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Comment by thoraway1010 | Hacker News Reader

No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily.

The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy.

They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely.

I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom.

We were making the move to docs and sheets, but it's basically stuck. Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs. For those of us who are older this is totally incredible - Office was so anti-linux / cloud it was incredible, and now word in the cloud kinda works!

And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.

Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything? Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).

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> The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy.

On the outset, you might think with such ridiculously high compensation there would be an expectation of quality, but I think that's an error.

Google operates as an ad-company that happens to employ ridiculous amounts of exhorbitantly compensated individuals to engage in market and technological research, particularly to open or expand markets for their ads.

They didn't create mail, docs, drive et al in order to create productivity apps, they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same. They don't really care what content is in the browser so long as it is browser-based content the user consumes and not native apps. The more browser time spent, the higher the likelihood of being served Google ads, or providing Google with data, and similar.

> _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same

Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data.

This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all.

Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating systems, then it's +1 for them and -1 for the competition.

> Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product"

So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?

It's a rule of thumb. No, not every costless product is monetizing your use of it. FOSS is especially counter to this rule.

In the case of web-based tools that are owned and operated by big advertising companies, I think it's a fairly safe bet. As always, think critically about each instance and consider the implications of the software and products you use.

You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free.

The quote is pithy but assumes some context - the [something] is being provided below the marginal cost to produce and therefore being provided with an expectation of benefit for the provider.

Acquiring LibreOffice is not $0 marginal cost but they have a big "DONATE" button top-right corner of the website and The Document Foundation turns a small profit from donations.

> You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free.

That's silly. Paid office suites use just as many computing resources, and Google docs use plenty resources through your browser as well.

I think the "if you don't pay for it, you're the product" quote is fine. You just have to exclude free and open source software.

Excluding free software from a quote that starts "When something is free..." is equally silly. The quote stops being about anything.

But yeah, good point that my argument didn't make sense.

There is free as in Freedom as well as free as in beer. The quote seems to apply to things that are free as in beer but not free as in freedom. It'd be valid given that distinction.

> The quote stops being about anything.

It is still about stuff other than open source software.

You can't expect some Internet quote to apply universally. Just know the exceptions and use it when it applies.

Originally this product knwn as StarOffice ws not free. It only became so after Sun aquired it and reeased it as OpenOffice. This was basically a loss-leader not just fr sun but for other companies as well to break Microsoft's capture of the Knowledege Worker productivity which they leveraged into other areas.

So the idea was you were the product, "sold" to the non-MS-Windows/Intel companies in te hopes of you being retained or transferred to a non-MS stack.

LibreOffice is post Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but the idea is still the same.

Nobody called them “knowledge workers” outside of Page Mill Dr. when StarOffice was made and Sun didn’t compete in that space as much though Microsoft was starting to eat their lunch in other areas, like academia, government, military, and high end computation.

I worked on a Sun at NOAA in the 90s in Hawaii and the computer we used for bathymetry imaging was a Sun and the ships used Suns.

Most of that equipment was replaced with a little Linux and Windows Servers.

Same experience, maybe few years earlier . We all had the Sun pizzaboxes that had replaced Lisp Machines, and 2 years later we all had Mac's and later PC's.

Latex still had it's place in academia, and would continue to dominate academic publishing for quite some time, but for 'ordinary' daily productivity needs first MacWrite and MacDraw, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and later Word and Excel were becoming the staples.

With both software being ported to the PC/Mac platforms, and Linux starting to make inroads into the Unix compute workloads, Sun needed an answer fast to stop the bleeding.

Their inability to transform their high tough / high margin business model would do them in eventually as the commodity / thin margin model of the PC ecosystem grinded them into dust. But before that, they would try several things one of which was an attempt to 'complete' the offering of a single box solution which would have to include an 'office' package so as to keep the Mac / PC of the desks.

For open source, you kind of are in a weird way. Open source projects need contributions, for example in the form of bug reports, feature requests, proof reading and (in the rare case) source code. Many ousers provide these benefits to open source projects, which make them thrive.

On the other hand, looking at the coin from the other side you could also argue you’re paying with your time and effort and not your money.

It's not a good comparison.

StarOffice was developed by a company that was trying to sell it the old fashioned way but became Open Source because Sun was trying to keep its Unix workstations viable (no way we'd see "Office for SPARC") and also challenging Microsoft with Java.

Oracle bought Sun. Oracle kept Sun products alive because they know one reason people $$$ for Oracle is support.

Once it got renamed and spun out of Oracle, LibreOffice has been kept alive by various stakeholders such as companies that have big fleets of heavily hacked instances, Eurocrats who wish they could break the hold of American software monopolies, linux distros who want another piece of shovelware to list on the box, etc.

A typical end user might not perceive that leaving an issue on GitHub is not good customer service, even if some people enjoy the liberty of fixing things for themselves.

---

More seriously, Libreoffice is software you run on a computer you control (e.g. your desktop, a cloud server, whatever, ...) Since you are paying for the computer, you don't have conflicts about how generously to provision hardware.

Libreoffice is a ship in a bottle. 1000 years from now somebody might dig up an optical disk from a landfill and boot Libreoffice, but it is hard to believe Google Docs will last that long.

Who does Google sell your docs and drive data to?

They aggregate what they learn about each user across all their properties. (Their hope was the plus would make this easier). So while I seriously doubt they tell advertisers, “joshuamorton writes about JavaScript, metallurgy and anime”, whatever they learn from the enormous number of places they are collecting info increases the probability that you might see an ad on gmail relating to anime.

And they are quite public about scanning documents written using the free drive service, as they are proud that they take down documents with content they or the government consider inappropriate, as discussed on HN recently.

So your contention is that because they check hashes of documents stored on drive for unlawful material, we'll say, that this proves that Google is lying about how it uses data from docs and drive?

Or are you saying they don't actually share any data learned from docs and drive

how would they check the HASH of a document for unlawful material?

I think the complaint was they scan your entire doc, for all it's content.

> HASH of a document for unlawful material

This is ~super common with things like copyright violations and child porn. You store a database of hashes of copyrighted or pornographic data. And specifically you can use visual-similarity hashing to detect even somewhat perturbed documents.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA)

What does checking hashes of documents mean? Isn’t stuff either encrypted or not?

This might not be a good look for me to be confused by this as a web dev/programmer, but I does that mean they are securely or otherwise hashing everything they store on all users? Drive, Gmail and other Google services have tons of data. After THats they are also still only checking hashes?

Checking a hash of a document unavoidably necessitates reading the entirety of that document.

They needn't sell it at all. The important thing is that you're using a browser more often to do things that were traditionally done with native apps.

For using Gmail, Drive and Docs you will have a Google account and you'll be logged in often or all the time. Quite useful for targeting you outside those tools.

they don't sell it, they use it to profile you

From docs and drive? Which stuff?

Everything searchable is indexed. Everything indexed and associated with a user is used to profile that user in order to provide superior search results.

> And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data.

I am a vocal Google critic, but I have yet to see any evidence of them selling my data. Unlike a number of other companies and organizations Google serms to have realized long ago that they are totally dependent on user trust.

I'm not saying they are smart (judging by the ads they have sent me the last 13 years, the killing off of Reader, the nymwars and then killing off Google+ after it turned out to be nice) or nice (the way they keep trying to crush the open web, the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model of pushing Chrome relentlessly until they almost have monopoly, then try to remove the possibility to run adblockers etc etc)

I guess throwing away your key asset is not in the interest of Google or Facebook. I presume Cambridge Analytica only got so far with Facebook because Facebook didn't realize the potential value of its user data till then. Now they'll engage in the same act themselves.

mail, docs, drive et al ... they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising

This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite as a paid service, and "everyone uses the same service at home that they do at work" has clear advantages, whether or not there is advertising in your gmail. Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite (or "google apps for domains", as they called it then - horrible).

> Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite

This is clearly false. The screenshots in this Time article show gmail having advertising from day one.

https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/

Completely accurate. The ads were even touted as somewhat of a feature. Something along the lines of "Gmail has ads, just like the other services, but our ads will be relevant to your interests."

It’s accurate and inaccurate. Ads were there but many users saw none for a long time.

IMO ads were a distraction to enable the data harvesting, which drove Adsense targeting. Even today, the ads I see on GMail are pretty low quality. Some lovelorn guy used my email address unintentionally to sign up for a 55+ dating site 3 years ago. The most targeted ads I get are for similar sites.

Of course YMMV.

They actually stopped targeting by email contents a while back https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...

My early adopter google apps account is still free and has no ads.

When using GSuite it is used in a browser, and this is key to the Google strategy. The goal is to get more users spending more time in their browsers, in order to funnel them to Google Ads and to serve Google their browsing data.

GSuite exists, at least in part, to break down the model of the walled corporate intranet. There are just too many people behind the corporate veil to ignore; and as a bonus, the browsing and cloud app usage habits they develop at work will tend to translate to their usage habits at home.

Also, as noted by another responder, GMail has had ads since launch. I was a beta user from day 1, and I recall the ads.

Edit: worth noting the historical difficulty of getting open source software into the business environment because corporate purchasers were wary of anything that was "free"; putting a price on something makes it more palatable to corporate adoption.

I can’t imagine that being true. Gmail had “relevant” ads based off their other ad tech from the get go. That was a point vs other majors having banner ads.

> This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite

It's not obviously false when advertising makes up something like 80%+ of their revenue:

https://theatlas.com/charts/n8ea9MPE0

Gmail very quickly introduced advertising in your mailbox. There was a huge outcry because they would scan your mails to provide contextual advertising.

This was before other GSuite components even existed.

Notice every G product with a decent level of ongoing support & development is in some form or another an ad platform.

To be fair, DFP sucks too.

Tsk tsk. You mean Ad Manager :rolls eyes:

And the reason they probably want to stay an ad company is so they don't get stuck with IBM sized workforce.

Their lack of customer support is border line criminal.

Lol, no. They have >100k employees.

Google has 118,899 employees.

IBM has 352,600 which is about 3x the number of employees that Google has.

If you count on-site, full time contractors at Google you get closer to 250,000.

Give it time. My guess is Google will be well over 300,000 by 2030.

You're comparing a 900lbs Gorilla to a 300lbs Gorilla and sort of overlooking that they're both Gorillas.

I think the argument is that the 300lb gorilla is actually an overweight chimp.

Imagine all the tech support you could buy with 200k employees.

"_open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same."

No, I think they wanted to make money from it directly via Enterprise sales.

MS Office is the #1 source of profit for MS for a long while.

In the 2000's it seemed 'everything was going cloud', naturally Google thought they could leapfrog MS into that space.

But it didn't work out.

Well, obviously, if Google was going to have to take an actual phone call from somebody when things went pear-shaped, that was never going to work out.

And that even though MSFT started creating Office Online much later and also had to basically create a whole new product. And yet they now have the by far superior product.

Google didn't create Docs, they bought it.

>Android / Chrome are amazing

Chrome has been deteriorating in performance and power usage - on OSX at least, I recently switched back to Firefox because it was that bad (Safari is a step too far as I want to work on non-Apple platforms). Firefox has slipped from the mainstream and it's very obvious - so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) - the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.

And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation. Implementation is ridiculously inconsistent across OS versions and HW vendors - I was trying to create a WiFi management API for some industrial application that would connect to controller specific networks - Android has 2 layers of terrible and depricated API with documentation that was misleading at best, a new API that only worked on 10+ without backcompat, and the actual implementation was inconsistent across four Android devices we tested. We gave up on the project as the Matrix of features missing and hacks needed for every platform we could find was just not practical to maintain.

Chrome has recently (within the last year) been repeatedly making me frustrated with its pdf issues. It feels like 40% of the time I open a pdf in chrome, I instead get an error message like "the plugin has crashed" or some bs. The only solution is to restart the browser entirely. Switched back to FF for this reason.

> many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF)

You can report sites that are broken in Firefox at https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla engineers will debug the broken site and try to contact the site's developers. Firefox also ships some site-specific workarounds (such as spoofing Chrome's User-Agent string or tweaking some CSS). You can see the current list of site workarounds in Firefox's about:compat page.

> the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.

I've been preaching this for a while:

- Chrome is dominant line IE was.

- Chrome - like IE - doesn't care about the standards because they know developers will adapt to them.

- Chrome - like IE - is starting to fail.

Unfortunately, meanwhile Mozilla has been busy tearing apart a number of the things that made Firefox shine, especially the extension API. They've also been busy trying to destroy the massive trust many of us had in them by doing stupid things like injecting a silly ad extension and lying (IIRC) about the Pocket thing (nothing against Pocket, they just shouldn't have lied about it, many of us are looking for ways to fund FF development.)

Edit: I still use and recommend Firefox. For me it is still the best browser out there in more than one way, I just feel it could have been so much better.

Have you tried Brave?

Brave is basically just Chrome with an adblocker, just like edge is chrome with a reskin. Obviously that's a bit of an exaggeration, but they are all chromium at heart.

It's a pretty big distinction don't you think. FWIW I also use FireFox...

> so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF

I find this really interesting, and would like to hear more. I've been a Firefox ESR user for almost a decade, and apart from some breakage on some videoconferencing sites, and sometimes having to disable uBlock Origin, I've not faced an unusable site. And this is on ESR!

I also use FF on daily basis and I don't remember having such problems. Some webapps like Skype were blocking FF user-agent on purpose (changing User-Agent made it work). Maybe I use different sites than the one complaining but it may also be worth checking addons and considering starting FF in Safe Mode (which disables addons temporarily). Sometimes addons can mess up sites in unexpected ways.

> And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation.

Ho ho ho. You haven't even touched the worst that Android has to offer.

- The bluetooth stack. My god the bluetooth stack. A mix of absolutely awful APIs trying to disguise state machines, APIs trying to simplify GATT (but awfully failing at it), the Android lifecycle making you tear your hair out when you want any kind of long lived connection.

- Camera. Thankfully, CameraX from the AndroidX team makes it much easier. But a few years back? I'll just let Google's very own Camera2BasicFragment speak for itself. https://github.com/googlearchive/android-Camera2Basic/blob/m... . 1100 lines of basicness.

- Well, speaking of lifecycle, here's the Fragment lolcycle: http://boloorian.free.fr/_Media/complete_android_fragment_l_...

- The java.io.File API is basically gone. The reasons themselves are "good". The replacement, SAF is a horrible, slow, inconvenient API that breaks pretty much every file manager.

- Looking at the bug tracker is a whole other level of sadness. What's that, You'd need your testing library to ba able to instantiate a Fragment in an arbitrary Activity ? radio silence since 2019

I have to say, as a FF user who's never gotten on board the Chrome train other than as a target for dev work (because it doesn't have tree-style tabs), I do not see the problems you're reporting.

Android feels just as janky as Windows did for years. Everything about the ecosystem shows a lack of leadership. Microsoft did better with dealing with its OEMs in 1995 with WinHEC than Google does today.

> The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily.

This drove me nuts with my Nest Minis until I tried out Apple's Homepod.

People hate on Apple for moving slow in the "connected home" space, but my Homepod sounds great, can distinguish between my wife and I, and can handle BOTH personal and work calendars for the two of us. I'll take the polish over my actual use cases, rather than rough edges around a wider set of uses, most of which I never will use.

And neither of us use iCloud for email! It blows my mind that a Google can offer email/calendars for both personal and work use can tie both to you as an individual, but _somehow_ can't make your "smart" speaker do the same.

I'm fairly frustrated with siri's voice recognition in general myself as a multi-year homepod user. The amazon echos I had before the homepod were more consistent and google's general voice transcription & knowledge base is still way ahead of siri.

I mostly chose the homepod because of privacy and better sound. If the privacy story was the same on google or amazon, I'd probably be using that right now instead.

> Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs

You are in for a surprise. Office 365 (at least Excel and Word) looks like a toy compared to the desktop versions. I'm not talking about niche features or VBA, I'm talking about things like naming a table, which is explicitly only supported in the desktop version. Ah, of course! You need the table's name to use it in their Power Automate platform. Microsoft 365 is a mess right now. I hope it improves.

I’m confused. Doesn’t Microsoft 365 include the desktop versions of the product and the ability to update them?

Yes, but I believe that the parent was talking about the web versions, since the comparison was made against Google Suite.

You have all collaboration features with the desktop version.

And yet, for the typical office user, it supports most or all of the stuff they are going to do. It's also fast, reliable, it renders Office files correctly, and the UI matches what people are familiar with.

All told, it's pretty good.

I'm not sure if the typical office user is the same as the casual office user.

>You are in for a surprise.

Here's another Office 365 Web surprise. Last week we had 5 team members working in a shared Word document with track-changes; A) There is no "view final markup" option, and B) after a while the web-app crawled to a halt.

We've had some bugs with loss of recent modifications to some spreadsheets when several users modify it collaboratively (Google Sheets-style). It sucks, unfortunately.

If you need power features, you should be using the desktop version...

The web version is intended for basic/common use cases, not power user functions.

Except that Microsoft's discourse states otherwise to its business customers :)

> Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything

They did. Sundar ran both Android and Chrome, and now he's CEO.

Gsuite/GAFYD domain users (which are a tiny fraction of all Google accounts, for what it is worth) have a special pain with all Google consumer products. Many products and features simply do not work with Gsuite accounts. Why? Gsuite accounts have a different terms of service, and getting legal, privacy, compliance, etc to sign off on launching your feature is a pain in the neck. Also it's possible that some features and products really aren't compatible with the Gsuite TOS. So as an engineer you can choose to just not launch your feature to Gsuite, or you can go through a lot of work to launch it all the way, for which you will gain no marginal users and will receive no recognition or compensation.

> They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there...

I mostly use YouTube to watch series - PBS Space Time, World War Two, Crash Course etc. YouTube is absolutely horrible at navigating through these series - it is difficult to find where you left, it is difficult to find the next episode, there is absolutely no user comfort.

Yes - I find myself navigating Channel pages often, in hopes that the content creator took the time to create an applicable playlist

But then if I quit a video _that I played from a playlist_ and check my history _the playlist itself is listed, and not the actual video_

It is, indeed, a mess

> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).

That is a really strange false equivalency. Not even the slightest bit relevant, yet it reads as if you believe that protesting for social change is a bad thing.

There are lots of people that protest for social change without the luxury of getting company paid days off!

Chrome? Try Edge. On mac, it's day and night, Edge does actually stop the pages you aren't viewing, bringing battery life and CPU use much closer to battery.

It's like this was a low hanging fruit of finally cleaning up some old mess in Chromium, Google ignored it for years, and MS team just did it.

Google Assistant is a product that relies on cross-learning from large amounts of user data. GSuite is a product that is contractually obligated to NOT doing this. The silos between GSuite and the rest of Google are intentional.

I don't work at Google these days so I can't offer the exact reasons why, but it shouldn't be surprising then that the two don't play well.

Amazon, on the other hand is not contractually obligated to create this silo. For it, your GSuite account is just another third party account, no different from your GMail account.

Yes this is an undesirable outcome, but when business users choose to buy GSuite services with the assurance that the data won't be available to Google for general purpose learning, this is the price they pay for that privacy.

Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run.

It's like they develop products just enough to get people using them so they can squeeze out some more meta-data and connect the dots back to a Google account, and then they stop development because it's not going to add more revenue.

And if they can't figure out how to push advertising with it, they drop it.

> Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run.

Absolutely. Just look at Google Maps these days. Google Maps used to be the only map app I'd use for everything. Now it is so littered with ads once you zoom in that I find it useless for anything other than directions.

This is not a new trend for Google, the advertising company that occasionally builds things.

There's also a big problem with accuracy in GMaps. From what I can tell they put some effort in within the US, but in the two countries I've lived in, GMaps is sufficiently inaccurate that I have to use other maps.

For example: About a third of the streets that show on GMaps for my previous town don't actually exist - they're paddocks. Every other map is correct: HERE, Apple Maps, OSM, TomTom, etc. As Google notoriously has no support, there's no way to get it fixed, so I simply had to instruct everyone coming to visit me that they needed to download and use a different map software in order to find me.

OSM is better where I live in the US now when it used to be only better in Europe Edit: google maps is a spatial yellow pages. OSM is an atlas.

O365 live collaborative document editing has been an absolute broken nightmare for us. We abandoned it in favor of Google Docs and everything has gotten a LOT easier.

Our general sense is that whatever MS is using for autoscaling the Sharepoint instances that run the service doesn't work. During busy work days Word loses its connection to the service constantly.

> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).

This is totally unnecessary. Striking is a serious matter and not just getting company paid days off for some lazy egineers.

While agree with you that google has been dropping the ball, you've got to use the online version of Office 365, it is awful. Like shockingly terrible. Gsuite is 10x better, no exaggeration. Apple's online office stuff is equally a joke. Google blew a 10 year lead but lucky for them, the other possible large competitors are doing even worse.

Although they haven't evolved much in recent years, I still find most Gsuite apps to actually be quite good. What is terrible is Drive itself. File management is just a joke with Drive.

Youtube is a slow boated Javascript mess.

I've been using invidio.us and mpv for more and more of my Youtube consumption, especially after it started becoming terribly unstable under Firefox.

Android amazing?!?

It uses a pseudo-compatible Java 8 subset, with no official roadmap to ever move beyond that, everyone is supposed to move to Kotlin, while they keep fixing the slower developer experience and broken tooling introduced by adding Kotlin support.

NDK requires a great resistance to pain with a development experience that occasionally still makes me miss Carbide/Symbian C++. It took them 10 years to introduce any kind of packaging support for NDK dependencies, there are still no tools to improve the developer experience calling Android APIs, one has to manually write JNI wrappers, or use their unsafe C bindings to APIs that are actually written in somehow safer C++.

I lost count how many stuff introduced as one year amazing IO stuff, is already deprecated the following year. Latest example, all the GUI layout editing tools still being worked on, which will be eventually deprecated when JetPack Composer hits stable.

Critical libraries like Oboe, that are just dumped into Github, instead of having first class support on the SDK and project templates.

Team that puts critical information everywhere on the Internet except on Android's official documentation.

Very small rant, 10 years have a lot of stuff to rant on, so amazing? Not really.

I agree entirely with your sentiment, but this

> now word in the cloud kinda works!

is the overstatement of the century. I am stuck with this horrendous product, with its unbelievably bad live collaboration which constantly overwrites what other people are doing, its terrible SSO implementation, its penchant for presenting the least navigable UI I have ever had the misfortune to experience...

Google Docs has stagnated, I agree, Office is light years away from having its seamless sync.

>And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.

Glad you brought this one up. I had an issue with an enterprise account where I was attempting to access work and code I had contained in a doc I created for the client. I was the owner and creator of the doc, but somehow I got stuck in a loop where I had to request permission from myself.

Google "Support" was basically nonexistent - I had to ask our company adminstrator, who told me only they could get access to speak with a human, and even that wouldn't be able to be done immediately.

I ended up redoing all the work. AWS and Microsoft, in comparison, have had excellent enterprise support.

I do find that failure baffling -- especially since it used to work. I don't use voice commands much, but setting reminders while I'm doing something else used to be very helpful. Suddenly last August, it's just "not available for g suite users". (https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/11607814?hl=en)

I get it for free, but g suite is valuable enough to me that I'd pay for it. The thread implies that paying for it wouldn't help.

I'm also an early gsuite user and have the same complaints about assistant integration - but I am 85% sure that I tried to create a new google for business account to verify that it would at least work if I was paying, and it didn't.

Which led me to experimenting with migrating off my legacy gsuite, and with the API rate limiting, it seems it would take upwards of 30 days. I can download that data in 10 minutes if it's unhindered.

MS Office online collaboration still hasn’t caught up with Google, even with Google’s neglect.

Personally, I think web based office is something Microsoft wants to drive subscription revenue, but isn’t something customers want. Office is probably the best and most complex fat client app in the world, why sacrifice that?

IMO, Office will embrace add on supplementation and value add to the Office apps.

In beta, but FYI you can grant calendar access: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/11/use-google-assi...

I'm using it but the fact the the assitant can only respond for the active google account is driving me nuts.

The Google Calendar app from my Google Pixel merges all my accounts but yet, the assistant is linked to my Google Account instead of my device.

It's useless because I'm using multiple calandars on multiple accounts.

Same issue here. They have features like "okay google dial into my next meeting," however it doesn't work since my phone's primary account is my personal account. Assistant doesn't work with my secondary work account.

The cross-integration docs should have by now and doesn't simply blows my mind.

Like why even doesn't sheets and docs have the exact same table cell formatting options?

Following that, why can't a sheet seamlessly embed to a google doc.

> They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely.

Namely, the things that directly contribute to the ads business.

> I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom.

The Hangouts move is still one of the most infuriating things I've seen in tech anytime in the last decade. Remember how Google was actively contributing to an open and interoperable spec for chat, and then just proceeded to go full Ayn Rand about it?

There's a pretty strong argument to be made that if any major players were still backing XMPP as a standard, we wouldn't all have a bunch of people in our lives who have said some variation of "I would quit Facebook right now if I didn't need Messenger"

I can only assume they don't want to make it work for some reason. The best practical answer is to just set up a normal gmail account and a lot of weird google bugs go away.

I have a normal Gmail account, and the last time I checked Google Home could only access my primary calendar. So my imported-from-Outlook work calendar and any other custom calendars are invisible to it. It just just frustrating to look at calendar.google.com and say "there they are, my appointments!" and Google Home cannot read them unless they are on the default calendar.

Strange, works fine for me, you can pick as many calendars as you want in Assistant Settings > Services > Calendar

Yeah, I eventually just created "proper" gmail accounts for the rest of my family that is on a free gsuite.

> Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).

What's that got to do with it? Are you suggesting this is the reason things aren't shipping? I saw the "strikes" as another symptom of a company that is now deaf. Employees can't get their voices heard as individuals anymore.

i think the point is engineers are spending too much time on Twitter and not doing enough actual engineering.

> Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything?

Android / Chrome are providing what is primarily a platform, not a product. That's a very different mindset and way of working.

I still don't think you can even use G Suite domains with their voice assistant/home devices. It's beyond absurd.

You should write a know about this.

Google doesn't have time to fix that. They've got top-level leetcode engineers to make a new chat app.

But first they have to make their own programming languages and frameworks.

and don't forget launching an abysmal cloud gaming service that was DoA!

Goooogcorp: We have seen that you are displeased that we are not supporting product. In response we are shutting this down.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Let's not forget that had gtalk, which could have dominated easily. Over ten year lead wasted on that one.

Gtalk was brilliant! When they launched it my appreciation for Google grew tenfold. It was so un-enterprisey and it just worked! Shortly thereafter they fixed their offering by launching the very Enterprise-friendly Wave.

Mmmmmm, Wave. (drooling dead-eyes Homer impression).

At this point I don't even know what's their main chat/video product. Meet? Hangouts? Duo? I have all three on my phone for some reason but still end up using Zoom and Whatsapp

You can even get locked out of your google account by uploading old cartoons on youtube you thought were old enough to not care.

So tell me again why I would use google products when they are all so interlinked that one affects the other? No thanks

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