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.
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.
- 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.
You touch on something I have thought about a lot.... why don’t we launch companies with the intent of winding them down once we have achieved what we set out to? It’s rhetorical as I know the answer is money But I yearn to live in a society where that would be the norm.
I don't know enough about Hey to judge that, but to me comparing Notion to Google Docs is like comparing Slack to Gmail. I mean sure, both Slack and Gmail are communication tools, but they solve for different use cases so they're not really interchangeable. I can imagine that if your use cases are all things that Slack is better at you might think "Wow, Gmail is so outdated and horrible why isn't it like Slack?" But personally I like having both because I have use cases that email is better for and I'm skeptical that one generalist tool that tried to be useful for all use cases would be particularly good for any of them.
Getting back to Notion and Google Docs, I'd rather use Notion for internal documentation and I'd really, really rather use Google Docs for redlining contracts, which is most often what I'm doing when I'm dealing with .doc/.docx files. In Microsoft's suite I think Notion is an alternative to OneNote, not to Word. So I would agree with the author if the implication was that Google should have a Notion-like tool in addition to Google Docs, but suggesting that Google Docs is bad because it's not Notion-like doesn't make any more sense to me than saying that Gmail is bad because it's not Slack.
> but I really don't find "Hey" a suitable alternatives to Gmail
I don't get why people need an alternative to Gmail. Email is already decentralized. Just buy a custom domain for a few dollars per year, and then use any email provider you want. You'll own your email address forever.
I currently host my email on Protonmail, but if I ever decide to switch providers, I can do it without having to give people a new email address. I could even go back to Gmail. Worst-case scenario is that I lose the old messages in my inbox that I failed to back up, but that's no big deal.
A coworker asked me last night about a cloud but controlled email option and protonmail was my first thought, though I don't know the current competition. Own a domain, put some cash aside for paying for the service, and go from there.
I still use gmail for my mail server but I use Windows Mail for my PC mail client nowadays. Not that Windows Mail is great but Google is determined to make Gmail progressively worse. All they had to do was nothing.
If your “actual work” is designing documents for printing on dead tree paper, then sure. If your work is modern digital-first collaboration there are way more effective choices these days.
I highly doubt this. It might be, might be, a majority. But there are lots of academic, personal, and even business cases that are digital only or digital mostly.
I agree with this. I have had Hey for more than a week now. The UI is nice and feels fresh but that's about it. There are some features which won't work well if you keep an address for long enough.
- Screener: This works well at start but it won't scale well. I still have to see every address for the first time. Google is smart to send spam to spam. I almost never have to check it. I have used other email services and no one comes even close to recognizing and flagging spam well.
- Categorization : Algos work well mostly in Gmail. Auto Categorization works reall well, sure it sometimes mislabels and sends email to a different category. But it is accurate most of the times. I don't have to spend time on these rules.
I think Google is screwing up massively with letting these things rot on the vine, but I still prefer google docs/drive to sharepoint/office365 even - word on desktop is okay but the web based version is utter crap compared to Google Docs.
According to my gf, a rabid Inbox fan, many important feature didn’t make he transition. She said a lot of her colleagues were pissed off about it too...and she was working at google at the time (not on Inbox/Gmail of course).
Scuttlebutt I heard (not via her) was it was the usual Google story: internal political fight unrelated to features or technical issues.
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.