I don't think Google cares whether its users are "passionate" or not. They've reached market saturation, so further spread of their products through word-of-mouth (via passionate users and such) isn't a goal at this time.
With regard to their Internet service products, their goal seem to be to monetize the user base effectively, while avoiding wasting funds on unnecessary developer time. To that end, many of their products seem to exist as short-term bets or "experiments", ostensibly to give users something great/interesting, but internally justified by the extra data or "research" those products will generate. See Google Voice (angle: voicemails help train Google Assistant), Inbox (angle: research on some email ideas for potential incorporation into GMail), etc.
Google's cultural fixation on decision-making based on data and statistics will bite them eventually. It may help them squeeze the market, but it won't help them care about other people.
Agree entirely. They don't launch products with the hope of having a long term product. They launch products to experiment and learn more about ad delivery. The core ad system is the main priority. As such, falling in love with any product that isnt their ad tech means understanding the product may disappear for no decent reason.
And people happily store their 20 years of photo memories there...one day it will not be a custom inbox view or a voicemail transcript that will disappear.
Got it, MTurk defintely makes more sense than the Turk :)
Which actually raises an interesting point. The word data comes from Latin dare for "to give". So, as Rob Kitchin observes, while something like MTurk can be properly described as collecting "data", Google and the vast majority of networked platforms should really be more properly described as collecting "capta", from Latin capere, or "to take".
You are absolutely correct and I completely agree; this is part of what I wanted to get at. Google also uses this two-fold "data-gathering disguised as a service" methodology in its captchas -- as your reference to "capare" reminded me. :)
It's actually interesting because Rob Kitchin has started almost exclusively using the word "capta" in his later works. I'm tempted to follow him in doing that in my personal writings. (Captcha and other forms of "data labor" [1] or even "data slavery" is also something that I've started exploring.)
I had no idea anyone was doing in-depth research into this kind of -- as he aptly calls it -- data labor. This would really merit its own HN submission. Thank you for showing me!
This. Google cloud for example is the most technologically advanced. But no one in my company would touch it with a ten foot pole. Google can and will shutdown things is just ingrained - even when we pay, things will change so drastically or be not supported any more that you just can't assume anything.
They had an internal search box you could setup to crawl your intranet. They have shut this down and order all companies to turn it off. SLA does not matter
it seems so weird to me how many companies seem okay with choosing just one cloud vendor, when operating across two isn't that much extra overhead, if you limit yourself to products that two companies provide, and gets you a lot of negotiation and business continuity options.
I would argue that there's a huge overhead. At least if you make use of tools that these companies provide. And if you don't, then just go with dedicated boxes which you can get cheaper than cloud solutions.
I think this article[0] is very well written and clearly explains the problems with provisioning resources in multiple clouds. Yes, there are tools that allow you to do it, however you give up most of the reasons for going into the cloud.
Switching between cloud providers is much easier than going from on-prem to the cloud. So, once your systems are "cloud" ready you should be able to avoid vendor lock in naturally.
I'm thinking we're now at the point that there aren't enough passionate people to lead people away from Google, because Google has become just so engrained in the lives of so many people, especially through Android.
The learning curve to a Google free life is steeper than many people want to take.
I'm so tired of this decision making process in business: well our statistics say <5% of people want feature X so lets just kill X to streamline.
Just stop. Please. Analytics != insight. Meetings should stop being won by whoever prints off the the most tables and visualizations, because gasp sometimes that leads to the wrong decision.
I don’t get this. Features complicate products and require maintenance. By your logic, features would never get built because they’d carry a lifelong burden.
I think the idea is that the ‘long tail’ of users that such use features can still be 10s of millions for google, and preserving can act as a most preventing these power users from seeking alternatives.
It's not linear. GCD haven't got traction (and billions of revenue) it might have now because of shutdown of some products like Reader. And that's oversimplified example actually.
People's minds are not linear, especially when they make decisions. The only market when you can do well with raw numbers only is cheapest 10%, when all competition is about price, and customers have zero loyalty whatsoever.
It's the frustration of people building their workflow on those features that is talking. It's very irritating when you find yourself in the position during your hard earned vacation to (once again) have to find a new option for something that your company needs to function.
Google themselves has actually built very few successful products outside of search. Half of what they build internally they kill and the other half is acquisitions, many of which they also kill.
Sometimes I even wonder about things like GSuite. When does the 2-year sunset period start?
$5/month per user is a pretty good return and it keeps those users/businesses from an expanded Microsoft footprint. I think (hope?) That G suite will be the exception.
the four listed are the biggest products in the world in their space. the first three would be multi billion dollar companies outside of Google.
not to mention Search itself, Docs has become a fantastic product as has Photos. of course they have killed hundreds of potentially great projects (RIP Reader) but give the company their due - they know how to build products.
>the first three would be multi billion dollar companies outside of Google
Gmail got popular because it's free (and had large space for a free client). If it wasn't to be outside of Google, it would make an insignificant amount of money through ads, or started to charge (in which case users would flee).
Ditto for Chrome. There are 4-5 free browsers, nobody would use a browser that's not free (a required for it to be a multi-billion dollar company). At best they'd sell their search bar default setting, like FF does, which is less than a billion IIRC.
Gmail would not be a multi-billion dollar company. It doesn't make money (remember they don't target ads on email content anymore). You'd have to roll in Google apps for business to get to the money making part.
Chrome definitely isn't a multi-billion dollar company. There is no revenue stream there. Firefox only exists by selling the search bar and being a non-profit.
"the first three would be multi billion dollar companies
outside of Google"
I think this is the problem. Google does not care about products smaller than that. They will happily shut down a product because it's too small, even though it would be a reasonably successful business on its own.
However, "reasonably successful" is not good enough for them.
>Google's cultural fixation on decision-making based on data and statistics will bite them eventually.
As will their attitude towards the privacy of their users. Everyone keeps the focus on Facebook while failing to realise that Google are probably worse.
I remember when they came out with Goog411 where you could could google and search for businesses and such. This was way before smartphones so it was a solid, free option for finding stuff on the go. They canned it after a while, but used all the interaction data to further their voice recognition services.
Precisely. I can be as pissed at Google as they come, ready to pick up my pitchfork, but at the end of the month when I spent $120,000 on adwords and made $280,000 in profit as a return, I will gladly tattoo Google logo on my chest.
The scary part is they will sunset gmail eventually. I know from someone inside “L team” that founders hate how much headache gmail brings for such little return. Initially started at the boom of free email providers with fancy always-updating clock of how many extra megabytes you just got in last few seconds, fastforward today there is no money to be make in providing free email.
As they failed to secure sale for a reasonable amount and on fair conditions, expect eventually they will offer to keep paid accounts and auto forward anyone else to another provider for a year or so and then sunset gmail free only leaving gmail enterprise on.
More than a billion people use Gmail, and it continues to serve as the gateway for many people to the Google ecosystem. I, for one, doubt they would sunset it any time soon.
They still scan your Gmails though? I'd think the information they gather this way would still be worth something even if they don't "personalize" their own ads with it.
Everyone scans emails. Google was just a high profile example and there was some backlash because they used for ads, not for "spam prevention", or "anti-virus".
Not a chance. Gmail is the gateway to their cloud storage and office products. There is not way they will get rid of free Gmail. Maybe cut back on the free storage. But even that...
Google's shutdown of products and APIs seems to have led to critical level of trust loss amongst developers and influencers.
It's time for Google to either fix this or get out of providing services and APIs to developers.
Google doesn't seem to put any weight at all on the outcry every time its shutters another service/API.
The trust must be restored.
Google doesn't seem to understand that when they shut service X, that their (potential) customers for service Y (such as Google Compute Engine) become concerned that service Y will be shut down too.
To put a positive suggestion forward, Google could consider giving all services a "sunset guarantee".
A "sunset guarantee" is a commitment that the service will be shut down only with a minimum notice period of say for example 5 years.
Playing devil's advocate, what happens when the trust doesn't become restored?
The company loses ad revenue?
Developers flee in mass droves to...Yahoo and Microsoft?
Look what happened when people "lost trust" in Facebook. Shares are down 4% relative to a year ago. Is the company permanently crippled? Are people revolting and moving to alternate forms of social media? Fewer of the people immediately connected to your local graph are probably using Facebook. But that local loss of users gets completely offset by the new users they grow internationally.
Ultimately, these companies are beholden to their boards and shareholders.
Unless Inbox users clicked enough ads to make a dent in revenue, the organization has every reason to deprioritze competing products, and continue down the path of creating free A/B tests, and then merging the winner into a hybrid/better product.
Take a look at Fuchsia.
Or Dart and Flutter.
Or Hangouts and Talk.
An easy heuristic here might be, "Lose trust in the few in order to benefit the many." It sounds really sad, but it is the reality numerous companies live by.
Facebook is in trouble man, I am amazed the outcry of general public. Its all circumstantial evidence but the amount of people in my circle who are talking about leaving, creating fake profiles and getting their kids pictures of the platform is profound.
Edit:
IMO.
Teenagers have abandoned Facebook in favour of other social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram, according to a study from the Pew Research Center.
Just 51% of US individuals aged 13 to 17 say they use Facebook – a dramatic plunge from the 71% who said they used the social network in Pew’s previous study in 2015, when it was the dominant online platform.
In this year’s study reported Facebook use was, according to Pew, “notably lower” than the percentage of teens who said they used YouTube (85%), Instagram (72%) or Snapchat (69%). In the previous study, just 52% of teens said they used Instagram, while 41% said they used Snapchat.
Considering Facebook owns Instagram this sounds like great news for Facebook. Facebook the company owning the product teens are using instead of Facebook the product seems like a good long term strategy.
Yeah, not so great news for Facebook the company I'm afraid.
Being a social media user is age-independent, whereas one's teens is something they grow out of.
So, not only existing teens grow out of being teens (and eventually Snapchat users), but new teens won't necessarily grow into it to replace them.
Unlike older people, who value utility and what they already know more, new teens are just entering the social media field (and thus are more open to whatever might come next), and they are all about what's cool (so when a service loses it's cool it abandoned MySpace-like fast).
Good point. To that, I'd add that Facebook needs "cool" users. Grandmas may use Facebook a ton and be very loyal, but they're not a cool, inspiring user group others want to follow and emulate.
No tech company of this size dies overnight. And they might be diversified enough to be fine for a very long time (WhatsApp, Instagram) but these are very real problems for facebook.
>Look what happened when people "lost trust" in Facebook. Shares are down 4% relative to a year ago. Is the company permanently crippled? Are people revolting and moving to alternate forms of social media? Fewer of the people immediately connected to your local graph are probably using Facebook. But that local loss of users gets completely offset by the new users they grow internationally.
The idea that because things are some way now they will be forever thusly hasn't panned out historically.
Once dominant IT companies are now dust. The same thing can happen to any company, including FB and Google is they piss enough people off.
And that's incremental. Today's annoyances matter.
Once all-mighty 99% of the Desktop Microsoft now has the more lucrative 5% of the desktop eaten by Apple, and is irrelevant on mobile and web services (search, mail). If they had gathered goodwill back then (like they strive to do now) things would have been different.
> The idea that because things are some way now they will be forever thusly hasn't panned out historically.
I'm not refuting (because I don't really know) but questioning this statement.
Technological progress is a confounder, apart from that I think people and organizations behave as they always have. Okay, enslaving and murdering people has become harder - in the "modern" parts of the world at least. The "system" still favors not paying too much attention to the human side, and to do whatever you can get away with regardless of cost to society, I think.
>Technological progress is a confounder, apart from that I think people and organizations behave as they always have
This discussion (and thus the quip about "things being the same forever") is not about human nature, though. It's about consumer choices, and whether Google is really secure long term.
Eh. I just refuse to work on stuff involving Google APIs unless I really have no other choice. It's not as annoying to set up as, say AWS, but it's much less predictable. Not worth it. A focused alternative is usually more responsive. Though sometimes they get acquired so there really is no winning.
Google has brought Diane Green to run their cloud business. How many major clients have they signed up? Google has a huge Cash cow in ads. Otherwise all these cracks would be much more visible.
> Google's shutdown of products and APIs seems to have led to critical level of trust loss amongst developers and influencers.
Some companies have to care what developers think. (Few, to be frank; developers overestimate their importance.) Many companies have to care what "influencers" think.
But not all, and Google is not part of that "most". Google doesn't have to give a shit because everyone uses Google. They are literally market-saturated at this point. They have no competition and the only material threat in the medium run is a powerful country with a salty antitrust division.
And on your other point, the idea that a company like Google should care about the rounding error of people who care about some B2C thing like Reader shutting down (while many totally-fine alternatives exist) being so personally put out that that colors their analysis of B2B offerings is more than a little silly. If you decide on GCP based frustrations over Google Reader or Google Inbox, you probably aren't clear-headed enough to be making decisions for your company and it's probably a good thing that you are a rounding error besides.
(I use some Google services; I don't use GCP for a variety of reasons completely unrelated to babyraging over a B2C shutdown.)
Couple weeks ago I was part of a discussion what to use for some new project that will require a pile of GPUs like a LARGE pile of them.
There was one guy who actually seriously suggested Google offering. Idea got dropped as EVERY other person in discussion said NO. Azure it will be. Over life of that project I am guessing google lost something like 1-2mil USD minimum. Obviously chump change by their standard but still.
Main reasoning for me was always the absolutely atrocious customer support, no fucking way in hell I will ever give 1c to them if I can avoid it.
You don’t need goodwill until you need it, and then it’s almost impossible to garner. How does that saying go? When you’re on top of the world you can do no wrong, when you’re down you can do no right? A lot of giant companies have to learn this the hard way, probably due to institutional inertia, apathy, lack of foresight, and the reality that today’s C-levels will probably be gone before that shit hits the fan.
> You don’t need goodwill until you need it, and then it’s almost impossible to garner.
This is the key. Google has my "business," but I'm also sick of it. The moment there's a really valid competitor - and these days, I'm starting to look at protonmail - I'm gone. The same stickiness that kept me with them will keep me gone.
In a way, Google's brand functions almost like an ol-school conglomerate-- you've got B2B and B2C products under one roof, with wildly different quality expectations, but all weighing on the brand.
What sort of blowback do conglomerates see for this? Do railroad executives balk at buying GE locomotives because their GE refrigerators fail?
Once upon a time similar things have been said about other giants who fell upon hard times, or died, or had to become shells of their former selves. It’s not like Google has made good friends with the business world either. Besides, the core of their business is advertisements, and they should probably pay attention to the slow, but inexorable backlash against advertising. Given that only a minority block ads and protect their privacy today, it may seem like that’s a silly thing to say, it history suggests otherwise. A bit of goodwill earned while on top can make inevitable slides down the mountain less fatal.
Pivoting is seen as a tremendously good thing in the startup community. If you have a product that isn't working and isn't getting users, you do something different or your company dies. You simply cannot keep throwing developer time at such a product.
Google has a lot more money than a startup and can afford to waste developer time, but it still isn't good. "We tried this thing out and it didn't get a lot of users" is an absolutely reasonable argument for killing a product. Google just gets known for killing products because they are so big and therefore start so many new products.
>This is bizarre to me. Pivoting is seen as a tremendously good thing in the startup community.
What's good for the startup community is not the same for the entrenched behemoth community.
>. If you have a product that isn't working and isn't getting users, you do something different or your company dies. You simply cannot keep throwing developer time at such a product.
Google however can. But instead of developing their product further, they announce it as the next thing, get millions of users, and then forget about it, don't update it, don't promote it anymore, and eventually close it pissing off all those users and failing to attract more users due to their own inaction.
(See the ex-googler's comment above about how this process goes).
Nobody misses products that aren't working, or that aren't satisfying anyone's needs. In the very article you are commenting on, the author says "Good riddance" to the Chrome extension that has been superceded by Gmail's offline capability.
Killing a thriving service is not the same as pulling the plug on one that no one uses.
Microsoft and Intel _worship_ backwards compatibility and the result is that I actually do trust them to not nuke api's on a whim. I can build a product on MS or Intel and it will work for a long time. Google does not care about developers if it nukes api's.
I don’t know, they lost me with this one. They were on their initiation to join the ranks of the evil the last few years, but they’ve really stepped up their game this year and become a full fledged member.
I used to be a 100% Google products user, but my faith that it is fundamentally a good and ethical company has been systematically destroyed in the past years.
7.2 Deprecation Policy. Google will announce if it intends to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to the Services specified at the URL in the next sentence. Google will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate those Services versions and features identified at https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation without these changes for at least one year after that announcement, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment):
(i) required by law or third party relationship (including if there is a change in applicable law or relationship), or
(ii) doing so could create a security risk or substantial economic or material technical burden.
This is nonsense. Gmail is free. Inbox was free. Google Search is free. You can launch a profitable business on Google Cloud or Firebase in the free tier. They built Kubernetes and Go, for free, and it's very easy to port your Cloud infrastructure anywhere. You can translate text to any language, for free.
What exactly do they owe you?
Not enough people were using Inbox. It was an experiment and now they're moving on.
Gsuite also had inbox and Gmail and they are not free. Users who pay for those care.
Next time I have to make a choice on Google product, most likely will reject it coz I can't really on them to either maintain it or give actual human support either
MS is probably supporting XP in the embedded world. If you are not selling to consumers you have to be prepared to do that
That's the difference between with MS and Google(i.e. enterprise and consumer), it doesn't matter how small the user base is, once a feature/product is GA to paying customers, you maintain it for a reasonable amount of time (>>> 1 year ) If you are not sure whether it will have usage/ interest, do your research , but once you go GA stick to it. Even if you are maintaining it for one customer, it shows the commitment you are showing to your customer , builds a lot of confidence on the vendor - Google doesn't get mine today.
* I meant the SLA for notice of deprecation not the lifetime of the product
You're right they owe you nothing, but that goes both ways!
When companies launch experiments and features that people actually like and then take them away, they piss some people off.
The bad PR they are getting from this means they didn't make it clear they were going to discontinue the service in 2020 (or something like that) and make it super easy to transition.
It's pretty weird they wouldn't just keep their Inbox service up and running and minimize maintenance costs.
Seems to suggest they want to make big changes to the underlying data storage and don't want to worry about backward compatibility.
> This is nonsense. Gmail is free. Inbox was free.
> What exactly do they owe you?
This is oversimplified. Google makes products expecting something in return: users provide it data and ad revenue. More directly, users invest time and thought into learning it and integrating it into their lives. Google invited people to depend on it, and after they did, it killed the product. That's real hours wasted for real people. It's not irrational for them to feel betrayed.
Yes, Google has the right to kill a product, just as you have the right to tell a party guest to leave your house. But don't expect them to love you afterward.
> Not enough people were using Inbox. It was an experiment and now they're moving on.
Why weren't enough people using Inbox? Speaking personally, I never tried it because I expected exactly this. I don't want to waste my time on things that will be shuttered.
Google seems to think that each product is an independent experiment. But it seems more likely that each "experiment" they end contributes to the failure of subsequent ones.
Google doesn't owe people products. But people don't owe Google goodwill, either. And without goodwill, it can't launch new products.
Should have switched to bare metal, things like AWS cost a ton more than you realize, it just looks like a good deal because you have smaller cost up front. But in the long run managing your own systems at places like Softlayer can save you a bundle.
EDIT: I don't care about downvotes, but if you are going to do it at least leave a comment of why you think I am wrong.
1. AWS saves us money despite the apparent higher costs because our developers spend more time working on our core business than managing infrastructure, and developer time is our most expensive resource.
2. Softlayer completely f'ed us twice now with down time resulting in a substantial dollar loss.
> 1. AWS saves us money despite the apparent higher costs because our developers spend more time working on our core business than managing infrastructure, and developer time is our most expensive resource.
But in most cases you lose any preserved savings because of the very ease of use and lack of needing to think about the infrastructure management. This is because more often than not problems are solved by just adding another instance, vs actually solving the larger problem.
Also, I would say part of the core business is providing the server, not simply writing the software that is the interface to the service being provided to the end users. E.G. Keeping servers up and and the right number of them in operating is just as important to the core of the business as writing the software / website of the service you are intending on providing. Outsourcing that a 3rd party removes your ability for you to control the entire service that you intend on providing, it is left in the hands of somebody else who may not be aligned to your business needs.
> 2. Softlayer completely f'ed us twice now with down time resulting in a substantial dollar loss.
AWS has f'ed near half the internet before, and probably will do so again.
Service outages are shitty, I get it, but my suggestion for Softlayer was just that, there are others, and my favorite is actually colo with everybody else's cheap EOL servers.
As a anatotal I have seen far to many projects move from bare metal, to AWS or the likes who at a minimum tripple the running cost for less performance. You could say the engineers suck, but I thought they were going to get to spend more time working on core business?
I have ran the numbers many time myself and I can't support AWS for anything other than bootstrapping a well funded startup. After that if you want to lower your cost you are either going to have to jump through hoops and formulate your service to use the cheapest parts all while not focusing on the busness but trying to get that AWS bill down.
Does part of your core business also involve mining silicon, crystalizing it, cutting the crystals into wafers, and then etching those wafers to make the chips your servers are built from?
Somewhere, you're drawing the line between what you build in-house and what you outsource. Where to draw the line depends on many factors. There's definitely no "right" place, such as never using cloud resources.
Vertical integration is function of size. At scale even the small efficiency improvements can make big differences, Facebook run their own DCs and design some hardware too coz it probably makes sense at their scale.
Vertical integration is a function of size and other variables.
For example, I used to work for a solar power company that would install panels on the roofs of big box stores and then sell the power to the stores below grid prices. This company did not manufacture panels -- they bought them at market rate from various suppliers.
The company got acquired by a major silicon wafer manufacturer. One of the things this wafer company made were solar panels -- boom, vertical integration. What a win, right? Well, as it turned out, after about a year, their competitors were able to bring their panel prices down whereas the acquiring company moved a bit more slowly. Thus the wafer company became an albatross around the solar power company's neck. They had to use the parent company's panels, instead of their more cost-effective competitors, and ended up no longer being competitive in the market.
So vertical integration can and often does make sense, but it comes with a loss of agility, and sometimes being nimble is more important.
While there are no fairy tale solutions . Vertical integration gives lot more control which can give gain competitive advantage if done correctly either by doing it cheaper or adding features your competiton cannot
In your ancedote the buying company seems to be benefit with increased sales for a non competitive product. Ofcourse they are doing at the expense of the eroding target , but they are deriving value not the way you see it perhaps or the best possible one but value nonetheless.
Developers managing infrastructure is expensive. Get some experienced architects and operations folks who dont let developers use resources because they are there.
Amazes me when I see automation stacks with 5x the hardware you need to run the entire production / dev / stage environments
> Developers managing infrastructure is expensive.
This is a phrase tossed around a lot, and I am challenging it.
If you make the developers part of the process then the software that is produced is forced to keep the entire vertical inline with the business needs.
You do this by giving the developers the budget along with the requirements. Developers are smart, they will figure out how produce the solution with the budget at hand. And when they realize they will be the one getting the call when things go wrong they will ensure systems are robust and fault tolerant by baking those features directly into the software they are building.
But I guess part of the process is there is a big effort to dumb down each segment of building software so people who have no desire to build software can simply use people as pawns in the game of business. It really shocks me that we still have businesses built with the core of people coming form antiquated business schools. Where they have reinforce the notion that a business needs to be swamped with a bunch of people who collect big paychecks for attending meeting after meeting after meeting while the engineers and developers continuously bring real value to organization.
Nobody ever talks about that CEO, CFO, or VP of whatever or Director of what ever as being expensive. Nobody ever talks about how to cut cost at that level. Meanwhile we have all sorts of strategies and cost cutting measures to lower the amount of budget going to the very people who are actually creating the value in a company.
I will tell you what is expansive. Paying some guy 6+ figures to tell you the guys who build the software that the company's revenue comes from is expansive. When was the last time you heard somebody outsourcing the executive team at a company ?
For those enraptures and founders out there, please don't get me wrong. I am not talking about you. I am talking about the people you may hire, or the people that other people say you need to hire.
> managing your own systems at places like Softlayer
The problem is, at a place like SL, they're not actually your own systems.
> can save you a bundle
It can, and usually does provide at least some savings, but it still comes with both the obvious form of vendor lock-in, and a subtler disadvantage, which is that you're limited by SL's specific hardware and engineering (including network) choices.
The real (performance and/or cost) magic of running ones own servers comes from custom combination of commodity ingredients, not merely lack of virtualization.
> The problem is, at a place like SL, they're not actually your own systems.
You are right, I do prefer colo and EOL hardware for low budget operations. But SL is a step lower than AWS. SL still can give you a punch in the face. But the point I really want is bare metal more than anything.
Also, if you need current gen stuff not owning can be nice because you won't have to repair when they break.
> It can, and usually does provide at least some savings, but it still comes with both the obvious form of vendor lock-in, and a subtler disadvantage, which is that you're limited by SL's specific hardware and engineering (including network) choices.
I advise you never to use vender provided features (that means avoiding AWS features along with depending on SL network topology (which is vlans, nothing special)).
Anybody making a service today should be able to buy a server at any provider, or setup a colo anywhere and join those resources in and get advantage of those resources instantly. All without depending on stacks and software you have no control over.
I hear this as a reason not to own, but I struggle to understand it, given my experience with how reliable modern hardware is (with notable exceptions[1]).
Regardless, you don't have to repair anything broken at all. It may seem preposterous at first, but, for low enough failure rates, on things with low enough replacement cost [2], using warm spares and abandoning in place can be a reasonable strategy. This can work remarkably well for disks in remote locations, especially in non-hot-swap enclosures.
> depending on SL network topology
One doesn't have a choice, though. There's no alternate topology (nor maximum bandwidths) available. Not taking maximum advantage may be premature optimization (optimizing for stability, rather than performance).
> Anybody making a service today should be able to buy a server at any provider, or setup a colo anywhere and join those resources in and get advantage of those resources instantly.
That would be nice, but it's tantamount to asking everyone go "multi-cloud", which removes too much of the "don't have to think/worry about it" purported benefit of cloud/IaaS.
[1] high-density (say, more than 1socket/U) seems to be the worst offenders
[2] by which I mean the current equivalent, including something like half of a server of a quarter of a CPU
> EDIT: I don't care about downvotes, but if you are going to do it at least leave a comment of why you think I am wrong.
That would defeat the entire purpose of using voting to manage the signal to noise ratio; in general, if a comment is worthy responding to, it shouldn't be downvoted, and vice versa.
I thought about this. Here is what I came up with.
If you upvote, and had to reply saying the same thing because you agree no new information is presented. Thus simply upvoting is needed.
But if you downvote, that means somebody has a differing opinion. Leaving it at a downvote only lets us know somebody disagrees and no new dialog can be had about what other ways something could be viewed.
That being said I think we mostly use the upvote and downvote feature on HN wrong but I could be wrong because I never really looked it up.
I think the intent is a upvote and downvote marks relevance, not agreement, but we often use it for agreement when upvoting. And downvotes seem to happen for both relevance and disagreements.
For example, replying to a post about what hosting provider is best with "I like chocolate ice cream", and "Rackspace is a good option" could both be downvoted for very difference reasons. One for being off topic, OR not liking chocolate ice cream" and the other for simply hating Rack Space.
So if you find you are downvoting something that has no comments that cover your settlement and the post is on topic then it would be helpful for many who may not share your sentiment if you explain why. I don't think that is too much to ask for.
You're downvoted for saying "You, person I don't know, should have used a different solution because of reason X" without considering they thought of that when they made their decision.
It was in the phrasing, not in some defense of the "Cloud", which is overrated for existing businesses.
If Azure costs 10x what bare metal costs, it's choosing between 1% of my tech budget or 0.1%. I doubt the multiplier is that bad, but bare metal isn't a consideration either way.
There's also some good integration with PM and IDE software that we use and enjoy.
EDIT: I don't care about downvotes, but if you are going to do it at least leave a comment of why you think I am wrong.
I look forward to the national election where a politician stops what they're doing to complain every single time someone doesn't vote for them, and interrupt what's happening to demand an explanation.
That isn't how voting works.
"cost a ton more than you realize" - unless you look at the prices for the contract you're agreeing to? Y'know, like you do?
"Should have" - telling someone what their company should have done, without even knowing what their company /is/, let alone what they were trying to achieve and what constraints they had on their available options. Assuming or implying that the cheaper thing is always the more correct thing and no other factors can change that.
I don't care about the upvotes either. I care about why somebody thinks one way or the other.
Maybe I will agree, or disagree. Maybe I will learn something. But simply downvoting because you don't agree leaves no new information for me or anybody else reading to learn something.
I could be horribly wrong. And the process of being told why somebody thinks I am wrong might inlighten somebody else even if I hold to my initial view.
That being said, the voting system AFAIK on HN is more about being relevant to the topic, and less about agreeing. Although in practice upvotes tend to be more about agreeing and down votes more about being off topic or illrevent.
Not everybody can downvote, so when somebody does it means they have been around long enough to gain enough magical internet points to do so. So they might have some real insight that could help a OP or inlighten others. Along with making a good conversation even if no agreement is made at the end.
> I look forward to the national election where a politician stops what they're doing to complain every single time someone doesn't vote for them, and interrupt what's happening to demand an explanation.
Nobody is a politician here, what does that have to do with anything? This entire site was designed to talk about things, so I am hardly interrupting "what's happening"
> "cost a ton more than you realize" - unless you look at the prices for the contract you're agreeing to? Y'know, like you do?
AWS has public pricing, I can compare them to other publicly priced places. I don't need a contract that simply don't exist in most cases.
> "Should have" - telling someone what their company should have done, without even knowing what their company /is/, let alone what they were trying to achieve and what constraints they had on their available options. Assuming or implying that the cheaper thing is always the more correct thing and no other factors can change that.
I can compare server for server , compute for compute, and all the above. I don't really need to know what our anybody else is doing with a system to understand the raw resources you can get from the services offered and compare them based off that.
Not everybody can downvote, so when somebody does it means they have been around long enough
And long enough to know that they can write a reply if they want to write a reply, without being prompted.
Nobody is a politician here, what does that have to do with anything? This entire site was designed to talk about things, so I am hardly interrupting "what's happening"
It's illustrative because politicians are the main thing people deal with when 'voting' for something, and the scale of political votes draws attention to the problem. Imagine HN if every comment that got downvoted had a line asking for an explanation - that would be almost every single comment - totally interrupting the flow of the comment threads. Imagine if political votes with millions of voters were stopped by someone demanding an explanation for one or two "down"votes. It would be unworkable. Voting is an aggregate, noisy, large-scale summary. And now this really is dragging it off-topic talking about voting instead, and entreaties to "explain your votes" to people who could have done that if they wanted to, always will tend towards "that's not downvote-worthy", "yes it is", "no it isn't".
AWS has public pricing, I can compare them to other publicly priced places.
Right. So why are you telling other people they are spending "more than they realize"? Either they didn't bother reading the prices, or they don't understand the prices - where's any evidence for either of those? How is it any more than an insult about their inability to understand the public pricing before signing up?
"I can compare server for server , compute for compute, and all the above. I don't really need to know what our anybody else is doing with a system to understand the raw resources you can get from the services offered and compare them based off that."
Indeed you can. What you can't do - or what I disagree with - is you saying "I can get cheaper compute resources here, /so/ that's what your company /should/ have done". It doesn't matter what you started with, who you employ, what skills they have, what constraints you had on timescale or rewriting or redesigning, what your management or investors would support, what discounts you could get, what your future plans are, none of those things matter, only a rudimentary price-per-ghz is enough to tell you that you did the wrong thing and say I know better.
Microsoft have done a few of their own u-turns on developers.
The most recent that springs to mind is the ditching of ADO in favour of ODBC which pissed a lot of developers off. There are plenty of other examples.
Best of luck. I've found azure far more difficult to manage even simple things with than on AWS. Even spinning up a single simple development server feels far more complicated.
Burn I wonder if that’s really a problem because in 3 years, if GOogle Cloud becomes a billion dollar company then most wont question its financial importance to Alphabet.
But that also means if it doesn't become profitable, it'll be shut down on short notice. Which is exactly the reason nobody is considering Google Cloud, and going to AWS and Azure instead. Google knows this (they're not stupid after all) and seems to be pulling out of kubernetes development recently.
Google is not pulling out of Kubernetes development. Their contributions have stayed at a very high level and they remain the largest single contributor, although their % of all contributions has declined over time as many more companies have gotten involved.
Thanks for clarification! The TechCrunch article might indeed be click-baity, but OTOH it seems credible to me Google wouldn't be maintaining k8s indefinitely when they've nothing to gain. I understood Google said as much when they were calling on other parties (presumably AWS, Azure) benefitting from k8s more than Google itself to engage in k8s development. Though I'm not sure Azure, and much less AWS, would have a business case for doing so.
With respect to googlers, I 100% do not even consider google solutions because I have so little trust that what I do on whatever platform they role out this week, however great it may be, will actually still work in one year.
I think the corporate culture of Google does not allow for continued support of 'non core' projects. It's so much cooler to work on new stuff, supporting a chrome plugging that was written eight years ago probably doesn't get you anywhere within Google.
Also they don't have any feedback / bug report channels - these are also important if you plan to support your own stuff (I know you can monitor a lot but it's still not the same level of customer support)
Yup, I use scrapers instead of the official APIs for any data from Google these days. It's works out better in the long run and you can do whatever you like.
To put a positive suggestion forward, Google could consider giving all services a "sunset guarantee
I'd honestly even settle with something like a program where users can choose to enroll in these programs in some sort of test phase. Maybe put some kind of marker in the name or even on the logo that clearly informs and denotes "this product might not last long, it might go into production, it may die after 3 years, you have been warned".
There's a word for this but for some reason it eludes me (and apparently eludes google as well). At least it'd soften the blow when they inevitably roll things up on one of these so designated services.
I've worked with Google APIs before and I was frustrated by the poor support and the breaking changes, but I didn't have a choice. Lack of integration with Google services would have been a major weak point for our product.
The bottom line is that Google is so big and important that other companies just have to put up with Google's behavior. Until that changes there won't be a migration away from Google's APIs.
If the product was a paid service, there would be a better case to be made for guarantees. Given no money is changing hands and Google is providing a world class service for nothing, I'm not sure users have any right to make demands about minimum notice periods.
There is always so much vitriol on HN about these kinds of announcements.
I've never understood why. Google presumably has lots of data and feedback from people using Inbox, and determined that it wasn't useful enough or widespread enough to justify ongoing investment. Why is this surprising or shocking? This happens all the time in commercial and open source software.
The internet is great, but unfortunately has the ability to agglomerate individual moments of otherwise transient irritation into a pyroclastic flow of outrage.
* if the maintainer is no longer able to take the project further, the code is still there an can be used as is, maybe with a few bugfixes. (ala, thunderbird). The code does not disappear overnight. r.
* All the associated data is still yours and available. So no information is lost.
* If it is very critical, you can develop it yourself further
I am not an user of Inbox, but I can understand the outrage. When a service is offered for free by such a mammoth of a company, it gives a false sense of security and permanence. It crushes most competition and development of open source alternatives. Then one fine day, the rug is pulled from under your feet and there is no recourse.
The most ironic aspect is you no longer have access to your pinned emails, bundles and such. Yet, somewhere in google's distributed data storage, it will continue to reside for a long long time. The information asymmetry is outrageous.
> ...It crushes most competition and development of open source alternatives....
This is the aspect, above all the others, that bothers me. Apple is guilty of this too. As soon as a project or tool is released free or as part of the OS or whatever, it drives any competing version out of business. Does it matter if the implementation is shitty? No, because it will still be "good enough" for enough users to make that competition unviable. Does it matter if the implementation stops being developed and eventually gets pulled? No, because the competition has already been driven out.
If somehow the big company that pulls this (Google, Apple, etc) were to seriously commit to maintaining the project, hm, ok, fine I guess. But of course they've repeatedly shown that they won't do that.
The 'bundles' and pinned emails are not lost - they are all just 'labels' under the hood, and they can be found back in gmail as well (except for a couple, I think travel doesn't carry over)
You bring up a good point, it seems as though the answer is to invest more into open source mail clients that can offer more since there truly is value in an improved mail UI.
Hi (ex-googler here, although i wasn't on this project). Product usage isn't a one-way street. It requires coordination from marketing, customer support, and ongoing product development. Inbox was yet another product that Google spent years on internally, launched with a bang, and then basically forgot about while the PMs got their promo and moved on to new projects, and so on.
To make a bad analogy (sorry) in response to your "lots of data and feedback", what Google repeatedly does is the equivalent of walking out into a crowd and yelling "HEY FREE HOT DOGS AT 1600 AMPHITHEATER PARKWAY" only one single time, and then concluding a week later that, even though initially the people who heard about the free hot dogs came by last week, since nobody is coming by for hot dogs anymore that people don't want free hot dogs. Remember Duo? Allo? Even Hangouts Chat from earlier this year is probably unknown to most people because google's stopped yelling in crowds about it.
It seems like the incentives for employees at Google are the problem here. People are rewarded for successfully completing projects, not for maintaining existing ones, so rational employees will maximize their compensation by moving on from a project after it launches and trying to launch a new one.
There seems to be nobody at the top enforcing a consistent product vision.
This is how Android ended up having several text messaging apps at the same time a few years ago. Apple certainly would not have done that, and I doubt even Microsoft would have allowed that state of affairs to exist.
> The internet is great, but unfortunately has the ability to agglomerate individual moments of otherwise transient irritation into a pyroclastic flow of outrage.
I must admit I love the way that you phrased this.
Google seems more willing than most to shut down their offerings. While there's nothing wrong with that, it does give users less of a reason to use one of their services, because you never know when it might just go away.
They had the opportunity to monetize google reader. What's more important than eyeballs. You made a wrapper around other people's website. They could have done _something_. But, no. The just shuttered it.
> This happens all the time in commercial and open source software.
I think it's not the same for Google, or other large companies. Products going away are something that happens a lot - you're right. But in many cases, it's a startup folding because their idea wasn't profitable / worth continuing. In case of a single service, the company will often fight to keep it alive, will try to improve and maybe increase the prices.
It's different for the huge enterprises. They just decide at some point to kill the product - it could be because they're not profitable (but is Gmail profitable?), it could be because of staffing assignment, it could be due to management shift, it could be because of internal conflicts.
It's easier to take "we tried and just can't succeed with this" than "management decision, deal with it".
I think you will be surprised how decisions are made in Big Tech, especially Google. If they are truly metric driven, it will be really hard to explain why they would end up with so many different messengers, and continuously discontinue some and churn out new ones and repeat. Even if they claimed to be, I am afraid they way they read the data is very different than we understand the data, after all, data is just a way to win the argument, the decision need to be made by human.
I don't even try to understand Google anymore. They released "Hangouts Chat" not to be confused with Google Hangouts, which is not to be confused with their Allo, Duo, Voice, or Messenger apps. On the upside, they shut down Google Spaces and replaced Gmail Chat with Google Hangouts (not Hangouts Chat, that's different) and now they've canned Inbox and are keeping the Gmail app.
And if we can't follow this, imagine the average consumer. I can't even imagine how much more successful Google could be if they could cure their insane A.D.D. problem.
The new look Gmail has performed very poorly for me. Hanging for extended periods while changing views, and during search. I'm not sure why a UI refresh would have such an effect but I've been avoiding switching because of this
I have to agree with this. I have upgraded (or rather it upgraded for me a couple of weeks ago), and now everything I do is delayed by a couple of seconds. Archive an email? I can't close the tab otherwise the browser tells me I'm going to lose data. Send an email? Ditto. I wouldn't mind a better UI, but beside the added lag I don't find there's anything better or different than before.
What happens when you revert to the old Gmail? I'm wondering if you get the speed of the old Gmail back or if it instead just reverts to the non-industrial design elements of the previous version of Gmail. Today a friend told me he reverted all the way back to HTML Gmail because he was so annoyed with the non-responsiveness.
I hate how it collapses the left menu bar (Inbox, Drafts, Sent etc) to icons only and then has a big lag to open the menu drawer and show the texts when you hover over it. Gmail was better when it was simpler.
I hate their “new” tabs that tries to categorize emails. It’s just extra clicks to get to the emails I want. It’s forced me to go back to a dedicated email app.
Enabling/disabling tabs via "Configure Inbox", or through Settings > Inbox > Categories does not effect the ability to snooze. The only thing it effects is whether emails are sorted into different tabs or not.
Tabs were not something just introduced in the new UI, the have been in Gmail for 5 years. You can turn them off in settings, or drag and drop emails into different tabs to train it. Gmail has a very high degree of customization and available settings.
I hate how when hovering over labels or threads it hides the information that was previously shown, such as number of unreads in a label or received time for threads. The UX of the new UI is amazingly bad.
I've been using the gmail website since beta (20 year beta, I know, but this was extremely early, when it was invite only) for my email and I just switched to Thunderbird about two weeks ago. It really is that bad.
I think it's complete crap, that's my diplomatic opinion of it (NSFW to post what I really think of vindictive, incompetent, user hostile garbage like this). Slow, high CPU usage, laptop gets hot and fans go to full while loading it, and stay rather high once loaded. My biggest complaint? No opt out apparently.
http://fortune.com/2018/06/05/g-suite-gmail-update-opt-out/
Edit: Aha! This might be a reason to try Thunderbird 60 out.
I used to be a Google fan boy but am starting to dislike them more and more. This, they killed off reader and the creepy data collection they do is why I've started to look into alternatives for their products - anyone have any good suggestions?
After being a keen Google user in the late 2000s to mid 2010s, I’ve been in on a process of extracting them from my life now their true creepy colours are on display.
YouTube => Deleted
Google plus => Deleted
Gmail => Deleted, switched to Soverin [0], works great, less than $4 per month for 25gb email hosting
Drive => Deleted, moved to iCloud
Docs => Deleted, use iWork for docs and Bear [1] for text
Search => Duck Duck Go, getting better all the time
Chrome => Safari, excellent battery life, good tracking protection
Google Photos => Deleted, moved to Apple photos
Next project is to move my website off of Google Analytics.
I’d love to fully switch to Apple Maps as it’s getting better but don’t know if I fully trust it yet. Google Maps is the gold standard.
It says "Up to date as of: 2018-05-22". That seems to imply that it may have been invalidated at some later point. If it is valid until removed, then it shouldn't have a date at all.
I used Apple Maps when I had my iPhone and it worked great for me. Loved the UI. When I saw error on the maps, I gave feedback so Apple could improve the thing. I do the same on Google Maps.
I'm using a Pixel 2 XL now and while Google's services are indeed quite good, Apple's own suite of apps worked quite well, too. I like that the image recognition for photos was done on device instead of some remote servers.
Great list, thanks for posting. I've been anti-Google for a long time and never was a fan. The only product of theirs that I find is indispensable is Youtube. They bought it, but it's by far the most useful and enjoyable product they keep going. Google Maps is close and it is the gold standard for maps, but I could get by without it for sure and just stick to Apple Maps.
I'm a Firefox/DDG/Dropbox+OneDrive/Outlook.com guy. No social media.
I just suffer with whatever battery loss I get on my laptops with Firefox. But I do think it draws less than Chrome. I tell people to just use native browsers that are already installed on their laptops for power/performance reasons, with a note that the only other browser that's customizable and powerful enough to be worth sacrificing battery efficiency for is Firefox. I love the features of Firefox and if it weren't so vastly customizable and superior to Edge/Safari I'd use and recommend native browsers only.
I do tend to prefer Apple and Microsoft over Google but that's a long held bias of mine. I didn't care for Google when they were popular with everyone in the early days of Chrome's release. Hated Google before it was cool, hipster Google hater.
The sad thing is, you just confirmed they‘re doing the right thing. They probably still make money with you as youtube, analytics, adwords „user“ and they never got a dime from you with the products you stopped using (except ads on Search perhaps). Their net income from you probably increased when you stopped usig their free products.
I understand most of the switches, but unfortunately any gmail address you correspond with will eventually tag and index you. Its difficult to fully separate your email history from Google when the whole market has been colonized.
What I'm trying to say is your data will be accessible by Google servers regardless of which email service you use -- so why the paid switch?
How is Soverin delivery? It's the first time I've heard of them so they don't seem to have been around for many time. Newer mail companies sometimes have problems delivering to Microsoft or Yahoo servers. Can you comment on that? I'd be very interested to switch.
I’ve noticed a bit more spam, but not hugely so. Apple Mail’s spam filtering has caught everything pretty well.
A few years ago, when I was using gmail my address got used as the sender on a spam campaign and I was overwhelmed for weeks. Had nothing like that so far.
The things that rub me the most seem to be problems I think from the way the hire people. The average stay at google is like 2.5 years, so most of the things I loved were created by people who are no longer there ( I am sure there are some staples that stay there, but ... )
They tend to higher young and fresh out of school people who know algorithms but seem to lack a strong foundation in computer history. Not just normal computer history (the why things are the way they are) but they lack even the historical history with the products they are working on. You can see this in the way their products have changed and either lost features, or changed features in a fundamental way that break them.
I think many of the problems created area also created from the altitude that "they are the best and brightest so whatever they think must be right". I know this generalization does not hold true in all cases. This sort of attitude can be seen most recently in the way they are handling "www" and "m" domains, and then even suggesting that they would somehow just make the change and then assume they could push a standard on the rest of the internet. There are other cases but don't have the time or will to detail every one of them.
The google today is not the google many of us fell in love with.
> I think many of the problems created area also created from the altitude that "they are the best and brightest so whatever they think must be right". I know this generalization does not hold true in all cases. This sort of attitude can be seen most recently in the way they are handling "www" and "m" domains, and then even suggesting that they would somehow just make the change and then assume they could push a standard on the rest of the internet. There are other cases but don't have the time or will to detail every one of them.
This. That attitude will also result in an almost total inability to take valid feedback. If you incorrectly and arrogantly think your the best and brightest, why would you listen to the plebs when they tell you you're making a mistake.
Then you get the plebs who buy into the best and brightest myth. They falsely assume whatever decision Google, Apple, or Facebook makes must be backed by air-tight reasoning, understanding, and skill; then praise turds to the heavens out of ignorance.
I use Fastmail (paid) for email with my domain name.
It's alright, the app works well enough on iOS. No complaints so far really.
Then DuckDuckGo for search. You can use !g to switch to google search but I rarely do anymore.
Then Weblock and uBlock origin as ad blockers for phone and desktop respectively to prevent some data harvesting.
And I only browse in incognito, I just log in everytime I need to use something.
Then Apple Maps to replace maps.
I do still have a gmail account so no quite totally off google. And Apple Maps has gotten a lot better over time but is undeniably the worse product of the two.
As others have commented, there is a variety of alternatives to Google for the majority of their products, and the discussion has been had on HN a number of times . [0].
What really annoys me is how woven Google has now become to our working day processes. It's all very well having open-source alternatives for private use, but many (I included) used Inbox for work where we are obligated to use Gmail. This feels like a step backwards in many regards.
I agree, it's mind boggling how Google managed to work their way into such major corporations and organizations. At a company I used to work for Google massively (massively) undercut Microsoft for Gmail and Google Docs vs O365. I guess like with Android, no one stopped to wonder why they're giving it away practically free?
It's astonishing what they have done in education too. Kids have no idea what any browser but Chrome is. They don't know that there is any other email besides Gmail. They're equating everything Google with the Internet.
It's actually rather frightening for the open web. Kids can't get away from Youtube. Even on mobile devices, so many searches promote Google products over anything else. Try looking for an address on an iPhone. You can't even copy/paste the address or open it in Apple Maps. it automatically brings up Google Maps and prompts you to install it.
I ended up switching to Bing on my iPhone because I got so sick of Google's invasive tactics. On my device.
> no one stopped to wonder why they're giving it away practically free?
Practically free!? Google Apps for domains is either $5 or $10+ a month per user, depending on feature set. That’s roughly the same price as most other commercial email providers. I don’t know for sure, but my guess is they make a profit on every account just on those monthly fees.
Office 365 is literally double the price of Gmail, and full-blown Exchange is even more expensive. I wouldn't call double the price "roughly the same".
It’s literally not double the price. Office 365 is $5-15 depending on edition (Business Essentials, Business, and Business Premier) and if you do an annual commitment. That’s the same price range as GSuite which is $5 to $25 depending on version (Basic, Business, Enterprise).
I was a fan boy for a while due to the general Unix geekdom impedance match, and I disliked the Apple ecosystem due to being led by big-ego designers, but I still gotta admit, Apple's incentives are better aligned with the little people's (the end users') interest. In the case of Google the users are the advertisers and you get what you get. I see the decisions play out internally at the adtech company I work for, and it's really nothing sinister, but revenue has a huge influence on decisions and the end user often loses.
I'm the same! I had the very first Android phone, the G1, and countless Android phones after that. I was a huge promoter when Android first came out. I pay for Gmail, Google drive, Google Fi, and use Google voice.
- I've decided I'm going to switch back to FireFox.
- I switch to an iPhone for the first time ever this year.
- I've looked hard into switching to https://www.fastmail.com. I've gone as far as backing up all my emails. (Funnily enough, I was looking into switching to Inbox.)
- I switched over to Dropbox.
- I literally only talk to one person on hangouts now.
- I primarily use Dialpad now. (from the makers of Uber Conference)
- I've been using duckduckgo.com more and more. I tried it
as a daily driver for a bit but eventually went back.
They lost my trust with reader. The data collection stuff only confirmed it. I began to self-host my mail, and it's working out really well. I used SOGo, which does contacts and calendar too. For files I used Nextcloud. I use the Nextcloud News app as my reader. All authenticate to my home's LDAP servers, so same username and password, two-factor etc.
I have used protonmail for a long time but have now switched to tutanora. The recent 100% rebuild of the webapp is really nice and fast. Android app is also 100% open source on fdroid
You can do it bit by bit. Start by switching to Firefox on desktop and mobile (if you're an Android user). Install Firefox Multi-Account Containers to sandbox Google and other surveillance capitalism products. Switch to another provider for your email, contacts and calendars. I chose Fastmail - it's adequate. The best thing I can say about it is that it has a suite comparable to Google mail, calendar and contacts and there's no evidence it's tracking me. I use Thunderbird on the desktop and the Fastmail app on mobile. I've moved all my contacts into Fastmail.
Use hooktube (and Hooktube Redirector) on desktop and mobile and NewPipe on mobile. Favour apps from F-Droid. Install uBlock Origin on desktop and mobile.
My next moves are to get my calendars out of Google (my wife and I have several calendars we've shared for years) and into Fastmail. I need to get a couple of years' worth of photos out of Google Photos and back into Flickr. (They probably have a brighter future now that they've been rescued from oblivion by Smugmug - though Ipernity is probably another decent option for a classic Flickr experience.) `rclone` will probably be a lifesaver there.
I need to find a solution for hosted files and docs; I've not found Nextcloud to be convincing. I use B2 for offsite backups. I've yet to install a pi-hole, though I already have a pi doing DHCP and name resolution for my home network. I often use sshuttle if I want to become opaque to my ISP. I have a PIA VPN account but it's consistently terrible - could be my ISP mucking with the traffic.
It's going to be a multi-month project. I look at what I've done and have yet to do to evade constant casual surveillance and I strike myself as sounding like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist - but I'm not. I'm just a rational citizen, attempting to recover for myself some of the human rights I took for granted a decade ago.
Thanks for sharing. I think I need to organize myself to be able to walk away from google and it's all-encompassing experience and grasp, and it's not always easy to make the first step.
I feel the same way. I used to like most all of their offerings and I considered them [as a company] pretty benign. But over time I am less impressed by both their product offerings and their ethos.
Fastmail and DuckDuckGo is what I use. I've been meaning to install LineageOS on my phone, too. Anyone have suggestions of alternatives for YouTube? Would be cool to see a list of software and services organized by the Google product they're alternatives of.
If you mean the site you could use youtube-dl on desktop and NewPipe on Android. If you mean the service, I don't think there's anything. YouTube is pervasive for non-porn videos.
Want to watch a talk from that conference last month? It's only on YouTube.
Want to learn how to rebuild a V8? The best information is on YouTube.
The only thing I know of that isn't on YouTube is gun videos, and only because Google banned their accounts.
Youtube has the benefit of a huge audience, but organic discovery?! Come on. Unless you’re producing clickbait, appealing to tweens, crapping our memes, or pimping rage fuel, their algos will not put you up next. It’s almost comical how bad their recommendation engine is for discovery. Listen to a pop song? Doesn’t matter if it’s the only one you ever watched, now you’re being recmmmemded Ariana Grande until you die. At least that’s sort of comprehensible, but they also make weird connection too. Watch The Jimquisition, and because “games” you get gamergate and alt right trash. Watch a video on the moon landings, and because “moon” you get conspiracy theories.
The algorithmic purpose seems to be, “hey you like X, maybe you’d like an insane or hateful tangent to X? Would that keep you clicking?”
You may find it terrible (I don’t think it’s great, but it’s usually at least mediocre for me), but Vimeo has virtually nothing. Also, Vimeo doesn’t seem to rank well in search engines either. So yes, even if YouTube was universally terrible as you claim for organic discovery (it isn’t), it’s still better than basically nothing.
I think “better than nothing” is the perfect way to describe it. Almost anything else would be better, but there is effectively nothing else. I would point out that when talking about how Youtube does well on search engines though, it can’t hurt that it has that little connection to Google, the premier search engine.
I’m glad that you’ve had better luck with using it for discovery though, any tips on how how to get that to work?
Those (like me) who like using Google products know the bargain. Until a product reaches critical mass, it could get canceled.
Wave died. G Suite has succeeded. Chrome succeeded. Reader died. Google+ is in a coma. Hangouts and Google Photos which came out of the ashes looks like they will stay, though what they are doing with their chat tools is a real mystery. In hardware, Chromecast succeeded, Nexus faded away as did a bunch of other stuff. Among the ones i am a little worried about : Google Keep - which i am using more and more. I hope it does not die. Also, Google wifi which i am using now - hope it stays. I tried Inbox and liked it, but I did not invest a lot in it.
The ones you can be certain won't go away are the ones with a billion+ users : Gmail, Android, Chrome, Maps, Search, Youtube, Google Drive (almost 1B) and Google Photos (500M+) should be fine as well.
But Google does not owe me anything. And I don't owe them. I don't have to use any of their products if I don't want to.
This is puzzling, as Google pushed Inbox pretty hard. I was under the impression that the Gmail interface would be decommissioned, and Inbox would be the future.
They had a strategic priority a while back to 'make mail good on mobile' ... whereas now they are folding it all back into the gmail umbrella because the overall strategic impetus would be to be gmail founded.
So, short term strategy now important with the longer term issues of product portfolio. Collapse the 'good bits' of inbox into Gmail and move forward.
You have to consider it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have two email products at the same time.
The real problem is the new Gmail is not very good.
It still blows my mind how companies with billions of dollars to burn get UI wrong. Like the first Windows 10.
"It still blows my mind how companies with billions of dollars to burn get UI wrong. Like the first Windows 10."
It's much harder to build a UI that a billion people like than one that a hundred people like.
Startups have the luxury of being able to pick their customers. They can (and should) make the UI really, really tailored to their initial customers, because that's all they've got. Nail that and the initial customers evangelize the product, and bring new customers in.
Big companies do not have that luxury. Most peoples' desires are contradictory; some people like things one way, other people like it another way, some people want it configurable just the way they want it, most people get confused and leave if you put in too many knobs and configuration options. When you're doing UI design for a billion-dollar company, you have to shoot for the middle-ground that will piss off the fewest people. That's invariably something that doesn't make people all that excited either.
I was involved in 4 UI redesigns for Google Search, one as the first engineer, two as a tech lead, and one as a consultant. Usually the version we launched was a pale shadow of some of the cooler ideas that the UI designers came up with, and made nobody particularly excited, including the people who designed it. But that's the reality of serving over a billion people. Every feature cut was cut because it would make the design unusable for some fraction of the userbase; every misfeature added was added because somebody really wanted it, and in most cases we had the metrics to prove it.
There is no excuse for the failure of Win 10 it was just a ball of confusion.
As for Google Search, why can't they just offer features for those who want them? I wan't long pages of results, not short, I want inverted colours, don't want search results that don't include a term etc..
"As for Google Search, why can't they just offer features for those who want them?"
Heh. I am intimately familiar with the road that leads down...
My first project at Google was the Search Options panel [1]. This was a collapsible left-nav with a bunch of additional tools that you could use to help refine, visualize, or otherwise improve your search results. Many of these tools were very useful to certain populations (one that I worked on was called Wonder Wheel [2] and was very popular with teachers, reporters, and advertisers) and virtually useless to everyone else. Why was this panel collapsible? So that we could offer these features to just those who wanted them without cluttering the UI for everyone else.
Many of these tools got very low usage despite rave reviews. Why? Well, when we interviewed users, they didn't know they existed. On Hacker News discussions I'd direct-link people to a specific tool like custom date range or verbatim mode, and they'd be like "Wow, this is so useful. I had no idea this existed. You guys should make this obvious in the UI."
So my 3rd project at Google, a visual redesign of all of Search [3], included an always-open left nav.
After an initial bump, though, usage numbers for all the tools started dropping off. One interesting effect that you find out, if you do enough metrics-based UI design, is that people become blind to features they don't use. These tools were special-purpose enough that the majority of searchers - who just want to get to their result as fast as possible - were becoming blind to the whole left nav. So the order came down that we needed to hide most of the tools, and only show the ones that we could predict would be likely to be used on the particular query.
Well, we did that, but another principle of UI design is that controls should appear in a predictable order and not move around, so that people can build habits around their use. Changing the set of tools displayed per query violates that principle.
Eventually, after a few more redesigns, the left nav moved to the top nav and most of the tools were discontinued anyways. Many of the features you want actually exist, and I bet you don't know about them. You can get long results through Settings -> Search Settings -> Results per page, for example, and you can prevent Google from inferring what you really mean via Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim. But that sorta proves my point, right? You can't really please everyone - even if you build the features they need, there's no guarantee they'll know about them.
I think most of it can be explained by your very first sentence. Gmail is 15 years old. It has massive institutional inertia and clout. Hundreds of engineers (https://www.quora.com/How-large-is-the-Gmail-team), probably a similar number of PHBs. Some of those people have spent their entire professional lives working on Gmail. They are loath to admit it sucks. Understandably.
You don't just phase that sort of thing out in favor of some upstart that came along three years ago. You can't. A category 5 shitstorm would ensue. Few people have the stomach for that.
Fine you say, can't Inbox and Gmail at least co-exist? There again the answer is no. The usurper must eventually be vanquished. The situation is not long-term sustainable.
Bingo. And it's this dynamic that requires a continual turnover of institutions.
> You don't just phase that sort of thing out
Things that "just can't be done" end up being perfectly feasible in the hands of a leader with some boldness and tolerance for organizational pushback. Often, all that's required to achieve the politically impossible is for an absolute authority to say "do it".
My problem with gmail and inbox is that the search feature is terrible. I routinely have to search for things that I setup like a to do list or a recent reply.. and I use a few keywords and nothing can’t find them.
Exactly. What google doesn't seem to 'get' is that email + searchable database = life. I email stuff to myself, or bcc: myself, all the time. If all emails were in a searchable database, perhaps with automatic clustering to group associations, all very fast -- that's killer sticky. The emails, plus stuff on gdocs, gdrive, etc, all fully searchable? Gold. (Yes, non-trivial privacy concern, but no personal data should reside un-encrypted in the cloud, and decryption should happen locally in the browser.)
I know of a 'top Brazilian designer' who was hired by Google and then quit because they just didn't get it.
I can actually see a shade of rationality in 'metrics driven design' i.e. 'picking the colour blue' on the web page. Small change in hue = difference. But beyond that - you need to trust your designers.
If they are set up with the right philosophy and don't let their aesthetic aspirations get out of hand ... you need them.
With regard to their Internet service products, their goal seem to be to monetize the user base effectively, while avoiding wasting funds on unnecessary developer time. To that end, many of their products seem to exist as short-term bets or "experiments", ostensibly to give users something great/interesting, but internally justified by the extra data or "research" those products will generate. See Google Voice (angle: voicemails help train Google Assistant), Inbox (angle: research on some email ideas for potential incorporation into GMail), etc.
Google's cultural fixation on decision-making based on data and statistics will bite them eventually. It may help them squeeze the market, but it won't help them care about other people.