How many people really care about Google Services? | Hacker News Reader

How many people really care about Google Services?

ben-evans.com

12 pointsfpgeek12 comments

Its pretty telling that after he dismisses the need for maps because, apparently, normal users never drive to unfamiliar places, he dismisses the need for flight updates in part because normal users drive to vacations (and when they do fly, apparently, their planes are never delayed.)

No, i's pretty telling that you're so keen to shout 'gotcha!' that you miss the point ;)

If you use maps once a year to drive on holiday, you're not using it every week, are you? How many people use these services ALL THE TIME?

Most people don't have a flight every week, so flight updates are not a common problem. And most people don't go on holiday every week either, do they?

I care about google search, use it everyday, every hour. it is not shallow at all for me. I care about youtube, spend hours and hours for its content, not really for the service. I used to care about google reader a lot, spent long hours on it. And then they killed it.

Great. The post isn't about search, or YouTube.

Oh, another Benedict Evans article with an agenda?

What is the agenda? Seems to be some guy spewing speculative, vague nonsense. I can't even tell what his point is, and the scant hypotheticals don't support any point at all.

This is seriously just a post for the sake of posting. I can't even wrap my head around what I disagree with.

Like... who cares if Google services are shallow? Nothing used by hundreds of millions of people is going to be purpose-built for any one specific group. That's what plugins/APIs are for...

And if the typical Gmail user gets five emails a day, then can we even say that Gmail should be built for them? Do they really need anything but the shallowest of email services?

It's frustrating how fluffy and nebulous this article is!!

His point isn't just that the services are inadequate or shallow. The main thrust is speculation that Google Services may not be enough irreplaceable enough to fortify Android stewardship from takeover.

My takeaway from this was the narrow view in which Google's power is shown off. The airplane example is a perfect representation of this. I think what he's trying to say is someone like Google needs to find better ways to show their products and services can impact their users lives.

Product demos have a different target audience than, say, the TV ads that Google also buys for Google services (nominally, Chrome or Android, but both, particularly the former, often are more highlighting functionality of service than the product nominally advertised.)

I would suggest that the audience of product demos are people for whom need for flight information is more frequent than the average user.

Most people in tech use lots of google services all the time and think they're very important to the broader market. But many people have little or no use for them or use them only occasionally.

So, it may be that services like maps or calendar are broad (hundreds of millions of users) but shallow (many of those users use them very little)

I tried to make that clear - sorry if you couldn't get the sense.

Yes, I spend a lot of time trying to work out what's going on.

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