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Comment by nvarsj | Hacker News Reader

What happened at Google? I remember when gmail was first released - such a great product.

Hangouts destroyed the google talk experience and community. Someone should have gotten fired over it. Everyone seemed to use google talk before the plus/hangouts conversion. Such a massive lost opportunity.

There are many other examples of half-baked and unmaintained software from G. For example, play music's web UI has many irritating bugs that never get fixed. I'm close to canceling my subscription.

I'd be pretty hesitant about committing all in to any of Google's enterprise offerings, like GCE, based on my experience with their other products.

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Google makes money off of data. Essentially, they are a big ad company that does tech. Whatever that means to you, that's generally how they make money. The more of your data that they can have going through their services, the better.

All of their "products"/tools (at least after a certain point) have this end in mind. If a product does not get them enough data[0], they either a) bastardize it until it does, or b) kill it.

I'm sure this is not news to a lot of people, but it surprises me how often people forget that Google has no reason to care about the quality of their tools as long as enough people are using it. I'm not saying they don't make good tools, but that is why we see good tools get killed (Reader, Wave) or ruined (Hangouts, Voice).

[0]: or they can't figure out a good way to get good ad data from it.

EDIT: formatting.

Google just can't do UI's, I can't think of a UI put out by google that I don't dislike, if not completely hate. It's almost like there's someone super senior in the company who forces bad decisions on designers.

The crowning achievement of absurdity is probably the YouTube app, it's not as bad as Skype, but given time they may get there.

Their initial search UI was great, though they ruined that too.

I switched away years ago, and am increasingly baffled whenever I accidentally run a google search.

Switched to what though?

DuckDuckGo is really good - maybe where Google was a year ago but without the user tracking. Also, bangs are awesome.

Search results are as good? If so maybe I'll try, I've basically gotten to the point that I could sider google to be mostly evil.

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