https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2014/09/google-vo...
Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues?
I have no idea what the decision making looks like for this internally, but my impression as an outsider is that there's a lot of short-term empire building. A new product manager/AVP/VP shows up and wants to gather power or just make their mark, so they rebrand or merge or kill a project to show they've done something. If something new is created, it immediately becomes subject to this dynamic.
The only Google products I use that I feel I can rely on for daily use without fearing the rug getting pulled out are Gmail, Gcal, Search, and Docs. (And I don't know how they make money on Docs so I'm still nervous there) I'm not a PaaS users/decision maker so that doesn't apply to me, but if it did then I would still be very reluctant to invest there unless it was part of an easily migrated multi-cloud strategy. I though Music was safe and got burned on that with the YT migration, which is a much inferior player. Even basic things like shuffling a play list and having it endlessly play through it don't seem to work.. at some point it wanders off to some random suggested song I don't own and don't want to listen to.
It will be years before I could feel comfortable making any other sort of Google service a daily driver for a given task, assuming they get their act together.
Docs seems ripe for being combined with drive
Surely maps as well? Or has there been any bad news I don't know about?
By using them you're giving them complete 100% unfettered access to your data, that more than pays for itself.
So that was final nail in the coffin for Google Music. I moved everything to Spotify (thanks Soundiiz!) and realized what I was missing. I thought I would now unsubscribe and stop paying Google Music so someone up there will noice. Guess what? They had no way to unsubscribe for Google Music anymore because they rolled the whole thing to YouTube Premium. So upper management will never know that customer left in droves. The empire builders who are working in this part of Google are super smart but they only use their smartness in building empires.
I’ve already dumped Google Drive for self-managed p2p file-sharing so it’s just a matter of hooking it up to a nice interface for family use.
It's got a bunch of features you won't find with any other photo app: https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/
but know that the product is young, and my to-do list is long: https://photostructure.com/about/whats-next/
I think you should prioritize in your “about” the ease of import from Google Takeouts (which is the killer feature for me personally at this moment anyway). You might also want to have a section that explicitly names the other “big” players in this space, since I didn’t turn up your solution when googling for “self-hosted Google Photos” when I first started down this path.
The one necessary feature that prevents me from choosing this right now vs some of the other open source solutions is a story about how to safely browse my photos using a logon with on any Internet connected device.
Speaking of, this might be a perfect use case for SQRL[0], although I’d be happy with a simple HTTPS username/password story.
Not making any promises, but let me know if you’d accept any help with your to-do list.
Google Music was decent. This new replacement is not so good. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" mix was generally right. The YT versions are good for about five songs and then trail off into Do Not Like. No amount of thumbs down seems to be making a positive change.
I'm surprised thumbing things down isn't helping you - it was the thing that fixed YTM for me. I wasn't thumbing things down enough, now anything I don't want to hear again I thumb down, and I mostly listen to the personalized and discovery mixes. You might need to switch/reload stations for it to take effect. And IIRC the discovery mix only updates on Wed.
One thing that I seem to remember it having was a social aspect. Twitter doesn't treat its lists very well but it is possible to find somebody that you want to follow, then see what lists they're on. Maybe that leads you to other people that you want to follow.
The thing about blogs is that typically the signal/noise ratio is higher than Twitter accounts.
Aaron Patzer, founder of Pando Daily has said that businesses should subtract $250K for every MBA and add $500K for every engineer. When you have MBA at the top, subtraction weight grows exponentially. I know I shouldn't so severely generalize MBAs so much but here we are... Just like Gates and Jobs, Larry Page chose an MBA to run the business while praising need for "product person" all their lives. All of these CEOs will show continuous revenue growth and doubling of profits somehow while products will linger in the limbo.
It is quite funny that Google has (or had) 6 different meeting apps and during COVID they are no where on the map in this business!
I wouldn't call "adding 2 million users per day" nowhere on the map... Google Meet is growing tremendously and seeing huge attach rates, even as Zoom continues growth apace as well.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/how-google-me...
Google's internal incentive structure strongly favors shipping — at least, it did back in the day, and I believe that's still true now to a great extent. Steve Yegge said it most concisely back in 2006 [1]: "At Google, projects launch because it's the least-energy state for the system."
The problem is that when one dedicates so much optimization power to shipping, there's less left over for things like maintenance and support. That might not be a huge deal for any individual product, but in the aggregate it sets a higher bar for keeping an initiative running — which presents externally as an excessive proclivity for killing products.
That perception, in turn, erodes user trust in the continuing existence of Google's portfolio of non-flagship products. And that leads to even fewer of those products clearing the bar for maintenance funding, because users are less willing to commit to using a product that may be discontinued.
Google's shipping-first bias was probably a huge advantage for them in the early days. But sometimes a company outgrows aspects of its culture.
Ha, I was thinking this the other day as I was looking at Google Wallet / Google Pay / Android Pay and all the various permutations it has been through.
Play store hasn't been renamed in a while, though. I guess its next.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/theme/promotion_gpm_shutd...
> The Music store on Google Play is no longer available.
> To continue listening to your Play Music library, transfer your library to YouTube Music
You can still Play Books though?
Who goes to the store to buy some extra 'play?'
I'm honestly confused.
I set up a google voice number just for that and it worked a treat.
For what is worth, I was a happy Grand central user from the very first days.
I wouldn’t even call this “empire building” by people as a sibling comment is suggesting. It is the eternal desire for companies to integrate everything together. Sometimes shit shouldn’t be all integrated together. Single sign on and single profile is not all the panacea that people make it out to be.
I am otherwise a Google fan boy in every sense and I hate what they did with Google Fi. I wanted to signup but I had to choose between giving up my Google Voice number or not having Fi. This is clearly because of this overzealous unification in a big company.
Signup for the free Google voice? Sure we let you choose a number you like? Signup for paid Google Fi, sorry we can’t let you choose a number.
Have you seen the new Xbox names? Microsoft still loves to tack on Office on everything.
I suppose you can call the Q superfluous, and then point to BMW if you want another company that just names cars by number, but at least there's a well-understood history and progression between the 3 series and the 5 series and the 7 series, but I have no idea what makes a Q60 (big number!) a sporty coupe that used to be a G35/G37 and now the QX30 is a small SUV-like-thing, that's, I guess, the size of older G35s but that means the Q60 somehow jumped 3 places in the tens column for no apparent reason.
Sony: PS, PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5
Microsoft: Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One Series X
There just _has_ to be some monetary reason for this, it’s too insane and has gone on too long for there to not be money involved somehow. Or maybe it truly is just insanity?!
Like, everyone's argument made sense from a certain perspective, and the "common sense" ideas weren't perfect, but the compromise solutions that resulted had bigger problems. Problems which the media or public noticed more quickly than the people who had finally signed off on them internally...
My speculation for the early Xbox names would be that part of it was someone insisting that you don't want to be trying to sell Xbox 2 against PS3 - you're one behind! - and then 360 is a fun way to get a "3" in there... but then what next, you have the same problem again, 460 is nonsensical (Xbox 420 would've been fun...!), etc...
Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10
I mean that sort of goes up as a general pattern, but only generally.
* Windows 1/2/3.0/3.1/3.11/WFW3.11 - 16-bit (with 32-bit extensions as win32s), ran on DOS
* Concurrently, NT 3.1, 3.5, and 3.51 were marketed for servers instead of home users. They were fully 32 bit and separate from DOS.
* Windows 95/97/98 started naming after the year. This line eliminated DOS (from the user's perspective) and was 32-bit without the need for installing extensions.
* Concurrent with Windows 95 was NT4 which had 95's new interface based on Cairo
* At this point it was clear NT was the future for the desktop, so keeping with the year naming came Windows 2000 (which was really NT 5.0, but desktop users were by now used to year naming). But there was one more release of "old" Windows, as Millennium Edition (ME)
* The two names that dont fit are XP and Vista; these are NT 5.1 and 6.0, respectively. And now Windows 7 and 8 make more sense; we are back to the versioning we had starting with NT 3.1
* To make things more confusing, the server versions now started getting named after the year when previously that was the desktops. So we've got Windows Server 2000, 2003, 2008, 2011, and so on.
* Windows 10 is the oddball, skipping 9. I like to think someone at MS was poking fun at Apple, which skipped OS 9 to go straight to OS X, which two years later got the version 10.0. Mac OS 9 came after OS X but before OS X 10.0. I recall reading that 8.5 was originally supposed to be end of the line for classic mac os, but I don't have a source. So now there's 8.5, X 1.0, 9.0, and X 10.0, and everyone seems to think the X is a 10.
As for why they skipped 9, I believe I did hear a good reason for that one: people sometimes tested for Windows 95/98 by seeing if the version started with a 9, and they didn't want to clash with that. So this weirdness is simply an unintended side effect of their inconsistency in naming/versioning scheme.
For later versions of Windows, programmers applied other tests, but none of those tests stepped on the "does it start with 9" test for 95/98. Using 9 for the version after 8.1 would have done so.
As in, the brand-new New 3DS! New! Buy it today!
Consumers were confused.
It doesn't always work.
I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft "loses" this generation, with their confusing name losing sales from parents and non-hardcore gamers that don't know this is a new console.
Nintendo is just as bad at naming things as Microsoft. And they are very anti-gamer with all of their ludicrous attacks against fan content (most recently, their attack against the competitive melee scene)
Their attacks on fans are so nonsensical. It goes beyond copyright protection. Look at how Sega treats Sonic fans. It's night and day.
And yet by the time it hit this year, Zoom took the prize. I think this represents a much bigger fail on Google's part than I have seen being mentioned.
Compare the effect on competitors’ stock prices when Amazon or Apple announce they’re moving into a market versus Google or Microsoft.
I remember how refreshingly easy to use Whatsapp was when it came out. It was such a pain to transfer contacts and images and whatnot before, and having to worry about international MMS/SMS charges. Then this tiny little app comes along and blows all the others away by simple requiring phone number verification.
Nest was a paid, acquired, hardware product. If a product manager gets distracted, any Google product—apart from ads—will, if not fail, dramatically degrade. Google are a terrible company to bet anything important on.
AWS has entered the chat
Some new features, the icon, what it's next to? If they were actually going away I'm not sure how they could communicate that to me in a way I would believe at this point.
This caught my eye. My initial reaction was to disagree that google was a software company and that it's more of a "tech/search/social media" company. Microsoft is a software company, not google. But the longer I think about it, the more it becomes apparent that google is a software company. It just provides its software as a service/subscription for your data.
- There's no branding change, Google Voice is Google Voice.
- As an Android user the past 3 years, this is equivalent to Apple transitioning from iChat to iMessage, or when Apple appified/stickerified iMessage.
- It is very strange to see people turning this into a 'product cancellation' - Hangouts was deprecated _4 years ago_, it has a _direct_ replacement, scheduling and providing notice to users as it winds down over _years_ is hardly the irresponsible willy-nilly cancelling the comments here are claiming, especially because this is an integration of another product that is, and always has, its own frontend
So, let me get this straight. 6 years ago, Google made the Google Voice user move to hangout, and 2 years later it was deprecated?
It just seems worse.
> But then, well, Google...Googled. It let Voice languish for years, without any attention or updates, then awkwardly half-merged it into Hangouts and had it rot away unattended for years. And we all know how the whole Hangouts saga ended (or is still in the process of ending, I guess we should say).
> A few years ago, though, something unexpected happened: Following years of neglect, Google suddenly brought Voice back to life.
You can find discussion of it on HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022660 :
> Don't get me started. I think my Google Voice / Hangouts account will be deprecated soon, or has been, and will be eliminated, or maybe not. It's not clear. It never is.
> Google voice has been all but deprecated at this point. The form for buying credits has been broken for a year, and calls calls to my google voice number no longer get forwarded to my phone / google hangouts.
Perhaps if you didn't live through all this, you don't get why people find it annoying.
What is the direct replacement? Spaces? Allo? Duo? Chat? Meet? Google Messages? Google+ Messenger? It's hardly clear...
I didn't even know chat.google.com existed until someone on HN linked to it a few weeks ago. I think it's pretty difficult to claim that Google's hodgepodge of overlapping chat products is anywhere close to the iChat -> iMessage change.
I don't grok how this could confuse, other than to people who aren't in the ecosystem or using the products at all, and even then it seems to be giving 0 charity to the facts on the ground. No one's bemoaning the deep confusion and duplication they face between iMessage, FaceTime, Slack, and Zoom.
Edit: I'm really, really, tired of understanding, calm, takes that make an effort to have empathy and share info getting downvoted, if it's outside a mono-Apple worldview. It is literally the only tech topic where you can immediately hit -2 for no discernable reason. This didn't used to happen on HN, and that's what used to make it distinctive.
This thread feels pretty suspicious IMHO, I really, really doubt you're missing the point this widely due to irrelevant details.
I highly, highly, highly doubt that you were so deeply confused by the Meet/Slack Allo/iMessage analogy that you needed me to spell out 'hypothetically, if Apple owned Slack, which of course it doesn't, would it be more usable for you to have Slack merged with iMessage?' Your complete lack of charity in interpretation forces lengthy, caveated, responses in drawn-out threads, emphasizing downvotes, and ensuring several opportunities for downvotes.
I get the impression you may be treating this as "what are the leading products in each niche for the overall ecosystem," but that doesn't really have anything to do with what's being discussed.
I, at least, wouldn't clamor for the merger of an Apple-owned Slack and iMessage.
The point being, people are conflating work messaging apps with personal messaging apps and acting like having unique versions of both is a problem. It's not.
As far as I know there isn’t one. There are people I message with Hangouts pretty regularly and it’s never told me it’s deprecated or suggested anything else to use instead (except for just now, to switch to the dedicated Voice app for Voice, which… fine, but no suggestion to do my chatting elsewhere).
So is Hangouts deprecated? I have no idea. If it is, does that mean chatting with my Gmail contacts is deprecated?
I wouldn’t say it’s a straw man to call it confusing. Maybe the product lineup is less confusing if you’re on Android? But from where I’m sat… yep, confusing!
I agree, it is confusing! I wanted to make sure you meant 'chat in Gmail' before getting more specific: in that case, we are caught in a cycle of repeatedly noting Google has a deprecation timeline for cutting people over from Hangouts to chat.google.com, that's what the grandparent was referencing. It's virtually identical to Hangouts, just with modernized UI and Google sez a more stable backend. Everything works _just as it always has and will_ for your day to day user.