Which products specifically have gotten better?
Android has seen enormous improvements, I love stock 4.3 and Google Now.
Chrome's new 'native' apps wrapper-like thing is neat.
Even Youtube has improved a little bit, they've got a nice nifty ajax loader bar up top instead of refreshing the entire page when you go to another video.
But I guess with a different perspective, someone could argue how they don't like any of those changes. But for me, I love them.
They made a change a while back where the video will only buffer a few seconds beyond where you've paused it. Previously, you could go a few seconds into the video, pause it, and let it buffer 100% in whatever quality you needed, now I find myself having to constantly pause the video to let it load. One workaround I was forced to use is TaperMonkey Chrome addon with a script that adds a download link underneath the Youtube video in Chrome. I download the video and watch it offline in perfect quality.
[1] https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter/wiki
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_over...
For many queries Google search is now better than Wikipedia. For example, Google 'Tom Cruise' and the right-hand side of the results page has an almost perfect summary of the actor: A great selection of photos, a concise biography, a clickable list of his popular movies and other actors related to him. This is the sort of thing that makes Google search far better than the competition for most people.
Yeah, even the rather homogeneous group of HN readers seems to have very different opinions of what got better and what got worse :)
But with Android I was talking features. The UI is not bad but (without ever having used Win mobile) MS seems to have the better UI. And Apple the worst (again, without having used them).