For as long a I am a “wanna-be founder”, I used to be afraid of working on ideas that compete with (parts of) Google business. That feeling is no more.
I use GSuite at work at a FAANG company, and Google slides with 50+ pages is so slow (multi-second pauses when changing slides) to be practically unusable. Finding documents in Google drive is hard to impossible, and good luck keeping track of comments or tasks assigned to you in multiple unrelated documents.
I’m sure at some level consolidating their offerings is a right product move, but I don’t think Basecamp or Calendly should be particularly concerned.
You aren’t really competing on quality when you go up against these kinds of products though, you are competing against “free and good enough” which is actually quite compelling in a lot of cases. If you’ve ever been up against Microsoft in a deal for example they just ignore your product and keep throwing more unrelated free stuff into the enterprise agreement until the client acquiesces.
Yep, but workspace is not free. Or good for that matter. It’s maybe cheap, but with so many asterisks that I, and lot of other, starts to be unwilling to commit to anything Google
Teams is not the best messaging/videoconferencing program by a country mile, yet it shows the most growth YoY [citation needed].
I worked for a few companies who dipped a toe into the Microsoft waters and their products drowned everything else out; this was not because the offering was technically superior or cheaper.
Microsoft and Google have a fundamentally different approach to enterprise software than Google.
Microsoft is the mediocre Apple of enterprise tech, before Apple even got that reputation.
EVERYTHING IS INTEGRATED. Microsoft makes it so insanely easy to stay within the microsoft ecosystem, that using a mediocre software created by Microsoft is always a better option than a 3rd party tool. (See slacks getting clobbered by teams, despite slacks being significantly faster)
Part of what makes MSFT click is that they they go above and beyond to create a tool everyone can use. Additionally, they are obsessed with customers to a point that their tools lose all personality. This is bad if you want something that is opinionated in exactly the way you want (see Obsidian vs OneNote), but great for companies that want to offer an inoffensive tool that is serviceable for all its employees.
An incumbent is fearsome when it uses every little advantage in its greater product offering to embed itself as the obvious option. (Apple for consumer tech, MSFT for enterprise tech). Google has refused to implement the kind of top down organizational structure needed to enforce such integration in its product lineup. This is the company that couldn't sync its grocery lists with google keep. As long as it stays true, Google will never be able to leverage the advantage of an incumbent. It's a shame too, their products are honestly quite good.
We also switched and I don’t miss slack anymore. Teams has been getting better by the day. Lots of features are worse than slack but many are also better, especially around video.
#2 and #4 are both about Zoom having a botched e2e implementation (it was "e2e", but had server-side key management). That's not really a win for Teams since it doesn't even try to support e2e.
I’m actually surprised that Slack hasn’t tried their hand at an email service to combat this. Yes o365 is more than email but that’s their foot in the door. If you cut off that sales vector you make MS have to compete on the merits of their add-on services and they don’t hold up. Notion is a OneNote and Sharepoint destroyers. Zoom and Slack are better than Teams and S4B. Okta and Auth0 are better than ADFS.
Do you know Okta well? I've been looking for product comparisons but the best I came up with was Okta's "Why Choose Okta vs. ADFS?" [1]
And that's just sales talk. It says ADFS needs multiple servers, which it doesn't. At least it depends on your deployment model. And whether AD running on another server constitutes "multiple servers" (of course just as true for Okta).
It also says Okta runs in the cloud. The implication is that ADFS doesnt. Well, like anything, it does.
The remainder talks about low TCO, deployment speed, simplifying AD complexity, and the cloud. All of which are rather subjective.
I say all of this having done some very complex ADFS deployments - at the extreme using Chip & PIN authN, and authR from client workstations assumed to be compromised.
So given the above I'd love to find a compelling and unbiased comparison. Including featureset.
> I’m actually surprised that Slack hasn’t tried their hand at an email service to combat this.
This either shows that Slack's "email is dead" marketing strategy was very effective (did an important job during a specific period of early growth and they have now moved on) or very ineffective (their main proposition completely passed you by).
Outlook is not my preferred email client but having. Used it on both windows and Mac OS as groupware tool, it's still better than most things by Google.
It's just snappier, because it's native code. And outlook on Mac OS used to be gorgeous.
Excel is a jewel and a marvel of software engineering. Google sheets is good for doing just 2+2.
And so on. When it comes to office stuff, Microsoft software is just better.
Sadly, because it's all proprietary software, but it is was it it.
Gmail used to be snappier than Outlook is now when it launched, even as a webapp. I'm not sure quite how they've managed to mess it up so badly, but it's poor engineering not a limitation of the tech stack.
Agree with you on the other office products though. Word, Excel, etc aren't perfect, but they're much better than the alternatives for most things.
The problem was that most people compared big inboxes managed in Outlook when brand new emails in GMail. It's certainly easier to search when you have very little data to go through.
> It's just snappier, because it's native code. And outlook on Mac OS used to be gorgeous.
I've been forced into using Outlook on Windows and Mac and snappy has never been my impression, although I seem to recall it being somewhat more usable on Windows. Not that GMail is snappy either, but a browser based client isn't necessarily slower than Outlook. Although an actually fast native client would be hard to beat.
I’ve used only the outlook web access client for outlook for four-plus years (literally haven’t installed the native client). It’s been more than tolerable.
We literally just dumped Zoom at work. Why? Because Teams was "free" (Included in our o365 agreement), and it was just good enough. We have had both for a couple of years now, but nobody ever went to Teams for a meeting, and everybody is pissed... because it really wasn't as good.
We just had our first Teams meeting this morning, in fact... we could not figure out how to simply view the person speaking. Seems like it's always in split view, or that goofy "Together" view. Nothing makes you want to turn off the camera more than having your face on everybody's screen through 100% of the meeting.
yes, and that's what I normally do as well. I also bookmark docs that I know I am gonna access in the future. I just don't trust I will be able to find it again.
Same here. 100-slide decks open without a problem for our entire org. And drive search is spot on 99% of the time. There are other issues, but these aren’t it.
I mean it's Google. You'd think they'd have nailed the concept of "searching" by now. :)
But I have found a weird workaround for this. After installing Google Drive File Stream locally and searching for things with the file explorer, it doesn't seem that bad all of a sudden.
I don't have this experience at all - first, I have slide decks that have 100s of slides and it works fine. I have no issue finding documents either - however I do struggle with the invites to documents inside of Gmail.
Yep, and I'm building something to sit on top of google Drive, to manage files, and make it easier to collaborate as a team. That's not something new, similar, to what Confluence, Notion are offering, ...
The reality is that google sucks at B2B, everything they do don't work. There are a few exception like google Workspace because Gmail was number 1 in B2C and they were the first to get Words and Excel in the browser and Google Analytics.
The reality is that, innovation for a big company is hard, Microsoft was able to build Teams from scratch to compete with Slack and managed to it, and that's an amazing achievement, not something that we are used to seeing.
> Microsoft was able to build Teams from scratch to compete with Slack and managed to it
Teams is complete shit though, they didn't compete on quality of their offering. They're competing because every org already pays Microsoft a lot of money and they may as well use Teams because it's "integrated"
I don't really understand where this notion comes from. I've used Slack; I've used Teams; I find Teams more than adequate for my organization's use-case. I'm sure that's not the case for everyone, but "Teams is complete shit" is such an odd over-generalization from my vantage point.
For me it is the slowness and bugs. I complained on occasion about Slack's responsiveness but Teams on my Mac is on another level of unresponsiveness. Also it doesn't seem to use the macOS APIs for notifications, Teams notifications show up even in Do Not Disturb mode. Tapping the notification is hit-or-miss as to whether or not it will actually load the relevant discussion.
Teams is also really bad at emoji support compared to Slack.
I've been using Teams for only a few months after having used Slack for years but in the time I've used it I've come to despise it.
Point of note, Teams wasn't built from scratch it was more like a remodel of skype which they already owned. If you start looking under the hood at various aspects of teams one will start to see Skype all over the place.
It looks a lot more like a remodeled Lync (eventually rebranded Skype for Business) than a remodeled Skype, basically Lync but written in Sharepoint, hence the up to 1 hour account creation and license syncing delays.
I don't know if they updated this yet, but one location this was evident was on Linux. During a Teams call, if you looked at the applications using pulseaudio, Teams would show up as Skype.
That statement is very hard to quantify even within the same industry.
Apple makes and will continue to make great products for a specific subset of uses because they are willing to make big investments and are very opinionated about optimal user experience. The end result of that is the often great experience of their ecosystem today.
They obviously also employ tactics to lock out competition too (see the purchase of AuthenTec, Dark Sky and a few other small purchases of best in class companies explicitly demanding that they don't work with anyone else).
Innovation in reality is "improving things" and many many companies suck at defining what an improvement is and who the improvement is for. Too many focus on improving revenue numbers and that's it instead of improving user experience, reliability, security, privacy, etc. All things Apple cares deeply about*
* Again, Apple's decisions are only an improvement to a subset of users but that's really all that matters to them. Happier users means more use of Apple products which is a win.
GSuite is downright horrible compared to alternatives and its only saving grace is GMail. And its the same with GCloud which makes doing the most basic things slow and annoying. It really feels like most of those GSuite products are there JUST so that Google can say they have it.
I've used GSuite for years and find it fine. I do think it performs best using Chrome though. The document collaboration works well, and search works when I need it. Much better than something like Confluence.
What other tools would you suggest in place of GSuite (email, calendaring, collaborative document building, searching/finding docs, etc...)? O365 is all that comes to mind.
I like Meet b/c it's easy. Click link and people are in a meeting. I don't want to force people to install and app or hunt around for the tiny text that lets people join a meeting from their browser.
Meet is far from perfect (performance issues on Macs), but ease of use trumps that for me personally.
What attracts you to Google Meet? I prefer Zoom personally (despite the privacy concerns), as I can have a meeting with someone without the fans on my 2017 MBP 13" going into liftoff, and the video feeds of the participants never freeze. Legitimately every Google Meet I've ever been a part of has either completely drained my battery, or frozen the video feeds of multiple participants, or both, even if there's just 1-2 other people.
Plus I kind of resent Google Calendar not having reasonable plugins for other video services (Jitsi, Zoom, etc.); feels anti-trusty to me.
It just works. You get a link, you open the link, you're in.
Whenever I get a Zoom link, it first forces me to download the app. As in, you open the link and it instantly downloads an executable to my computer, which I need to then go delete. Then I need to fight the website by clicking a series of links to get to the browser version. Then I enter my name and join. Except oops, the meeting has not formally started, so it has now kicked me back to the previous page to re-enter my name. Try again, except later since if you go before it's officially started, you're doing this again.
And that's how bad Zoom is even before you start the call. The UI in Zoom calls is also worse than Google Meet. What the hell is "Join with Computer Audio"? What does that even mean?
Yeah it seems like Zoom's falling prey to the "we're a 10,000 seat contract but we really need this feature" stuff. I think using Zoom was fine as long as you could effectively ignore the UI (yeah "Join with Computer Audio" is completely nonsensical, double especially at that phase like, oh yeah I would like to make that decision right now where people don't know I can't hear them and they can't hear me, cool cool cool), but if you're actually using Zoom features beyond like, everyone get on Zoom, it's not wonderful.
You should experience what it's like as parents and educators to use Google Meet for school. It's barely usable with massive performance and access issues.
Google Meet unfortunately doesn't just work as easily as it should.
Well, I’m not a parent or an educator, but we’ve had company-wide meetings on Google Meet with triple-digit attendance and I haven’t noticed performance issues.
The issue I personally have with zoom (besides all the historic security concerns) is that it is typically incredibly complicated to
use - too many bells
and whistles to do even basic things. Meet generally ‘just works’, and has been better performance wise than Zoom on my hardware.
Zoom does seem to do better overly severely degraded connections (and surfaces that
It is happening). The experience is still pretty bad though.
Oh yeah that's totally fair. I was hosting a meeting the other day and one of my participants wanted to share their screen, and I still haven't found where to do that. I just made them host. Their UI is hot garbage.
But the behavior of auto layout when someone is sharing a screen is completely weird to me. Also their new UI which rolled out to us recently is bit more complex than the simpler one before.
> Is that the HTML version? Because the normal GMail is also horribly slow.
Out of interest, what is slow about gmail for you? I use gmail for work and speed has never been a problem or even an annoyance. Im genuinely interested as some people seem to have a totally different experience to me and it'd be interesting to understand why.
For me, if I have long email threads (think 1 year worth of to and fros), it takes ages to load and keeps moving the position based on images loading etc. The conversation view completely becomes unusable beyond few tens of emails.
Each morning I have to aggressively sift through ~300 emails and archive ~270 of them. Archiving 10 emails at a time can take several seconds, from pressing the archive button, to the email list being refreshed with 10 more items from the previous page.
Opening a conversation that has more than 5 messages in the thread will regularly take several seconds.
EDIT: paging set to 100 conversations per page, with reader view / vertical split to enable reading emails at the same time as viewing the rest of the list of threads.
Similar experiences with Chrome on Win10 as safari on macOS or gmail app on iOS.
A long delay when loading it, a noticeable delay (I’d guess 50-200ms, it’s not consistent) whenever I open any E-Mail. Compared to Fastmail where the start-up delay is shorter, and opening any mail feels instant.
Don't be afraid to compete with Google on anything short of products like ads and YouTube. You shouldn't be afraid to compete with them unless their product is making billions of dollars. They'll kill a highly profitable product without hesitation if it looks like it won't win them the NBU (Next Billion Users). They're smart cookies, but their ethos is win big or fuggedaboutit. They have very little stamina or patience for middling products.
Next perfectly viable Google product on the chopping block: Stadia
out of curiosity, what kind of machine are you using ? I expect it's not network io causing the slowdowns, but i'm curious if even latest machines can't handle google apps
I'd lay money it's not the engineers, but management. If management doesn't put performance as a top-tier requirement, there's no way to stuff enough features into a program for something like an office suite (already half-crippled by having to run in a browser) and keep the performance high. It's too much work for even the engineers who care to take it on in the cracks & edges around their other projects... it has to be something management prioritizes.
Seems like this is how all "enterprise-grade" software becomes a pain to use. Usability and performance get short shrift below getting the next 100 bullet-point-features and before you know it the only computers in the world that can run it decently are the developer's, where it still is frankly only on the edge of usability and far from where it would be a joy to use.
There is another factor with enterprise software - people build workflows around it that are business critical (think checklists and HOW-TO guides), and taught to folks that just want to turn the crank and get things done, not mess around with the latest changes (in general).
UX changes (usually what people mean when they say ‘usability) are problematic because they often require disruptive changes, retraining people, and breaking someone’s business for awhile if they can’t know this is coming and stage it out properly. That is a good way to lose customers.
Performance improvements over unlocking some major business area with a feature are not as high priority - because an extra .5% in cost to an existing customer is usually not as important as unlocking another 10% of sales.
Over time it can of course kill the product if not addressed. It’s easy to see how the incentives lead people there though.
And for an enterprise, they already pay people to do things they aren’t excited to do every day - why should they care the software is motivating when people already clean toilets, deal with retail customers, and mop floors without any of those being exciting either? As long as it works, it works.
"why should they care the software is motivating when people already clean toilets, deal with retail customers, and mop floors without any of those being exciting either?"
Efficient. I'm not looking to enterprise software to provide personal affirmation in life, but if it takes me 5 minutes of staring at loading screens to do something I ought to have been able to do in 15 seconds, that's that much lost productivity, and it multiplies over days, months, years, and across employees.
Moreover, while supermegaultra performance tuning may be expensive, many performance improvements can be had for much less than the cost of time they are losing people, and many others can be obtained relatively cheaply if they are simply something that is kept in mind at all parts of the design process rather than completely ignored until it can't possibly be ignored any more. To a large degree, I'm not asking for these companies to make a moon shot to make me slightly happier... I'm asking for them to pick the freaking low-hanging fruit that is right in front of them, and, ideally, to do so on an ongoing basis. Computers are pretty fast nowadays, you don't really have to try that hard to put something on the screen in less than 30 seconds.
For sure - but you’re still thinking about it from the using side, not the purchasing/management side.
We all know how dysfunctional management can be, and IMO this is more a symptom of the disconnect between management and the employees resulting in bad business performance.
It’s clear whoever is doing the purchasing either doesn’t care, doesn’t know, or has to pick the option due to another checkbox somewhere they can’t control. The people who know have no control over the tools they are using.
It’s amazing how pathological organizations can be.
It is exactly this. Try competing with a company like Google or Microsoft for a giant contact with a Fortune 500 company, where the person making the decision doesn't have to use the products and their primary concern is the cost of training and migration.
"Your employees will be happier" is not on anyone's radar.
"Does it work with our company's authentication system from 2003?"
"Does it support playing ogg vorbis files embedded in spreadsheet cells?"
"The director of sales won't consider it for their department unless you add this particular feature that they are used to from product X, even though they don't actually do any selling anymore and it makes no sense in our own product and will require special-case handling for all maintenance in perpetuity. They have a hunch that it's valuable."
People use to laugh at PMs (disclaimer: I’m a PM), but making right product decisions in a big Corp, with multiple parties to align with that had competing interests, is hard.
I’m sure Google has high quality engineers working more or less on every product. It’s just the solution space of products with big surface area and many interdependencies is really large. When you are more steps removed from your customers, and can’t move fast (comparing to a small nibble team), finding the optimum becomes a very non-trivial exercise.
Most successful products at big corps have laser-focused teams with highly influential leaders. Anything else results on mediocrity.
Why is it, then, that Google products with ~N users tend to be less good than equivalent open-source projects in the same verticals with ~N users, when those open-source projects mostly don’t even have access to effective product management?
That’s a good question, even if I disagree slightly about the premise, as random large open-source products targeting consumers (as opposed to infrastructure projects like Linux kernel) can dramatically vary in quality.
My hypothesis: devs are much closer to users, as they are often users themselves, and have more freedom to work on fixing broken experiences, as opposed to just rolling new features.
Linus was able to out-compete a team of hundreds of Microsoft Engineers who spent years building a Source Control system by himself within a span of 10 days when he built git.
You can't take Microsoft Source Control, add a few stories, and end up with git in a Sprint. You can't split that work up between different teams.
The essence of git is in a unified design that matches the essential complexity of source control requirements. When you play the game of telephone from user to sales to program manager to project manager to architect to lead developer to UX designer to DB modeler, each step along the path introduces errors. Those errors made the system harder to design for, harder to scale, and harder to use.
Linus was able to cover every element of those to a passable degree himself. You need to empower your developers. If they don't use the product, if they are not dogfooding, you have no chance to compete against those that are.
IMO Linus is a very unique, one in a million, engineer building a proto git in 10 days is really not a common feat and is the result of a mix of passion and focus that is very hard to replicate.
That being said, I agree with the general point that having vision and trusting your developers with their vision can be a winning strategy.
I think it's less "passion" and "focus", more his position as the Linux lead giving him first-hand experience with change control at scale. He didn't need a product manager to gather requirements, because he already knew them.
That's basically what ItsMonkk is saying, but I think it's worth making it more explicit. Because a one-in-a-million engineer is not replicable, but a deep understanding of your users' needs is.
What large open source hosted office suite is better exactly? I’m unaware of one.
Same with large open source email services? (Ala Gmail)
It’s usually apples and oranges comparisons. There is libreoffice, but even on it’s best day it’s not doing real time document editing/collaboration with 10+ people on opposite sides of the planet, and that is the Google Docs bread and butter for instance.
I think you're trying to compare against Google's best and largest products (which probably have the best PMs working for them, with the clearest demand for "vision.")
Compare instead Google's average products (y'know — the kind they eventually shut down) to the largest FOSS competitors in those same verticals.
For example, compare Google Reader at its peak MAU, to the current #1 open-source RSS reader app.
Or compare Google+ to, say, Mastadon. (Mastadon is a FOSS Twitter knockoff whereas Google+ was a Facebook knockoff, but I think the point stands.)
Or, for a painful one, compare Blogger to Wordpress! (Okay, maybe that one's not fair, since Wordpress is a real company that can hire product managers. But most WP development is still random FOSS developers scratching their own itches.)
Or compare Google Code at its peak to, well, anything. GitLab CE, GNU Savannah, anything.
None of these were failures of engineering. They were either failures of product management, or failures of budget/staffing — which is in essence still product management, since it's a PM's role to fight for the budget and headcount to get the job done.
(That's not to say all but the best Google products rot on the vine. IMHO Google are pretty good with steering their internal B2B engineering-driven offerings, e.g. GKE, Firebase, BigQuery, etc. Those are run a lot like FOSS projects, in that it's a combination of internal engineers scratching their own itches, and customers directly filing bug reports, that determine what gets built. It's the B2C products, and the marketing-driven B2B products — where in either case the engineers involved might not have the problem themselves, and the customers might never directly engage with them in troubleshooting their workflows — that tend to falter.)
> There is libreoffice, but even on it’s best day it’s not doing real time document editing/collaboration with 10+ people on opposite sides of the planet, and that is the Google Docs bread and butter for instance.
If that's your only requirement, then the FOSS project https://etherpad.org/ that Google acquired to build Google Wave off of (and then later dis-acquired) satisfies it pretty well. These days it's even kind of a word-processor! (Originally it was just a multiplayer <textarea> with per-user text background colors.)
> For example, compare Google Reader at its peak MAU, to the current #1 open-source RSS reader app.
What's the current #1 open-source RSS reader app? Google Reader at its peak was by far the best RSS reader I've ever used - and presumably the same was true for many other users, hence why it shutting down functionally killed RSS entirely. But possibly I've just not found the better alternatives.
> Or compare Google+ to, say, Mastadon.
Wasn't your original point to compare similarly-sized services? G+'s userbase was multiple orders of magnitude larger than Mastodon's has ever been.
None? Google has ~3 well-managed products that everyone loves and uses, such that nobody even bothers to try to compete with them. These products are the exceptions. They may as well not be Google products, because they aren't representative of Google's product-management philosophy at all. You can't set up a new team at Google and talk to them about doing things "the Google way" and have them to understand that to mean "like Gmail does."
Google has 1000+ badly-managed products. Google's actual product-management philosophy, is reflected in how these products are created, managed (into the ground), stagnated, and usually eventually killed. My post was about those.
It's very easy to beat the complete lack of product-management in your average FOSS project, by just having one full-time product manager with vision for where the product should go. See, for example, what this guy (https://www.youtube.com/c/Tantacrul) has to say about various pieces of FOSS DAW software, where all the flaws usually come down to a pure lack of product management on the FOSS projects' part. The problems he points out could all easily be fixed by having one person with vision submit bug-reports about workflow issues, and having those bug-reports get taken seriously by the engineers. (And he's now doing exactly that, as PM, for Audacity.)
Google should easily be able to hire guys like him, and put them on projects like the ones I listed in my sibling comment. But they just... don't... seem to have it in them.
Making the right decision is easy. Winning the internal political battles to nurture that decision to production is sisyphean, especially when the alternative is falling in line, not taking risks, and collecting a paycheck.
The people who made Gmail are either still working on Gmail, working somewhere else, or working on a pet project because they bought the proof-of-competence to choose their project. Google's management structure basically doesn't have anything that says "Hey, you were successful at X, can you work on (thing adjacent to X)?" and incentivize the employee to do that if the employee wants to do something else.
There's no reason to assume the people working on Slides, Spreadsheets, Drive, Docs, &c started particularly overlapped (though I'm sure there's consolidation these days). Similarly with GCloud; all the pieces of GCloud started as independent initiatives (App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Compute Engine, &c). All of these started separate and only began using consolidated resources / providing consolidated UX frontends and APIs as they were forced to by a management chain ad-hoc'd together after Google decided "Cloud" was a space they wanted to do business in as an organized front.
GMail is TRASH for me. It's the slowest, most ressoruce intensive site/app I've ever had the "pleasure" of using. I'm using Fastmail now and it's mindblowing how slow Gmail is in comparison.
It is now, but it didn't used to be. Gmail at launch was incredibly fast. It gradually got a little bit slower over time, and then they made it a lot slower with a rewrite a few years ago.
I still use the basic HTML version, it works fine and does all the things I need a mail client to do (except a "select all" button, which I've added with a short userscript: http://ix.io/3pXu/js)
It’s embarrassing quite how much faster the plain html version is. Proof that all the fancy JavaScript gubbins do very little to enhance the experience and a whole lot to slow it down
A lot of Google's web stuff is god-awful, as far as performance. Today I tracked a most-of-a-second delay on KB input across my entire browser to... having a tab with the Google Cloud dashboard open. A really boring one with nothing going on, too. Damn near an empty view.
Right back at you. I've used Gmail daily since it's launch and have never experienced "slow" unless I was on a slow/poor connection. How many tabs /instances are you opening? Are you using ancient hardware?
Google Fiber, powerful MacBooks for the last decade-plus (currently an Apple Silicon machine). Normal gmail takes longer to do its AJAX requests than full-page loads on "basic HTML" gmail, consistently. Lots longer. It also likes to eat 400-500MB of memory and all the processor cycles it can get, sitting in the background.
Inbox was even worse, but I think they fattened up Gmail to match it after Inbox folded so the Inbox-loving people wouldn't suffer from increased performance when they had to switch back.
On the plus side they drove me to finally start using real, native mail clients again, so... I guess I can thank them for that.
I'm on PC and don't experience any of these issues. My Chrome is using <400 MB of memory with two instances of Gmail, G Drive, Google Calendar, Google Ads and a couple more tabs, and is consuming maybe 0-1% of my CPU. I routinely have 4 separate Gmail inboxes open each in their own tab.
Compose windows is instantaneous. Opening /viewing email is also nearly instantaneous. Same for search, and navigating between labels/folders.
> My Chrome is using <400 MB of memory with two instances of Gmail, G Drive, Google Calendar, Google Ads and a couple more tabs, and is consuming maybe 0-1% of my CPU.
This is... very surprising. Are you sure you're accounting for the resources each tab is taking up? They may be listed separately from the core Chrome process in the task manager.
I just opened my very boring and nearly empty Google Calendar and that tab alone eats 275MB of memory and idles bouncing around(!) between 0.2 and 1% of a CPU core (which is a lot to be doing nothing, and the way it bounces around tells me timers or WebSockets or some other unfortunate-technology-to-have-added-to-Javascript is involved)
[EDIT] for reference, loading an HN page spikes to 100-150MB of memory, then frees memory down to 40-75MB over tens of seconds, and idles around 0.0% of CPU when I'm not interacting with it. That's approximately the base cost of rendering anything and the (mostly memory) overhead of isolating tabs so they can crash independently. Calendar stays at ~275MB and constantly uses some CPU, and I bet if I watched it over time that memory use would grow.
[EDIT EDIT] basic HTML gmail hangs out around 170MB but keeps allocating then de-allocing 10-20MB more memory, bouncing up then returning to about 170MB. Then when I click on the link in the footer to load "standard" gmail instead, it spikes to 700MB(!!!) then drops to "merely" about 490MB and hangs out there indefinitely, using 0.4% CPU constantly and spiking to 2.5% periodically, while the tab is backgrounded. You are definitely not looking in the right place for your browser's total resource use.
Sure, Apple Mail uses about half a GB, too (same mailbox as I just loaded in Gmail, even). But that's the whole program, with several HTML emails open (a large thread) and my entire inbox scrollable instantly at once. Major view-switches take maybe 300-500ms, and its idle CPU use sits at 0.0%, not a constant 0.4-2.5%. And it doesn't have to reach out to a server to search, so some of that (I'm guessing quite a bit of it, actually) is likely in-memory search cache. That with what amounts to two of gmail's pages open (an email thread view, and a mailbox view, side-by-side—I only had the latter open in Gmail to achieve this much memory use)
Unlike Gmail and other google properties, I can leave it open for weeks and forget it's there. It doesn't affect overall system performance—because it's not demanding CPU time and forcing context switches when it's not doing anything.
[EDIT] incidentally, has Thunderbird bloated a ton or something? I used to use it on machines with 256MB of memory total and it was not the only thing I had open, and it was totally fine. And yes, HTML email existed then. I was under the impression it was—thanks to neglect, basically—still on good, old tech and the plan to "improve" it to ditch that for bloated modern junk was still on the drawing board.
> Sure, Apple Mail uses about half a GB, too (same mailbox as I just loaded in Gmail, even). But that's the whole program
Okay... Gmail is also the whole program?
> That with what amounts to two of gmail's pages open (an email thread view, and a mailbox view, side-by-side
Huh? You can do that in a single page in gmail, too.
> incidentally, has Thunderbird bloated a ton or something?
So has everything else. I used to use Chrome because it was less resource-intensive than Firefox (back in Chrome's early days, and circa Firefox 3.5)...
It's hosted in a browser. It gets things like HTML rendering "for free".
> Huh? You can do that in a single page in gmail, too.
I've never seen that and just tried to figure out how to do it just to see what it did to memory use. Couldn't. Did end up sitting around 680MB of memory (spiked to 800MB) looking at the same email thread I have open in Apple Mail, which, notably, doesn't exhibit those crazy memory-use spikes every time I click on anything.
[EDIT] What I'm talking about is a fairly typical email client 3-column layout, with folders and such in one column, the current mailbox or folder loaded in another (these two columns together are like the default layout when you first load Gmail), and an email thread in the remaining column, all open at once. I've never seen that in Gmail, and with both ~1min of poking around their interface and ~1min of Googling, couldn't figure out how to get that. I can get columns 1 & 2, or 1 & 3. Not 1, 2, and 3 all at once.
> So has everything else. I used to use Chrome because it was less resource-intensive than Firefox (back in Chrome's early days, and circa Firefox 3.5)
Same. FF went way downhill in a hurry after the 2.x days.
I use GSuite at work at a FAANG company, and Google slides with 50+ pages is so slow (multi-second pauses when changing slides) to be practically unusable. Finding documents in Google drive is hard to impossible, and good luck keeping track of comments or tasks assigned to you in multiple unrelated documents.
I’m sure at some level consolidating their offerings is a right product move, but I don’t think Basecamp or Calendly should be particularly concerned.