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Comment by COGlory | Hacker News Reader

I tried so hard to integrate into the Google ecosystem. I had a Gmail account and Google Talk to start. Eventually an Android phone, on Project Fi, with Hangouts and SMS (so I could send SMS over the internet). I upgraded from Gmail to Inbox. Then when they ditched that for Allo and Duo I tried to switch to those. Then I lost SMS on my computer because it got removed from Hangouts. Then I tried to switch to Google voice after they redid that, but you couldn't have Google voice with Fi...I also uploaded all my music to Google music. All my RSS in Google reader. I had a Google+ account. Multiple Google pixels.

I really thought Google was going to be the answer for a completely integrated, non-Apple online life.

Anyways, long story short, after endless frustration trying to get everything to work seamlessly, I ditched Google entirely.

My email is now IMAP. I have multiple accounts in one app. My calendar and contacts are now WebDAV. Every other app I use on PC and mobile can integrate with them. My messaging is now Element/Matrix with bridges to whatever other services I need. My search is DuckDuckGo, browser is Firefox, etc.

Currently, everything is as integrated, or more integrated, than it was with Google, and worlds more stable. Somehow, despite being huge and having all the data and basically a monopoly, they still can't integrate to save their lives.

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I used Google Voice when they first acquired it - it was years early and really ahead of things back then. Texting from the web, voice transcription for messages, could ring multiple numbers.

Then they did nothing with it for maybe seven years? MMS would silently fail so people inviting you to events via group chat or sending you a photo would just think you were ignoring them.

Hangouts came and the mess with that and sms was worse. I had nexus phones back then which also had turn by turn navigation before the iPhone did.

Huge missed opportunity, years wasted. When the iPhone 5 came out and Apple Maps shipped turn by turn nav and eventually iMessage did everything voice did but better I switched and never went back.

Google’s software consumer stack sucks. I also tried to like it - it’s a mostly crappy mix of stuff that gets dropped, ignored, and poorly integrated.

At the same time Apple’s stuff has improved year over year. Out of all the large tech companies I’m most bearish about Google’s future - they seem aimless. Deepmind is cool, but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing.

> At the same time Apple’s stuff has improved year over year. Out of all the large tech companies I’m most bearish about Google’s future - they seem aimless. Deepmind is cool, but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing.

As an iOS user, I feel the opposite in most areas except calling/messaging/facetime. I find Apple software to be severely limiting their own hardware. Their iPads are such excellent devices yet severely limited because of iOS. If iOS hadn't done calling/messaging/FaceTime right, I would have completely ditched them.

I agree there’s a lot more potential for iPad hardware UI, but also think they’ve improved year over year.

It’ll be interesting to see what they work out for iPad OS to make it more powerful. They’re obviously not willing to just slap a standard PC OS on there. I’d guess they’re going to come up with new stuff from first principles as best they can for it (even if that means limiting it in the short term).

Based on how MacOS switched app icons to rounded corner similar to iPad and they added extra spacing on menu bar icons, controls (volume/display etc) are all similar to iOS ones, I won't be surprised if they put MacOS on iPad. iPad already has M1 chip too.

They're closer to putting ipadOS on macbooks

As against all the awesome tables OSes and applications on competing devices?

I think it's just that growing tablets to be competitive with desktops is either really, really hard or just not reasonable to expect. As a form factor, for all that I love it and you'd have to tear my iPad out of my cold dead hands, it just has inherent limitations to go with it's strengths.

> As against all the awesome tables OSes and applications on competing devices?

Not them, but my argument would be compared against a full desktop OS.

I love the form factor and for smaller things, if I had a full blown OS, I would be able to do so much more and not carry both my laptop and my iPad.

I'm glad Apple are putting in better support for keyboards and touch pads in iPadOS. It makes sense that these can improve usability in a lot of use cases. However I don't use those and even if I did iPad apps must always be usable without them.

I think that imposes significant limitations. Some of the more powerful apps I use on my iPad have quite fiddly interfaces that would be fine on a desktop, but are really awkward on the tablet. It is getting better, but very slowly as developers figure out how to adapt to the form factor.

The new Multitasking interface does look like a big improvement though. Hopefully that will help developers to step up a bit.

It's because Google voice wasn't a Google product, it was an acquisition. It used to be Grand Central. But yes they basically bought it, threw the G on it, and then let it bitrot.

Google has the same problems Microsoft has always had. They have one huge cash cow that funds the entire company, and everything else is peripheral (a first world problem of course). Arguably MS now has more than one, but they've existed twice as long as Google and it's taken many decades to get to that point.

It never really mattered if PlayForSure, Zune, Bing, Windows Phone etc were big successes or not, the company was absolutely fine anyway. XBOX is a success, but the massive billon+ write off they suffered back in the day means even now overall it's probably not made a profit, and if so not much. IE has floundered for over a decade. They do have many successful products but most of them could die and it wouldn't matter.

It's the same with Google. As long as they're awash in a torrent of search advertising money nothing else matters. Like Micorosoft they do have some successful non-core products. Chrome, Android, GMail, Google Docs, Chromebooks. However all of those could drop stone dead and they'd be A-Okay.

This is why Amazon is so impressive to me. Bezos built two world class mega-businsses simultaneously from scratch. I can't think of a single other example of this anywhere.

They're not quite at the same scale as amazon, but many of the Korean/Japanese behemoth companies have enormously succesful businesses in multiple areas. Samsung, Sony, Yamaha for example.

The Zaibatsu/Keiretsu took many generations to get where they are now, and relied on heavy political patronage and financial muscle to grow over protracted periods of time. None of their founders built multiple global businesses from scratch in a single lifetime, let alone simultaneously.

They're also very much artificial constructs, in the sense at this point they are as much political as economic artefacts. The Chaebol are more recent in their modern form but followed the same model.

> They have one huge cash cow that funds the entire company

Office, windows, Azure/development, Xbox/gaming are all integrated and cash cows.

Surface, Dynamics/PowerBI, Research, NeXT (Hololens)

All utterly peripheral, they could wither and die and have no noticeable impact on the bottom line, which is exactly the point I'm making.

Surface is already ~$8B of revenue/year business, not sure how or why you think a business of that size is unnoticeable or nobody would notice that if it were to wither away. Not sure how specific revenue figures I'm allowed to express here publicly but Dynamics and Hololens have also been big cashcows lately.

Research, sure it isn't a direct revenue generating group but their patents portfolio is immense.

Heck, even LinkedIn is $10B/year business now. Maybe you're living under a rock?

They’re nice businesses, but losing them would not substantially change or harm the company the way losing Windows or Azure would. The way losing AWS would harm Amazon, losing Search Ads would harm Google, losing iPhone would harm Apple. If Microsoft lost XBox or LinkedIN they’d walk it off. That’s the point I’m making.

I addressed XBox specifically. They wrote off $1.5Bn over the XBox 360 red rings of death issue. It's possible they might have recouped that since, with inflation and interest adjustment, but doubtful.

Windows and Azure are the tent poles I was thinking of when I said they had more than one now.

I tend to see Windows and Office as fundamentally the same business though, along with development tools, in the same way that I think it's unreasonable to consider Apple's applications business separately from MacOS. Split Office from Windows and I think it would struggle, certainly it wouldn't have got to where it is now. It's an add-on to the Windows business. On it's own it wouldn't be industry dominating the way Windows, AWS, Google Search, etc are. It's a good business but not industry shaping, not anymore anyway.

Arguably Windows was starting to fail and Microsoft appeared to be in serious trouble. Then Nadella replaced Ballmer and corrected course: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/

Now they’ve pivoted to grow azure and O365 successfully in addition to leverage the Xbox via game pass to fit into that strategic world.

I think this mostly supports your point - it took an existential crisis and ousting a CEO that couldn’t adapt in order to save them when their cash cow started to falter.

Windows never failed in desktop OS. And didn't succeed in mobile in the first place.

Nadella could quickly release office cross-platform because of work during Ballmer.

Desktop operating systems as a differentiating feature started being a strategic failure because of the web. Ballmer doubled down on Windows at the expense of other stuff.

There is a common HN trope that Ballmer was doing everything perfectly and Nadella just continued it.

I don’t buy it and neither did the market. (Neither did Microsoft’s board presumably)

I think Ballmer’s entire strategic direction was long-term wrong and Nadella changed it. This isn’t to say no projects started under Ballmer (they definitely did) it’s about whether those were prioritized or would have ever shipped under him successfully.

If the wrong things are considered important - it doesn’t really matter what projects are happening.

Google was the one pushing web relentlessly and has arguably made computing UX worse for everyone. From bad performance and overdone advertising+tracking to relatively smaller issues like bad accessibility.

They're still trying very hard to put everything on web so Chrome can be what windows used to be.

The web won because it's cross platform, keeps state across everything and puts collaboration among users first. In a lot of ways that's easier for users - it's the closest thing to a universal OS.

This is mostly a failure of desktop operating systems to be interoperable and perhaps most seriously fail to support good network first/collaborative thinking in design. I think they did this in part because they saw being distinct as a way to differentiate themselves, but also because they were created pre-internet before a lot of modern application use cases were really possible or relevant, in the end this made them less competitive and native applications less desirable (in most cases).

I also wish it wasn't that way because the web has a lot of issues, it's slow, creates incentives towards megacorps that run centralized servers and ads, etc.

All this is one of the reasons I'm hopeful Urbit might succeed against all odds - they're rebuilding the OS with network first in mind.

Chrome isn't really comparable to windows because anyone can make a browser that reads the open web standards - while only Microsoft could make an OS that ran windows apps (outside of hacks). This reason is why web won out over native even though native apps have nice performance advantages.

That plus limited amounts of high quality devs can target the web and ship to everyone without having to build multiple native applications for multiple platforms, and again native platforms still haven't solved collab really.

Keeping state across and putting collab first is something native apps can do as well. You don't need a web interface to do that.

I do however agree about the positive cross-platform support. From my experience, which is very limited - it is the decades of backward compat and complexity that makes native development so tiresome. It gets even worse when there are multiple platforms with not much in common.

Thanks, I'll check out Urbit.

And? How many non-Chrome browsers do we have? Even Microsoft gave in to Chromium. Can't wait for Google's next move to tie their protocols deeper into the browser just like they did with Android and playstore services.

This was another eye opener to me, how limited high quality developers are.

> I don’t buy it and neither did the market.

I suppose you didn't check the stock...

> I tend to see Windows and Office as fundamentally the same business though, along with development tools, i

What? Windows, Office ( cross-platform since recently) and dev tools are totally different cash cows.

The ring of death ( = console) isn't even related to the cash cow in consoles. It's the 30% commission on 60€ games.

Anti-competitive behavior for not releasing it to other platforms in the past, doesn't mean it's "just an add-on".

>What? Windows, Office ( cross-platform since recently) and dev tools are totally different cash cows.

Office for Windows was released in the same year as Windows 3.0, supporting all the new core technologies including OLE. Before then MS desktop software products were also-rans. From this point on they dominated, because they had been engineered natively for Windows right alongside the development of Windows itself before any of their competitors even had access to the frameworks and dev tools, or Windows 3.0 to develop and test on. It was part of a single coherent integrated platform strategy for Windows. Now it's grown beyond the platform, but the reason it matters is because of it's privileged position on the Windows platform.

XBox just doesn't matter. It's not big enough. If it died, Microsoft's bottom line would barely shift. Office does matter, we just see it's strategic position differently.

> It was part of a single coherent integrated platform strategy for Windows. Now it's grown beyond the platform, but the reason it matters is because of it's privileged position on the Windows platform.

Just like iOS and Apple apps or Chrome and Google sites?

> XBox just doesn't matter. It's not big enough. If it died, Microsoft's bottom line would barely shift. Office does matter, we just see it's strategic position differently.

xbox was $3.5B (8.5%) of the $41B revenue last quarter - not sure why you think that wouldn't affect bottom line or understand the fact that gaming/xbox is a growth business with a recognizable brand.

To give you a perspective, xbox alone made more than all apple services except for App store (even then the difference isn't that huge).

Is it existential in the way that Windows is, or AWS is for Amazon, or iPhone is for Apple, or search ad revenue is for Google? That’s what I’m talking about.

One contrast between Microsoft and Google is that Microsoft doesn’t repeatedly break working products and confuse everyone with changing names around yearly.

Microsoft has a long history of failures from Bob to the Zune, but their core stuff, including Windows, Office, Visual Studio, is solid. Bob didn’t destroy Windows. Occasionally the products go off course, like Windows ME, but they seem to correct fairly quickly.

It certainly has been disappointing watching rock solid software from Google just disintegrate over the past decade. If it wasn’t for the iOS Mail app, I suspect gmail would be completely botched by now.

Another consideration to the Verge article, how much money has Google spent doing all of this wild stuff just to their messaging products? I would guess well over $10b. Organizationally Google’s management layers should be gutted. From the CEO to middle management, the company is run by people who couldn’t operate an average company lacking a high margin cashflow cow.

The difference is, when Apple's software and services are disjointed and user hostile, it's because they think it serves their business interests, and they may be right. I'm proof of it.

I buy all their hardware in spite of not being able to use FaceTime or iMessage (beyond than SMS functionality) or any of their iCloud and services sharing because my wife and friends are all on Android/Linux/Windows. It's not a big deal because most software I use is on the web anyway.

But Google is a mystery to me. I recently tried to subscribe to Youtube Premium, but they wouldn't let me sign up with my Google account because it's a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) account. So if you pay for one of their services you're locked out of others. I don't think this is a business strategy. Google is simply flotilla of rudderless ships.

Compare the CEOs of Google and Apple. The contrast explains everything.

Every year I keep thinking Sundar Puchai’s ouster is imminent but it has yet to happen. Which perhaps explains Google’s disfunctionality even more.

Google Voice was basically almost de-staffed for few years. Then they started to invest into it again around 2017, I don’t remember exact reason why the strategy changed.

The original acquisition was simply to get their hands on the mounds of voicemail data so they could train their fancy new speech recognition models. It was a prescient move (the Google assistant is still years ahead of its competitors), but they never really had any interest in nurturing that baby. They got what they want from it and let it wither on the vine.

Years later, when Apple neared feature parity, they tried to salvage what was left of it, but it was too little to late. They started creating new messaging apps from scratch that didn't catch on, and now they have a flotilla of pseudo-connected messaging products in various states of abandonment.

Ironically, I think Apple is the only entity with the power to guide Google out of this mess. If Apple integrated its (encrypted) iMessage platform with the already-existing (encrypted) RCS standard, it'd suddenly be the closest we've gotten to having an interoperable communication standard since XMPP/Jabber in the mid-aughts. Apple won't ever choose to do this on their own of course, but I'm holding out hope that it sees the antitrust storm clouds forming in the distance and starts to take some drastic pro-consumer measures to neutralize that threat.

Early adopter curse.

I remember buying the first DVD Recorder on the market and being pissed later on that I couldn't burn the (much better) DVD+R type discs in my drive.

I never switched from my carrier to Project Fi. Never switched to Hangouts. Never switched to Inbox. Never switched to Allo and Duo.

So as far as I'm concerned... Gmail and Google Voice have pretty much always been working as intended for me.

It's kind of what you have to expect when you consider that we are Google's beta testers. Gmail was in beta for YEARS. If something new shows up, I may wait a year and see if it's still around, then maybe consider that I start using it... if I have a use for it.

In the end, Gmail is worth it to me over having to run my own email server. Never again. Ugh.

Google's beta in production strategy worked great when they were turning whole categories on their heads. I'm not sure it still works for them given the reputational damage. They're creating an in for more focused upstarts to swoop in and disrupt them piece by piece.

My concern is that there really isn't much left to 'turn on their heads' anymore. When Gmail came around, webmail was mostly hot garbage. Things just have matured since and well... I can now almost understand the culture issue that Google has now: Needing to reinvent something new instead of making what exists better. (And that's also entirely the problem)

Can't wait for Project Back to the Basics. If it ever happens.

Which service do you use for CalDAV / CardDAV? I've been trying to migrate from a gmail account to my own personal domain, but my current provider doesn't support those so I want to move on to someone else.

The thing that annoys me most is that (as far as I can tell) only the big name providers have integrated mail/caldav/carddav, if you use a bring-your-own-domain solution they need to be added as 3 separate accounts (at least on iOS/macOS).

I've been looking for a sane calendar service that's not Google calendar and there's just nothing that's open-standards compatible.

Fastmail supports CalDAV (as does iCloud).

I use mailbox.org that has CardDAV and CalDAV in addition to email. I use DAVx⁵ for syncing to my Android phone. Mailbox.org's web UI is clunky but I rarely use it for anything other than extending the subscription. The calendar/contact sync and email have worked well.

+1 for DAVx⁵. It was free on F-Droid, but I've paid for it anyway because I want to support the developer (and also I think it's a nice touch making it free on F-Droid but charging on commercial app stores).

Fastmail's calendar is built on the Cyrus IMAP server's CalDAV support, which does all the open-standards. It also has the upcoming JMAP Calendaring support and JSCalendar (soon to be an RFC) format.

There's a couple of other good CalDAV servers out there too, though of course as Fastmail CEO I can't really advertise anybody else :p

If that ain't the way to sell something, I don't know what is!

Will check it out right away :)

It's definitely a sell, no freebies (well, apart from the 30 day trial)

Fastmail is fantastic if you have an iOS device. They provide a file which you simply download/open on your iOS device and it automatically configures your phone to access FastMail mail, calendar, contacts, etc. I believe they use the same mechanism that corporates use to configure employees phones. Could not be more easier and you get to use all of Apple's native apps. iOS + Fastmail is the best combo I've found so far for easy Mail/Contacts/Calendar independent of the big giants.

Yet another +1 for Fastmail. Long time customer when I got sick of running my own IMAP/SMTP about 5+ years ago.

It has IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV. It has a snappy and responsive web interface and their iOS app is equally as good.

They have configuration of profiles for MacOS and iOS down (I can't talk to other environments).

I have a bunch of domains doing email through there, but I run my own DNS. I had a need to configure things that Fastmail's DNS doesn't deal with (IPv6 etc) but for general use, it's great. Properly configured SPF, DKIM, DMARC, good spam filtering, easy contact managenment etc.

self-hosted options: nextcloud, radicale, baikal, cyrus.

Another +1 for Fastmail and a referral link for 10% off your first year (or up to 12 months) if you decide to try it: https://ref.fm/u25202288

> . Somehow, despite being huge and having all the data and basically a monopoly, they still can't integrate to save their lives.

In a way its a blessing for other smaller companies to perform better. Dinosaurs may have all the money in the world but it does not make them better in execution.

> Then I lost SMS on my computer because it got removed from Hangouts

This isn't true, if you were a Fi subscriber. Fi subscribers were able to keep using Hangouts SMS up until they launched the replacement, Fi support in Messages for Web. There was no time where Web SMS was unsupported.

The transition worked reasonably well for me. I do miss the Gmail integration, and it's lame that you can't have RCS enabled if you want Web support (of course Hangouts never supported RCS anyway so it's not a regression, and hopefully it will be fixed someday). But otherwise it's a fine replacement and I use it every day.

I'm confused. I have Fi and I lost SMS in Hangouts as well as the ability to call in hangouts. Now I need to separately open google voice website to get those features. It's infuriating.

Yes, you lost SMS in Hangouts. But you didn't lose SMS on the web. The deprecation of SMS in Hangouts was delayed (for Fi subscribers only) until the replacement web SMS solution was ready.

I agree, as I mentioned, that the loss of Gmail integration is annoying. But the ability to use SMS on the web, without requiring a connection to your phone at all, is still there. There was no time period where Web SMS wasn't available for Fi subscribers.

But your integration into Google ecosystem was not an objective, and this is not a mess at all, it worked as intended - a lot of people got promos!

Just imagine if there is a consistent, coherent multi-year strategy, it would be way harder to get a promotion.

(I actually worked on one of the mentioned messaging products, it was a shitshow)

without giving names or identifiable details, could you explain what a "shitshow" looks like in those kind of environments ?

Is it like having an insane amount of validation, or everchanging requirements, or huge technical constraints, demotivated or unqualified people, etc.. what is it ?

i still remember the time when google was at the forefront of web app innovation, and it was probably already quite big. So i'm really curious to know what are the things that make it different today.

The name of product in question hypothetically might have started with A and ended with o.

This was last-ditch effort to outwhatsapp WhatsApp. Essentially this is high-risk high-reward project. Google comp is not setup to deal with this. Some people who were early in the game and shipped initial version got their good reviews/promos and quickly left after ship. Rest of the team started a shaky ride trying to find that extra secret feature that will turn this ship around, while metrics were not so good. This lead to worse reviews, management reshuffles, unsteady short-term micromanagement. Which in turn motivated more people to change projects.

The failure of enthusiastic VP of Communications and Photos (I kid you fucking not, he traded Hangouts for Photos, he wanted to shutdown Hangouts, but it turned out a lot of enterprise customers depend on it. So GSuite/GCP said they are going to take over Hangouts, so after some politicking he traded it for Photos). Anyway, he’s failure is to setup and manage this project in such a way when smallest negative result doesn’t lead to a shitshow.

Meanwhile I’m using Google stuff just fine. Skip the fads and stick to the basics, and it all still works. I’m glad your setup works for you, but Google apps haven’t been all that frustrating for me.

I’ve been using Gmail and Hangouts since they were introduced, migrated from Google Talk to Hangouts which was fairly transparent except I had to stop using Pidgin and use the web app instead. Still using Hangouts all these years later until they make me switch to Chat. It works fine.

There is a chance I try to get my family and friends to switch to Element or something instead of Chat, but it’s unlikely, since Google will provide a smooth switchover and we’ll all just have to tap a button to switch, and they’ll interoperate.

I got a Google Voice number many years ago too, but only use it for forwarding, never set up Fi, and it still works fine. Never enabled the hangouts SMS integration, because I can already get texts on the computer.

I skipped out on Allo and Duo; they seemed like a lost cause from the start. Never really posted much on Google+ anyway.

My music was in Google Play and now it’s in YouTube Music, but I mostly stream anyway. I don’t love the new interface, but it mostly works fine.

I had lots of RSS feeds in Google Reader, but NewsBlur had a simple import and works just as well as Reader ever did.

There's not even a button. Google Chat seems to "just work" already. I am cautiously optimistic. It actually also seems better than Hangouts. https://mail.google.com/chat actually works well. Pageup/pagedown works, which is a nice change.

"Google Chat" feels a lot like they finally fixed all the bugs they introduced when they replaced GChat with Hangouts.

What are you doing now for SMS? Google Voice alternatives are surprisingly thin on the ground.

I don't think Google or Microsoft have the culture to compete with Apple in consumer space. Microsoft is all about milking enterprises and Google seems to be geared towards launching random projects and then getting them stuck in limbo or killed off.

This is sad for me because I hate how locked down Apple ecosystem is, I constantly get rubbed by their store policy that I stick with Android, but life is much simpler in the Apple ecosystem and none of their competitors look like they have what it takes to compete (eg. Samsung software is a joke even when the hardware is competitive).

I think they easily outpace Apple in the consumer space. What areas do you think Apple does better?

Thanks for laying out alternatives. Others were already asking about Calendar, but additionally I am curious if you found a solution for Maps/Navigation and Photo syncronisation and sharing. I'm still trying to find a migration path off from Google...

Photo sync I use Nextcloud for. It will automatically upload my photos to my Nextcloud instance. That takes a bit of effort though, because you have to set up a Nextcloud server.

I tried using another search engine, like Duck, but they are horrible. I don't know if it's because I'm not in the US, but it's BARELY usable.

this seems pretty pertinent here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27575640 and I guess it answers my question from that thread - Google still doesn't get platforms.

> My email is now IMAP

> WebDAV

Can you explain how you implemented these too?

What’s WebDAV I’m just curious to know

It's calenders events over http(s) with ftp-like file transfer (yes still over http)

WebDAV is a fairly portable file (or "resource") transfer and remote directory listing etc. protocol over HTTP designed such that it doesn't conflict with regular HTTP operations (GET, POST) send from browsers and implemented by traditional web servers to replace late-1990s FTP-based site maintenance practices by a webserver-integrated facility. It uses HTTP PUT operations (not normally send from browsers unless using JavaScript) and introduces WebDAV-only HTTP verbs (COPY, LOCK, MKCOL, PROPFIND, etc.). It uses XML payloads for representing directory listings and arbitrary file metadata attributes. In the context of this thread, the add-on protocol CalDAV is meant, which specializes the "resource" concept to calendars and scheduling events. There's also a much more elaborate XML-leaning protocol for messaging called XMPP.

I read this the Linkin Park way https://youtu.be/eVTXPUF4Oz4?t=53

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