Plus it wont be randomly cancelled when Google decides they got bored with it after several years of neglecting it first.
I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going. Your comment caused me to reflect that Google hires a lot of smart people. Smart people tend to get bored with working on the same thing and want to work on new shiny things. Could it be that the smart people at Google do a bang up job of creating new services, but then get bored and move on to something new, leaving the previous service to slowly die and eventually get abandoned?
I'm starting to believe that it might be simply because low quality software is hard to maintain. They have some very complex software, but nothing of great quality. They might hire a lot of smart people, but not very many that are actually good at developing quality software. It appears that being smart doesn't make you diligent in your work, or give you an eye for detail.
Examples of this bad quality are simply everywhere; cursor left and right too fast in Google Image Search and that functionality breaks until you use the mouse to select the next image. Want to reply in Gmail, you have to click the reply button twice for the reply pane to appear. This is really basic stuff, and suggests a lack of competency in developing quality software, and a lack of care.
They are huge, but they are actually not very good.
but i see where you're coming from, it's "konkurencja" in Polish :)
Not to say that every point is spot-on, but it’s true that Google in general makes their software and UIs complicated enough that outside of perhaps search or betas, they don’t update or change them all that frequently, maybe every two years at best. Apple or Microsoft could by now show them a thing or two on how to iterate user interfaces annually to evolve UI instead of making drastic changes folks might not like or sticking with the status quo forever with rollouts via obscure settings panels.
I will fight to death anyone who says different.
>Letterboxing causes burn-in on OLEDs, not exactly ideal for a screen saver.
They letterbox the portrait photos correctly. Well, sort of. They have a small gap between the top/bottom of the TV and the top/bottom of the photo. The letterbox area uses part of the photo so there's no additional risk of burn in. Even if they did just use black, I don't think black can be burned in.
This doesn't happen to me, and a quick Google (ha) isn't turning up complaint posts about it. This might just be a you thing.
Have you used Google maps? Or Google {search,photos}?
I get the feeling that they have two very different grades of software they write, and the stuff written by the varsity is so good that it's invisible to it's users.
This. They seem to hire people who are excellent Computer Scientists, but that DOESN'T make you an excellent software engineer!
The result is what we often see from Google: A product with an impressive/complex algorithm (whether it be AI or efficiency) wrapped in terrible software prone to tons of bugs and breakage.
In a deeply fundamental way, every service or software product that isn't part of the revenue stream doesn't really matter to the business and there is no incentive to maintain it.
The problem is that maintaining existing projects generally isn't considered to be a demonstration of impact (or at least, it's a MUCH harder case to make). It's much easier to make the case that greenfield projects demonstrate impact.
Additionally, engineers have a good amount of power over what they get to work on: managers generally have to convince them to join a team. It's nice in concept, but lacks a steady influx of unwitting new engineers to help support all the not-so-sexy projects (like many other companies).
…so, you tend to see a pattern of engineers building a new thing, launching it, and then moving on to the next project. Leaving a trail of poorly supported projects in their wake.
The promotion process is how you described though, PMs don't get promoted for maintaining projects, or even improvement on some metrics (that engineers are very good at), they always want new shiny stuff to brag about.
Then again, if its just a matter of cutting any project that won't make billions, the point is moot.
People helpers are good tech support: "I'm sure I can help you. I've done this a thousand times."
Problem solvers are not: "I'm going out of my mind. I've done this a thousand times!"
It's more complicated than that, with people falling somewhere on an X-Y graph, some skewing one way and some the other.
Also, I used to think that all the values were positive. But there are those who not only don't help, they make the situation worse. And those who can't solve the problem, but make that worse, too.
What would be nice is if Google were to have someone who scored more on the "people helper" part. "Yes, this is older and boring but it's what people are used to and we're going to maintain it."
Google cancels stuff. A lot? Maybe but they have a lot of products.
But it's not without logic and it's much less likely to effect paid products and core services. How many parts of Docs/Drive have been cancelled? How many GCP components?
Next time someone is about to post another "Google cancels everything!" comment I hope they might pause and think whether it's plausible in this specific case. (And maybe pause to consider whether they are adding anything new to the debate or just repeating the same point that's been made a thousand times previously)
1. A group of pinned emails in one place. I can star things, and they end up in "Primary". But if I then go to the "Promotions" or "Updates" folder and select all -> archive the starred items get picked up too.
2. Same complaint as above, but for "Important" emails. Except "Important" emails aren't moved into "Primary", they are ALL left in their regular boxes.
3. Does not have an endless scroll of emails. I need to click back and forth between pages to see them all. Select all only selects my current page of emails.
4. If I choose priority inbox I lose the ability to select all documents in a given inbox. The above are fixed with priority inbox, but then I can't select all. I switch back and forth once a week because I'm honestly not sure which features are more painful to live without.
If I could have a separate box for important/ starred and display ALL of my unarchived emails on the screen I'd be happy. Inbox taught me to make heavy use of archive and keeping an empty inbox except for what's essential... And then they provided no tools for continuing to use it this way.
As a consumer of several of those products, I could not give less ducks what their problem is. That's an excuse for a Google PM to say to themselves.
Google's cancelling of products hurts me, and presumably others, and I wont trust it with business critical tasks when there's Amazon and Microsoft that have a much better developer record.