Google is historically terrible as a product company (and has succeeded in spite of that) As their technical innovations become less of a moat (we're already there) they won't be able to win on engineering alone (they are no longer winning on engineering alone)
As a person who gets paid to make Chrome (CEF really) do its bidding, I would say Chrome is really as close to an OS as it can get, as in I've found API or service typically an OS or an external tool would provide, that wasn't built into Chrome.
On a semi-related note, I bought a Pixel phone about a month ago, and I'm shocked by how unpolished it is. I've had so many little annoyances pop up, issues I never had on other android phones. Keyboard hiding/appearing when it's not suppose to, bluetooth dropping, WiFi dropping, network switching taking forever, screen becoming unresponsive... It's mostly all small things, but they really start to add up after a while.
They are all pretty par for the course. Google used to be outstanding... but I'm not sure of a single product they have that is outstanding (def: significantly better than the competition) anymore. On the other hand I rarely use any google products these days, so maybe I'm not the one to be judging.
I'm not a fan of Google, and also not attached to Apple or Microsoft, so this isn't me trying to stan for Google, but I'd like to request that you give examples of what competing products are categorically better (and, by what metric(s) you're judging - code quality? stability? robust set of features?) -- for Gmail, Docs/Drive/etc, Google Calendar, Maps, Classroom, YouTube.
As far as I can tell, if judged by the marketplace (and breaking ties with which product I like better), Google has run away with the ball on all of those, and Gemini seems to at least be competitive.
The only major product I'd say they've sunk below acceptability on is Search, which is demonstrably dogshit now...though I suspect it's more that they have changed their definition of what Search is for, from "helping users efficiently find other websites that are useful to them" to "A convenient on-ramp to, many times per day, capture the current user intent and steer them toward something that earns Google some ad revenue."
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 think it’s a major feature gap that Gmail (paid or free) cannot create filters on headers.
I also can’t do wildcard filters on “to” or “from”. For example, in my GApps I have it set up to route all emails not associated with a specific user to my primary user. So that it’s easier to make throwaway emails. I want to filter all to:`X.X@domain.tld` to a certain folder. No can do.
> but I'd like to request that you give examples of what competing products are categorically better
Personally I much prefer Fastmail to Gmail. The site is way faster and more cohesively designed. Fastmail supports jmap, and way more imap extensions (including push support on Apple mail). They have helpful humans handling support requests. And they do all of that with what seems like 1/10th or less the number of employees.
The only thing I like more about Gmail is their native mobile apps. Fastmail’s official mobile app is a web view.
Funny. Search is the only thing that is outstanding as it is the big revenue arm, that and youtube.
The last time i tried using gmaps i got ads and the thing could figure out where i was on the roads. It was comical as i always remembered google maps being better than apple. Today tho, apple beats them hands down.
Googles products that do not get cancelled are pretty mediocre in todays market. They can build useful things but if it doesnt have ads in it, it gets axed
Maps & Gmail & Search all have plenty of accumulating flaws... but they also completely defined their product category and today are among the most popular software products ever made.
More than plenty of people (including me) would argue that Windows is an awful product, but a quite significant number of people (maybe even including me) would argue that its an outstanding product.
Garmin was and is better than Google Maps and Mapquest was better than Google Maps when you needed to print directions. If Google didn’t have Android would maps matter as much?
Apple Maps and Waze is better for directions. Apple has better CarPlay integration and HUD. Google Maps is way better at searching for things like restaurants or local businesses but not as much the nav part.
All of these are outstanding! In so far they are not singular or new anymore, well... If for the past ~20 years nobody has come up with something clearly better, then I would say that speaks to how outstanding the product that are being copied are to this day.
Search has degraded for sure, but still better than anything else? Maps - I guess you mean Apple ones are better? Can't tell, I am not on Apple, but if you don't use Apple products, there are not many alternatives to Google maps
Apple Maps is - or soon will - show ads. A trillion dollar company that charges thousands for the device. So that’s out.
OsmAnd’s UI really doesn’t suit me, and there are a few others that I personally liked even less.
But Organic Maps ticks enough boxes to come close. I’ve been using Organic Maps on iOS for driving, and it’s tolerable. And for offline mapping it’s a godsend.
… sure, but until someone creates a competitor that is good enough to overcome the switching costs, people are going to stay with Google. Most of Google's then-competitors in the categories listed are not just inferior products, they're dead. ISPs no longer do email, Alta Vista & Ask Jeeves are gone, MapQuest is a thing that makes us that used it sound old.
Not only does an upstart have to overcome the switching costs, they have to actually survive, and not just get hoovered up by acquisition and then Our-Incredible-Journeyed.
It's … okay … but it still falls down in a fair few areas? It's crap at finding restrooms. Finding a stop on the road is also difficult, as it seems like it just defaults to a basic radial search, when as a driver you want things down-route, not radially out. All the AI in the world can't seem to figure out when I'm looking for gas or food that closed businesses are not results I want to see. It eats enough CPU to melt phones, such that Android now has built-in support for this?!¹. Attempting to report things often goes in vain². Some of the notifications need work ("object in road ahead" … I'd kill for what lane! this one is just anxiety in a notification), and it'd be nice to see the lane designations ahead of time (it only shows them once you're like <1mi out). I've never gotten the AI-home detection to work. Attempting to navigate to the house of anyone with an Irish name gets me a bar, and the forced-voice-navigation when in a car means I have to be able to pronounce the destination. Google does not seem to grok that sometimes … there's a person in the car who is designated navigator. They can type, it's fine. Some turn directions could be better if you incorporate more precise language into them³. Some directions could be abbreviated "Navigate to I-4 North": I live here, I don't need step-by-step hand-holding to the interstate, but I'd like to plug in the destination before the car is rolling.
¹literally, phones can now demand you put them in A/C b/c they're dying
²I reported once that a jetway was 3D modeled as being like 8 stories high. Google couldn't confirm that, and closed the request. I reported a business as not being present, while my GPS showed me as being at the alleged address, that also couldn't be confirmed. My GPS trace would have seen me walk the whole block, twice!
³as designated navigator in my relationship, I can tell her "leftish" or "rightish", and she understands what I mean. Where I live a lot of the intersections' designs appear as if a civil engineer was given artistic license, and so sometimes the direction is "5-way intersection, left-ish". "Left" is a bad direction when there are two lefts. Of course … me & her have developed a fairly extensive lexicon over years of long road trips, too.
The Pixel series outside of security (to which their own flavor of Android doesn't even take advantage of like we see with GrapheneOS) doesn't have any particular outliers that would make it any more or less enticing than another company's phone.
Their ChromeOS hardware was nice but had lackluster software and by the time it was EoL'd, never got the love of ChromeOS-present.
Google TV generally gets outpaced by onn (Walmart's brand) on cost and value proposition.
And also the fact they have shown time and time again that they just kill products over and over again.
A big part of why Stadia was cancelled is because it didn't get traction, and a big part of why it didn't get traction was because of how many people assumed it was just going to get cancelled.
I think both can be true. Google has a history of annoying churn while still being good enough (or just … being large enough) that switching to competitors is still too high a cost for most.
For example, their "chat" app has churned 3? 4? times now? Their assistant app has churned from whatever the OG assistant was to now Gemini. Wave churned to "+" in the social category, and that's dead now.
The default placement in Android probably helps a lot, or other things, like forced signups into adjacent products (e.g., like + was doing for a while).
Do they have any supported way to export a user's account (e-mail, calendars, etc) for offline archiving yet? I used to have to reset their password, disable their 2FA, log in as their user, initiate a 'Takeout' request to export their account data into an archive, wait until the request was done (between minutes and days depending on the account), download it manually (often in chunks if it was large enough), store it somewhere, and then delete it and delete the account.
I can't imagine that no other 'Google Workspace' organizations want to actually save their employee data rather than irrevocably delete it forever.
Arguably, "exceptional" products are not ones that can vanish on a whim, like a great, great many of Google products have. Or they actually compete with other products in the same space, like a great, great many of Google products have not. Also, one would argue a good product is not one that is bought out and then deliberately destroyed to prevent its expansion into or development of a market for itself. Google is an advertising company with tremendous reach because of a handful of very aggressive and very fortunate business decisions that successfully exploded. It now uses its massive influence to exert market pressure, but the market does not always bend to its whim because sometimes it does things wrong, some of those products it pushes fail, and I can only assume some products are slaughtered because of projections on their performance regardless of their quality or utility.
I really like Fastmail. It’s just - clean and lightweight. It loads much faster. Has all the features you actually need. No mystery meat. And the UI doesn’t churn every few years for no reason.
A lot of the products they killed were promising, it's just that Google just has no stomach for investing in anything for the long haul if it's not going to either capture the entire market or prevent someone else from capturing the entire market.
