Comment by naringas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by naringas | Hacker News Reader

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Stratechery quoting Satya Nadella:

> Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. [...] what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about.

Isn't this basically what the web is (or could have been?) all about?

"An application experience that trascends any device"... isn't this the web? I can access it in my smartphone (the real personal computer device), my laptop, ipad, you name it... All of these of course powered by "the cloud" (somebody's server on somebody else's giant datacenters)

Microsoft's purchase of github seems clearer and their overall strategy seems very coherent. To be the best web's (understood as an OS) vendor and tooling provider.

At this rate they'll be eating the lunch Google could have had but can't quite get...

It seems that Google is dangerously close to a crisis even if they cannot percieve this over all their ad revenue.

Google original's innovation which got them to where they are now is basically their better technology. But how good is google search today? IMO it is way worse than it was around 5 to 10 years ago.

> Microsoft's purchase of github seems clearer and their overall strategy seems very coherent. To be the best web's (understood as an OS) vendor and tooling provider.

I think you are being too generous with Microsoft. My take is Microsoft is forced into this strategy because it failed build a successful mobile phone and the ecosystem around it, unlike Apple and Google. It has to transcend the hardware as its only option. MS 365 is capitulation that the strategy of using Office as the killer app to keep people on Windows is no longer as effective as before.

Microsoft was born as a developer tooling company that accidentally ended up in OSes because early OSes were developer tools. (BASIC was the first OS for the IBM PC, just as it was for the Commodore 64.) Microsoft's strategy to buy GitHub is clearly a developer tooling choice, nothing to do with the failure in phones. Microsoft's original strategy was always to transcend hardware (early Microsoft products were notoriously cross-platform in an age where cross-platform was much harder), they've always been a software company first (hence their name), and a hardware company begrudgingly.

How is Google worse than 10 years ago?

I would agree that they are doing shady moves that can hurt search quality, but overall, the results look much better today than 10 years ago.

In my experience, there are two massive pains:

1. For a few years now, it has been very difficult for me to search for specific phrases, even with surrounding quotes, without getting results that don't include those phrases

2. Lately, every search where I am trying to research a topic or look up some instructrions for how to do something leads to to pages upon pages of products and services in that space rather than information about the thing. I can't look up how to install a stove without endless ads (whether posing as explicit ads or as official search results) for handymen or appliance stores. I want to know how to change my swamp cooler motor but instead I get professional HVAC services, and useless sponsored articles that aren't about "how to do <thing>" but "why you should do <thing> oh and by the way hire us".

On google search, results are neither informative nor accurate. The results exist only to sell something.

This is essentially the same thing that happened with Siri, started out really great and functional, then results shifted towards 'businesses' and 'services' rather than just the best content. Google's insistence on surfacing local results first exacerbates that in many cases. Better though for their bottom line.

> How is Google worse than 10 years ago?

GMail is unable using the web client. Google search results are not great when doing research on new topics, its good for telling you things you already know but forgot, but when trying to search about new topics the search bubbles are bad. They beg for adoption of new products and then cancel them within 18 months. Android is essentially a giant spyware platform, using your mic sends everything to google. Using chrome sends everything to google. On and on, I believe Google was a better company 10 years ago.

It is much harder to bypass the you-really-meant-something-else algorithms and search for the exact terms I need. I don't need you to "correct" it, I don't need the helpful synonyms, etc.

When I search for information about specific strings like class method names, now I quite often have to resort to GitHub search.

You don't need it, but 99% of their users do.

This is honestly not a shitpost, I truly feel that Google isn't doing anything better than they were 10 years ago. Search has noticeably declined in the past year, and I am regularly struck by how readily they will rank matches based on removing parts of my query over results that include all of the terms. Every Google Android app I use asks for some kind of interaction every time I start one up. "Got It!"

This happens most surprisingly when navigating with Maps. I have shortcuts for destinations I regularly use, and the number of times I've tapped one of those and had Google cover 90% of the screen with restaurants nearby and the announcement of some feature and the "start" bar across the bottom...my conclusion has been that Google's Maps UX philosophy is based entirely on discouraging use while driving.

Re: Google maps, the recent change where the map orientation changes when the phone changes orientation was almost enough to get me to quit using it. I just want to lock in my preferred orientation and forget about it, not have to fiddle with my phone because it got bumped, the car hit a bump, or something.

I wonder if that's related to this...bug? feature?...where at least once per minute (in Android) there's what is something like a spontaneous app swipe to itself without having touched the device. This infects other apps too, so it's been hard to figure out where it's coming from but I'm pretty sure it's caused by Maps. Like there's a hypervigilance in the attention the app pays to rotation.

I mostly agree, but I do quite like Google Sheets and Docs. Drive is pretty shit though.

Standards support is a big one.

Early Google took pride in following other people's standards and avoiding walled gardens: XMPP, RSS, semantic web/micro-formats.

Today's Google avoids traditional standards and many standards that don't originate from Google, doesn't mind walled gardens in their favor, or "standards" that they (almost) solely control (AMP as an obvious one, HTML nearly with the Chromium monopoly), and doesn't even use standards in many areas where early Google thought it important (communications apps that might use something like XMPP or Matrix to federate, for instance).

Relevance. if the search results has less relevance and historical data has lower importance compared to spikes in interest at the moment of the search, it's worse

For example medical related searches right now prioritize covid related results, they are important _now_, but they are less important than general statistical data

A general purpose search engine shouldn't be about what social networks talk more about

> Isn't this basically what the web is (or could have been?) all about?

Yes and no. The web started off and until recently was a content-first and application-second system. Reversing those two priorities is just starting to happen now, to some extent.

Better technology or better application of commodity hardware?

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