(repost after every Google-bashing...)
Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out.
As user, I'm pretty ok with Google.
Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day.
Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list.
Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materially more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, reasonably priced and people love them.
The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc.
Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular.
Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water.
Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features.
As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor).
As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet - we should only be so luck to have bought-and-held that stock. Meanwhile, Google owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price.
Ok enough, have at it. I'm ready. :-)
How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too.
Google Docs has some of the most cursed UI that I've used in the past 20 years (and I work with Jira). I'm forced to use it at work so I stick with it.
FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.
The alternative is... giving up on the idea? Just storing anything centrally because end-to-end/client-side encryption/local processing is a lost cause?
That's what Google does really well indeed: Things close to infrastructure with as little product/UI aspects as possible. Getting rid of hard links in Drive was a great move too. No complaints there. Voice is another thing in that category: It's a hard infrastructure problem, and Google nailed it. The same goes for the versioning/conflict resolution backend of GSuite: A marvel of engineering.
The hardest part is not accidentally cancelling things that work and that solve problems for actual users in favor of yet another instant messenger.
Quantitatively, sure, maybe. Qualitatively, having unleashed Protobuf onto the world alone undoes a significant amount of goodwill in my view.
I guess that's a philosophical point. I have pretty much zero interest in markdown. And, as someone who has used word processors since the 1980s, I really like Google Docs (and Google Slides) they pretty much do all of the things I want and rarely lack a feature I need. (Might feel different as a lawyer for revision tracking and my use of Sheets is far lighterweight than my use of Lotus and then Excel was back in the day.)
And I think I'd just give up were I to go make to emailing copies of documents around.
It's not perfect for everything and everyone but the Google Suite works really well for me.
There's an easy solution here: Offer both! Google can afford to offer two kinds of document editors, and it would make the entire GSuite infinitely more valuable and enjoyable to me.
I already have a bunch of Markdown text files synced to my GDrive – why can I literally not edit them in the GDrive web interface? There's not even a basic text editor!
Want me to really bake your noodle?
Ready?
It has Markdown mode as an option.
Peak HN, perfectly executed:
- "it's obvious my pet peeve feature X should be added to Y, the company in the article".
- "I don't like X".
- "Can we have both?"
I'm guffawing
Peak HN is also claiming Y already supports X without showing any evidence.
And no, converting a `#` into a H1 is not "markdown support". I want a non-WYSIWYG mode that can let me work on plain text and export it without changing a single comma or tab, optionally with a WYSIWYG presentation layer on top of that like Dropbox Paper does, but one that does not let me add non-markdown features (which would inevitably get lost when exporting and re-importing the same file, or parts of it via copy and paste).
Update: You made me look: Sadly still no Markdown support. I would have been very happy to be wrong here.
You redefined Markdown support into "only Markdown support." No refunds, sorry. :)*
Absolutely no trillion-dollar company is going to ship a product at scale that's simultaneously obsessed with: Markdown only, non-formatted Markdown, and Markdown.
That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code.
* also, note both my and my parent post are proceeding with the premise that perhaps both are desirable, I'm not sure why you felt deceived that Docs didn't become a Markdown-only editor
Markdown shortcuts just really aren't markdown, no refund needed, in the same way that supporting j/k keybindings for <- / -> isn't the same thing as Vim. It's about 10-20% of the way there.
And Google Docs has already shipped "pageless doucments", arguably a huge break with the paper-skeuomorphic word processor model (that makes it so much more usable on mobile, among other advantages).
I really don't think a "light" mode that tones down the WYSIWYG-ness further is out of reach for a company of Google's caliber.
That's completely unworkable for fast-paced collaboration, though, and additionally doesn't give me documents synced across devices.
GDocs' conflict resolution capabilities are phenomenal (both between multiple contributors and multiple offline devices); I'd just love to be able to use these with Markdown.
I’m with you. I would love this so much.
Maybe irrelevant, but I will say that my spouse who spends a lot more time in Google docs can’t be bothered to learn even the markdown shortcuts for H tags in docs even though it would save her a ton of time. I imagine that’s a large majority of people.
Which can be the formula for adding another layer of features that 1% (or whatever) of users care about.
If you think jira is bad you should try deltek costpoint. Holy shit.
Don't say its name!
its name
Costpoint is the UI hell you didn’t even know existed until you see it for yourself.
It’s timesheet software that appears to be a legacy Windows app using an unholy number of compatibility shims to run in the browser. Almost nothing is a native control!
It sometimes refuses to load randomly, and can be really slow at certain hours. Its job is to record a few numbers for each user once a day.
It can be used for a lot more than just timesheets, and the UI gets weirder and weirder in those other features.
Microsoft's "Azure DevOps" is worse than Jira.
TBH I'm surprised we aren't forced to use it since it's a Microsoft product and whenever there's a Microsoft version of something we seem to get forced to use it. Weird.
The only thing worse than B2B for UX is B2G.
To add my latest peeve, google search is suddenly terrible at units. When I look for "24 inches in cm" it gives me an answer in meters. And duh, I know that conversion, but until quite recently my browser search bar was a handy little calculator and now that's gone.
Surely we aren't blaming GPT for this.
It still works for me. What if you try it in an incognito window?
Ah, fun. It didn't work on my last few attempts, it works today. Gotta love the internet.
Markdown in Google docs: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en
Of course, if you want non wysiwyg, then don't use Google docs just use markdown in a text editor or install mediawiki or something.
Yeah, I want non-WYSIWYG, or at least something that cleanly copy-pastes into and out of markdown.
I don’t get to choose, and I bet a considerable fraction of Google Docs users don’t either and it’s just what their workplace prescribes.
This exactly hard on Google's caliber.
Not only do they have a bunch of requests for special modes where they can't simply add all without creating a mess, but at that size they also have to consider the support cost of users hitting the "wrong" mode and being tied to it and being frustrated.
WYSWIG is core to the product definition.
I do see that it’s not a simple problem. But this brings us back on topic nicely: This is Google we’re talking about!
There was a time when the name was synonymous for the best software engineering and some of the brightest minds in the world! And here we are arguing whether two different editing paradigms in one word processor might be too hard for them.
I just saw a markdown mode show up today, but only partially, like bold and italics in markdown
Approximately nobody wants this though. Sure, you want it, and I want it, and some other people like us, but we're a rounding error of the user base of Google Docs.
This would be a great plugin, but very difficult to justify building as a first class feature.
And there's nothing wrong with protobuf :)
If you think the complaint about google search is that it isn't as good as chatgpt, I think you might be not listening. The problem with google search is that it's worse than it was
To be fair, Google Search is worse today because the web is worse today.
But to be ultra-fair, the web is worse today because of the perverse incentives created by Google Search and Google Ads.
Who was a key player in ensuring the web is worse do you think?
If you had to pin it on a single actor, Google. Ads have corrupted the original vision of the web. When you offer a path for other actors to monetize the web, they will, and Google did that more than anybody.
Google has made so many "death of the web" moves over the past few years that it's hard for them not to be implicated in the current situation. If they've shat in their own pants, well that's too bad.
They could have prevented a lot if they stuck to penalizing when users received a different document than the googlebot got for indexing.
I was puzzling over this argument as well.
Is it possible GP was talking about SEO spam enabled by LLMs like ChatGPT? That's the most charitable read on it I can give it.
Because I can guarantee you my problem with Google Search has nothing to do with chat assistants, and if that is sincerely your position, I'd seriously consider trying to find perspective.
LLMs are an obvious threat to web search, and guaranteed Google is already seeing their effects.
What they have done is given people an alternative to interacting with human knowledge via Google search. It was falling in quality before, but in the general case no one had an alternative (and so it would still generate the same revenues). But ChatGPT is not only a substitute but a superior product, so people actually move to it instead of kvetching about the decline.
Apologies, I was making a deeper point, which is that search is going through a period of disruption and the endgame will be something more like ChatGPT and less like a lost of 10 links.
To address your concern, yes [low quality content] will still exist but it won't look at all like today's stuff. Too soon to tell.
In periods like these, the British saying applies to users: keep calm and carry on. The American saying: bitchin' ain't switchin'.
After trying all of them, I found that Google is last in the "easiest to use" category. Just not a good experience for me, and I have 30yoe. YMMV. AWS has been extremely easy, everything just makes sense, is well documented, and there's an API for everything. It's miles ahead of Google as a cloud platform to build on.
AWS is certainly very capable but I haven't at all found that everything AWS is easy or makes sense and that's certainly not the general reputation it has among other devs I know. It's quite baroque and the UI is chaotic and confusing and the documentation is very badly organized.
I’ve got no real love for AWS, but I do have some hate for GCP.
The UI is chaotic, cluttered, and has no sense of hierarchy. There’s very little consistency, and poor information hierarchy. On a page with eight layers of toolbars (why?!), it’s not unusual to find two things that conceptually seem to operate on the same thing in entirely different places.
Even pages I use almost every day in the Google Cloud Console I find myself unable to find common functionality. I literally wasted hours one day looking, googling, looking, searching the raw DOM, and more trying to find a panel that the documentation said was on a page only to find they’d introduced a brand new type of widget just for that page and apparently it automatically hid and left you just a tiny icon with no description off in a cluttered corner of the screen to reveal it.
Let’s not even get started on permissions.
I’ve never struggled as much with any other product.
And as for the documentation, well… at least AWS _has_ comprehensive and effectively always up-to-date/accurate documentation. It might be a slog to get through, but it’s extremely rare it doesn’t have the answer I’m looking for.
I’ll never get back the time I’ve spent blindly hammering away at GCP to figure out how it’s supposed to work. Or worse, the time I’ve spent following the documentation only to, after all my effort, find the random 5 year old GitHub issue about how the documentation is out of date and inaccurate and the project needs to be accomplished a totally different way… which it turns out was also out of date! Third time’s the charm!
My experience with GCP has been so bad over the past… almost decade now? in every aspect that my immediate reaction to the top level comment was to assume it was a troll as soon as it started praising GCP. I’m honestly shocked to find other people in here defending it.
Yeah this is more in line with my experience too.
This is pretty dissonant for me. AWS certainly has a lot, but I wouldn't describe any of it as being easy or making sense. It's all poorly integrated with UX that is just a hair above adequate. The documentation is generally pretty decent though, I'll give you that, and it's nice that everything has an API, though true to form, the client libraries for those APIs leave a lot to be desired.
But I haven't used Google Cloud extensively, so I don't know if it's even worse.
Trivializing privacy isn't the same thing as identifying good privacy.
We would, but Google. What a hell of a justification.
We have a multi billion dollar machine built by developers with the goal of doing good things and profiting by them.
Sure we make a cell phone and we make a cell phone OS but its best to look the other way and never trust your privacy to a device that society has decided should follow you 24/7.
Sorry for the flippant comment - I wasn't just referring to the code and apps running on your phone, but the servers and cell towers that collect tons of details about you. Plus, the physical emanations as your phone connects and responds to signals from 4g, 5g, wifi, bluetooth and more.
A secure OS is cute but so what - there's a million other ways to p0wn your privacy.
On the plus side, the digital trail is so intense, citizens have a pretty robust alibi against being framed. For example, sure someone could borrow your phone, but they'd have a real hard time using it exactly the way you do, from accelerometer data to swipes to individual apps and and and...
Ex googler here.
Google has become a utility company, and I believe that's what you are saying. And I agree. I love Gmail, photos, drive etc and I have been a Google user longer than I have been an employee. This is a good thing.
But, I started my career at google, and can tell you with confidence that it is not the best place to build a career, especially if you are a high performer. Google will shape everyones career around average, and will not do much to reward extraordinary contributions, and it shows up also in compensation, promotions etc. google will happily not promote people unless they ask for, and many will not.
What he really meant is it’s a great career choice financially (see the supporting extended family sentence after that)
And utility? Come on now. Yes it might be doing much less actual innovation than before but compare that to building awful websites at an actual utility company. I’ll wait.
I mean, it's something we use everyday without thinking much. That's what I meant mostly but yeah innovation is also slowing
Are gmail and gsuite really adding features?
I've used Google Slides for over a decade and I don't see any real improvement; Google Drawings is just pathetic. Basically "Powerpoint from 2001, but with doc sharing".
G Suite (now Workspace) absolutely is, a ton:
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/
This lists literally every new feature it gets. Browse to your heart's content.
Here's everything specific to Slides:
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/search/label/Google%...
I think Sheets has seen the most improvements since that's what power business users need, followed by Docs.
Reposted Google propaganda by someone associated with the company, at the top of HN. Hilarious.
As someone who worked in cloud security for a year, GCP's security mechanisms were a joke next to AWS IAM and Organizations. But some of their products like Bigtable were better.
Also, AWS answered the proverbial phone.
As another Xoogler, I'd dispute some of your points, though I agree with the rest:
1) The Cloud Console is very meh compared to the AWS frontend. Slow and cumbersome. Otherwise GCP is generally playing catch-up, though it's closed the gap significantly in recent years.
2) Morale is low. Googlers used to see themselves as representatives of the most beneficial company in the world. Now, they're much more likely to view themselves as well-compensated cogs in the next IBM. Which is more realistic, but the negative vibe shift is real.
3) Privacy/security wise, I trust Google to do what it promises to do better than anyone. Which is to say, it will extract your data and monetize it to the maximum extent possible and make sure no one else has access to it. Still better than the alternatives, but that's a pretty damn low bar.
And two other points:
4) Hiring standards have dropped. Googlers are more competent than the average SWE on the market, but they are not generally exceptional. And their experience at Google teaches them proprietary tooling and how to navigate bureaucracy.
5) On that note, the core issue is that Google is a bureaucracy split into fiefdoms, living off Ads profits like a Gulf oil state. It hampers execution and makes genuine product vision impossible.
Opposite opinion:
- Google has the attention span of a crack addled flea. They have been the least innovative company of the big 5 and cancel products and have no long term focus.
- GCP may be good but no one trusts Google to maintain their products and not cancel them under your feet. GCP representatives don’t know how to meet “customers where they are” and their enterprise relationships are so bad when I was at AWS (Professional Services) we didn’t even bother having have “talking points” about GCP vs AWS. GCP wasn’t even on our radar. Azure on the other hand was.
- Google and privacy? Really? Google’s whole purpose is to track you to monetize you. Android consistently has more security issues than iOS and Android devices don’t get security updates like iOS devices.
- Google like every other company only “contributes” to open source software that does not give it a competitive advantage.
I actually don't have a problem with Google myself. I love gmail and I use Google FI for my cellphone service. I agree their security has been fantastic. The only criticism I have for them is that they give up too easily on their new ideas. They're known for not seeing anything new through. And, while they saw things like Android and Gmail through to the bitter end, it has been a long time since they've had a win like that. Bard is impressive, but they were late to the game. Which is ironic, since they pioneered the research that made LLMs possible. They're very careful and don't take risks. To win big, you have to risk big. And, when you're as big as Google you stop taking the big risks. I think if I had any advice for them, it would be to create and announce a new accelerator to fund new startups. Something exciting with lots and lots of cash behind it to whip up innovation. They can steer that and ride the success of all the ventures that it starts. They have some funds but they're pretty low key about them. Companies like Nvidia have been funding some pretty impressive stuff with their accelerator. It is about how much noise you generate with that kind of thing.
They're getting rid of basic html gmail, so screw them.
why did you quit?
Thanks, haven't used GCE in nearly a decade, might give it another shot.
Try buying some ads through Google ads and you might lose some of your optimism.
I want to run ads and I am unable to. Chrome never finishes loading ads.google.com so I switched to Firefox. It loads successfully on Firefox but I cannot get it to actually run an ad.
Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt.
Search had become awful well before ChatGPT appeared - the final really visible decline was in 2019 I recall. Recent 1st result for "Likely": "LIKELY - Women's Dresses, Tops & More". They've been happy to put anything commercial first for any term.
Google has a lot going for it.
But the fact that they can kill your online identity in the blink of an eye, with zero recourse is the biggest reason why I personally cannot fully embrace the full Google ecosystem.
With regard to Waymo, it seems it just hit a cyclist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39296067
When Google sucks up your personal data or compound some profile on you against your will, it’s “ok”. When other people do it, it’s “hacking”.
IDK when but anything other than Google is better now. Even whatever default Brave has, or ddg. It's like using Google 15 years ago - minimal SEO crap.
Sure I do have to go back to google every few days, but thats due to braindead devs who explicitly only allow google to scrape them.
That's not ok here, so please don't. We want curious conversation, not repetition. (Fortunately it doesn't look like you've repeated this more than once, but that is already too often.)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html