In all seriousness, though: if I were a user of Google Voice, I'd be seriously concerned that they would shut it down in a way that caused me to lose access to my phone number (even if only indirectly, as happened recently with their divesture of Google Domains or whatever their registrar was called)... you are much braver than I ;P.
Dialects are always in flux and there are plenty of languages out there they haven't conquered, so ... I'd guess they're just leaving it running to detect new speech or languages or dialets or ... personal data gathering or... ?
In fact, Google Voice on Android was supposed to make calls via data-only (no minutes usage) on a smartphone, but carriers would not allow Google to do that. Hence the strange random-number dialing which utilizes a 3 way call to make a 2 way call by default. Years later, they quietly allowed calls over data but by then GV was already on lifesupport.
The speech patterns also differ heavily, with Youtubers (usually) talking in a presentative manner and speaking very clearly.
I think the way people talk in private phone calls, as well as the call audio quality, are much more similar to that of someone speaking to an assistant.
Like Google Domains?
It would also be pretty shortsighted from a business perspective, IMO. Voice could still be extended to compete with iMessage and WhatsApp, like they sort of tried to do back when they were going to merge it with Hangouts.
God please no more messaging apps from Google for the love of god.
I do miss when GV and SMS were integrated with Hangouts though... was imo a much better experience than you get today with all the broken out apps.
The only reason that merger was even allowed to happen was because it was extremely clear that Sprint would not have been a going concern into the next year if it would stay independent.
I feel like Sprint failing may have been better for the market; I expect more Sprint customers would have switched to AT&T or Verizon than to T-Mobile, and T-Mobile would still have to fight for customers.
Instead, T-Mo has jacked up prices just like everyone else, reduced nice perks, and their "uncarrier" movement is but a memory.
Frankly, I’m just as shocked they didn’t go full throttle with it either, because talk about a data selling gold mine with all that traffic
While I’m on that subject, it could have been a real opportunity for them to push fiber + YouTube TV as a package. Google isn’t good at making original content but at some point they have made a software + services play that makes such a package more palatable and user friendly, imagine subscribing to a YouTube channel and it becomes a channel as part of the TV app for instance. A lot of people watch channels like this as it is.
I don't feel any difference over our previous 1G service, other than it never lags, even if multiple kids are streaming video and I have a backup running. The biggest difference is that it's half the price of the 1G service that ran over AT&T's fiber.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
IIRC, Google doesn't sell user data. But it's plenty valuable to them all locked up.
DuckDuckGo is great for most purposes.
The best product Google has is Maps. That's about it.
I’ve been using Google and Duck on different kinds of searches these days, because neither is universally better but I might try Bing again.
Edit: NM, Bings UI is still annoying. It slides stuff in from the side when you scroll down.
It didn’t. The person you’re replying to is either exaggerating or uninformed.
Maybe give Ecosia a try. The interface is decent and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the results.
Are we just going to pretend that Chrome and Android don't exist just like that, or do I have a different definition of "has"?
Back then it felt like it was actually just possible that they just were that cool. Noughties Google was really something compared to the staid, implacable incumbents. 15GB (with a G!) of email storage that would grow forever! Google Earth! YouTube! Live long enough to see yourself become the villain indeed.
DoubleClick was the year after Google Code. They had a good few years of being considered cool and, well, Not Evil. Google Earth was 2001, Gmail, Scholar and Books was 2004, Reader and Gtalk (RIP x 2) 2005, Patents in 2006 and dropping 1.65 billion plus (which sounds trivial now that everyone and their mum's are worth billions for whatever dog-walking app, but not then) on YouTube that year, even though it was only a year old. Mad times, you could barely sign up for a beta before another one landed. The search engine itself was of course revolutionary and peerless. And you could use it on your WAP phone until something called the "iPhone" happened.
For those of us who were young and, yes, naive, and who weren't paying attention in the first dot com crash in those newspapers adults read while we played (8 year olds in the 90s rarely using IRC to get the lowdown on Silicon Valley), it seemed like it was possibly a new age. "Going public" in 2004 wasn't yet another obvious "oh here we go again" moments, because they were among the first in the generation, with the pervious generation mostly fizzling before pervasive internet access (Amazon made it, but it was a slower burn).
Chrome and Android was 2008, and I remember first hearing around then the phrase "Google Mothership". Though I never stopped using Firefox (and Opera, I don't remember when I switched to Firefox), Chrome was undeniably a technical coup at the time. Being cool and shiny and actually good at being a browser, while kicking that evil Microsoft in the teeth helped too. It took time to burn though that goodwill. Even today, very many otherwise FOSSy people won't move from Chrome.
Google currently has a quarterly revenue of $70-80B.
Imagine an internal team launches a new product to collect $100M in quarterly revenue. An earth-shattering success for any entrepreneur.
For Google...it doesn't even move the needle. Does nothing for stock, it's not strategic, and may become a liability later on.
You would need to launch a multi-billion new sub business for it to be of any interest to Google, which is impossibly hard.
Otherwise, with those expectations, it's impossible to build something good and impactful.
If done inside a conglomerate, it can be the best of both worlds. Access to Google tech and funding, but free from rigid corporate hierarchies, at least at the beginning.
Issue for Google: They have to be carful for Anti-Trust not blocking the acquisition for some reason.
You have to look at what teams at Google are using Flutter. Any dev tool Google officially releases tends to be funded by some product that actually likes/uses it.
Current list from https://flutter.dev/showcase: GPay, Earth, Ads (this is a big one), and others.
There are a lot of teams using it, which is why it's still getting so much support. If you see Google apps moving away from it, then it's time to start looking for an alternative.
It's also why AngularDart still exists and is getting updated. There are large projects that use it, so they will keep supporting it.
How is Ads using Flutter? It likely doesn't, or uses it for some largely irrelevant things like mobile SDK integrations
Wasn't it Analytics which had Dart? But I do remember something about Ads saving it.
> they weren't into doing yet another rewrite.
It all depends on politics within the company. For example: youtube was hastily rewritten using alpha/beta versions of Polymer targeting Custom Elements v0. The moment they did that v0 was deprecated.
So within next 4 years they rewrote Youtube again with Polymer version targeting Custom Elements v1. The moment they did that, Polymer was deprecated and replaced with lit.
Even though they haven't rewritten Youtube, they've now spent time integrating Wiz, an internal Google framework (that also got merged with Angular).
The costs of rewrites don't matter at Google as much as promotions.
If Flutter and Dart were donated to the community, they would most likely slowly die because no one outside of Google gets enough benefit from them to justify maintaining an entire programming language.
You could suggest using AI to OCR the canvas but even that would be subpar because most sites that use HTML provide multiple screens worth of info but sites that render to a canvas render only what's visible. The rest of the data is internal. You'd not only need the AI to successfully OCR the text, you'd need it to interact with the page get it to render what's not currently displayed.
I think you should ask the opposite question instead, and this goes for any project that is corporate "owned"/sponsored like Flutter: why should we expect the community to maintain it if the company abandons it?
Are there any non-Googlers with commit access to the project? Do non-Googlers comprise a decent percentage of contributions? If not, the bar goes up quite a bit for a fork, or for a "peaceful handoff" of the existing project.
GMail isn't going anywhere either.
YouTube is a bit less clear: it doesn't really have any competitors, and is extremely popular and widespread, but it surely costs a fortune to keep running.
It'd be interesting to see the financials on these different business units to see which are the healthiest and which aren't.
Gmail, on the other hand, like any email service, is much harder to switch. Until we get mandated email address portability, like was done with phone numbers some years back.
Right, and that's where most of Google Maps' value is: it's really a business directory combined with a navigation system. I'm not going to look up an address for some place, I want to just search for "<business name> near me" and find all the nearby locations and pick one and go there. Even better, Google Maps has reviews built-in so you can see if people hate a certain place.
>but I'd guess that they don't apply to the majority of people.
If you think the majority of people keep business names and addresses in a contacts list, you're really out of touch.
Also, GMaps has features competing systems usually don't, depending on locality. Here in Tokyo, it's tied into the public transportation system so it'll tell you which train lines to ride, which platform to use, which car to ride in, which station exit to use, when a train is delayed, etc. It'll even tell you exactly how much each option costs, since different train lines have different costs. Then, inside many buildings, it'll show you level-by-level what business is on what floor.
This is not at all what they were saying, and I'm not sure where you got that. What they're saying is that Google doesn't have a monopoly on business location data, so searching for a business on a competitor (especially a large one like Apple, but mostly even OSM) does just work.
I am aware of plenty public transports in European countries that you better print out those PDFs, from their website, assuming they have them in first place.
As far as I know, there is no other map application that does that.
There was a brief moment when it looked like Twitch would kill YouTube; then, much like Instagram responding to SnapChat, they took the best parts of it and added them to itself. I'd be amazed if YouTube wasn't profitable now with the combination of more ads, more subscription/superchat options and the pandemic-era boom in streaming.
If you expect you team to just go-go-go, you might something in the short term but you'll fail miserably in long-term.
It's not like they're doing cereals and now they're doing other cereals, so you can fall back to their previous cereals. You always have to find a new supplier, or then just start buying bread.
And, of course, they shut it down. At this point, Google is going to have to be in a space for at least 5 years and clearly be highly successful before I would even think about using them.
Was that partially FUD? Probably. But there were plenty of services sales could point to.
More Google style would be shortly after shutting down Google Code starting up a new code hosting project, migrating several times to always slightly incompatible frontends requiring developer changes, shutting down the project, and shortly afterwards starting up a new code hosting project...
With all the Big Corp asterisks, Microsoft Business Basic can be a pretty great deal at 6 USD/month. Solid reliability, aliases, (too many) config options, 1TB of OneDrive storage, cloud MS apps, etc.
Either now is probably a good choice.
I then used some other platform that was quite "old school" that is recommended here. The Mail Admin was very opinionated which lead to some mail being blocked. That wasn't cool.
I'm now with Migadu on the cheapest plan and it's been fine. Had a few outages here and there, but otherwise solid.
I'd happily rec Fastmail or Migadu.
other popular options are fastmail, migadu, and mxroute.
because of ordering by vote, we can't see how quickly it happened in this case. in godwin's law the likelihood increases by length of discussion, implying a slow/linear kind of probability, but for google product sunset i would argue that the likelihood ramps up very aggressively from the start.
i hereby dub this `jiveturkey's law`.
like godwin's law, the subthread becomes a distraction. unlike godwin's law, the sunset distraction is always a legitimate point. it's just that it has become tired.