I'm tired of Google's business products | Hacker News Reader

I'm tired of Google's business products

221 pointssqlpipe188 comments

I've been trying to start a business lately, and as many people do, have chosen to rely on Google's suite of products. Google Ads for marketing, Google workspace for email, Drive for spreadsheets... The works.

While working for other companies, I never really had a problem with their services. In fact, Google remains one of my favorite companies of all time for solving the search problem (their search engine is still the best, sorry haters).

However, over the past few months, I have STRUGGLED against the tide to use their other services. My Google ads account is currently suspended for reasons I cannot fathom. My Google Sheets spreadsheet is currently frozen (the reason I'm ranting right now). Their administrative setting pages feel like going to the DMV from the amount of options on screen. Last but not least, their support is almost nonexistent.

Am I alone in this? Is this a problem of my own making, by using Safari instead of Chrome, and not configuring my services properly? Or is this a feeling that others get?

Conclusion: I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off.

Edit: Shameless plug, my company peddles a data movement tool called SQLpipe. https://sqlpipe.com

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I created a small ad campaign to advertise a side project. The projects makes no money, has no plan for monetization, does not use passwords. The only personal data it collects is an email address.

I bought $50 worth of ads using my credit card. My account was immediately suspended for suspicious payment. I appealed, noting the card was mine, and I bought the ads. The appeal was rejected.

I have occasionally tried to resubmit the appeal, but it says "please wait 3-5 business days before submitting a new appeal." I wait more than that and get the same message.

I've called Google to try to talk to them. However, once it asks for my contact information, it tells me that they cannot talk to me because my account is suspended. It's a circular nightmare.

I currently do not needs ads so it's not a hardship. But it is extremely frustrating.

EDIT: One irony is that it is the same card I use to pay for my other Google services, linked through the same payment backend. They have no issue charging that card for my other services. But for Ads, it's suspicious. Who knows.

For whatever reason, if you post and it goes viral on twitter or reddit they tend to notice and comply....

Customer service through flaming pitchforks and torches really isn't a great business model but hey it is Google, what do they care?

Sadly it's been like this for very long.

I attended the third Google Summer of Code, and they paid me using an unnamed credit card. It was impossible to use the card anywhere, including using their very own Google Checkout!

All my transaction attempts were flagged as suspicious by Google. And I was performing very normal purchases from a regular country, both online and onsite.

Getting hold of someone that could help me was a nightmare, and I only managed to use my funds 20 hours before the card expired, and a year after GSoC had ended.

They have never had a customer service.

I've noticed this trend. However, this is not a solution. There are many people with similar problems who cannot win the viral lottery.

Yes! It's a systemic issue and it has turned into a popularity contest online... whoever has more clout gets their account fixed... It is a big issue and I agree with you.

Yep. Worked for us when the issue got quite a bit of attention.

Details - https://ilya-sher.org/2018/03/23/google-deleted-our-g-suite/

Be required to burn your 15 minutes of fame to get a reply from a company whose services you're paying for isn't worthwhile.

OP has just invented "Proof of Grief", a new way to mint crypto. Burn one to get an actual human being at Google to help you with a problem that they themselves caused for you.

The demand for this coin is basically unlimited.

This makes me want to make a startup which is a customer service arm for google. It runs a 2-sided marketplace to pay real google employees who can help with users who need their accounts unlocked/etc. It would have different categories for finding a relevant googler, and could even schedule them in shifts, with a chat room and shared note-taking space for the employees to collaborate. It would be a win win.

The next phase is when someone who believes in the startup gets to a exec position within google, and can hire and shield actual CSRs who only work through the startup. That business unit will find more success because of the better customer support, which will put pressure on other business units to do the same.

It would of course be much better if google just had the decency to provide human support.

That is a great idea provided that you can find actual human beings to make a deal with. I'm sure someone from google is reading this with a smug expression in their faces.

"I've called Google to try to talk to them"...

Currently contemplating this, but am certain it will leave me with a feeling of "well, I'll never get that 30 minutes back"

The support reps are nice and will talk to you but can't do much. My experience has been the following:

I have Google One and it annoys me that the new Drive client automatically adds a shortcut to my favorites in Finder and Explorer everytime I restart my computer. Google has been made aware of this a year ago according to threads in their product forums from about a year ago (they have thousands of upvotes). They haven't done anything about it and I haven't heard any feedback from the request that the support rep forwarded to the product team.

So from my POV it looks like they have support staff that answers to your request, but they have basically no power in the company and can't make any decisions. They probably send their request into a void where they get ignored.

My guess is that the only way to work with Google as a business is to buy their services over a major partner that generates tens of millions in revenue per year and has a personal relationship with account managers at Google.

Google has reinvented Soviet bureaucracy.

And they are in a position to suppress complaints via their search

To their credit, the automated system told me I was banned and couldn't talk to anyone until I got unbanned, so I never got anyone on the phone.

Sounds like a good ol' curfew pass A38.

Sounds like someone forgot to fill out the form twenty seven B stroke 6.

If Google trusts their AI that much, I hope they make the precognitive step of replacing their CEO with an AI. Other companies will and survive, whereas the Google AI will never recorrect itself and subsidize their stock at an exponential level.

Can confirm had the same issue. Begged someone in their team for 2 weeks to help until they did.

This is exactly my situation. There is no recourse.

Did they take the $50 or was the payment rejected? And did you get the money back if they took it?

I do not believe the payment was ever attempted. If I remember right, I approved a max spend budget, put in payment details, and then the account was immediately suspended before anything could be charged as the ad campaign never ran.

* > I've been trying to start a business lately, and as many people do, have chosen to rely on Google's suite of products.*

Just a reminder, most businesses fail - so doing what many people do is not necessarily the best thing to do.

Having said that, it's rather foolish to have your business depend on Google. They have repeatedly demonstrated they're not good business partners and the main thrust of their business isn't in providing products and services for businesses. They don't support their services, they'll drop them at a moment's notice without any regard to the impacts to your business, and there's no way to get ahold of a human being when things inevitably go sour. Why do you want to partner with someone like that?

I bash on the technical merits of Windows all day long but one thing Microsoft has done well over its nearly 50 year history is serving the needs of business. It's in their DNA. Office 365 is a very capable, and supported, platform. Nice thing is you can run it on a Mac too!

Exactly. They make major decisions, give you less than 3 months to completely change things you depend on. And you can't even get someone on the phone (or even email for god-sake) to complain to.

Sorry, but as a user, Office 365 is a nightmare to use. Outlook on Mac can’t even do in-line email quotes. Sharing documents in your org is done via SharePoint(tm), the greatest nightmare on the planet. Don’t get me started on MS teams.

Google products are much better from a UX perspective imho.

I think it's just a matter of opinion. I've used both O365 and GSuite extensively at different jobs, and after the initial switch, they are not too different, each has their annoyances, but I don't see a major change in productivity or quality of output between the two.

In my business I like the option of sharing a .docx or .pptx and not having to ask a client to use google docs to view stuff. But when I had google docs, I made it work. I agree with the root comment that MS is much more business oriented though. At the end of the day, Google's "products" are still just a ruse to sell ads, so they don't have the institutional focus on solving business problems that MS has (not that MS is in any way perfect)

Spot on. GSuite is a temporary thing, a fad. Microsoft 365 will be around long after we are all dead.

Lots of horrible-to-use software is extremely successful commercially. This usually happens when users of the software are not the ones making purchase decisions (SAP) or if there are strong network effects (Windows).

I think the comment was about enterprise/business support, not features.

Some businesses arguably care about their employees.

You have the same problem with MS or Google, and Google probably isn't going to kill Gmail/Drive anytime soon. If it's a core service you're fine.

You can absolutely contact support for MS products and they will be helpful. I've done it multiple times for our tiny account.

>You can absolutely contact support for MS products and they will be helpful.

I used to work as a sysadmin for a Windows shop. The support was terrible (~2013). Can't say about Google though.

Same here. Their support is rock solid.

Google also has support for all paid Workspace tiers.

I hate Google Workspace so much.

Not because of the product, which seems fine. But because 10 years ago I signed up for google apps. It was marketed as a way to have a vanity gmail domain. Free forever up to 10 users.

I thought it was cool, was a huge Google fan at the time, and created a custom domain for myself and another one for my grandparents. Now, 10 years later they are holding my online persona hostage in a shameless cash grab to try and make Workspaces more profitable.

All I ever wanted was my own Gmail domain. I have zero use for the business functionality. Fuck you google.

I'm a VP of Cloud Platform for a rather large enterprise and quite frankly this is why we won't even consider Google Cloud. Broken trust. Broken promises.

> Now, 10 years later they are holding my online persona hostage in a shameless cash grab to try and make Workspaces more profitable.

I'm in the same boat, but since ~2006 when I started my first company (dont recall exactly when I set up my google apps account though). I have to chose whether to move my account (which thanks to sign in with google is attached to more places than I can even remember), or pony up $6/mo/user with 20 friends and family having email accounts under my domain.

I have not yet decided what to do. But if I leave Google. I will leave for life, and that includes multiple other Workplace accounts that I already DO pay for. I'm sure losing a few thousand a year doesn't matter to them, but mail-in-a-box seems like a decent fit for my limited email I actually use on those older accounts.

I know it’s not the same thing but Cloudflare just released a new product for email that’s free. It just forwards any email from your domain in cloudflare. I already use cloudflare and instead of paying google apps for it, I just forward * to my gmail account. Thought it may be of some use if you’re not actively responding from them.

Exactly. If I have to leave I will leave forever as well. To the point of buying a mac / iphone, and completely leaving the google ecosystem. That's how much this pisses me off.

Its now about the principle rather than how much it actually costs.

I run an online club with about 20-something email addresses. We're almost certainly moving to Migadu (which doesn't charge per account and seems reputable, according to lots of folks here) and then downgrading our account to the "Google Workspace Essentials" so our Google Docs don't go anywhere.

I moved to Migadu from Google Apps a month ago. The only minor issue is slightly worse spam filter but everything else works well and the ability to use Sieve scripts is really nice.

My baby, PretzelBox.cc, is no Google but it does give you an inbox for your domain and a half decent looking blog (https://pretzelbox.cc/blog/) and a way to store and share files.

/shameless_plug

The page you link doesn't exactly give a good impression. The logo in the top left links to bulma.io, The templates list links to one called "Very Cool", but there's no way to get back to the original template (except of course the back button). There's no link back to pretzelbox.cc. The landing page there is much better, but then one of the testimonials is for a service called Moogle. The only connection between Moogle and PretzelBox seems to be your Twitter account.

The /blog/ related issues you pointed are now fixed. Thank you!

You're right about Moogle. While I was working on building PretzelBox, I had launched just the blogging piece - i.e. post to your blog from Gmal - as a standalone service on Moogle.cc.

Appreciate you taking the time to give feedback.

> which thanks to sign in with google is attached to more places than I can even remember

I used to think refusing that option and creating new accounts was just me being obtuse, but I don't regret it now (and with a password manager it's mostly not a major drag).

Will all those people lose their email when something happens to you?

They shouldn't - I usually keep enough money in my corporate bank account that will keep the handful of expenses running for years.

> All I ever wanted was my own Gmail domain

You don't need Workspace to use the Gmail UI with your custom domain. All you need is a regular free @gmail.com account. First switch your domain to an email hosting service that provides SMTP and IMAP, you probably get one free from your domain registrar. In Gmail settings for your @gmail account, add your custom domain as an alternate address for sending mail, using your SMTP server. Also configure Gmail to fetch mail from your IMAP server. Voila! Gmail is now a frontend for your custom domain, absolutely free. You can continue to use your existing custom email addresses, and you can forget about Workspace forever.

If you have purchased content such as Play Store apps that are tied to your Workspace account, you can downgrade it to a "Cloud Identity Free Edition" account, and continue to use it. This is a pain, and I think they are finally working on some kind of migration tool to move that content to another account. Hopefully that happens soon.

This definitely works in a pinch but it's not quite the same. Things never work quite right, for example calendar invites, push notifications for email and Google Sign In. Also, most clients will expose your custom domain AND your gmail address when they receive the email. If you're using it as a semi-professional address, this is probably a deal breaker.

You are trivializing a migration that involves more than ten times as many components. Here's my todo list for the same problem:

- gmail - drive storage - calendar - contacts - keep - photos - music - domains - Pay - adsense - webmaster tools - analytics - authenticator - Home - maps - chrome - youtube - Play - email at external sites

Can you explain your idea about using Cloud Identity Free Edition in order to allow an email at a third party to own Play Store apps?

You don't have to transfer ownership of the apps. I'm not 100% certain but I believe that you can just login to the phone with both your real account and the Cloud Identity account, install the apps from the Play Store using the Cloud Identity account, and once they're installed you can use them with either account. That's how it works with other Google accounts. And of course you only need to do this with paid apps previously owned by the Cloud Identity account. New apps or free apps you can just get in your real account.

Is there an in-depth howto guide to do this?

FWIW, this is literally exactly how my product PretzelBox (https://pretzelbox.cc) works. We are looking for beta users, if you care to take it for a spin.

A few issues:

- The braced hamburger menu — your logo, actually, on your blog home page redirects to bulma.io.

- There’s no way to switch from the "Very Cool" template back to the original.

Fixed! Thank you so much for pointing them out. Also added a couple of more templates to the menu.

I’ll get these fixed asap! Thanks for highlighting.

>All I ever wanted was my own Gmail domain.

Who owns the domain here? I use a custom domain with Gmail Workspaces, but I own the domain, and therefore control the MX records. The only thing I'd lose in a switch is stored email messages, but there are ways to download those.

Yes. I own the domains. And if they go through with this I will move and leave Google's ecosystem entirely.

It will be a huge pain in the ass trying to do it for my grandparents though.

Gotcha. Yeah, IT for the parents & grandparents is definitely a challenge for things like this.

It's a challenge for everybody. Having to put people who aren't computer savvy through it is just a reminder of what a pain in the ass it is... The fact that we can self-service doesn't make it less of an annoyance than we have to do something.

And at this point, the pattern is clear. Google Business products are free until they are not. Building them into your infrastructure is taking on technical debt that you will have to pay down in the future, either by actually buying the product when they decide it is no longer free or by switching to an alternative.

I still run into websites with a big API disabled rectangle where their Google maps integration used to be.

You need to migrate all the other google products you use with that email, including Photos, Play Store, Contacts, etc. It's about 20 products.

I wonder how many people with some clout have decided to forego Googles business offerings because of a bad personal interaction with them.

I use Gmail with my own domain for free. My domain registrar (namecheap) allows forwarding of email for free. You can add extra email addresses in Gmail itself.

When you send or reply using Gmail, does the email appear to come from your gmail account or your domain?

In Gmail you can choose the FROM address, so it appears to come from your own domain.

My own domain. I use Gandi's mail forwarding and SMTP (via GMail).

Is that large Enterprise a bank, or a company where VP actually means something?

Drive is incredible…ly terrible.

Our non-technical staff (and some good technical people too) are always losing track of where files are. They write a doc then can’t find it later.

The desktop tool (so you can use it like Dropbox) keeps getting confused and disconnecting on the Mac.

I’m also part of a scout troop that uses google to organize its activities. In the troop’s Drive I’ve found doctor’s patient records, the marketing plan for a major public company often mentioned on HN, and other documents clearly accidentally stored/shared with this group.

If your drive folder has more than 50,000 files and you try to download an archive ZIP of them, your files will disappear at random. The only way to avoid this outcome is to install a desktop client and sync the folder.

> The only way to avoid this outcome is to install a desktop client and sync the folder.

Except the google desktop client is utterly flaky. They make Dropbox look good.

And that's a low barrier. The Dropbox client is totally flaky with me. I've never managed to get it to sync my files, because I have too many I guess? I just used rclone to get everything out of my Dropbox so I can close it.

I've synced terabytes with Dropbox no issue and know others doing the same. All others cloud sync products I've tested are much more flaky. Google drive was the worst and had many issues supporting others who decided they must use it.

Not sure what your dropbox issue is but I'd check you have the latest client, check you have granted file folder permissions to the app if using macos. First sync takes a while but performance is good after the first sync.

Sadly I tried pretty much everything. It was the newest version, no previous versions installed. I had 2TB of data, but it was hundreds of thousands of small PDFs.

I've also used One Drive, GDrive, IDrive, Mega and some others. All of them have different issues. I guess I hate One Drive the least, but the barrier is low.

I hope you verify file existence and integrity using a third party tool instead of blindly trusting the syncer or eyeballing it.

Use rclone to grab them instead.

I used to be part of a volunteer organization that is a loose confederation of local chapters that are all kept in line with a bit of copyright law by the original chapter. The central council that meets nationally on a monthly basis is organized almost entirely through Google Drive.

The problem with the Business side of Drive is how Google conflates Groups, the message board/mailing list product with Groups that you apply permissions to. The chapter I belonged to had our own Google Apps domain. My account on that domain was added to one of the mothership's Groups so I would get announcements and participate in discussions.

Unknown to them, that Group inherited a lot of default permissions from their Shared Drives. I couldn't get to the drives by browsing, but if I searched for terms that matched documents in those shared drives, I could open the documents AND open the containing folder. At which point I could browse up to the root of the shared drive.

I reported it on the sly, one Mistress of Webs to another. We had a good "holy sh** what?!" laugh about it.

It got fixed but as I've spoken to people at other NPO orgs that use Google apps, I've found that most have had the same mess happen: A group with external members was created as a convenient mailing list. Then, later they discovered that if the external member was also a Google for Business account they "inherited" some interesting access to things in Drive.

Drive's organization is a usability nightmare and I hope someone at Google has a plan for this. Shared with me is a graveyard, file permissions are a nightmare to manage, and repairing mistakes is painful to impossible.

> usability nightmare and I hope someone at Google has a plan for this

One of the things I love about HN is the humor.

> I hope someone at Google has a plan for this

Knowing Google the plan is to kill it and make a new thing, without options of moving, make it free so people flock to it and then turn into a subscription a year later.

I can usually find the docs I've created pretty easily--but then I'm pretty good about sensibly filing things.

But finding random Shared with Me is pretty problematic especially if I don't know exactly what I'm looking for. And, of course, as you say, if you're sharing docs, it's pretty easy to share with someone you don't mean to. Of course, the same could be said with sending around docs on email.

And docs shared with me can’t be moved into my filesystem

Whether you can make a snapshot copy depends on permissions I think.

But, yes, what I'd really like to do in many cases is to basically create a symlink to documents I know I'll be referencing/working with somewhere that they aren't mixed in with all the shared meeting presentations and the like I'll never look at again.

Indeed because a snapshot loses the shared editing, which is only sometimes what you want.

Not by right-clicking on the docs. You have to select the folder or document and then press "Shift-Z" which brings up a prompt letting you select where in your drive you'd like to move it.

And yes, according to their forums, even this feature will be removed at some point in the medium term future.

If you can't find files, are you saying they're disappearing? I'm having a hard time understanding what the problem has to do with Drive specifically.

If people just forgot where they put something, it seems like you need to develop and practice some organization. I work with lots of clients and use Drive and organize things into folders named for each client, and then into separate categories based on what the file is. It's relatively easy to find things.

If I happen to forget, then I've found the search works well. I use the cloudsearch page at cloudsearch.google.com

I consider myself a technical person, but opening the files on Drive is always stressful for me (fortunately I don't need to do it often). The navigation sucks (I don't see the files that I know are there), the search is the only thing that works - if I know what to search for. I wonder how many files I simply don't know I have.

We have had a few files just seemingly disappear, never to be seen again. Only once or twice, but still.

Mostly, organization of files behaves... oddly. It is weirdly hard to ensure everyone has a consistent view of a hierarchy / folders. Search does work, so long as you have a good idea what you are searching for. It isn't great for discoverability, or if you only have a vague idea what it is you are looking for.

The interface does not make it easy to figure out where a file you have opened is located.

I'm not making the trip. It sounds like you're saying users are moving files to the the wrong folders on their computers and the desktop tool respects that. What should the software do differently?

I guess the idea was that it's very confusing for non-technical people, and very easy to misplace..

(sorry if your message was accompanied by an "/s" -- I didn't see any)

I'd rather pay to use Dropbox than have 50GB+ free on gDrive.

Google is an advertising company. Their productivity apps exist for one reason --- privacy invasion/data collection --- in support of their advertising objectives.

Using Google apps for anything other than advertising is like going to a medical doctor for a toothache. You might receive something that temporarily eases the pain but the root problem remains largely unsolved.

Do you think Google is reading the contents of drive documents? I struggle to make the connection between those kinds of business apps and advertising.

Perhaps they get some usage data of how/when people work?

I do believe much of what Google does (i.e. chrome) is to benefit their ads business, but I think it's a bit cynical to think that's true of every product they have.

FWIW I've worked at companies that use both Microsoft + Google suites (mostly drive + calendar + mail) and generally preferred Google's. I did not have any issues like the post mentions.

>Do you think Google is reading the contents of drive documents?

It literally says in gdrive tos that they read the docs, yes they do .

"Our automated systems analyse your content to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customised search results, and spam and malware detection,"

They actually removed the statement that you're quoting from the current version of the Google Drive terms of service. (The old version you're quoting is still available online, but it's under an "/archive" URL.)

That being said, I've read through all the Google Terms of Service online, and I can't actually figure out whether they still use Google Drive content for customized search results.

>>I struggle to make the connection between those kinds of business apps and advertising.

I'm starting a restaurant. I put together a doc about items I need. All the sudden I'm getting ads for restaurant equipment.

Yes - I understand the connection if they are in fact reading document content

Do you think Google is reading the contents of drive documents?

Google's definition of "reading" involves human eyeballs.

Do they have algorithms in place that can collect personal data from drive documents?

Most likely.

It's been proven that they scan your mail for every scrap of available info such as web links and purchases receipts. Why would they treat other documents any differently when there is no legal requirement to do so?

https://mashable.com/article/gmail-tracks-your-purchases

Google’s Ad Products have - over the last few years, in the pursuit of “smartness” —gotten progressively dumber and harder to use, making all sorts of bad and often unchangable decisions on your behalf, and having really awful interfaces for trying to make any sorts of edits and apply them anywhere. And I say this as a technical marketer. Facebook’s ads products are a godsend compared to the awful nonsense that is Google Ads.

Which of Google's productivity apps collect your data for ads? Can you provide some proof?

The fact that Google engages in and facilitates privacy invasion shouldn't need proof at this point.

https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/gmail-snooping/

Can you prove or show anything in their terms of service or privacy policy that legally prevents it?

Being a profit driven company, the only reasonable assumption is that anything that can be used to increase profits will be used.

Of course both the privacy policy and TOS are very explicit about this.

https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US

> We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos.

https://workspace.google.com/security/

> Google does not collect, scan, or use your data in Google Workspace services for advertising purposes and we do not display ads in Google Workspace

https://workspace.google.com/terms/2013/1/premier_terms.html

> Notwithstanding any other term of the Agreement, Google will not process Customer Data for Advertising purposes or serve Advertising in the Services.

Will you be retracting your claims, or are you planning on moving the goal posts instead?

We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos.

LOL! Everything from Google must be carefully and legally parsed.

No, they don't show ads *from Drive, GMail or Photos* --- these services are ad free. They do show ads *from the web* --- based on your personal profile and data collected from multiple sources. Nothing here rules out using data from Drive, Gmail and Photos to profile you.

It's been proven that they scan, collect and save purchase receipts and access/scan web links contained in Gmail documents. Why do you suppose they do this?

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18629789/google-purchase-...

Regarding your *Workspace Premier* terms --- The document you quote is not current but paid services do have different TOS. This is not a major source of their income.

> No, they don't show ads from Drive, GMail or Photos --- these services are ad free. They do show ads from the web --- based on your personal profile and data collected from multiple sources. Nothing here rules out using data from Drive, Gmail and Photos to profile you.

Are you really seriously claiming that there's some kind of ambiguity in "Google does not collect, scan, or use your data in Google Workspace services for advertising purposes"?

If you're going to argue that "advertising purposes" wouldn't cover using the data for ad targeting, they have text explicitly addressing that too:

https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change.

https://www.google.com/intl/en_fj/drive/

Your [Drive] content is safe, private, and never used for ad personalization

> The document you quote is not current but paid services do have different TOS

True, sorry about that! The current version states:

Google will not process Customer Data for Advertising purposes or serve Advertising in the Services.

But given that it's the same text, I don't really see how this helps your case.

> This is not a major source of their income.

Why would that matter?

> It's been proven that they scan, collect and save purchase receipts and access/scan web links contained in Gmail documents. Why do you suppose they do this?

Pretty obviously the receipt thing was due to it being a really convenient feature for Gmail users. I used it multiple times, and was sad when it was removed due to the outcry. For scanning web links, the even more obvious reason is to scan the links for malware, phishing pages, etc. But I am confident that these things are not for any kind of advertising purposes. And so should you: it was after all you who set the bar at whether using the data for ads was disallowed by the privacy policy or TOS.

When you get to set the standard of proof, and then refuse to accept that proof when provided, it doesn't really feel like you're acting in good faith here.

But I am confident that these things are not for any kind of advertising purposes.

When your proof is "I trust Google", it doesn't really feel like you're acting in good faith here.

It costs Google time and money to scan your email and extract and store your purchase receipts --- and you think their only motivation was to be nice? Wow!

But assuming your interpretation agrees with Google's legal team ... where do you suppose they get all the info needed to profile users and deliver "personalized" ads --- which is how they make 90% of their money?

Presumably from applications like Search, Chrome, YouTube, Android, Ads, Play Store, Assistant, Translate, News, Maps, Podcasts, Shopping, Google TV, Discover, etc. (That list based on the sources that show up for me https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols; your mileage will probably vary.)

But not from the productivity apps, which is what you were complaining about.

> When your proof is "I trust Google", it doesn't really feel like you're acting in good faith here.

What do you think the reactions from various regulators around the world would be if these statements turned out to be blatant lies like you suggest? Lying about it would be really, really stupid when the option is to say nothing.

If you don't trust the TOS and the privacy policy on such crystal clear statements, why did you suggest that as the proof you wanted to see?

Presumably from applications like Search, Chrome...

And presumably Google Docs and Google Sheets --- which are productivity apps. Basically any of their "free" services.

What do you think the reactions from various regulators around the world would be if these statements turned out to be blatant lies like you suggest?

They're not blatant lies. I showed you above, Google is perfectly OK with you interpreting things in a way that differs from the legally plausible argument they will put forth in a legal setting.

Your TOS quotes are from their paid "premier" products. These are not their only productivity apps.

> And presumably Google Docs and Google Sheets --- which are productivity apps.

No. I did not include them in that list for two reasons. First, as has been demonstrated Google is incredibly explicit about data on Drive (which Docs and Sheets are) not being used for ad targeting. There is no ambiguity there. Second, because those apps are not listed on that activity page. Nor are the other apps where Google is making explicit statements about the data not being used for advertising purposes, e.g. Gmail, Photos, Chat.

Again, they're pretty open about the apps whose data can be used for ad targeting. There is no misdirection there, there is no hiding of them from the list of data that they have. If you were correct and they were just blatantly lying, why not do it for all products?

> Your TOS quotes are from their paid "premier" products. These are not their only productivity apps.

The initial submission was about Workspace, so of course I linked to those. But when you moved the goalposts, I posted additional links that were about consumer services (Gmail, Drive). But here's one more. The page for with the account privacy settings says the following, whether you have ads personalization turned on or off, and even for a consumer account:

https://myaccount.google.com/u/1/data-and-privacy

Content from Drive, Gmail and Photos is never used for any ads purposes.

There is just no ambiguity here.

The link you included seems to have nothing to do with our claim that Google is using data from their office apps for advertising. It looks like it was about people explicitly granting vetted third-party apps access to the content of their email. What's the connection?

What's the connection?

The connection is that they aren't legally prevented from using any data that passes through their servers --- and in some cases allowing others to use it too.

Thank you for saying that. We will have to band together and fight against Google. I think we should have a separate category on HN to expose Google's evil doings.

Observe HN posts for a while. You will notice, that whenever Goolge and their support comes up, comments are rich with experiences/anecdotes of people, who have been stonewalled by Google. Their support is non-existent. Having proper support would cost them lots of money. Same for their other big disservices like YouTube. How many people have been banned for non-sensical reasons and tried to appeal. It has become something of a common knowledge, that there is basically no support worth mentioning, at least in the tech circles.

Oh and don't think for a second, that using MS' alternative web products (Office 365) is much better. You pay for the probably buggiest office experience on the planet.

I can confirm Microsoft ads (Bing ads or whatever they're called) are even worse. We shut off an underperforming campaign and they were automatically restarted, repeatedly, until we disabled the entire account.

It's better. I hate Office 365 usability with a passion, and I hate the bugs, but it's much better than periodically having a fire as Google burns your business to the ground.

Microsoft deals with businesses, and it works.

> Is this a problem of my own making (...)? Or is this a feeling that others get?

I can understand why you "had" to rely on Google Ads. But in my opinion choosing Google Workspace/Drive falls unfortunately under "problem of your own making". None of the problems you describe is new nor unknown, and there are plenty of products that are just as good.

> I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off.

I think that that's the issue: maybe not in ads, but there is competition for everything else.

> and there are plenty of products that are just as good.

Other than MS Office, what's a good suite providing all of shared docs, spreadsheets, email, and a cloud drive?

If you're in the Apple ecosystem, file sharing through iCloud and the Apple quite of apps is pretty good (not quite as good as O365, but worlds better than Google Docs)

I have to disagree here. iCloud file sharing is atrociously bad. I share a fairly minimal amount of files with another apple account and there's constant sync issues, it's not anywhere near realtime or even "soon". Shared files and folders routinely never show up in iCloud drive even when they appear on the web interface. Restarts seem to be required to fix problems as they arise.

I've had nary an issue in the last several eyars since first trying it ... guess this may be a ymmv situation?

I might be the wrong person to comment on this, but I would never even remotely have the idea to use any google product as part of my business other than their web search.

I don't really see the advantage this would give me over any desktop solution at all, while giving me a ton of disadvantages. Any update could destroy my companies work, and there would be nothing I could do. I can't guarantee data privacy for both myself (trade secrets?) and my customers (data protection laws?). I can't really build automated infrastructure on top of google because they could change any part of the product ever so slightly without notice and have it break things with a big crash (or maybe even worse: silently).

Infrastructure that you are in control of is better than infrastructure that you are not in control of, if the core of your business depends on it.

I decided I wanted to start a blog and run ads on it, created a google ads account and was immediately blocked with no means of redress or support, only automated "tough luck" replies.

Me too!

Upon appeal, they emailed me back saying "we can confirm your account isn't suspended"... It's like what are you talking about? I'm looking right at a big red banner saying my account is suspended!

My hopes are not high for a fast resolution.

The OP is not alone in being screwed over by Google. I mean, your small business can get absolutely wrecked by them, and they don't seem to care. There appears to be out of control malicious targeting, blacklisting, suspensions, banning, shadow banning, and privacy violations without accountability or due process.

The opinions of many is that Google is very unreliable, unless you are a big enough customer for them to care. It gets really weird when you start paying for various Google services, but apparently are not paying enough. There can be an expectation of customer service and support, that is not there.

Even worse, if you are not big enough to matter or paying them enough, seems you can easily get stepped on (to include odd suspensions). Your business revenues can possibly decrease, where you thought previously it would been a good idea to use Google services and products.

Very good argument, as a small business, not to rely on Google. Find other ways, with better customer support and less weirdness. Have low expectations of Google, like you would street gangsters in the hood squeezing local unsuspecting businesses for cash.

Yeah they have edges and the support is bad, but they still kind of hit a sweet spot of good ux and features all tied into the google account you probably already use for mail/search.

I think we will see more competitors in this space though. Google isn’t investing enough into it and there is opportunity.

I think its kinda funny that Office is so ubiquitous that everyone forgets how the productivity software market is like. Microsoft has 90% of it, so credit to Google for taking on the incumbent. It will be insanely hard for any challenger to dislodge MS from a company with thousands of employees, let alone build multiple products to beat all of the ones bundled in Office. The moat is large, like taking on Google themselves in search/ads

The primary reason I don't use Adsense is the risk that I'll be locked out of my Google account for unknown reasons.

I've heard the same advice here on HN: if you're using Google tools for anything, do not use Adsense.

This is something that has worried me somewhat as well. Is there any sort of workaround? Can you use a burner Google account for it?

"Google Services generated $69.4 billion, or about 92% of total revenue, in Q4 FY 2021. Advertising revenue, at $61.2 billion, comprised 88% of the segment's revenue."

Most of their money comes from Ads, they couldn't give two crap about all other services, including cloud. And that's why they keep launching and discontinuing products.

My company (~30 people, healthcare field, engineering, software) uses Google. I have heard complaints about the ads, but I use the sheets on a daily basis, and we all use the drive to share and collaborate on most files. No complaints on that front.

I really like sheets because I learned how to use AppScript to automate a lot and I can't imagine working on anything without that functionality. Same goes for docs, slides and the rest of the suite.

We do have a guy who handles all the support and set-up though so I don't have the full perspective on this.

I have been trying to increase the quotas they set on my gcp account and the whole thing has been an absolute madness :

1) Try increasing number of nodes - > fails with some cryptic message saying number of in use addresses is hitting the quota limit.

2) Search through their absolutely garbage console to go to the exact page which has the quotas. Try editing - > See a tooltip (not even an error message just a tooltip) saying I can't do it my self and has to contact their support.

3) Contact their billing support and ask for quota increase. After taking all the details they redirect me to their sales support.

4) Contact their sales support and its like dealing with second hand car sales people. Even after clearly stating that I'm an existing customer, they want a complete biography of my whole business, its needs and everything else. At the end they say they don't have anyway to actually raise the quote increase request from their side.

5) They have helpfully assigned me a relationship manager for further 'assisting' me with evaluating their products and that I got a meeting request for next week to discuss our 'needs'.

Absolute garbage company with third rate support and sales people. And I can say that with confidence because I had the exact opposite experience with Linode when trying to raise limits on my account. Got a human to both respond and increase the limit almost immediately and I didn't need to provide any details about my business.

I'm with OP - Google products are absolute trash.

It's funny they manage to have resource quotas but folks around here claim they couldn't possibly add spend quotas.

1. Nerd snipe Hacker News, for example with a story about how Google's services are declining in quality

2. Link to your company website

3. Better marketing than your allegedly suspended AdWords account!

You might take a look at the Zoho One suite, my experience with Zoho has been great as a small biz, and you definitely get a human when you need support, they are very responsive and helpful. Not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer.

I love Zoho! Used it on another project, and will certainly use it going forward.

> Am I alone in this?

No: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811297

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30771057

It’s complete BS and between the forced upgrade to a paid account for the same email I’ve used for about 10 years AND the lack of response to an Adsense issue where I could not run ads for a YEAR because Google thought a JPEG was malicious software, I’m moving everything I own away from Google. Already moved the email and domains, working on the drive stuff now.

I was one of those people who was hesitant to jump on the cloud bandwagon as a personal user, I didn't trust it. I didn't foresee the random account closings, but I file them under "service interruptions I can't predict". I don't own a business, but if I did I'd strongly question every attempt to give up control. There is nothing worse than having your business threatened by some crazy algorithm that won't stop banning you for who knows what obscure reason, or whatever the next thing will be in a few years. It's obviously an unaccounted for risk and it should be handled as one. If my business depends on it and I can't reposition fast enough, it could be disastrous.

I also distrust "free". If I'm not signing a contract, I have to assume I don't have any real recourse if something random like this happens.

Google's stuff is barely hastily patched together, hard to reason through crap.

It works, don't get me wrong. But I'm helping a family member start a business on the tech front, and most of their offerings are opaque to her. Built by tech people to be used by tech people, without the benefit of good, solid, onramp documentation, tooling, and user hostile offering design.

Example: don't even try to admin Drive with anything less than business Standard, despite the fact centralized file handling is most useful to those with lower data quotas.

The sharing is a mess. And I was horrified that most searches for Google drive administration were either docs that tried to sell you on drive, or internet public drives of individual users who just left stuff out there with personal information in it waiting to get reaped.

At this point, it really frightens me what Google is trying to normalize in computing.

I would never use google for my business. I would rather self host it, especially with a small team or solo.

> their support is almost nonexistent

This is the critical bit. If you're happy with a vanilla product where you essentially search for how to access every feature ("how do I make a pivot table?"), Google Suite is for you. I use it for just low-value bags of documents, nothing critical in it at all. I never have a need for special features, and anything I do need I'm confident is actually there because I only use spreadsheets for totally vanilla stuff. I also don't depend on anything being available, so I avoid the pain every time there's an outage.

I think for that kind of service, a few bucks a month is about right.

For anything that needs a higher level of service, you don't really want to rely on a business whose strategy revolves around minimal customer interaction.

Makes me think of a question I've pondered but to which I don't have an answer: is there a way to use Libre Office synched through cloud storage such that multiple people can work on different parts of the same document at the same time and see each other's changes?

Nextcloud with Collabora CODE has worked pretty well for me, but please keep in mind I'm only using it at home.

They offer a more enterprise option, I believe. CODE is more the development track.

Collabora is also a major LibreOffice developer. They're pretty great from about all standpoints.

There is a Libreoffice "cloud" project, but I'm not sure how stable and reliable it is.

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

I completely agree - this is nearly verbatim a personal frustration I recorded in my work log from a few days ago:

Extremely frustrated with Google Shopping ads. I can’t understand how they make money. Spent an hour trying to figure out how to:

- Add custom UTM parameters (can’t unless with a manual feed, it looks like) because Google doesn’t doesn’t seem to track shopping ads unless you install extra JS events and modify google analytics

- Change search queries that products come up for (after deeper research, look like you can’t - again, handled by the data feed but your product title must be now SEO’d to all heck to hit the right keywords. Good luck if you have an original product name)

- Fix the product disapprovals (their bot was too dumb to understand how to navigate native shopify variants, it keeps seeing a mismatch between a variant and its price… and this is the data feed that Googles own app in Shopify generates!)

- Understand why the shopping ads dashboard in Google and the in-Shopify google shopping ads dashboard show different product disapprovals... just why? Genuinely confused here.

It’s ridiculous. It wasn’t this hard a few years ago. In the quest to add more ‘automation’ and ‘smartness’ they’ve made it so dumb and so bad it drives me up the wall.

It reminds me of the time when a friend tried to do Google’s recommendations for “smart” ads and it optimized his local North Carolina health store ads to ads for dieticians targetting neighboring states, because of a few logical algorithmic leaps of “well this is what other users see success with, with ads like yours.” He wasted a few hundred dollars and time fielding confused calls, until we reverted the campaign, turned all the recommendations off and made it a simple, dumb but effective campaign.

What a joke. A horribly infuriating joke played by a group of product managers and engineers. They are literally leaving so much money on the table because the platform is so unusable (speaking for experience: I regularly have people turn to me asking for help setting up their ads because they can’t make heads or tails of it).

> by using Safari instead of Chrome, and not configuring my services properly

I use Chrome for work and Safari as my personal browser and the amount of FUD created by Google is almost hilarious. In 90% of cases it's just a small glitch (e.g. a piece of UI looking a bit shitty on Safari), but in the remaining 10%... I get spiking CPU usage to the point where I could start frying eggs on my MacBook.

I still prefer my browser being occasionally sluggish when using Google services to the ad-infested cesspool my parents' Chrome is.

OK, my Safari can get a bit slow when using Gmail, but at least I'm not browsing the web through a storefront.

One aspect of building a business is resilience: What happens when things break?

Because things break.

I personally would not use Google business products for a startup. They're fine for established shops where when Google fucks up your account, they 'know' who you are. If you're a small-$ nobody, the support policy is "sucks to be you".

But everyone has different risk tolerances and fond feelings for certain companies. More important than that choice is to ask, "what do I do when Google/whoever breaks, or I have to generate a quote and the connectivity is down", and so on.

Speaking of which, is Atlasssian still rebuilding?

dear diary...

In any case, Google has plenty of competition in the areas you're talking about. Try the Office suite + Microsoft Ads.

I agree. Other options are Zoho [1] and ONLYOFFICE [2].

[1] https://www.zoho.com/

[2] https://www.onlyoffice.com/

Microsoft Office+Outlook+Teams is some of the worst software I've recently used. Poorly designed and poorly integrated with tons of overlapping functionality cracks where productivity goes to die.

Google Analytics

Google Ads

Google Workspace

All terrible experiences with overly complex UIs and a nightmare to use for small biz.

Just go 100% Linux with the LibreOffice suite and if the business takes off, kick down a sizable donation.

I think you hit the points yourself, Google is an advertising company that also makes business software. They never really had to offer support for SMBs, even for Ads, you need like double digit million spend to have a account manager. I've heard similar complaints from friends at big cos who moved to Workspace and even from Googlers themselves.

In terms of competitors, MS and Zoho the big ones are actually productivity software companies.

I worked a lot with both MS online offerings and google's. My own money go's to MS when it comes to documents etc . It is better than the offering of google especially if you need a bit more the the basics. Support is also better.

I don't thing that google office suit is bad just that MS is better

That being said I'm contamplating to stop with MS as I have less needs for a good office suit and just use what apple offers

My main struggle is more broad: I dislike modern crappy and archaic IT toolchains. For instance I see no points in using Meet/Teams/Zoom when we can do the same without a central service, but so far beside few limited software like Jami or classic, buggy and expensive stuff (classic VoIP gears) there is almost nothing and more important nothing spread so even if that's theoretically perfectly possible avoid those modern platforms I simply can't: being able to talk to myself alone is not much interesting.

Similarly I hate when people send .docx instead of a pdf with proper forms (and when people print then scan documents, or take photos of their screen to send them instead of a screenshot) etc...

Google by itself does not sell anything more crappier then it's competitors, so I "hate" them equally seeing not much differences between them. Beside that in corporate terms, it's not only a matter of internal choices stakeholders choices have to be taken into account and in the present time it's no less tedious avoiding Alphabet than using it, unfortunately...

I am now working on a startup idea. We use:

  Fastmail for email
  Github for code, actions, registry and projects management
  Discord for comms
  Obsydian + Git for notes
  Cloudflare for domains, analytics
  Hetzner Cloud for hosting

We are not at stage to advertise (pre MVP) but I made a decision to avoid Google from day one.

How about advertising? Do you plan on using adwords, or do you have any alternative platforms/services you think are useful?

We are building product for public sector. We plan to use a combination of direct sales and advertising on conferences and expert groups.

Microsoft has actual customer service

Just don't touch Teams and you'll be OK.

I never understand the hate Teams gets on HN - I use it more-or-less all day in both $WORK and $CUSTOMER environments ... rarely have more than a momentary hiccup in file sharing, screen sharing, group calls, chats, task tracking ...

Mac user here:

- It forces the discrete GPU for no apparent reason

- I cannot be in multiple teams, which is terrible to freelancers

- It has no AppleScript support compared to the excellent support of all other office apps, nor System Events

- Having connectivity issues with calls where Hangouts (or whatever it's called nowadays) just works fine

Never noticed the GPU issue (running an M1 MacBook Pro)

I'm in multiple Teams by being on $WORK on my laptop and in a VDI instance for $CUSTOMER

Honestly: never had a use for AppleScript ...haven't found anything I've wanted to automate on my Macs for the last decades

The calls issue is the only thing that's ever a hiccup ... and it's rare (and when it does hiccup, it's on my end (ie Zoom doesn't work either)

I use their other enterprise products and they are a bit interesting. They do listen to feedback more than the competition when you pay them enough but they seem continually lack perspective of their users who live outside the Google bubble. As a result, they can be user unfriendly and have a steep learning curve or bug tolerant, by which I mean I get the feeling they expect users to be comfortable debugging and troubleshooting a bit or figuring things out from minimal documentation.

I mean at the end their products are good. My theory is they are biased by statistics, where normally Google culture might be tolerant of issues to .1% of users here and there (which is still millions of users) but at their scale, when this becomes a culture it adds up fast. But that fail-fast culture is also crucial to being innovative without costing a lot of money.

> their support is almost nonexistent

#1 reason why I will never use GCP. With regards to their advertising services, last year their support took a grotesk turn - or account managers told us, that we have to create tickets to get help (which in fact mitigates the need of having account managers in the first place)

The advantage of dealing with small businesses in tech is that they are not huge cold monsters.

10 years+ ago I tried to get google apps (paid) setup for a nonprofit. Got in some weird doomloop / eventual consistency issue with the temp domain they assign being the admin At the time support was no help. Then I got a google home and it didn't work with my other google workspace account (I hear this was eventually fixed after like 5 years).

Compared to Amazon is interesting.

On Amazon.com I had a tricky high value return that really would take some thought to see I was owed the funds (some shipment mess with tracking issues). Someone worked it out and I got my money (maybe they looked at 10+ years of pretty high use with few returns in this).

And AWS dev support used to be good too (haven't tried recently).

> their search engine is still the best, sorry haters

Naming or using the "hater" word in the sentence does not make us in the right side of the story.

Considering users of other search engines as Haters does not sound right.

You think is the best, fine. Recently today, in this network, there is an analysis about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31020229

as far as I understood it, it was a tongue-in-cheek, a joke... or are you trolling too (in which case joke's on me :D)?

You got me...

yeah.. these days you really can't tell; every opinion, its counter-opinion, its meta-counter, its sarcastic spin, its trolling version, its counter-trolling, meta-counter-trolling versions.. everything (in the absence of body language cues etc.) is equally likely, which if I recall correctly is the definition of maximal entropy of information, i.e. random noise

Safari isn't a good browser for modern powerful web apps. I stopped using it once it killed an active Google Meet tab. Hello, I'm talking here, I don't care how resource-intensive it is right now, give me a warning if you'd like.

That wouldn't solve most of your problems, but on my M1 MBP I very rarely get any freezes with Sheets, and I often have thousands of rows there.

I'd prescribe libreoffice and nextcloud to your affliction, but my approach will be downvoted into oblivion for a myriad of Reasons™

I have used everything from google (as a typical user and as dev using their GCP) and everything they do "works" I feel like they do something messy and that's it. Kind of let's throw products and the client will figure out and if it isn't successful or we lose our main team we shut down the product.

I've never much cared for Google Workspaces. Give me dedicated desktop applications. Our corporate Google drive is a hot useless mess of ugly, half-finished files.

> I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off.

Microsoft Office is still a big player, and I personally really like the 365 ecosystem.

I used google ads in 2009 when it was still doing business in China.

Before I made the payment, i can always get through their cell phone, after I made the payment, there is no human tech support. And they own me 500 CNY.

We help with this, it can be easier. Miles@sada.com As good as their products are, setup and config and ops are invariably too pesky, so we train experts to know how to efficiently navigate.

are you playing for google apps/gsuite for a custom domain? I have had no trouble getting live support that way. Ymmv

And there is no way to provide feedback!

You're not alone.

move to zoho.com FFS

Google docs is a joke.

Huh?

If somebody was trying to make Microsoft Office look good they would invent Google Docs.

I hate to admit it but I am a boss with Powerpoint, I can get almost any kind of business illustration out of my head and into Powerpoint with the greatest of ease.

Giving me Google Docs to attempt the same is like giving Superman Kryptonite.

I think some people don't know how bad Google Docs is compared to Microsoft Word because they've got this idea that using Word is like putting your hand in a toilet so they never try it. If they did they would be singing ‘Google Docs is a Joke’ (I opened Google Docs a long time ago, don’t you know how late it reacts…)

I used Microsoft Office for years. Leaving aside collaborative editing which has been a game-changer for me (and, of course, you can get from Microsoft as well now), Google products do everything* I need and most of the features in Office just get in the way.

*I'm not a power-spreadsheet user these days and every now and then I run into some very specific thing I can do in Word that I can't do in Docs--or it's easier to use word for compatibility with someone else--but for the most part I much prefer using Google day-to-day.

I see Excel as the weak point in Office, at least from the viewpoint of getting the right answers.

There was that time I went and gave a talk in NYC and then came back to give the same talk in Ithaca and had an eagle-eyed web developer note an error in a chart I made with Excel because of the broken defaults.

There are numerous ways people get wrong answers with Excel, plus Excel does some really strange stuff to hide the fact that

  0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3

in floating point numbers (hint: none of those numbers actually exist in the floating point number system, when you ask for 0.1 you get a different number that happens to print out as '0.1')

There is something brilliant in the spreadsheet model, namely, it frees programming from the need to sequence operations in some particular order. The CS community has seen relaxing this as a way to find parallelism for the CPU & friends but not so much as a way to take a burden off the programmer who might not need to think about it.

However there is quite a bit structurally inadequate about Excel from the grid model which doesn't necessarily fit the problem and no support for software eng practices to make complex sheets that really work.

Former Excel developer here. In Excel 97, the difference between the values needed to be less than 1e-16 times the magnitudes of the operands to be considered equal. It makes sense since such a small proportion is unlikely to occur by chance through arithmetic without the values being "equal" in the original base.

In Inflex decimals are not floating point, they’re fixed precision. So 0.1+0.2=0.3 produces #true. You can try by hitting the Formula button here: https://inflex.io/try

And you can choose an arbitrary level of precision: https://discourse.inflex.io/t/how-to-increase-decimal-places...

RE the grid I agree completely, I have a blog post about it: https://inflex.io/blog/whats-wrong-with-the-grid

I’ve considered adding floating points as an optional advanced feature, but on the other hand, unums might also be a better approximate number type.

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