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Comment by tmd83 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone feels looking at Google's products lately that there's something tremendously wrong with the organization. I'm not talking about just dropping features but just quality of implementation and missing things that people should get fed up and do something during development.

Like hangout > chat, let's drop the existing feature of read receipt that is even more important in the remote/work world in a product geared toward business.

Let's do an integration of task & files in chat in gmail but not what's suppose to be the primary app the standalone chat.

Let's take 3 release to decide yes there is some usefulness to wireless scanning and we can put it as an advance option.

It's not just dropping produces, it's actually degradation of function as if just to bump up the changelog size.

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Google Maps use to be a hell of a tool for exploration, navigation and travel. We used it on a tablet as we drove across Scotland in 2013 and it was fantastic. It provided tons of data about your routes and allowed you to easily manage your trip.

Since then they've gradually removed useful features, cluttered the UI with crap, and dumbed everything down to the point where it's almost useless. At one point they even removed the map scale, I think you have to enable an option buried in a menu to bring it back.

It's gotten so incredibly slow and clumsy to use that it's not even worth it half the time.

Google Photos is rapidly heading in that direction. They seem to be distancing you more and more from your photos and trying to throw their services in your face.

Isn't that with all the products? New teams that own the legacy code base, new PMs that need to show they are doing something... That's how all software products rot. It's normal lifecycle of products that we need to accept.

it shouldn't have to be that way

It gives an opportunity for newer, simpler and faster actors to come and replace the incumbents. Complex systems are hard to maintain. Nature spent billions of years perfecting the process, we can't be expected to learn it in couple of decades.

A small example of this I noticed recently: the Google Weather app (the one that's default in Android, at least for Pixel phones).

A few years ago it used to have air quality index. Then, it just disappeared one day for unknown reasons. According to this article, it disappeared in 2018 https://9to5google.com/2018/11/11/google-weather-missing-air...

So this bug fix or feature regression is probably sitting in their backlog somewhere. Now the past few weeks, the skies in the Bay Area have turned orange and there's extreme unhealthy air quality for weeks. And not a single Google developer thought, hey we really should prioritize fixing that air quality bug now? Does anyone at Google even use Android? How can the skies be orange and it's so dark during daytime from smoke that headlights are on, but no one noticed the Weather app doesn't have air quality index?

Let's admit it.

Google is on its way to become the new ____.

IBM ?

they are quite a lot like Microsoft of the late 90s and early 00s

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