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Comment by peterangular | Hacker News Reader

> their messaging platforms and failure to leverage Google voice for 10yrs after the acquisition are too

The Hangouts > Chat transition is exactly this. Objectively, they've made it worse and more buggy on their own Android platform. Ever since the transition I talk to friends less on Google services. Many of us jumped to Discord

Don't even get me going on the Gmail rollout...

Google was once an innovator (search, Gmail, Docs) but I'm not expecting quality from any of their future product rollouts... especially if it's an existing product.

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This upsets me, because I genuinely liked GTalk and early Hangouts. The constant rebrands and iterations made me and my friends stop using G's chat products too.

I too don't expect quality from anything Google anymore. It's become an untrustworthy brand.

Yeah - I moved off every Google service during covid (switching all accounts to fastmail was the biggest pain, but once moved has been great).

One nice thing I'll say is Google's data tools and privacy controls are great. It's very easy to export/delete/control your data there from the settings if you dig through them.

The only thing I still use regularly for personal accounts is YouTube premium.

Thankfully no friends use hangouts and I was able to move the stragglers to signal. I personally don't like discord either, but it's harder to get people out of that one (for now).

> Google was once an innovator (search, Gmail, Docs)

Docs was from an acquisition.

I used to think that mattered, but I’m not so sure any more. After all the people that developed that product became part of Google, and they didn’t become any less the innovators of it as a result.

I think what matters with an acquisition is how it’s managed and how the technology is developed. I think it’s unarguable Google has put significant investment into docs and done a good job developing the product so I have no problem at this point giving them credit for it.

If you want maintained, passionately developed software, it absolutely matters.

I used to use Google docs because it was faster that starting libre office. Now Google docs starts 15s for empty document.

FWIW on multiple browsers on several different computers I've never had Google docs take anywhere close to 15 seconds to load.

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