Has Google become a big waste of time?

computerworld.com

19 points·johndfsgdgdfg··7 comments

From an end user perspective most google products are the same or worse than they were when this article was written (the big exception being YouTube), but their ads business has continued to explode, so whether Google itself has been a waste of time depends a lot on who you ask.

> most google products are the same or worse than they were when this article was written

Maps was an HTML based non-interactive tool that mostly gave printable driving directions.

Android was a laggy and hard to use mess.

Photos didn't even exist.

Most Google products had a tiny fraction of the feature set they do today, in a world when even one of these features is removed, people complain for years like how they did for Reader or Inbox. So to claim that these products "are the same or worse" is very deceptive. You wouldn't last a day if you were thrown back to using the 2010 version of these products.

Anything else is just rose-tinted glasses.

>You wouldn't last a day if you were thrown back to using the 2010 version of these products

Pretty sure I did just fine at the time...

That's because you haven't had a taste of the hundreds of features that have been added since, and embedded them into your daily workflows.

>Maps was an HTML based non-interactive tool that mostly gave printable driving directions.

Google Maps launched with interactivity (or at least had it by the time this was written), pulling in tiles dynamically instead of loading a new page like mapquest. At the time of this post Google Maps even had turn by turn navigation on Android.

(2010)

I was wondering what Google Buzz was :)

2010

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