to mind. They do innovate.

They just have so much money, blocking out other big tech companies is a
strategy they are not willing to give up. And when this is the strategy, well,
Google sheets already took a huge chunk from Microsoft, what more does it
need?

------
listenallyall
To be clear, this is a stealth ad for Hey email service wrapped in a rant
against Google. #1 on HN 20 minutes after posting. It's quite impressive,
actually.

~~~
secondbreakfast
(author here) i promise this is not an ad for Hey haha, have no affiliation
with basecamp and wish i was that good at content marketing.

~~~
imprettycool
It's kind of fishy this is the only comment OP responded to. And OP's other
most recent comment was on a basecamp thread

~~~
scarface74
You really don’t know DHH or BaseCamp. I can guarantee you that he has enough
of a reach and platform not to engage in shady guerrilla marketing

------
vinay_ys
Photoshop->Figma :D that's hilarious!

~~~
arcturus17
Why? I guess it's because Figma has fewer features, but if OP used PS for
web/app design, wouldn't this be fair?

~~~
vinay_ys
Because photoshop is primarily a complex software for professional raster
image editing/designing. Those who use it for that purpose will not think of
Figma as its replacement. Figma is a SVG based UX design tool and those who do
UX design in 2020 most likely (hopefully) aren't using a heavy/complex raster
graphics tool like photoshop.

~~~
arcturus17
No, I understand and agree with all of that, I sometimes design UIs and I
wouldn’t touch PS with a laser pointer for that purpose.

But the article talks about software from 10 years ago to now. I remember even
as Sketch had been rising for a while, something like 52% of UI designers
still used PS. Pretty sure that wasn’t even close to 10 years ago!

So I guess that’s why I thought PS->Figma was a reasonable jump in that
context. Even if they used Sketch in the interim or whatever.

------
dsschnau
Google has a clear mission and it's advertising, duh

~~~
maerF0x0
exactly this. The only reason the other services exist is to feed more data
into the advertising (search?) machinations. Because the company is so
myopically focused on Advertising dollars and everything else as loss
leaders(or under monetized), they are unable to see a potential reversal of
roles where the other products become ends unto themselves

------
buboard
> At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats

> I started using HEY last week

refreshing to see a person who 's not suggestable and easily swayed by fads

~~~
lostlogin
My gauge is okaying up, is this sarcastic?

~~~
buboard
yes
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNy_GNWwhQk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNy_GNWwhQk)

