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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Google is an engineer-driven company. They're great at building solutions, but terrible at packaging them up as products. Making them desirable, and easy to understand, and just having any kind of unifying vision at all. Nobody who understands this fact is the least bit shocked about how Stadia is turning out.

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I agree with this, but only for their consumer products. I gave up on the Google Home and went back to Alexa. It was like they just don’t try to use their own products themselves, and once they tick the box of releasing, improvements seem to be nonexistent.

Admittedly, most of my issues were because I have a GSuite account, but when it can’t read my own calendar or set a reminder, you realise they just don’t care. Alexa can read my GSuite calendar just fine.

I always approach Google products with caution.

Could it be possible that employees designing the google home ecosystem can't actually afford homes in the bay area? If everyone is renting, then they likely have to make do, and just imagine what owning a home might be like.

What does owning a home have to do with the comment above? Calendar integration has nothing to do with whether you pay a mortgage or rent.

The least they could do is set up a test lab on campus and have testers spend time living in it. Google isn’t the type of company to make that sort of investment in product quality. They don’t seem to believe in manual processes even when they’re superior to automated processes. So it doesn’t surprise me they have difficulty delivering a high quality home automation suite.

Right, I finally got what you were referring to. So I think you're considering Google Home as in home automation. Maybe my frustration is actually the Google Assistant which I happened to use through a Google Home device.

Either way, the experience for consumers is shockingly bad the moment you have an experience that is outside of their simplified 'marketing' message.

This is a ridiculous comment. They make products people enjoy and use every day: Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Chrome, Google Photos. Billions of people who aren't technically savvy use the products.

Google makes some bad products too. Stadia happens to be one of them imo.

None of the products are original idea. They are all better clones of somebody else's product.

So is everything.

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