Google Workspace for everyone
blog.google
blog.google
I use GSuite at work at a FAANG company, and Google slides with 50+ pages is so slow (multi-second pauses when changing slides) to be practically unusable. Finding documents in Google drive is hard to impossible, and good luck keeping track of comments or tasks assigned to you in multiple unrelated documents.
I’m sure at some level consolidating their offerings is a right product move, but I don’t think Basecamp or Calendly should be particularly concerned.
I’m sure Google has high quality engineers working more or less on every product. It’s just the solution space of products with big surface area and many interdependencies is really large. When you are more steps removed from your customers, and can’t move fast (comparing to a small nibble team), finding the optimum becomes a very non-trivial exercise.
Most successful products at big corps have laser-focused teams with highly influential leaders. Anything else results on mediocrity.
My hypothesis: devs are much closer to users, as they are often users themselves, and have more freedom to work on fixing broken experiences, as opposed to just rolling new features.
Linus was able to out-compete a team of hundreds of Microsoft Engineers who spent years building a Source Control system by himself within a span of 10 days when he built git.
You can't take Microsoft Source Control, add a few stories, and end up with git in a Sprint. You can't split that work up between different teams.
The essence of git is in a unified design that matches the essential complexity of source control requirements. When you play the game of telephone from user to sales to program manager to project manager to architect to lead developer to UX designer to DB modeler, each step along the path introduces errors. Those errors made the system harder to design for, harder to scale, and harder to use.
Linus was able to cover every element of those to a passable degree himself. You need to empower your developers. If they don't use the product, if they are not dogfooding, you have no chance to compete against those that are.
That being said, I agree with the general point that having vision and trusting your developers with their vision can be a winning strategy.
That's basically what ItsMonkk is saying, but I think it's worth making it more explicit. Because a one-in-a-million engineer is not replicable, but a deep understanding of your users' needs is.
Same with large open source email services? (Ala Gmail)
It’s usually apples and oranges comparisons. There is libreoffice, but even on it’s best day it’s not doing real time document editing/collaboration with 10+ people on opposite sides of the planet, and that is the Google Docs bread and butter for instance.
Compare instead Google's average products (y'know — the kind they eventually shut down) to the largest FOSS competitors in those same verticals.
For example, compare Google Reader at its peak MAU, to the current #1 open-source RSS reader app.
Or compare Google+ to, say, Mastadon. (Mastadon is a FOSS Twitter knockoff whereas Google+ was a Facebook knockoff, but I think the point stands.)
Or, for a painful one, compare Blogger to Wordpress! (Okay, maybe that one's not fair, since Wordpress is a real company that can hire product managers. But most WP development is still random FOSS developers scratching their own itches.)
Or compare Google Code at its peak to, well, anything. GitLab CE, GNU Savannah, anything.
None of these were failures of engineering. They were either failures of product management, or failures of budget/staffing — which is in essence still product management, since it's a PM's role to fight for the budget and headcount to get the job done.
(That's not to say all but the best Google products rot on the vine. IMHO Google are pretty good with steering their internal B2B engineering-driven offerings, e.g. GKE, Firebase, BigQuery, etc. Those are run a lot like FOSS projects, in that it's a combination of internal engineers scratching their own itches, and customers directly filing bug reports, that determine what gets built. It's the B2C products, and the marketing-driven B2B products — where in either case the engineers involved might not have the problem themselves, and the customers might never directly engage with them in troubleshooting their workflows — that tend to falter.)
> There is libreoffice, but even on it’s best day it’s not doing real time document editing/collaboration with 10+ people on opposite sides of the planet, and that is the Google Docs bread and butter for instance.
If that's your only requirement, then the FOSS project https://etherpad.org/ that Google acquired to build Google Wave off of (and then later dis-acquired) satisfies it pretty well. These days it's even kind of a word-processor! (Originally it was just a multiplayer <textarea> with per-user text background colors.)
What's the current #1 open-source RSS reader app? Google Reader at its peak was by far the best RSS reader I've ever used - and presumably the same was true for many other users, hence why it shutting down functionally killed RSS entirely. But possibly I've just not found the better alternatives.
> Or compare Google+ to, say, Mastadon.
Wasn't your original point to compare similarly-sized services? G+'s userbase was multiple orders of magnitude larger than Mastodon's has ever been.
Google has 1000+ badly-managed products. Google's actual product-management philosophy, is reflected in how these products are created, managed (into the ground), stagnated, and usually eventually killed. My post was about those.
It's very easy to beat the complete lack of product-management in your average FOSS project, by just having one full-time product manager with vision for where the product should go. See, for example, what this guy (https://www.youtube.com/c/Tantacrul) has to say about various pieces of FOSS DAW software, where all the flaws usually come down to a pure lack of product management on the FOSS projects' part. The problems he points out could all easily be fixed by having one person with vision submit bug-reports about workflow issues, and having those bug-reports get taken seriously by the engineers. (And he's now doing exactly that, as PM, for Audacity.)
Google should easily be able to hire guys like him, and put them on projects like the ones I listed in my sibling comment. But they just... don't... seem to have it in them.
Seems like this is how all "enterprise-grade" software becomes a pain to use. Usability and performance get short shrift below getting the next 100 bullet-point-features and before you know it the only computers in the world that can run it decently are the developer's, where it still is frankly only on the edge of usability and far from where it would be a joy to use.
UX changes (usually what people mean when they say ‘usability) are problematic because they often require disruptive changes, retraining people, and breaking someone’s business for awhile if they can’t know this is coming and stage it out properly. That is a good way to lose customers.
Performance improvements over unlocking some major business area with a feature are not as high priority - because an extra .5% in cost to an existing customer is usually not as important as unlocking another 10% of sales.
Over time it can of course kill the product if not addressed. It’s easy to see how the incentives lead people there though.
And for an enterprise, they already pay people to do things they aren’t excited to do every day - why should they care the software is motivating when people already clean toilets, deal with retail customers, and mop floors without any of those being exciting either? As long as it works, it works.
Efficient. I'm not looking to enterprise software to provide personal affirmation in life, but if it takes me 5 minutes of staring at loading screens to do something I ought to have been able to do in 15 seconds, that's that much lost productivity, and it multiplies over days, months, years, and across employees.
Moreover, while supermegaultra performance tuning may be expensive, many performance improvements can be had for much less than the cost of time they are losing people, and many others can be obtained relatively cheaply if they are simply something that is kept in mind at all parts of the design process rather than completely ignored until it can't possibly be ignored any more. To a large degree, I'm not asking for these companies to make a moon shot to make me slightly happier... I'm asking for them to pick the freaking low-hanging fruit that is right in front of them, and, ideally, to do so on an ongoing basis. Computers are pretty fast nowadays, you don't really have to try that hard to put something on the screen in less than 30 seconds.
We all know how dysfunctional management can be, and IMO this is more a symptom of the disconnect between management and the employees resulting in bad business performance.
It’s clear whoever is doing the purchasing either doesn’t care, doesn’t know, or has to pick the option due to another checkbox somewhere they can’t control. The people who know have no control over the tools they are using.
It’s amazing how pathological organizations can be.
"Your employees will be happier" is not on anyone's radar.
"Does it work with our company's authentication system from 2003?"
"Does it support playing ogg vorbis files embedded in spreadsheet cells?"
"The director of sales won't consider it for their department unless you add this particular feature that they are used to from product X, even though they don't actually do any selling anymore and it makes no sense in our own product and will require special-case handling for all maintenance in perpetuity. They have a hunch that it's valuable."
The people who made Gmail are either still working on Gmail, working somewhere else, or working on a pet project because they bought the proof-of-competence to choose their project. Google's management structure basically doesn't have anything that says "Hey, you were successful at X, can you work on (thing adjacent to X)?" and incentivize the employee to do that if the employee wants to do something else.
There's no reason to assume the people working on Slides, Spreadsheets, Drive, Docs, &c started particularly overlapped (though I'm sure there's consolidation these days). Similarly with GCloud; all the pieces of GCloud started as independent initiatives (App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Compute Engine, &c). All of these started separate and only began using consolidated resources / providing consolidated UX frontends and APIs as they were forced to by a management chain ad-hoc'd together after Google decided "Cloud" was a space they wanted to do business in as an organized front.
GMail is TRASH for me. It's the slowest, most ressoruce intensive site/app I've ever had the "pleasure" of using. I'm using Fastmail now and it's mindblowing how slow Gmail is in comparison.
Right back at you. I've used Gmail daily since it's launch and have never experienced "slow" unless I was on a slow/poor connection. How many tabs /instances are you opening? Are you using ancient hardware?
Inbox was even worse, but I think they fattened up Gmail to match it after Inbox folded so the Inbox-loving people wouldn't suffer from increased performance when they had to switch back.
On the plus side they drove me to finally start using real, native mail clients again, so... I guess I can thank them for that.
I'm on PC and don't experience any of these issues. My Chrome is using <400 MB of memory with two instances of Gmail, G Drive, Google Calendar, Google Ads and a couple more tabs, and is consuming maybe 0-1% of my CPU. I routinely have 4 separate Gmail inboxes open each in their own tab.
Compose windows is instantaneous. Opening /viewing email is also nearly instantaneous. Same for search, and navigating between labels/folders.
This is... very surprising. Are you sure you're accounting for the resources each tab is taking up? They may be listed separately from the core Chrome process in the task manager.
I just opened my very boring and nearly empty Google Calendar and that tab alone eats 275MB of memory and idles bouncing around(!) between 0.2 and 1% of a CPU core (which is a lot to be doing nothing, and the way it bounces around tells me timers or WebSockets or some other unfortunate-technology-to-have-added-to-Javascript is involved)
[EDIT] for reference, loading an HN page spikes to 100-150MB of memory, then frees memory down to 40-75MB over tens of seconds, and idles around 0.0% of CPU when I'm not interacting with it. That's approximately the base cost of rendering anything and the (mostly memory) overhead of isolating tabs so they can crash independently. Calendar stays at ~275MB and constantly uses some CPU, and I bet if I watched it over time that memory use would grow.
[EDIT EDIT] basic HTML gmail hangs out around 170MB but keeps allocating then de-allocing 10-20MB more memory, bouncing up then returning to about 170MB. Then when I click on the link in the footer to load "standard" gmail instead, it spikes to 700MB(!!!) then drops to "merely" about 490MB and hangs out there indefinitely, using 0.4% CPU constantly and spiking to 2.5% periodically, while the tab is backgrounded. You are definitely not looking in the right place for your browser's total resource use.
(In fairness, I suppose Mutt's resource usage is probably lower.)
Unlike Gmail and other google properties, I can leave it open for weeks and forget it's there. It doesn't affect overall system performance—because it's not demanding CPU time and forcing context switches when it's not doing anything.
[EDIT] incidentally, has Thunderbird bloated a ton or something? I used to use it on machines with 256MB of memory total and it was not the only thing I had open, and it was totally fine. And yes, HTML email existed then. I was under the impression it was—thanks to neglect, basically—still on good, old tech and the plan to "improve" it to ditch that for bloated modern junk was still on the drawing board.
Okay... Gmail is also the whole program?
> That with what amounts to two of gmail's pages open (an email thread view, and a mailbox view, side-by-side
Huh? You can do that in a single page in gmail, too.
> incidentally, has Thunderbird bloated a ton or something?
So has everything else. I used to use Chrome because it was less resource-intensive than Firefox (back in Chrome's early days, and circa Firefox 3.5)...
It's hosted in a browser. It gets things like HTML rendering "for free".
> Huh? You can do that in a single page in gmail, too.
I've never seen that and just tried to figure out how to do it just to see what it did to memory use. Couldn't. Did end up sitting around 680MB of memory (spiked to 800MB) looking at the same email thread I have open in Apple Mail, which, notably, doesn't exhibit those crazy memory-use spikes every time I click on anything.
[EDIT] What I'm talking about is a fairly typical email client 3-column layout, with folders and such in one column, the current mailbox or folder loaded in another (these two columns together are like the default layout when you first load Gmail), and an email thread in the remaining column, all open at once. I've never seen that in Gmail, and with both ~1min of poking around their interface and ~1min of Googling, couldn't figure out how to get that. I can get columns 1 & 2, or 1 & 3. Not 1, 2, and 3 all at once.
> So has everything else. I used to use Chrome because it was less resource-intensive than Firefox (back in Chrome's early days, and circa Firefox 3.5)
Same. FF went way downhill in a hurry after the 2.x days.
It is now, but it didn't used to be. Gmail at launch was incredibly fast. It gradually got a little bit slower over time, and then they made it a lot slower with a rewrite a few years ago.
Teams is not the best messaging/videoconferencing program by a country mile, yet it shows the most growth YoY [citation needed].
I worked for a few companies who dipped a toe into the Microsoft waters and their products drowned everything else out; this was not because the offering was technically superior or cheaper.
Outlook is not my preferred email client but having. Used it on both windows and Mac OS as groupware tool, it's still better than most things by Google.
It's just snappier, because it's native code. And outlook on Mac OS used to be gorgeous.
Excel is a jewel and a marvel of software engineering. Google sheets is good for doing just 2+2.
And so on. When it comes to office stuff, Microsoft software is just better.
Sadly, because it's all proprietary software, but it is was it it.
I've been forced into using Outlook on Windows and Mac and snappy has never been my impression, although I seem to recall it being somewhat more usable on Windows. Not that GMail is snappy either, but a browser based client isn't necessarily slower than Outlook. Although an actually fast native client would be hard to beat.
Gmail used to be snappier than Outlook is now when it launched, even as a webapp. I'm not sure quite how they've managed to mess it up so badly, but it's poor engineering not a limitation of the tech stack.
Agree with you on the other office products though. Word, Excel, etc aren't perfect, but they're much better than the alternatives for most things.
"Do you already have O365? Yes? Then you already have Teams!"
That's a hard place to sell a competing solution to =)
And that's just sales talk. It says ADFS needs multiple servers, which it doesn't. At least it depends on your deployment model. And whether AD running on another server constitutes "multiple servers" (of course just as true for Okta).
It also says Okta runs in the cloud. The implication is that ADFS doesnt. Well, like anything, it does.
The remainder talks about low TCO, deployment speed, simplifying AD complexity, and the cloud. All of which are rather subjective.
I say all of this having done some very complex ADFS deployments - at the extreme using Chip & PIN authN, and authR from client workstations assumed to be compromised.
So given the above I'd love to find a compelling and unbiased comparison. Including featureset.
[1] https://www.okta.com/resources/whitepaper/why-choose-okta-vs...
This either shows that Slack's "email is dead" marketing strategy was very effective (did an important job during a specific period of early growth and they have now moved on) or very ineffective (their main proposition completely passed you by).
IT went as far as remotely disabling the use of zoom after months of pleading with people not to use it.
This was ostensibly done for security reasons (citing zoom bombing, of all things, coz it was in the news).
When teams had a raft of really bad zero days, of course, nobody in IT batted an eye.
MS reaaaallly got its hooks in to that place.
It made me wonder how startups are supposed to compete with this type of thing. Zoom was free and better liked and it still got shut down.
I don't think this is without basis? Zoom got some bad press. Unsure if Teams is any better.
Zoom apps sending data to Facebook https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22693792
Zoom lying about e2ee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25044254
Zoom installer on macOS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706650
Zoom rolling its own crypto https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22768494
I'd reckon Zoom engs know what's e2ee and what's not. I tend to agree with folks who say their sales team purposefully lied to win deals.
I remember the Facebook thing alone getting about as much airtime as MS's three teams zero days despite being insignificant by comparison.
E2E encryption that isn't properly end to end is newsworthy but it isn't a good reason to justify selecting a competing product that doesn't even try.
March 31, 2020: 75 million DAU [0]
March 31, 2021: 145 million DAU [1]
0: https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2020/04/30/mi...
1: https://twitter.com/jeffteper/status/1387141320519557120?s=2... (https://twitter.com/bdsams/status/1387146648678244356?s=20)
Microsoft and Google have a fundamentally different approach to enterprise software than Google. Microsoft is the mediocre Apple of enterprise tech, before Apple even got that reputation.
EVERYTHING IS INTEGRATED. Microsoft makes it so insanely easy to stay within the microsoft ecosystem, that using a mediocre software created by Microsoft is always a better option than a 3rd party tool. (See slacks getting clobbered by teams, despite slacks being significantly faster)
Part of what makes MSFT click is that they they go above and beyond to create a tool everyone can use. Additionally, they are obsessed with customers to a point that their tools lose all personality. This is bad if you want something that is opinionated in exactly the way you want (see Obsidian vs OneNote), but great for companies that want to offer an inoffensive tool that is serviceable for all its employees.
An incumbent is fearsome when it uses every little advantage in its greater product offering to embed itself as the obvious option. (Apple for consumer tech, MSFT for enterprise tech). Google has refused to implement the kind of top down organizational structure needed to enforce such integration in its product lineup. This is the company that couldn't sync its grocery lists with google keep. As long as it stays true, Google will never be able to leverage the advantage of an incumbent. It's a shame too, their products are honestly quite good.
We just had our first Teams meeting this morning, in fact... we could not figure out how to simply view the person speaking. Seems like it's always in split view, or that goofy "Together" view. Nothing makes you want to turn off the camera more than having your face on everybody's screen through 100% of the meeting.
I've personally never found a better alternative to Google Meet.
Plus I kind of resent Google Calendar not having reasonable plugins for other video services (Jitsi, Zoom, etc.); feels anti-trusty to me.
Zoom does seem to do better overly severely degraded connections (and surfaces that It is happening). The experience is still pretty bad though.
It just works. You get a link, you open the link, you're in.
Whenever I get a Zoom link, it first forces me to download the app. As in, you open the link and it instantly downloads an executable to my computer, which I need to then go delete. Then I need to fight the website by clicking a series of links to get to the browser version. Then I enter my name and join. Except oops, the meeting has not formally started, so it has now kicked me back to the previous page to re-enter my name. Try again, except later since if you go before it's officially started, you're doing this again.
And that's how bad Zoom is even before you start the call. The UI in Zoom calls is also worse than Google Meet. What the hell is "Join with Computer Audio"? What does that even mean?
Google Meet unfortunately doesn't just work as easily as it should.
Not perfect, yes my fans go nuts, but it works, everybody can understand how to get in, and it's rather very intuitive. I LOVE GOOGLE MEET.
It isn't native to gcal, but the zoom chrome extension works relatively well.
Meet is far from perfect (performance issues on Macs), but ease of use trumps that for me personally.
But the behavior of auto layout when someone is sharing a screen is completely weird to me. Also their new UI which rolled out to us recently is bit more complex than the simpler one before.
Is that the HTML version? Because the normal GMail is also horribly slow.
Out of interest, what is slow about gmail for you? I use gmail for work and speed has never been a problem or even an annoyance. Im genuinely interested as some people seem to have a totally different experience to me and it'd be interesting to understand why.
Opening a conversation that has more than 5 messages in the thread will regularly take several seconds.
EDIT: paging set to 100 conversations per page, with reader view / vertical split to enable reading emails at the same time as viewing the rest of the list of threads.
Similar experiences with Chrome on Win10 as safari on macOS or gmail app on iOS.
It makes me miss Outlook.
What other tools would you suggest in place of GSuite (email, calendaring, collaborative document building, searching/finding docs, etc...)? O365 is all that comes to mind.
Sounds like a nail in the coffin, to me.
I'll avoid Chrome. Unless it suddenly goes 100% FOSS, gets audited, and every feature that causes platform lockin gets stripped / opened.
Or Chromium which is FOSS.
Google Drive sync client doesn’t even work half the time for me and nothing would make me happier than going back to Dropbox for me.
Yep, and I'm building something to sit on top of google Drive, to manage files, and make it easier to collaborate as a team. That's not something new, similar, to what Confluence, Notion are offering, ...
The reality is that google sucks at B2B, everything they do don't work. There are a few exception like google Workspace because Gmail was number 1 in B2C and they were the first to get Words and Excel in the browser and Google Analytics.
The reality is that, innovation for a big company is hard, Microsoft was able to build Teams from scratch to compete with Slack and managed to it, and that's an amazing achievement, not something that we are used to seeing.
Then why is Apple innovating more than anyone else?
Apple makes and will continue to make great products for a specific subset of uses because they are willing to make big investments and are very opinionated about optimal user experience. The end result of that is the often great experience of their ecosystem today.
They obviously also employ tactics to lock out competition too (see the purchase of AuthenTec, Dark Sky and a few other small purchases of best in class companies explicitly demanding that they don't work with anyone else).
Innovation in reality is "improving things" and many many companies suck at defining what an improvement is and who the improvement is for. Too many focus on improving revenue numbers and that's it instead of improving user experience, reliability, security, privacy, etc. All things Apple cares deeply about*
* Again, Apple's decisions are only an improvement to a subset of users but that's really all that matters to them. Happier users means more use of Apple products which is a win.
Teams is complete shit though, they didn't compete on quality of their offering. They're competing because every org already pays Microsoft a lot of money and they may as well use Teams because it's "integrated"
Teams is also really bad at emoji support compared to Slack.
I've been using Teams for only a few months after having used Slack for years but in the time I've used it I've come to despise it.
This! I can't wrap my head around on how impossible is to search for things in drive.
Staggeringly bad for, you know, a search company.
But I have found a weird workaround for this. After installing Google Drive File Stream locally and searching for things with the file explorer, it doesn't seem that bad all of a sudden.
Try searching for "followup:actionitems" in drive.
Disc:Googler.
Its clunky and annoying in so many ways.
Next perfectly viable Google product on the chopping block: Stadia
Dev: "OK, I finished the user story for migration from a free account to a paid account this sprint, but, again, there's a story for migration from a paid account to a free one and that'll involve compromises X and Y and there are a couple Hard Problems involved since usage may have exceeded free tier limits, and we physically migrate the account in ways that will be hard to undo since we cut corners to get this shipped, which will make it even harder. That's going to be a big chunk of work, and I think we'll need to break it up into smaller stories. Will we be going over that today?"
PM: "Ummmmmmm... yeah..." presses big red button that throws an inconvenient story into the "on ice" bucket that may as well represent "deleted" "Putting that 'on ice', we'll definitely get to it... some day."
I'm really glad I didn't try signing up for it when I was trying to setup my custom domain to host mail.
Possible I'm doing something wrong so I'd love to know what it is, but as far as I can tell, I can't get my free tier back.
This was/is a domain account, right? @yourdomain.com? You upgraded from the free "google apps for your domain" account to a paid workspace account, and now you can't downgrade? If that's the case, that's unfortunately works as intended - that free domain-level tier doesn't exist anymore, so anyone who is on it (myself included) who starts paying and thereby upgrades to one of the current SKUs, can't downgrade to a SKU that no longer is offered.
Good to know at least that I didn't do something wrong. However, there was no warning about this happening in either direction that I recall - no warning that I would not be able to downgrade and no warning upon cancelling my Workplace subscription that I would not go back to my previous free tier. Nothing I could find by some searching that described this either. I appreciate your response here, otherwise I would never have known if I did it wrong...
Yeah - my email is elsewhere now, and I was hoping that by cancelling Workspace, my account would convert into the type of account you get when you sign up for Google services with a non Google email. But it didn't.
That feature was unfortunately removed some time in 2018.
It took me over two weeks of dedicated hourly time slots, a few automation, and many manual deletions to clean up everything. I also end up deleting essential documents that I should not have (I did have backups).
I wrote down my frustration, the horrible experience deleting all the photos (some tips included that will help if you are planning to do so) - How to delete all Photos and get off Google Photos - https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get...
I do have the grandfathered legacy Google Domains for Apps (may be about 10 or odd domains) and I pay for about 5 domains Google Workspaces. Teams find it easier to use Google Products (especially Gmail, and Calendar).
I do it by connecting drive to Google colab and using bash/python as if it's a normal filesystem but admittedly even then it can occasionally behave weird (especially with bigger files). However, you can at least add whatever retry and double checking logic you want.
I shall attempt to explain what this announcement actually means, since it doesn't do a great job:
1) "Starting today, all of Google Workspace is available to anyone with a Google account" there are a lot of individual business owners that have signed up for free Gmail accounts and use them to run their business, now they can pay a subscription fee to upgrade those accounts to include Workspace functionality (like Google Chat rooms, Meet recordings, Calendar appointments, ML assisted writing, device management and other business features).
2) Google Chat (their competitor to Slack) and Docs suite are getting more deeply integrated in Gmail. Enabling the ability to bring in Docs/Sheets/Slides inline with a Chat "room" for collaboration without leaving Gmail. This will only be available for Workspace users (business, enterprise, education or the new individual plan).
Right, but I was wondering if it is now free for @gmail.com users, would it also be free for us individual users using our own domain.
One big issue that's always existed with Gsuite/Workspace is that there's two types of usecases that are nothing alike. One is a company/school/nonprofit admins who want to manage all their employees/students. The other are people like me who literally have a single "user" and just use Gsuite to have gmail on their own domain. Unfortunately, most of the changes, features and UI really cater to the former. I've always hoped they'd make a special thing for people who don't care about any of that administration stuff and just want Gmail-on-custom-domain.
Which makes it a no-go once you have a family, EOT. So now the entire family have Apple services instead for the same price.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
I've still got old accounts with photos etc on that I cannot move, and the only reason I moved from GAFYD is because of so much functionality being missing.
GAFYD https://lifehacker.com/what-does-google-apps-for-your-domain...
...and I cannot, unless they all have my domain.
By the way, you can sort-of "move" your photos by adding them to shared album and "saving to local" on the other side. But then, if the original account is removed, the photos are still removed (AFAIK).
I really do wish I hadn't moved my domain over to them - but my Google Calendar, email, and Google Play purchases are all in there.
You can't use family sharing on a Google Apps/G Suite/Workspace account at all, whether they share your domain or not.
With this restriction on Workspace accounts, I decided to just forego a subscription altogether until they get their act together.
Google is happy to drop you, mostly for an obnoxious up-sell. You're a statistic, and if they drive your business under, that's a statistic too.
Google removed that functionality, borked my entire system, and lost all of my trust that they know (or care about) what their customers want.
* Be notified when packages are coming via "e mail"
* Send your own "e mail" to other people
* Organize events by date in a "calendar"
* Write an episode of Stranger Things in a "document", or if you don't happen to own the Stranger Things franchise, write about your viewing experience
* Write down a list of band names
* Sum the number of times a given child poops in a day in a "spreadsheet"
* Take part in a "meet", which is a sort of phone call but with video
I hope that clears it up.
I’m still puzzled at what’s new and what’s different from what people with (free and paid) Google accounts have.
In many ways, the market has matured enough that Old Google isn't viable. Shareholders care about P&L and Google's one major innovation, "ads that work," is industry standard now. Old Google worked because ads made so much money that it drowned out everything else and gave people a lot of freedom to do crazy things.
Wall Street wants the numbers.
https://youtu.be/ICp2-EUKQAI?t=199
Wow, Google literally demos almost exactly that:
Also Google's spreadsheet program is dogballs compared to excel.
Basically, Workspaces is failing so they're trying to open it to a wider audience in the hopes that it won't fail. It'll probably be abandoned by October and shutdown in a year or two.
Because if the answer is no, it's going to the graveyard no matter how many users it has. (https://killedbygoogle.com/)
Which means, practically, that everything is done through internal mail lists, because chat is not usable.
Pre-covid, that also strongly incentivized everyone to actually work on campus.
Edit: Disc: Googler.
I think they've gone beyond making it unusable, I literally don't know how I'd find it if I wanted to, and they've long since convinced me that I shouldn't try.
FWIW, chat.google.com wasn't rolled out for @gmail.com accounts. It was being rolled out in Google Workspace/gSuite. And this announcement rolled it out to @gmail.com accounts. Old Hangouts is replaced by Chat for text and Meet for video. You can access it at chat.google.com.
Voice is for texting with your GVoice number. It used to be possible to integrate with Hangouts but it's not integrated with Chat. Chat just works with gmail/Workspace account and not a phone number. Voice works with a phone number.
0: https://workspace.google.com/terms/sla.html#:~:text=rate-,go...
1: https://support.google.com/a/table/7539891?hl=en (and this is just the public list).
If you open Word or Excel directly, does the main page show you a list of appropriate documents to open? I have found the amount of times where the workflow requires navigating to a document through teams first to be extremely minimal. If the document isnt on the list, typing a couple characters into the Word/Excel search bar does the trick.
There is a "shared with me" submenu on the main screen of Word / Excel. Things shared with you should show up.
If it got dragged into chat, do you have the option to right click or three dot click and open in desktop app?
In my experience, you never have to open it in the webapp before opening it in the desktop app, if you ask to open in the desktop app or open the desktop app first and then open the file.
Like you, I can't fucking stand it, and I make the same mistake at least once a day.
Disclaimer: I work at msft etc etc.
Obviously, other systems process the contents of your email, eg spam filter, the frontend displaying the email to you, and I assume the government can get access through legal warrants (the ethics of the secrecy of such actions is a different debate - Google is required to follow the law).
1. a switchover to Chat (apparently some hybrid slack/discord/I can't figure out)
2. serious plans to compete with microsoft office via more enterprise capabilities
3. availability of (previously) paid gsuite-only features to individuals for $10/mo
all bundled together in a mash
I feel that they have neat product ideas, but organizationally maybe the are oriented around engineering lines, so product might lack focus, and product marketing is an afterthought.
Remember Google+ ? Nobody knew what it was.
Remember Wave? Nobody really knew what it did.
How does the biggest company on earth fail to understand how to communicate basic things?
This product page has way too much text, and not nearly enough 'what it is' 'what it can do' and especially 'why'.
As such, it's hard to get the word out organically.
Information spreads like a virus, you want a high R0 which comes with clarity, consistency and authenticity.
'Company A strategy vs. Company B' is not something 'people' think or know about.
That's something for people in the industry to think about.
Ask your mother or father who work in Real Estate and Healthcare what 'Google+' is (back in the day) and they wouldn't really know.
And nobody knew what Wave was. I used it and couldn't understand it, other than it was a means to communicate with other people. Colossal product marketing, usability and communications failure.
You'd have to ask your Circles.
Not a lot better, but still better. There's a gif of basically integrated workflow between email, chat and document editing... I think.
Probably more Microsoft or whatever.
I really just want custom domain hosting with Gmail and ignore everything else.
Groups could already sign up to pay for Google Workspace, that doesn't change.
Individuals could also sign up for Google Workplace group account that only a single person would use or use a lot of features in their individual account.
The announcement could be more straightforward about what's actually changing.
At the moment, they still have dis-joined paid offerings, for example Youtube Premium, Google Play Pass, Google Workspace, etc. - with many Google products, such as Android or GMaps, there is still no way to pay your way out of tracking/ads (at least that I know of). Instead, there should be a single paid subscription, for all Google services.
I left Google a while ago[1] but if the "privacy subscription" offering became a thing, I would be back in no time.
[1] My main Google account was deleted and replaced with a combination of Mailinabox, Nextcloud, Duckduckgo etc. - but I have an alt account only for Youtube, linked to my wife's Youtube Premium Family plan.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8637365 (2014)
https://contributor.google.com/v/beta
But it was never very publicized and I'm not sure how well it worked. It seems you can't sign up as a user anymore but they're still fielding individual publishers?
I would assume it just wasn't very popular, but feelings on programmatic ads have shifted and it's definitely worth trying again IMO.
Ideally Google One would bundle all this (YT Premium, Play Pass, etc.) for the users who want that, but offering them separately might make more sense for many users.
Will google Docs suddenly be limited to documents no longer than 3 pages or 3 collaborators unless I pay for a subscription to "Google Workspace for Individuals"?
The rebranding from "Google hangouts" and "Gsuite" to "Google Workspace" and everything inbetween I have to say has been a tremendously terrible marketing job, given the talent of the people at that company.
Sadly for me, it seems like a re-brand like you said. It also seems like they may be planning on evolving the communication suites Email, Chat, Video Chat, to be a more integrated experience a la Microsoft Teams or Front?
Again presumably, the GSuite Admin Dashboard would thus likely be integrated into the SPA as well (i.e. this SPA would now "be" GSuite) — but for the people only paying for a Google Workspace, not a GSuite org, they'd probably see a version of the GSuite Admin dashboard where most of the more complex functionality related to domains / group policy / etc. is hidden, with the stripped-down version matching something more akin to a Slack team's admin panel: user management, group management, storage management, and app/integration management.
whip
as someone who used gmail since the first week of beta: this is most definitely not true
Google Chat to Hangouts to Hangouts Chat and now back to Chat. Amazing.
[1] Will be renamed to "Google Metaphor" in 2022.
Announcement here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/helping-bus...
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/next-evolut...
For me this is a classic case of a great idea that for the life of me I would never decide to depend on because Google has so thoroughly trashed their own reputation for supporting something that it would literally be more hassle to recover from their inevitable sun-setting of the project after I had invested in it, or done the ransom thing where "now I need to be on a 'pro' plan to use that for only $x/month."
[1] https://marcellusdrilling.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/luc...
In any case, I wasn't going to pay Google $72 a year just to get a trickle of email. I signed up for the Zoho free plan and I'm starting to wonder why I stuck with Gmail so long. It's making Gmail look like it's from 2004. Granted, the free plan you can only use their web app or mobile app. But it's like $12 to step up to a full plan with POP/IMAP I think.
https://medium.com/builduniversity/how-to-hook-up-a-custom-d...
Cool. So when are we (admins - or heck even users!) going to be able to edit, or delete, or hide, or restrict access to, rooms/Spaces?
(Unless you're like me and still have grandfathered unlimited storage).
I'm just glad I make enough money that I can keep my GSuite and my personal separate. The one mistake I made is paying for this Google One shit which I don't know what it is but I'm too afraid to let it go in case they delete all my photos and email.
Literally the most half-assed platform of all time. But the features are so good I'm pretty sure I'm paying three times for them and not upset. It's the risk of losing the data that scares me.
One of these days, I’m going to self host it. Just need to figure out what’s the best way so my e-mails don’t get bounced back or get flagged as spam
Thanks!
Apparently, I was wrong.
Google Apps for Your Domain --> Google Apps --> Google Apps for Business --> Google Apps for Work --> G Suite --> Google Workplace
Same thing happened to Hangouts/Chat/Meet.
It means google is reduced for me to only being used for "casual" things as a primary store or secondary backup for other things - but those are specifically what I won't pay for (at least, not much) ...
Also, love ya grandma... :)
I can think of Hangouts, Gchat, Messages, Duo, Wave. Now Workspace.
How many years until the next one? I'm guessing 1.25.
Here's my list:
- Talk
- Hangouts
- Hangouts Chat (now called Chat)
- Allo
- Messages
- Voice
- Google+
You could arguably throw Groups, Inbox, Wave, and Gmail in there, as well, I guess.
I don't know if the product/branding people at Google need to be fired or to be taken seriously for the first time in the company's history, but I wish one of the two would happen.
Which sucks, because thats the only way to get Google Voice, which we still dont have here outside of Workspace.
Is this the used-to-be google apps?
is this g-suite?
is this google for education stuff?
I wish they had.