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Comment by simula67 | Hacker News Reader

I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively. They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something) and then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce.

This is precisely what Microsoft did to Google. They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money. Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply.

One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop. Now, with deals such as this, Microsoft will have more data to tune their engine while Google is left on the sidelines.

Let's just hope that the AI driven search revolution does not produce a monopoly.

View on HN

They kinda did that with ChromeOS + Google Docs with offline mode. The problem for Google is that while it was a solid investment for MS to persue cloud services to compete with Google, I don't think it would have been a good investment the other way around. Chrome is really the only desktop product that makes sense for Google because it pushes people into their ecosystem online. Creating something like a standalone OS or a standalone office software would have gone in the "wrong direction" for Google, taking people off their site rather than taking people there.

Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.

> Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.

If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed. That's how much impact the ChatGPT integration had for Bing -- overnight.

Well that and a 10B investment right?

I’ve used bing with gpt and it’s way worse than ChatGPT idk what you mean. I’d just as well use Google tbh. It wasn’t impressive.

The thing is: Google is threatened for the first time in its decades of history. It might not be better, yet, but it definitely is a real and existential threat to Google.

Google is threatened by MS and OA, OA is threatened by Stable Diffusion and MiniGPT-4. We are wondering if there will still be developer work in 10 years. Everyone is threatened.

If anything we will have more work because we will have more people capable of churning it out at a predictable rate.

Eh. Remember when Google was threatened by DuckDuckGo and other privacy search engines? Google is always being "threatened" by something or the other.

I just can't get over the ugly visual design and haphazard UX on bing.com.

For instance: That Microsoft Rewards counter? Ugh.

I think chatgtp itself with access to search / wolfram / apps etc is a more serious competitor than Bing.

I was not at all surprised, to be honest. ChatGPT took over about 90-95% of my what I would previously resort to Google. Since Microsoft was dealing cards at OpenAI, it was just a matter of time...

How do you manage the hallucination problems, or do you not seem to be having them?

I’m blown away by the competence of the language model but its willingness to make up facts makes me leary.

> its willingness to make up facts makes me leary

I see you haven't met humans

We can downvote human comments and proposed solution (on stack overflow, hn, etc...) and also I don't expect colleagues to lied to me when I ask them about a feature or how to do xyz in a language or library or framework.

Bing, IIRC, has a way to provide feedback, not sure how useful it is for today's users and if it will be able to solve hallucinations one day.

I try to always give Bing+ChatGPT chat or search results a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I am using the service for free, so it seems fair for me to take a moment to provide feedback.

Humans are actually quite reliable. Wikipedia is that trust manifested. Also a human liar knows they are lying, AI doesn't know it's saying something wrong.

That's why we call it hallucinating rather than lying. Confusing the two is conceptually unhygienic.

Humans can also give wrong information without realizing it.

The average human is going to give me the wrong answer to a question I ask him.

But I'm generally not interested in asking an average human. I'm interested in asking someone who knows their butt from a hole in the ground in whichever topic I'm asking them about.

When google sends me to a website, I can at least judge the credibility of a website.

When ChatGPT tells me something, I have no idea if it's paraphrasing information gathered from Encyclopedia Britannica, or from a hollow-earther forum.

Which is why you use one of the AI search engines that makes it cite its sources.

phind.com has been incredibly good for me.

This is a real question, so I apologize if it comes off as sophistry:

Is the work of judging the accuracy of a summary not just the work of comprehending the non-summarized field?

For example, a summary could be completely correct and cite its facts exhaustively. Say you're asking about available operating systems: it tells you a bunch of true info about Windows and OSX, but doesn't mention the existence of Linux. Without familiarity with the territory, wouldn't verifying the factuality of each reference still leave you with an incomplete picture?

At a slightly more practical level, do you actually save any time if you've gotta fully verify the sources? I assume you're doing more than just making sure the link doesn't 404, as citing a link that doesn't say what it is made out to be isn't exactly a new problem, but at that point we're mighty close to the traditional experience of running through a SERP.

Finally, even if you're reading all the links in detail, isn't that still a situation prone to automation bias? There's a lot of examples of cases where humans are supposed to check machine output, but if it's usually good enough the checkers fall into a pattern of trusting it too much and skipping work. Maybe I'm just lazy, but I think I'd eventually get less gung-ho about verifying sources and eventually do myself a mischief.

I'm asking because I've been underwhelmed by my own attempts at using LMs for search tasks, so maybe I'm doing it wrong.

> When ChatGPT tells me something, I have no idea if it's paraphrasing information gathered from Encyclopedia Britannica, or from a hollow-earther forum.

Or it's something it just hallucinated out of thin air.

Citations! I never trust Bing Chat's answer. The links usually quickly tell you if the answer is hallucinated. Basically: treat it as a search engine, not an answer engine. Follow the links like you would on any other search engine. Those links will still be more relevant.

It happily made up citations for me. In a follow up, I asked it not too, and to please use only real papers. It apologized, said it would not do it again, then in the same reply made up another non-existent but plausible citation.

Checking the links is a good practice.

I feel like we just created an interesting novel problem in the world. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

Sounds like you should be doing the research yourself but are relying on an untrusted source to feed you answers? I don't think we're there yet...

On the contrary, I was doing a calibration, asking about something to which I know the answers very well. To see if it was trustworthy.

Are you talking about Bing Chat, which cites actual web pages it used to make the summary, or ChatGPT, which is a very different beast and relies on built-in knowledge rather than searches?

Good call. I was using ChatGPT.

Phind gives you citations and even let’s you ignore certain sources.

https://www.phind.com/

Not any use to me (not a developer), but it's cool there are niche search engines for stuff like this.

Ignore the tagline, it's a general purpose search engine with some features for code.

Yeah that seems an unnecessary tagline - it works great for everything in my experience

95% of what I search for, I can independently confirm once I have it in hand. For the other 5%, I avoid ChatGPT.

Reminds me of Knoll’s law of media accuracy:

“everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge”.

Humans are pretty good bullshitters too!

Bing generating snippets of text from websites isn't going to generate hallucinations like you think it is.

It totally would, if Bing doesn't return relevant results.

I've asked BingGPT about myself and it gave me three answers. One was more or less on-point (it found my linkedin profile), and the other two were hallucinations. What happened was Bing found two unrelated pages and GPT has tried and failed to make sense of them.

Either that, or I am a prince whose name means "goose" in Polish.

Newspapers print their errata though. Does ChatGPT ever admit to making a mistake?

It can pick up on inconsistencies, especially when pointed out, and can say it was wrong, and try to reconcile the information.

Errata are extremely rare. Gross misrepresentations and errors are not, unfortunately.

All the time, but only when prompted. You have to have a conversation with it and provide more detail which exposes the flaws in its previous answers, then it will happily apologize for its mistakes. (For me, this usually looks like me pasting an error message that its code caused.)

I really hope they find a way to have it apply context from future conversations such that when it learns the error of its ways it emails you a retraction, but that's probably a ways out because humans can't be trusted to not weaponize such a feature into sending spam.

But it doesn't learn its error, that's the whole problem. It only responds to 'accusations' from user in the most common way, which is 'apologies-like'.

The weight of phrases like "you are wrong" is in fact so strong, that it fools the chatGPT to apologize for its 'mistakes' even in the scenarios where its text was obviously correct - like telling it 2+2 doesn't equal 4

Well yeah, it's an imperfect tool, and you have to treat it as such. Probably there's a lot to be discovered about how to use it most effectively. I just don't find that it's more problematic than the other tools in my box.

Sure, grep has never flat out lied to me the way chatGPT does, but it's a statistical model, not a co-worker, so I don't feel betrayed, I just feel... cautioned. It keeps you on your toes, which isn't such a bad state to be in.

Problematically, they're much better bullshitters than ChatGPT. And if you used Google to find them, they're probably either selling you something, or you had to navigate a minefield of people who are in order to find them.

It’s great too when you don’t know exactly what to search for, especially for acronyms.

What I've found is that until you see it really hallucinate like mad on a subject you know well you don't realize how crazy it can be.

Especially when I talk to it about fiction and ask questions about - for example - a specific story and you see it invent whole quotes and characters and so on...it is a masterful bullshitter.

Hallucination problem is easily solved by using it as a code/config template or starter, and actually vetting its output. It's still a huge time-saver, even with the vetting time involved.

Cold War strategy. Trust but Verify.

Let the car drive itself, but do all the work of driving anyway so you can take the wheel when it screws up.

That was a problem for ChatGPT3. Not so much for ChatGPT4. I also switched to ChatGPT4 for most of my searches. I only use Google now as a shortcut for navigating to specific website.

> leary

Leary is a rare variant spelling of leery.

I mention this, because you seem to care about correctness.

Is this really a problem?

What could be more 2020s than a post-truth search engine?

GPT4 got a lot better at avoiding hallucinations, in my anecdotal experiences. But it ain't free yet.

Leery

How are you dealing with it just manufacturing answers it does not readily have? Or is that pretty much the same as SEO spam and easy to filter out?

GPT4 is much better at it. So far, I haven't seen it hallucinate. GPT3 hallucinates terribly, but not that often, and it's fairly predictable in what kinds of questions it's more inclined to hallucinate.

90-95% of your searches don't require information more recent than September 2021?

bing actually uses search results as part of the llm context window.

it solves a lot for hallicination and current event problems you have in chatgpt

in my exp. bing even hallucinates the sources. I use chatgpt and bing side by side instead of the average google, then resort to google with those both fail.

i find chatgpt 3.5 answers better than bing. Also ive had bing end conversion with me on more than one occasion without saying anything offensive

That sounds about right for me. When I'm searching the web for information, only rarely does that information have to be newer than that.

That said, I'm not a fan of using these tools for search. For me, anyway, they don't even come close to doing what I want when I'm searching the web.

No. In few cases where there is time sensitivity, it's not an issue.

I'm using it to help me with a library integration, for example. I noticed it was recommending deprecated methods. So I copy/pasted the latest source code, asked it to update itself, and voilá.

It's super smart and learns literally in a second. Just drop recent information at it and ask what you need.

Can you give examples of the average pre-ChatGPT Google queries you were doing, that ChatGPT can fully handle?

Personally — and having not tried ChatGPT for this — I don't think ChatGPT would do well with resolving the kinds of queries I consider Google "good at."

To me, the place where Google wins over Bing, DDG, etc. is when I know there must exist some page that uniquely talks about some extremely niche overlap of concepts; but I don't know any specific "natural key" keywords to refer to the that overlapped-set-of-concepts, and instead only have a "cloud of highly-correlated keywords for the individual concepts involved" to throw into the search box.

For example, if I'm trying to conjure from the aether a discussion people are having about an issue I'm facing with some buggy behavior in an API — where that buggy behavior doesn't spit out any distinctive error message to use in the search.

I could see ChatGPT being good at a limited version of this problem, where I could give it e.g. several definitions of a word (= correlated keywords), and it could tell me the word that fits those definitions.

But the full version of the problem — pointing you at (or regurgitating) the one unique conversation that most highly correlates with your keyword cloud — essentially implies an Internet-scale "language model": one where there are unique vertices for every unique URL. Which, if you think about it, is what a traditional search engine's index is: a very dumb, but very large correlational language model, where that "dumbness" is a valuable constraint meaning that queries are able to be run map-reduced across many nodes.

Is there something I'm missing here, that makes Bing+ChatGPT better at these types of queries than Google is?

Or are the advantages ChatGPT is bringing to the table here, in areas that have nothing to do with making search engines better at the things they're already "the best tool for the job" at, and instead are in solving problems that could be solved any number of other ways (e.g. querying a search assistant such as Siri/Alexa; or pulling up an encyclopedia article or textbook relevant to the subject and just reading it) such that a search engine wouldn't necessarily be the first tool you'd search for?

There are several engineering tasks that I've just found explained better by ChatGPT than scouring Google for out of date documentation or abandoned forum posts. For example a while back I needed to encode some AAC audio frames into the ADTS format. In the work I've been doing recently, this isn't a hard task given you have the spec. The problem was I couldn't find the spec on Google - arguably it's not well supported either.

No problem for ChatGPT however which was not only able to write the code, but write it in Rust - the target language Iw as going to. Now I've just found it easier to ask ChatGPT first then go go google.

I had an example recently: I wanted to learn more about how certificate-based WiFi authentication worked. In the past, I would have used Google to find some resources on it, probably find that the relevant standard is called 802.1x, used Google to find the relevant Wikipedia article, skimmed that, etc. But instead of doing that, I just asked ChatGPT the specific questions I needed the answer to.

When you're asking generally about a pretty basic topic which you just happen to not be very familiar with, ChatGPT is not too dissimilar from having an expert in the field you can chat with and ask questions to. I find it to be a very effective way of querying the huge database of information that is its training dataset.

Surprisingly, the one thing it's really terrible at but which I would've expected it to be okay at, is writing config files. I sometimes ask it how to write, say, a systemd service file which does a particular thing, and it usually shows me something which looks roughly sensible but doesn't actually do what I wanted. Its nature of fancy autocomplete with no understanding really shines through in those cases. Its biggest downfall is that it has no way to recognize when it doesn't have an answer and is making stuff up.

Doesn't that leave you wondering if the answer it gave you for certificate based auth is accurate? How do you verify?

> In the past, I would have used Google to find some resources on it, probably find that the relevant standard is called 802.1x, used Google to find the relevant Wikipedia article, skimmed that, etc.

And apparently you didn't quite notice the particular inefficiency there...

> But instead of doing that, I just asked ChatGPT the specific questions I needed the answer to.

Yeah, sure, if you want to vet hallucinations in stead of just getting the facts.

Just go directly to Wikipedia instead.

But that's the thing. I can't ask Wikipedia targeted questions. I have to read through the whole article or try to skim to the right points, if the article even covers the exact question I have.

A) Wikipedia articles have chapters with headings.

B) Your browser (most probably) has a search function.

Over the weekend I wanted a recipe for a dish I wanted to make and the first recipe I found required an important ingredient I didn't have. I thought I'd give ChatGPT a shot and asked it for the same recipe but not including that ingredient to see if it could come up with an alternative formulation.

I'm sure that recipe exists somewhere on the internet but ChatGPT gave something to me in a very succinct format with none of the usual bullshit you deal with when looking through search results. ChatGPT also thankfully did not include the usual recipe backstory.

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I had been asking this question for a while but now I’m a convert. Here are some of my most recent uses:

how to create a multi line string in a bash script. I needed to encode a human-readable JSON string in a curl call and didn’t know how. Google game me crummy tutorial sites, GPT gave me instructions, and when provided with the target, did all the formatting too.

I found it also understands git well. I use git at work, but I almost never use anything beyond push/pull/commit so crazy rebases or merges and stuff I still have to search for instructions to remember them. Now GPT can just explain to me the steps for my particular case. When I googled things, I’d search for keywords and stuff based on my knowledge and piece together the steps myself.

On a counter example, I recently had an intern who botched their config on VsCode and didn’t know what settings to fix. I found it was easier to google search how to reset things than use GPT. Ymmv.

I was a skeptic, but it's very useful and not hallucinatory for small and specific coding questions.

For example, today I asked ChatGPT how to write a class method in Ruby and to explain the class << self idiom. Super simple stuff, but it gives accurate answers and it's way more convenient than Google.

For this class of simple queries there's a lot of overhead to do a Google search and then try to filter out bullshit and padded results vs a super simple prompt to ChatGPT.

Almost anything related to programming.

Geographical information about a region.

What is the name of a song I have in my mind.

Virtually anything else. I'm studying architecture and read about associations of feelings that cardinal points transmit in a house (north, south, east, west). Like, east is associated with youth because of sunrise. At first it wasn't obvious why, so I asked ChatGPT and it explained everything brilliantly to me.

It takes me an order of magnitude less time to educate myself on ChatGPT comparing to Google.

I'm very curious what will happen when seo spammers come after chatgpt.

I'm sure they'll use ChatGPT to come up with solutions.

Spammers will, too, and since OpenAI has access to what they're asking and can easily flag their questions, they can feed misleading guidance to spammers.

Google has spent the last 10 years ago making Google worse. They achieved this in large part by making the whole Internet worse [0], but a search engine with results of the quality of Google 10 years ago would be a serious competitor.

[0] For example, Google used to have a fairly strictly enforced rule that indexable content had to actually be visible to an unauthenticated user. The current crop of sites that have apparently useful content in snippets but that hide it when loaded would have been penalized, possibly severely.

They really have a flywheel of internet destruction. The fact that they own the entire display advertising business + search and ping pong people from a 50% paid search listing to a CPM arbitrage SEO website and back is just gross.

It’s almost if there is a downside to treating your users like shit. Google is such a weird company.

It’s an advertising company. Their destiny is to reach parity with Clear Channel Communications in terms of ethics and quality.

I've been using DDG and Brave for a few years now, and I went back to Google yesterday because its the default for Chrome on my phone. I was startled at the difference in quality, especially with Brave vs Google. Brave typically prefers long-form writing and the quality of the articles is typically a lot higher than what I found using Google.

Brave Search is like Google from 2005/6.

this comment got me to switch from google, thanks

They really feel like they've reached a 'Microsoft of the late 90s' phase.

I'm afraid we're not there yet.

After 2016, Google went on a crusade to save the universe by stamping out all misinformation and seems to have highly deranked all forums and blogs in favor of mainstream sites. This has made Google unusable for any political or controversial subject matter. This has also made their LLM efforts too cautious as they can't handle the political controversy of an LLM and can't verify that it will never return anything that offends anyone.

It does seem like Larry and Sergei are finally back trying to fix the excessively politically sensitive and overly cautious culture. Larry, having disappeared to Fiji for several years, must have been pretty bored or annoyed with running it.

It’s not just Google.

Yesterday night I was trying to recall the name of a particular SCOTUS case that I had (semi-incorrectly) thought was connected to the 14th Amendment.

Bombed out on the SERPs two or three times, so I started looking for an very old article by Thomas Sowell that randomly introduced me to the case a few years back. I knew it was something regarding the unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Act.

Neither Google nor DDG gave me ANY useful results for 3-5 variations on “scholarly critique of the Civil Rights Act”. I eventually remembered the Sowell connection and even adding his name in quotes only got me to a page deboonking the article I was searching for!

I’m very far from being a right winger or whatever so I’ve never really experienced this sort of thing before, but my god is the “no no, you don’t REALLY want to search for THAT” silent censorship out of control. Millions to billions of people use these search engines daily and assume they’re mildly biased but otherwise shining portals to the sum total of human knowledge.

In hindsight, I suspect I would have immediately found the SCOTUS case with my initial search on 2010 era Google. Very much seems like my starter queries were triggering the Bad Think Detected algorithm.

> deboonking

*debunking

Original spelling is intended, a purposeful and humorous misspelling introduced by a meme.

Aha, thanks.

Yandex seems to have a bunch of links to what you're looking for. Sadly, Yandex is the only decent search engine I've found for these sorts of topics.

https://yandex.com/search/touch/?text=scholarly+critique+of+...

While I have many reasons that Google made the Internet worse (AMP, censoring search, forcing localized search results, privacy, etc.) I don't think the hidden content is their fault but rather that of publishers.

Publishers blamed Google for declining revenue since they had to make their content openly accessible and therefore free in order to be visible to users on search. The EU tried to make Facebook and Google pay publishers to account for this. I think allowing paywalled content was a compromise to prevent this legislation from passing.

That being said, I agree with the publishers especially since hypocritically Google and Facebook strictly don't allow scraping of their services and litigate those who do.

Google could easily fix this by putting a symbol or label on paywall-related content so you know not to click it.

Huh, do you have a source for the EU issue?

People are acting like Bing has created some big market success and Samsung is running to them because the tech is better. But the alternative explanation is simple: vendors are always looking for reasons to (threaten to) put mediocre non-Google search as default on their products, so they can extract more money from search engine providers. Samsung sees the current hype around Bing/Google/AI as a convenient negotiating point, since the media will portray this as “Samsung switches to awesome AI search” rather than “Samsung forces its users to use crummy Bing.”

I think the problem is Google is also pretty crummy. Ai is in a golden age without poisoned data right now. But wait until Bing gets popular and blackhat seo types start poisoning chatgpt. It will stop being useful, and I suspect in a way that will be unfixable since these language models are so hard to wrangle.

There's another side to that medal: At the moment nobody takes any issue with OpenAI doing filtering and curation in deciding what is part of their training data set, aside from perhaps the anti-bias crowd. "AI neutrality" is not yet a topic. Yet.

I've already seen that several times with image generation. Most recently was an article commenting on how the American smile was polluting generated photos. People can't decide what they want. Do they want licensed, curated commercial photos in the database or do they want search engine style neutrality? You really can't have both.

> People can't decide what they want.

You mean, so that you can satisfy everybody at the same time?

No, sorry, the world doesn't work this way.

Musk was on the air this week talking about how the current AI is biased on the left as he promotes his new AI company

Lets laugh and watch him make the "truth social" of AI, hopefully setting fire to another few billion in the process.

People laughed at paypal, tesla and spacex. Now he owns twitter.

Being the richest gives someone a lot of power to make others look foolish

It's always nice to hear Mr. Musk has not given up his cannabis habit.

…or maybe he has!

> without poisoned data right now

It already seems poisoned to me. It's popularity over correctness, because LLMs don't know semantics.

The users who pay attention to search quality aren't impacted by the default search option. They will just go back to Google or whatever alternative they wish.

The users who the default engine really locks in are the ones who just mostly click ads and have no idea they are ads. When they use Google they are mostly clicking ads anyways, so the search result quality will appear about the same with Bing. Maybe even better if there are fewer ads.

For Microsoft, getting more users on board means higher ad volume which brings more advertisers who are going to spend the time to manage Bing ad campaigns. You can bet they've done the calculations for how much money they can spend at what price. Ultimately that leads to higher monetization and then Microsoft can pay other companies (like Apple) to switch the default engine.

Google is a multi-trillion dollar attention tax that just sucks money from the global economy. They've been wildly mismanaged since Eric Schmidt's CEO tenure ended. It's been a long time coming, but the timer is running out of sand for Google fast. The revenue may take a long time to peak and decline but when they start missing their quarterly earnings it will be a bloodbath for Google's employees.

Your tone subs like you're contradicting a point, but your actual comment is completely in like with the idea that Google has been caught by surprise that Bing is good enough (as measured by market sentiment) to be a credible threat.

>If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed.

Every day I enter a few difficult queries on both Google and Bing to see if Bing gives me something better. I'm still laughing that people think Bing is a serious threat.

Are you comparing Google to the "new A.I. powered Bing, only in Microsoft edge" or to the normal Bing search engine?

The Bing search engine not the chatbot. Is there some v2 Bing search engine? A quick Bing search didn't reveal anything about it.

The Bing chatbot searches the web for you, it doesn't just spit out answers like ChatGPT. There's no clear distinction between the Chatbot and a search engine.

I just asked it about something in today's news and it answered it and provided links to 6 news articles on that topic.

It's unfortunate that it requires logging in to Edge with your Microsoft account because I'm just not going to do that. I don't sign in to browsers.

Maybe my queries are not difficult enough. Do you have an example?

Ok here's one: "why did capote and vidal hate each other"

Answer from the Bing Chat feature (no edits):

Truman Capote and Gore Vidal were two American writers who had a long-standing feud with each other. The feud began when Capote wrote an article for Esquire magazine in which he claimed that Vidal had been thrown out of the White House after making a pass at a member of President Kennedy's family². Vidal took Capote to court for libel, where the two traded insults². After the pair settled out of court, their feud continued – even outliving Capote².

I hope that helps!

Source: Conversation with Bing, 4/17/2023(1) The A-Z of Gore Vidal | Gore Vidal | The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/01/the-a-z-gore-v... Accessed 4/17/2023. (2) Why Did Gore Vidal and William Buckley Hate Each Other? - Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-did-gore-vidal-and-william... Accessed 4/17/2023. (3) Feud sensation! Why Vargas Llosa thumped Márquez. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/mar/13/feud... Accessed 4/17/2023. (4) A life in feuds: how Gore Vidal gripped a nation - The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/14/gore-vidal-gri... Accessed 4/17/2023. (5) ‘Just a couple of fags’: Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and celebrity feud. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19392397.2015.1... Accessed 4/17/2023. (6) Truman Capote’s unhappy ending | PBS NewsHour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/truman-capotes-unhappy-e... Accessed 4/17/2023.

Not a very satisfying answer because it doesn't answer why Capote would slander Vidal in the first place. Indeed the feud existed before the Esquire slander took place so it's incorrect/hallucinatory for Bing Chat to say "The feud began when...".

Oh, and references (2) and (3) seem to be hallucinated and are unrelated to the question and response despite being cited inline. The other ref links are valuable but well then it's just a search engine with more noise.

Maybe I'm using a different Bing because I access it through Duck Duck Go, but it doesn't seem better than Google. I often have to add a !g to technical searches because DDD doesn't return the right results. Google has them in the very first links. I'll try to use Bing directly.

Raw ddg or google are awful for technical searches. But at least having ddg as default lets you have !whatever for specific topics.

Did ChatGPT even make Bing a threat?

Bing has only 10m+ downloads on Android. Not even a top 200 app.

Samsung switch too Bing will hurt Samsung more than Google.

“Only has 10 million downloads” wow

Or that someday Apple would be the most valuable company in the world

I moved to Bing a year ago, as 1) Google became a senseless SEO swamp 2) they don't allow VPN.

I think we still have a long way to go before people are actually saying "Bing it." Then it's a serious threat.

I suspect some people google for things on Bing.

Man I haven't used Google in 10 years yet I still say I "Googled it." It's just a saying at this point, not an endorsement.

I have a friend who started saying "let me just bing that" to get people to laugh. Now I've started saying it at work... originally for a laugh, but I find I'm using DDG and Bing more often than Google now. (Alas how I miss AltaVista) So it may be sooner than you think. I mean... my data set is only two people, so maybe it will only be 2 hours sooner than you think.

Even though I have invested heavily in Apple's sandbox world, I am very impressed by ChromeOS and inexpensive Chromebooks by 3rd parties. I have close to the cost of a car invested in Apple gear, yet, if I had to I could do all of my writing and coding on the very inexpensive Lenovo Duet Chromebook I bought a year ago. The Linux container support is OK, and I usually use remote servers anyway.

For search, Bing + ChatGPT is now my driver for search. I still use Google and Duck Duck Go occasionally, but usually I am OK with waiting a short while for Bing + ChatGPT results.

> I usually use remote servers anyway

Sorry for the OT question - do you use slime-tramp? And if so, do you have a way to use M-. (slime-edit-definition) without having to re-compile files using the remote paths?

I usually use Mosh (instead of SSH) and have a nice Emacs setup on remote servers. If I am using an iPad Pro instead of a laptop, I have Emacs on remote servers configured with Mosh to accept virtual mouse clicks (by tapping the iPad screen) to jump around source files and scrolling with screen gestures. This might seem awkward, but it is not.

For Common Lisp, running Emacs on a remote server instead of slime-tramp has always been good enough. Would you suggest I try slime-tramp?

> I usually use Mosh

Mosh as in "mobile shell"? https://mosh.org/

> Would you suggest I try slime-tramp?

I don't know yet, I've just started trying it out.

What made me want to try it was that I could use GUI Emacs to connect to emacs running on a different machine and still have full access to all the emacs keybindings.

So far, the downsides that I have encountered are that M-. and C-c C-k (slime-compile-and-load-file) don't quite work. The work-around would be to visit each file using the remote path and re-compile them so that the running Lisp image can map what's in the image to a path tramp recognizes. Then M-. and C-c C-k should work.

To recompile, select all then compile (X-c X-p C-c C-c) works, or I think C-c M-k also works. Not a great solution if there are a lot of files, though.

IIUC the problem boils down to M-. eventually calling (xref-find-definitions) which is an emacs built-in, and I think that's why the tramp paths aren't translating until a re-compile is done.

They used to ship a Google Drive app for Windows that adds it to Explorer similar to OneDrive. They killed it, as with everything else.

Edit: I'm wrong!

No, backup and sync was rebranded to Google drive for windows

Very well, I stand corrected.

> better desktop OS

> Google

It wouldn't be an OS, it would be a casino full of flashy ads. The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never. They get away with Android because it's mostly a consumer market.

Did you use Windows recently? https://uk.pcmag.com/migrated-3765-windows-10/132748/how-to-...

Was about to post the same thing. Windows is infuriating for me not because I dislike ads per se, but it triggers all sorts of ADD behavior in my brain -- try to open an application, and "ohh, what's Tom Cruise up to today?!".

Windows is already crapped up with flashy ads; it's a pretty damn low bar.

Having deployed Chromebooks into corporate and education, there's less ad content there than on a Windows machine... by oodles. In fact, the only place a stock Chromebook has ads is on websites, in the browser and I believe on a personal install it tries to sell you a subscription to Google's cloud service for extra storage. Once you start installing apps, well, your mileage will vary.

Having used Android as my daily driver since Android 1.3, again, the default experience is pretty much ad-free. I've even used Android in "desktop mode" where you connect a display, keyboard and mouse and used windowed Android apps. When you start installing apps, or if you buy a device with non-default apps installed (i.e. the mobile carrier install as infested crap). In that case you can disable or uninstall that app and move on.

> The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never.

While Google does have a history of cancelling some well-loved products (like Reader), Google Apps (Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentations, etc...) has been solid for a decade. The live, multiuser, real-time editing and versioning is a wonderful feature for collaboration. Also, Google has been very reasonable on pricing, and after six years of running three companies on Google Worplace/Apps, I'm very impressed with the reliability of Google Workplace (what they are now calling Apps).

Have you actually used Chrome OS? It's not like this at all. I would imagine the same approach would be taken on a fully featured OS.

Ironically Windows is the OS that is full of shit ads these days, not Google's OS.

Is this really about AI and ChatGPT? Google search just sucks now. I actually get better results from Bing and Duck Duck Go.

> then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop

With their inferior products? Not a chance. Google's apps are so far away from even competing with Microsoft's it's not even funny. Google Sheets doesn't even have proper tables. I wouldn't even be surprised if they cancelled it.

The fact that big corps have moved to Gsuite always surprises me and credit to Google salespeople. But they will never meaningfully breach Office, people at Microsoft fight tooth and nail when renewals are up and Google is in the picture

As someone who's worked at both gsuite and office shops, I would pick gsuite every time. After the first place where I used gsuite I used to try to figure out which I'd have to use before applying somewhere new.

Depends on use case, I regularly use sheets with 20k+ rows, experience is night and day

Google's whole raison d'être was internet computing - computing at scales never before seen. Think "BigFiles" and the original Google search. They were able to leverage that technology in creating AdSense, which is their huge money-maker. Google's challenge has been finding ways to monetize their internet compute technologies. But now that it's 25 years later and more and more people have internet-scale computing available to them it appears Google is losing their edge. What used to be their "special sauce" has now become a commodity. It's a story as old as business.

Increasingly people don't need this kind of special sauce to run a big Internet service. Everything that's challenging has been outsourced to public clouds. Just pay more and those special sauce comes to you.

Admittedly Google still has some special sauce left, but in my opinion those special sauce only improves efficiency; it doesn't enable one to do something that's impossible otherwise. (I've been reading about some public research reports about Google's special sauce: they range from special user space networking to new congestion control to custom TPUs etc.)

I'd say it another way - everything that's challenging has been commoditized and is available from your choice of public cloud providers. You've identified new special sauce opportunities for Google, the question is can these new opportunities generate as much revenue as they'd been enjoying?

> They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money.

Maybe a nitpick, but I think Bing has been profitable on its own for a while now.

(2015) https://time.com/4084975/microsoft-bing-search-engine-profit...

Yeah, Bing has been consistently profitable for a long time.

People mock it because its not bringing in obscene amounts that google search does, but it's revenues have consistently been growing for years: https://fourweekmba.com/bing-revenue/

$11.59B is pretty damn good revenue for a 'laughing stock'. Especially Consider that gaming 'only' was $16.23B.

That link shows revenue not profit.

>Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce.

Microsoft Office has a lot of network effect surrounding it. Organizations use MS Office because the people who pay them (e.g., government or large corporations) use MS Office. I've tried switching away to LibreOffice or Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, and those are very likely to mangle layout and formatting when saving to DOCX/XLSX/PPTX. Not worth the hassle trying to troubleshoot why my government program managers aren't seeing what I'm seeing on the document I sent them.

I can't tell if your sarcasm is top notch, but isn't Chromebooks and GSuite (docs, sheets, slides) exactly the thing you describe?

That's a stripped down OS running only a web browser and a bunch of webapps, not a real OS. Another one of those Google fantasies that failed to understand normal people.

What do you think Joe Sixpack runs on his computer these days? There are tons of people out there who do nothing but browse websites and use the "apps" as provided on those sites. They have no use for native Windows apps nor all the extra baggage that comes with it.

I wonder if it's more the fear of needing a desktop app one day again that you haven't started in years than the actual need for desktop apps.

That's a stupid over-generalization. There's always one shitty app you need for some weird use case which is not in the official stores. And to rule that out 100% by purchasing a chromebook is a hassle people don't want to worry about.

Yeah, most people shouldn't need more, but you're right. For example, to update the maps in our minivan's navigation system, I need to install some (crappy) Windows-only desktop application, "Garmin Express."

ChromeOS runs mobile apps from the Play Store, and Linux in a container.

Besides gaming people, I know very few people who need more. And gaming with webgl goes pretty far too. I think it works quite well; I don’t like it, or rather, actually hate it; I like optimal software against the hardware, but that is such a niche now. So just running everything in a browser is simply realistic and enough for most of the population. I think it sells quite well as well. I have a Chromebook which was cheap but it works very well. With GitHub spaces I am not sure if I will go back for many of the stuff I do; if I drop a pot of tea on it, it’s a short trip to the shop to get a new one and I will be back to work 30 min later.

Android and iOS work like that too of course. So maybe they should just switch to something like Dex instead as now you can run android apps in chromeos, so what’s the difference?

Windows is hopelessly overkill for most people.

Even gen-z still build their own PCs. It isn't as niche as often said. They would laugh in your face with the worst insults a 16 year old teenager can come up with if you offer them a chromebook. They would sell it to their wine-aunt (who happens to not run non-emulator windows emulators on Linux).

Sure, they also play Pokemon Go... although partially because they are not sitting in front of their PCs. Large market by volume, but more so for alternative situations.

Based. The kids are all right.

This is interesting insight. So Chromebooks aren't cool? I guess I can see that when every school is issuing Chromebooks to the kids these days. I remember Mac computers being uncool when I was a kid because that's what we had in the school computer lab in the 1990s, and they were locked down enough that it wasn't easy to do fun things on them.

"Wine-aunt" is new to me too, and funny (after looking up what it means).

I wouldn't say they aren't cool for them, but they too want to have powerful devices that do not lock them in too much.

Tell that to the scores of kids that have come up not understanding a filesystem because they just…haven’t needed to, in large part because they grew up using Chromebooks, happily.

Stop conflating yourself with a “normal person”. It’s quite clear from your comment that you’re anything but.

That might have been true years ago. It's currently leagues ahead of any other OS outside of Windows and Mac. It's still limited and quirky, but pretty much covers the basic needs of "normal" people.

> It's currently leagues ahead of any other OS outside of Windows and Mac.

Is ChromeOS really leagues ahead of Linux on the desktop? And other than Linux, how many other desktop OSes are there?

It heavily depends on what you do on linux, if you completely customized it to perfecfly fit your needs and only work with a stable set of programs, ChromeOS doesn't stand a chance.

For more "standard" users though, ChromeOS is very simple, has excelent touch support, battery management, a half baked but functional tablet mode, covers a lot of its ecosystem issues with the android subsytem, is fast to learn yet gives access to more power user features (including linux VMs). And it's of course very forgiving, as every regular apps are sandboxed. In that respect I see it succeeding where linux has been struggling for so long. TBH I was hoping Google made a decent iPad pro competitor based on ChromeOS, but I'm not holding my breath.

It's of course not perfect, far from it, but it's a pretty good computer experience IMHO. Linux has progressed a lot, but I still don't see the simplicity, versatility and forgiveness trio in a linux machine anytime soon.

On the other OSes, I didn't see it as desktop only, and iOS could have been a nice alternative, if Apple could have bothered (same for android and DEX). I actually think ChromeOS is a better choice than windows for light computer users, assuming Google doesn't throw the towel..

ChromeOS has for years supported a full linux shell in a chroot, with full X support. And even before that, it supported quite a bit through android apps. Your information is about ten years out of date.

If Microsoft's 48-year history has shown anything, it is that they can produce subpar products, experience numerous failures, make poor investments and acquisitions, and even ruin products (e.g., Skype), yet they remain resilient and successful!

As for Google, I am uncertain whether they were prepared for this competition because, firstly, the business terms offered by Microsoft might have been quite strategic, and secondly, the Google search engine has not experienced significant innovation or improvement since PageRank, at least from a user experience perspective rather than complexity. I will regale my descendants with stories of a time when I searched for something and found at least one relevant result among the top 20.

That to me is the big difference between Google and Microsoft. Microsoft is willing to slowly build on something for years before it goes anywhere. They maintain their products for incredible amounts of time, such as how IE11 was only killed off like a decade after its release.

Google on the other hand is always chasing the next big thing. It just doesn’t have the institutional attention span to do anything really big. If a project isn’t an explosive hit right away, Google moves on to the next big idea.

> Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply.

It's more like Google has to change from optimizing for next week's revenue numbers to optimizing for user experience. People have been saying for years that their search results are trash. That we haven't seen a response from Google may be an indicator that they aren't able to return useful search results.

'People have been saying for years that their search results are trash'.

Have they? I hear people say this on Hacker news but i've never heard it anywhere else, people seem to be using the internet just fine with Google as there main search engine, what is the alternative? Bing? It's still trash and Bing Chat is like a worse version of ChatGPT, I don't see it replacing Google currently.

Bing Chat was better but after three months of very hard work Microsoft successfully managed to remove all the good parts.

How naïve of Microsoft! They clearly didn't have enough experience to know that they have to remove the good parts and make it bland in order to make the product viable.

FWIW, many of the non-tech people I know gripe about the same user facing issues that come up on HN, including poor Google search results. They just don't post about it on the internet and might not even know that there are alternatives.

I would bet that a good chunk of users don't know that you can change the default browser or search engine, or at least don't think to do so. They might not like the UX, but they have other things occupying their focus and muddle through a bad experience with their phone or PC, just like they do with many other mediocre interfaces throughout the week.

They've been pretty good about making some results on the first page be better than competition still, and with niche search features IME.

If I want to find artists, lyrics, locations, results of sporting events, other special events... I'm not sure all the things, but DDG doesn't even compare.

Where do you see ChromeOS and Google Office as falling flat in that regard? Desktops are pretty smaller in market size compared to laptops these days.

Desktop = Laptop

God, I wish that were true.

Ask me how many times I've effed up the battery and sleep configuration upgrading Linux on a desktop vs a laptop.

Relative to desktops, laptops tend to be quirky little things because the heavy constraints of form factor, power, and weight result in engineering trade-offs and outright hacks that aren't necessary in the desktop ecosystem.

Okay. You’ve immediately alienated all but the smallest minority of users to draw a distinction that most people just flat out don’t experience.

It's not invalid though. Those are the reasons I stopped trying to use Linux on a laptop.

Linux is not relevant to the discussion.

By desktop app they don't mean an app that runs on desktop computers only. They mean an app that runs locally and not web-based. Office 365 desktop vs Office 365 web portal. Google doesn't offer anything but web based.

I'm not sure that would have changed anything, though. Their main loss is that ChromeOS isn't marketed as 'business-oriented' but that's probably because you can't market it to businesses when tons of legacy software doesn't run, and accountants still tend to prefer Excel over sheets (in my experience). But when businesses do use GWorkspace products, it's not an issue that it all happens within the browser.

You haven't been in a business environment then. Almost all of the users whine about having to use Google's Web Apps and prefer the desktop version of 365. Microsoft absolutely dominates in the enterprise environment. We have both, just because department will not use the Google Apps. They'll accept Gmail but that's it.

You are misattributing the cause. It’s not because they’re web-based, it’s because they aren’t *really^ Word, Excel, etc. I’ve shot myself in the foot one too many times with the web-based Office suite. There’s a reason there’s a nice big button to bounce you to the desktop applications - for when you need to do something they didn’t bother putting in the web version.

Eh... I think it's both. A lot of end-users don't understand understand what a web browser is. The older crowd is completely weirded out about running an app in their browser.

It could just be my circle of influence which is mostly SWEs, but nobody complains about Google and most prefer it. Maybe it's because doing anything on the web version of M365 is hell on earth if you have the audacity to be signed into more than one account at once.

You think the chief users of Office apps are software developers?

I don't think software developers are a good measure. They're not heavy users of any sort of word processing.

And as an an Admin, GMail is awful. Microsoft knows what admins need and give them to tools to do it. There is so much that can't be configured with GMail, and they don't even provide a proper cmd tool like Microsoft does with their powershell modules. The only option is "GAM", a third party not supported by Google project [0].

Another example, the default routing rules page in the admin console defaults to only showing 10 rules. Every time you add a rule, the pagination is reset, so you get lost where you are and can't even see the rule you literally just added.

And as an identity platform, Google is nothing compared to Okta or AAD. Whilst it's wonderful that Google login is everywhere now, I can't for example, request the user do 2FA for particular apps.

Even the admin console only requires 2FA once a month, it's ridiculous.

And don't get me started on "groups" still being attached to distribution lists out of the 60s [1]. Or the inability to have shared mailboxes.

No one should ever choose Google Workspace over Office 365.

[0] https://support.google.com/a/answer/10014088?hl=en

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35070618

Yeah I agree. You shouldn't have to use 3rd party tools to administer Google Workspaces. I find myself using Advanced-GAM and BetterCloud far too often.

I'm trying to talk my boss into dumping Gmail and switching to Outlook. It's such a waste running 365 and Google.

I've specifically been using Azure as my "source of truth" because I think it's more likely we'll dump Google than we'll ever dump things like on-prem AD or Azure.

>and accountants still tend to prefer Excel over sheets (in my experience).

And it isn't because they didn't try Sheets. Lol. Nobody I know likes Google Sheets.

They basically copied the UX of Office 2003 and did nothing to improve upon it since it's initial release over a decade ago.

It's awful.

Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like Excel does and you need to manually paint rows, manually find the hidden filter creation option for cells and manually refresh the table because the fitlers are kludged such that they don't automatically re-filter when you edit a row.

Even Mail Merging is awful. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/samples/automation...

Like, you don't need a programming degree to mail merge in Office but you do for Google Sheets because it's a script instead of built-in feature.

I love Google Docs and Sheets and hate Word and Excel.

You're probably in the tech field so you're not a good measure of the average white collar office worker.

> They basically copied the UX of Office 2003 and did nothing to improve upon it since it's initial release over a decade ago.

> It's awful.

On the contrary, sounds marvellous.

> Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like Excel does

Sounds utterly weird. Spreadsheets already are tables, so WTF is the use of a “separate concept of tables” within your tables? Seems to be geared towards creating confusion.

(Or are you just taking about some newfangled moniker for named ranges?)

Laptops are desktops.

In regards to ChromeOS, it hardly matters outside the US school system and Googleplex.

For me, one of the things that has stopped me from even trying ChromeOS is that is/meant to be 100% cloud which means no local storage and since I code for a living having things locally is a must for me.

It makes 100% sense in Schools and other places where you want to be able to reset the OS constantly and stop people from breaking it. I think for facebook machine's it would do well too but again I think alot of people will want to have local storage.

> For me, one of the things that has stopped me from even trying ChromeOS is that is/meant to be 100% cloud which means no local storage

I've had a Pixelbook for 4.5 years -- a Google product, so arguably as it's "meant to be" -- and it has 128GB of local storage, and I believe you can get them with up to 512GB. Coding locally using Linux VMs/containers is actually pretty pleasant IME (albeit I don't do frontend work).

Chrome OS deals decently with local file. This is the same way Chrome deals with local stuff anywhere else.

I think people underestimate what ChromeOS can do by a lot. There's the android subsytem coming with it, along with an optional linux subsystem, so all in all it covers a lot of ground.

That said, it's still limited a lot by Google not going the full length and having half baked support for a lot of things. Access to the bluetooth stack is pretty random for android apps for instance. Then Chromebooks are mostly low power machines, so the linux substack only helps that much.

Tablet mode support is too weak to take full advantage of the different form factors. ChromeOS isn't configurable enough to alternative keyboard configs, system wide shortcuts etc.

All in all, it has so much promises, only half delivered. But the half we have now is still pretty decent IMHO.

>I think people underestimate what ChromeOS can do by a lot. There's the android subsytem coming with it, along with an optional linux subsystem, so all in all it covers a lot of ground.

First impressions are everything.

ChromeOS's first impression was that it's Chrome in OS form with no local compute whatsoever; everything is done via the internet, aka the cloud.

That is not strictly the case anymore, but changing first impressions simply is not trivial.

Higher end Chromebooks also rival low- to middle-tier Windows laptops in price, and if you're paying top dollar why not buy the latter and have access to the much more capable Windows ecosystem instead?

Android and Crostini are only on some flagship devices.

And even in those, the lilliput SSD sizes make them hardly workable versus w regular laptop for the same price range.

That's not accurate, my device a Lenovo Chromebook S345 supports linux containers & android apps and is absolutely not a flagship. You'd struggle to run windows on a similarly priced laptop (cost me £150 a year ago).

It definitely is for the random devices being sold on German stores, usually with repeated discounts until finally someone takes them away.

Most of the time it is not possible to enable it.

On the SSD size, it's often the RAM that's really limiting for the linux subsystem. It's the same issue as on cheap windows laptops, only a tad better as ChromeOS is more frugal and orchestrates resources more aggressively.

Most cheap Windows devices come with 512GB.

Chrome being frugal, that is interesting. Maybe Electron devs could take some tips from ChromeOS.

Chrome OS devices have local storage. Premium ones (which are not even that expensive, in the $500+ price tier) have a 256GB SSD for local storage. This at least has not been my issue with Chrome OS.

For that price I rather pay for a proper OS, with at least a 512SSD and hardware not constrained to Web API capabilities.

Google docs/etc are totally eating into Microsoft Office's market share. I can't remember the last company I was at where they expected us to use Microsoft office products. But we used Google docs,sheets,etc constantly.

For big corporates, it is still 100% Microsoft Office and 0% Google Workspace. Email is still 100% Microsoft Outlook/Exchange. That said, for small to medium, Google must be eating into MSFT, but I don't have any visibility.

As someone that works at an IT company, not a software company, Almost every customer that started with google is switching to o365. Nearly 99% of our clients are on o365 or are switching from on-prem exchange to o365. I can see maybe the bubble of silicon valley might be more oriented toward google, but the vast majority of businesses continue to migrate to o365.

O365 is really starting to get tons of traction even with the mid-sized companies.

M365 the far superior solution to many business problems. As a long-time paying gmail customer I'm also moving away. It looks like Google didn't improve UI in their admin menus for at least a decade.

Some people would pay extra to not have the UI change every couple of years. As someone who no longer regularly uses Windows it drives me nuts to try to find anything in their web apps or settings interfaces.

Do you prefer it, or is it simply a cost saving measure? GSuite is substandard even compared to Open Office.

The only benefit, and it may be a big one, is real time collaboration and document sharing.

O365 has the same real time collaboration and document sharing. I worked at one company they were originally on Google had to share the enterprise plan by the parent company for “money reasons”. People just kept using Google until the account was closed 12 months after migrating. When I left they were going back to Google.

My current employer is pushing us to Office 365. We have a lot of meetings that center around a shared document. The syncing in Word is extremely slow and in Excel we gave up on it entirely because we got constant merge conflicts with no clear way off fixing them. Outlook web is very slow and sometimes stopped fetching new emails till you reload. Meanwhile outlook for Mac silently doesn't show more than ten all-day events which lead to massive confusion during the holidays with our shared OoO calendar.

I understand that some might see offline storage and editing as advantages, but I've only seen it create chaos. It makes the file save dialog much more complex and I constantly have non-technical users mail files around like it's the 90s because they don't understand how to share it properly.

I'm very confused to see people pushing O365 as a viable alternative to GSuite for collaborative documents. It's not even close.

It’s really not that hard to find data on GSuite vs Office market share that isn’t anecdotal

https://www.saasgenius.com/blog/why-office-365-is-overtaking...

The only "data" I see there is a couple survey results from 2016.

Major enterprises are not going to GSuite.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...

> Google grew its share of the productivity software market to 10.3% in 2020, according to research from Gartner, taking about 2% from Microsoft. Microsoft is still the clear leader however, with 89.2%. Overall, the productivity software suite market grew 18.2% during 2020.

My point wasn’t about the market share, it was that you decided to be condescending about not having relevant data, and then you also failed to provide any :)

For a business environment, Google Office is terrible compared to MS Office.

The features and functionally of Google office are very limited, especially when you compare Sheets to Excel

This is the only part they aren't on caliber in most cases. I rarely hear Slides or Docs isn't as good as PowerPoint or Word (even though, at least on paper, Word and Powerpoint have more features).

It seems that the sticky moat is Excel (and to a lesser extent but gaining somewhat rapidly, the Teams integration into 365. Google has blown it on being the enterprise chat solution).

Seems Google could chase this to close this, but Microsoft Excel is just absolutely sticky

Word is too, at least for lawyers. A whole generation of lawyers has spent 20 years learning the intricacies of cross-references, page/section numbering, styles and formatting. While some of that is possible in Google Docs, it's clumsy and uses much different conventions.

Just to clarify, I do know that Word fills some niches better (through both feature set and inertia). I know there are universities that still send their post doc writing standards out as word templates and they don't always translate well to Google Docs either.

That said, I think Excel is the exponentially higher case and hardest to replace. The niches filled by Word that Google Docs can't fill readily are pretty small comparatively. Excel has grown to mean so much more than just spreadsheets. Its pretty much a first line database to a huge amount of the business community, and still relied on across entire industries to do work, from wealth management to accounting to payroll to inventory etc.

I have, upon thinking about it as well, to hear any raised point about PowerPoint vs Google Slides where PowerPoint does something so niche that Slides doesn't and its a deal breaker, actually.

Or <null> to Visio. Visio is huge where I work. Being able to cut and paste technical diagrams into complex Word documents is a really important for our uses.

I have replaced visio with drawing.net for 90% of use cases

> just buy Canonical or something

Canonical doesn't really make any things that are considered part of a desktop OS. Ubuntu is just a package (and some argue a bad one) of things made by other people.

There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon. You're probably best re-inventing the wheel if you want a Windows competitor, like Google did with ChromeOS.

They surely do, its reason to fame is being the best distribution supporting OEM devices without religion regarding open source drivers.

They're using a package manager that a lot of people are comfortable with, they give away their packages without subscriptions and they work with some OEMs.

But in reality, the hardware support is in the kernel, so any distro with a more up2date kernel would fare at least as good. As for the software Canonical produces, I'm not great friends with anything. Snap is crap, Netplan is just a renderer to systemd-networkd or networkmanager, MAAS is a pile of garbage, Juju never caught on, upstart failed, Unity failed etc...

We're running a lot of Canonical at work and I'm not particularly impressed.

Nope in what concerns proprietary drivers and FOSS drama.

There is a reason why Canonical was the first option when Microsoft introduced WSL.

A canonical engineer did fix a kernel bug that prevented my laptop from booting on newer kernel versions. And they do develop their own software, too. Saying that they are "just a package" is not giving them enough credit.

> There's very little value in the Linux desktop

There's a tremendous amount of value in the Linux desktop. It's used to do amazing things every day.

What you mean is that it's very hard to turn it into a business model, which I'd agree with. But these are not the same in the world.

To you and me, sure, there is value in a linux desktop.

To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop. Where it works, it is the exception, not the norm.

Taking linux and turning it into a business model can be done - see valve and the steam deck. Granted, that is gaming-only but it can be done. The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop and things break far too often.

> To you and me, sure, there is value in a linux desktop.

"You and me" is actually not a small or meaningless demographic. It includes my thousands of colleagues at Mercedes-Benz who use Linux desktops to do engineering work, and millions of other developers. It means a lot of scientists, for example at NASA and CERN. It means a lot of school students and government employees in educational and other municipal deployments.

A lot of the places where Linux is used is for roles that act as multiplicators, e.g. in the development and production of end-user products, or research/science/RD that will lead to new ones, or in educating the people who will one day make new ones.

All of this is a lot of value if you sum it up. There may be no single shining CEO and his shareholders getting rich off of the Linux desktop in the way we're used to fawning over in the tech hustle news cycle. But the world at large almost certainly is. I submit that's a fine success metric.

> To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop.

For many users it's today more reliable than contemporary Windows. Ten years ago, the Linux desktop experience for a non-technical user was death by a thousand papercuts. Today there are still some gaps in HW support that can create unsolvables, but if your machine is well-supported, things work just fine.

What's mainly keeping it back is many other factors, from channel availability to software availability.

> see valve and the steam deck

:-) I worked on the Steam Deck as CTO of one of Valve's contractors on the project. Glad you like it.

In 2023, Linux on the desktop is merely death by a hundred papercuts instead of a thousand. Progress!

You may be snarky, but it is actually meaningful progress.

My first attempt on Linux was 20 years ago, before I was a technical user. It was a nightmare. Getting my mouse to work was impossible. Even figuring out how to turn the computer off so I could reinstall Windows was a pain.

I came back to Linux some 8 years ago, already as a Developer. Installed Ubuntu. Everything hardware worked well, no need to tinker around. Usability was good and somewhat intuitive, but it took me some time to adjust. I enjoyed it for programming, but not being able to play most games I care about limited my use, and I kept Windows in dual boot.

Nowadays I use Linux Mint as my only OS. It's objectively better than Windows in every way. For regular usage I don't even need to tinker with anything. Although I like the terminal and prefer using it, I can totally see how an average user can get by without touching it at all. I need only to tinker a little to get certain games running, and that's all.

> -) I worked on the Steam Deck as CTO of one of Valve's contractors on the project. Glad you like it.

Not who you're responding to, but I am extremely grateful for the work that was put to make gaming on Linux possible.

I may not own a Steam Deck, but it's development allowed me to switch entirely to Linux without looking back.

> To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop.

I've switched about a dozen average users to Linux from Windows, and they have all been happy with the change and have not switched back.

Based on that, I say that Linux absolutely is usable as a daily driver desktop. The only place I can see where Linux might not be the right choice is with a certain class of gamer -- but those gamers are not "average users".

> The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop

That's a strength, not a weakness. For the user want a windows-like desktop? Done. Does the user want something more to their style of working? Done. Not being locked into the desktop means that if your objection to desktop linux is the UX, there's probably a different desktop that will make you happier.

If it takes someone to show you how, it is not there yet. I know many technical people who can't be bothered to deal with Linux on the desktop due to driver issues et al

For it to be ready to be a mainstream desktop, it needs to just work.

> If it takes someone to show you how, it is not there yet.

How many average users install Windows by themselves? Most people just take their Windows laptop to a store/service provider for maintenance, buy a new PC because "the old one is slow now" or have their nerdy fam member once a year remove mal/spy/adware and run a reg cleaner. And yes, show them things.

Like OP, I've converted many family members over the years to Linux desktops, and as the resident nerdy family member, the amount of maintenance and assistance I need to provide has gone down very decently vs. supporting family Windows sytems.

My 70+ mother in law has no problems using a Linux desktop to run her book club and other things she needs to do, but is far less likely to accidentally install malware. I used to come back to these systems a year later and find a system tray full of 20 new icons, a stack of 5 new browser toolbars, ad popups and "install new version" popups galore and other horrific stuff that needed hours to clean up or required a wipe and reinstall.

There's a lot of Windows users on the fence about Linux that absolutely underestimate how technical they are and how much active and passive maintenance they do on their Windows systems. Are you a tech user who reads The Verge or Ars Technica and knows in advance about that bad new option in the new Win11 update that you will switch of day 0? Do you have your mental laundry list of five settings you change in every new Windows system you acquire? Most Windows users are and do not.

The truth is, a lot of people have a working body of knowledge about how to admin and keep alive a Windows system, and a Linux switch requires re-learning and re-acquiring similar knowledge at times. And it's absolutely fine if you don't have the time to do that. There's value to that existing body of knowledge, and there is a switching cost. Some people have better things to do than installing Linux. But Windows is not magically maintenance/upkeep/difficulty-free.

> If it takes someone to show you how, it is not there yet

Installing Windows is a more complicated and confusing job than installing Linux. The people who have to be shown how to install Linux also have to be shown how to install Windows.

The fact is that I don't really show them how to install and configure this stuff -- it's really very easy. What I do is hold their hand to get them past the fear of the unknown.

Valve turned it into a business model just fine. Their long-term goal is to not be dependent on proprietary OSes and this is why Linux is installed on Steam Deck by default.

> There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon

Only because no-one has disrupted the market. Typical case of “Who would pay for a Mantis open-source bugtracker”, then Jira appear and companies purchase it.

What you mean is, who would pay for Ubuntu. But I’d pay for an open-source macOS, with online backups, video editing and SSO for my IT fleet, anything that doesn’t look like Ubuntu.

I see no value in the Windows desktop. For my tasks.

> I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively.

I've always been shocked that Google didn't face antitrust action over using their internet video monopoly to kill Windows Phone. They wouldn't create a Youtube app for Windows Phone, nor would they allow Microsoft to create one themselves.

I had a Windows phone and android simultaneously - I actually liked the UI on the windows phone but I think I may have been the only person on earth that did because I virtually never saw another one. From that perspective, I can understand choosing not to build for the platform.

I can understand not wanting to build an app yourself, but when you hold a monopoly on internet video and you won't allow your platform competitors to build an app on their own dime, that really should have triggered antitrust action.

I can remember Google taking similar actions to lock out Amazon's Echo Show.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-youtube-a...

If anything, Google has been too aggressive.

>One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop

???

PageRank. It was PageRank, and the fact that they didn't rely on the lies put into <meta> tags. There was no feedback loop at that point.

Somewhere some shareholders are whispering to stage a culture revolution in the G.

Desktop market share moves very slowly. A 1% shift per year is a big move last I looked. ChromeOS is doing about as well as possible gaining share.

ChromeOS is only in the market because they have cheap laptops that schools bought up. And not a single student I know would ever use one outside of school.

Which is kind of depressing. I get public schools have budgetary needs and I suppose Chromebooks are perfectly appropriate for Elementary and (maybe) Middle Schoolers (my kid has one, he's in 2nd grade and its fine) but they should really consider supplying real laptops to the High Schoolers so they learn on hardware and software used in the real world.

cornering the market on educational computers is nothing to sneeze at.

Also "worst gaming device" is a feature, not a bug in that market.

Google did encroach. Google office/docs is much better than Microsoft. Chrome OS is a better OS for most non-tech jobs. The browser is the operating system for most people, and Chrome is leading in that. They won on mobile as well with Android. Google Workspace, in my opinion, is much better than Microsoft.

It's their outdated search bringing everything else down it seems.

Google Docs is not anywhere close to as powerful or as performant as Microsoft Office. I don’t really see how someone familiar with both forward suites could think that is the case.

Pretty much the only notable advantage MSO for my use is excel, which is better for "advanced" spreadsheet workloads. For collaborative work and 99% of documents and spreadsheets, Google docs is the superior option.

I haven't opened a MS product in years and my life is better for it. Their Mac product lineup is particularly lackluster.

What would a Google office for desktop do that the current Google docs doesn't?

Even MS is moving office to being cloud based, so it's not clear business users value local document availability that much - rather the opposite, I've worked in places that like cloud services because locking out their data from a disgruntled or departed employee is one button away.

There are worlds of difference between MS Office and Google Docs in terms of features and abilities. There’s actually a risk for MS to lose their edge by moving to the cloud with a reduced feature set.

Would Google Docs have more features if they had to maintain more platforms? I'd expect the opposite.

>google

>making any product that lasts

that's a tough chance for OS.

it wouldn't hit growth targets after n-th year and would be remotely disabled by google worldwide.

I created AISearch.vip but honestly I am now going to open source it and make it a locally run stand-alone AI search engine because it's absurd having to call OpenAI APIs in the backend when I can let the user run it with their own API keys

There's no moat in anything AI, but MS gets OpenAI access at a discount and therefore will win

ChromeOS and Google Docs?

A Google desktop OS wasn't going to win against Windows in PC gaming compatibility. Nor was it going to displace MS Office + Active Directory at the enterprise level.

With ChromeOS, they took the route available to them, which was to enter the school market and try to build something from there.

> They should have tried to make a better desktop OS

Desktop OS's are not the long term future of computing, is it? But they were astute in acquiring Android. Meanwhile, Microsoft thought that a mobile OS is just a desktop OS squished onto a smaller screen.

> They should have tried to make a better desktop OS

Wouldn't office suite be a better target? Everyone uses it. Lots of low hanging fruits. Easy to win the heart of geeks. Ample opportunities to integrate with other enterprise services.

>They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something)

Ah yes, Canonical, land of people attempting to fork the Linux ecosystem and getting shot down by everyone and doubling down.

Would be a perfect fit for Google.

Have people used BING lately? It's still not good - but maybe it will improve.

Google search has just gotten worse and is more ad prone. It's still better, but not golden age google - not even close.

> ...Google Office for Desktop

They did one better and made Chrome so good that its the OS for most, for all intents and purposes, now.

Why hasn't Canonical been acquired yet?

maybe shuttleworth is not interested in selling?

We will only see a monopoly if there is protectionism. Regulations, licensing, do not compete patents, etc.

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