Take, for example, Google Tasks. It has, roughly the same number of features, with the same design as when it launched two years ago. Presumably there are engineers assigned to it. What on earth are they doing? Meanwhile, Microsoft Tasks has subsumed all the features of Wunderlist and has become a far better to-do list app. It's a small example, but it's emblematic.
The same applies to Google Apps. Google Docs, Google Sheets, and the rest haven't had any substantial new features or (more importantly) performance improvements in 10 years. Try loading a hundred-page Word document in Google Docs and it still lags out.
And then there's chat. Oh, lord, Google's chat applications. How many do they have again? Five? Six? Which ones are they canceling this year? Every year, they promise that they're going to "unify" [1] chat, and every year they fail to deliver on that promise.
The only product at Google that actually seems to get updated and maintained is search. Everything else is either a half-baked science experiment that is soon to be canceled or a stagnant leftover without a clear product roadmap. You can quibble that this is bad product management rather than bad engineering, but as far I'm concerned, bad product management is bad engineering.
Take, for example, Google Tasks. It has, roughly the same number of features, with the same design as when it launched two years ago. Presumably there are engineers assigned to it. What on earth are they doing? Meanwhile, Microsoft Tasks has subsumed all the features of Wunderlist and has become a far better to-do list app. It's a small example, but it's emblematic.
The same applies to Google Apps. Google Docs, Google Sheets, and the rest haven't had any substantial new features or (more importantly) performance improvements in 10 years. Try loading a hundred-page Word document in Google Docs and it still lags out.
And then there's chat. Oh, lord, Google's chat applications. How many do they have again? Five? Six? Which ones are they canceling this year? Every year, they promise that they're going to "unify" [1] chat, and every year they fail to deliver on that promise.
The only product at Google that actually seems to get updated and maintained is search. Everything else is either a half-baked science experiment that is soon to be canceled or a stagnant leftover without a clear product roadmap. You can quibble that this is bad product management rather than bad engineering, but as far I'm concerned, bad product management is bad engineering.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/report-google-planni...