Frankly, I can't understand how Google is so chaotic. Perhaps it's the organization, which looks more like a conglomerate than a cohesive corporation with a clear vision.

They release products, only to abandon many of them without a clear reason (like Google Talk). Or they release two products that should be one instead (Android & ChromeOS, or Allo & Duo).

The Google Talk fiasco got me particularly disenchanted. A beautiful, open, standards-compliant product (they even helped extending XMPP with Jingle!) gets replaced by a proprietary mess like Hangouts.

It's the promotion system. People are incentivized to work 2y on a project, launch, get promoted, move on.

Coupled with no clear strategy other than "we need the next toothbrush" you get what you see.

"I think we could get them to brush their tongues."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brU_Pp-20g0

>> Frankly, I can't understand how Google is so chaotic.

I'd love an open and honest answer from someone up high in the org chart at Google on that. Better yet, just an acknowledgement of it and how they're going to stop doing this in the future. If they were a startup with 200 employees under the age of 30 I'd understand it, but they're obviously waaaaay beyond that stage.

Hell, at this point I would settle for some closure on "what the hell did you mean by 'more wood behind fewer arrows' in 2011 when you began the process of mass project shutdown?!... that's not really how arrows work :/".

More wood = bigger bow. Shoot fewer arrows harder, i.e. more resources behind fewer projects, i.e. quality over quantity.

THANK YOU! All of the other explanations I'd come across have thought they meant to shoot fewer, but heavier, arrows :/.

The real problem seems to be inability to aim. Google fired a ballista at Facebook with G+ and missed completely.

I read an essay on HN few weeks ago which said that the problem with G+ was that the higher mgmt at Google thought FB is famous because of a nicely designed product (rather than network effect), so they released a good product G+, it is somewhat a good product but it missed the train. Plus it has circles, it isn't intuitive.

I actually like G+ in principle. They already had the option to create a basic profile for your Google account which was good for those of us who already used Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Maps, etc. from them. I think they figured they had all of the pieces to make a "better Facebook" and compete in that space, but as you say, network effects are strong.

I know a ton of people who set up a G+ profile and I found both the web version and mobile app to be superior to Facebook's offering. Plus they had better image hosting and they had good text/video chat before FB updated theirs.

But in the end it comes down to critical mass of users (and particularly, non-early-adopters) on Facebook. You might get your other peers to try out a new service if you're into trying out new sites/services but unless you get everyone to make (and use) a profile the way most people seem to at least have a Facebook account, you're stuck maintaining two profiles on two sites and switching between them depending on who you want to share that update or photo or link with.

In the end it didn't matter if they had a modestly better site or mobile app because nobody wanted to post to two sites. And since, unlike email, these things don't operate on any sort of standard protocol, you can't just switch your client and let grandma keep using her old one so it fizzled as a FB competitor.

(I still use it for several niche interest groups though. Also I think circles are vastly superior to whatever Facebook has for granular control of who you share something with.)

Even I love G+ on principle, but that's the point, in principle. The problem with G+ goes deep, first of all, they just assumed that a network gets traction because of beautiful UI, it is not the case, if you look at facebook's growth, it started as a way to talk and later as a dev platform, because of farmville and games like that they get a lot of traffic, so essentially facebook means different things to different people.

When fb came into existence there wasn't much of a competitor to it, so they focused on making it easy to use and stuff, later, when g+ was being created they misread the entire picture. At that point fb had become a platform or was becoming a platform. Currently, FB has different users, some use it as a buy sell group, some for messenger, some for playing games (APIs) etc

g+ didn't focus on good things, just beautiful UI doesn't mean you win, you have to differentiate yourself, they should have gone this way, start a private beta, build a terrific API for developers, so devs will flock to your platform and build apps on it, plus the circles stuff, it is great for geeks like us, but not so much for my grandma, who doesn't even know what google means. Plus, g+ takes an awfully large amount of time to load on slow network. Overall. Plus they don't have an end vision.

Yeah the smart thing would have been to acknowledge that you arent FB and dont need to be FB and to focus on areas that are underserved rather than trying to semi repeat what they have done

People high up are aware of it; nobody seems competent enough (at management) to do anything about it.

They don't care. You as a user (for Google) ain't a customer, you're the product. This is most starkly clear in their customer service. Most of their free products don't even have one and refer to the Google forums. Meanwhile AdWords, AdSense etc. customer service is top notch.

What pisses me off most is that there is no clear alternative if you want to keep your data portable between multiple brands/devices. Microsoft often works poorly. Apple only works on Apple. The alternative is a hodgepodge of services (SimpleNote, HERE maps, EverNote, etc) that requires tons of accounts.

You underestimate how stultifying size can be. When I was at Google, pretty much everyone cared about how the internal incentives were screwed up. There were a lot of attempts at changing structure of promotion and career development, but nobody knows how to do it. To be fair, I'm not aware of any entities of that size who don't have the same problem of with balancing the need for centralization with keeping bright workers motivated and growing.

Why not just place a product manager above each product (Gmail, YouTube, Play Music, etc. etc.) that each report to the master manager who's only job is basically to unify all the services and make them work together in a nice way. He would be the one to force everyone to use the same animations, same icons, same conventions etc.. honestly I never understand how companies with millions of dollars can't come up with the simple fix of 'give an experienced person total authority'.

People lower down are aware of it too. It's bonkers.

The one-two punch of killing Google Talk and Google Reader in quick succession really hurt my confidence in Google. (Wave too, to a lesser extent.)

Wave I still miss. It was like it didn't go gangbusters straight away so google binned it off. Any it only didn't work because of the stupid JS hijacked chat scroller, where was its promise as a new chat protocol.

I've said before that there is probably an interesting alternate universe out there was G+ was built on top of Talk, Reader, and Wave instead of replacing those three. They really did throw out several babies in trying to throw out their over-silo-ed bathwater. One can only imagine the world in which the UX work applied to the G+ walled garden Facebook clone effort had instead been used to polish (a federation-capable) Wave and make it a consumer friendly product...

Stupid theory: It is fun working on projects, it is not fun supporting projects.

Putting together what a bunch of different people have said, it's not just this (although it's this too). It's that you get promoted by producing a high profile, popular product. After which you've been promoted and you're working on something else, and so the product you got promoted for gets neglected, languishes for a bit and then dies.

The problem with this idea is that once the project becomes a product or services of Google's, then it is supported by official paid working hours of its employees.

This: "they release two products that should be one instead (Android & ChromeOS)"... I've been thinking the same exact thing. Google basically split the ecosystem in half...devs have to unnecessary build seperate apps for each (unless they are using a cross platform engine).

Not really... chromeos is the bare minimum linux environment to run a chrome browser on laptop hardware. Android is some frankenstein of java IDE to develop phone software.

They might-should-be the same, but they're fundamentally very different roots.

I'm going to take a slightly controversial point of view and say: Android should have been ported to chromeos.

Newer phones should've shipped with the ping-pong update system, and the secure permissions system that permeates Linux.

Instead we're left with, what is really 75% a hack, Android. The update system sucks. The "recompiling" of app sucks. The permissions system sucks. The bloat really sucks. I am pretty sure my Nexus One was more responsive than my last Nexus phone, or any of the competition (which also, despite Google's best (awful) efforts have deviated in user experience greatly).

Google, once a golden god of the entire computer/software industry has fallen so far. It's really depressing. I wonder if it is even possible for a business to succeed the way Google used to and be profitable.

It's only a matter of time before someone eats their lunch, just the same as Microsoft. In 15 years $COMPANY will dominate and we'll be in the same spot.

Actually, I'm agreeing with you... Google never really should have done Android but rather skipped directly to making Chrome OS for phones.

A major tenant of Chrome is the rolling update model, nobody has ever got the android vendors to do anything slightly like that. My Moto E gen2 got 1 year of updates that's it.

Back at the time phones hadn't scaled up enough. Remember how horrid early android (and iphones) were? I actually skipped the first generation entirely (and only got my first smart phone because it would be better than my existing phone and have GPS navigation as it's killer app).

If chromeOS is the native eco, why is everyone talking about rolling chrome into Android and not the other way around?

Because Android is the big dog. Android can and very well may eat the world. It's a very easy distro to abuse.

Chromeos on the other hand is a very well-thought-out distro that is extremely simple and low-level, enough that it could easily form the basis of a great OS like Android

That is the bane of a large company. A product that would've been successful user-count-wise and revenue-wise for a smallish startup starts looking like a failure when you operate in billions of users and tens of billions of revenue.

It's not that someone internally calls it out as a failure, but the constant pressure to compete for scarce resources (department budgets and developers in Google's case) encourages the internal politicking and resource wars. If YouTube or Search or Android is considered top priority at the moment, it's very unlikely some project like Google Voice or Google Talk have any kind of leverage in defending their budgets and/or teams.

Likely because of their "20% personal project time" policy.

As best I recall, ChromeOS started as a personal project to see if one could build a OS around a web browser (and Google already had one handy).

On top of this Android didn't start within Google. And Rubin ran it as his own fief. Supposedly he insisted that all Android devices come equipped with a mobile radio, and thus Google would not certify WiFi only tablet devices.

A lot of other companies have this policy (Google didn’t invent it) and aren’t in that kind of mess.

I just switched from an iPhone to Android; there are pros and cons to both platforms. But one of the cons of the Apple ecosystem is how terrible all their (cloud) services are.

I still haven't fully bought into the Google ecosystem but I'm slowly move over.

I'd be interested to hear what issues you have with Apple's cloud services. I, personally, have had no problems, but am definitely curious.

One issue is how they nickel and dime you for storage space. I think you only get 5GB free and then have to "upgrade your icloud plan" even after dropping $800+ on a new phone, which you might want to back up.

Ah. I thought terrible meant "issues using the service." I do have some annoyances with how I'm charged for things, but I don't mind paying for services ($2/month for 200GB) that give me things without resorting to selling my browsing habits to the highest bidder.

5GB is actually enough for most people backing up their phones. The OS, Apps, Music, Books etc don't count towards that 5GB number.

The issue is if you take a lot of photos that you will want to upgrade. But it is a small amount.

Photo sharing doesn't seem to count towards your storage limits either...

It's not free. You must own an iDevice or a Mac to use iCloud and worse if you pay for one device you get 5gig. If you pay for 2 you don't get another 5gig

Importing thousands of pictures from my honeymoon lead to tons of duplicates. I tried to consolidate the library and a bunch got deleted. Luckly I backed up everything but I know not to fully trust apple.

The state of the phone is not synced in iCloud, its backed up into iCloud, which is not the same thing. That means if you have multiple phones, once you install a phone from another's phone backup you will have two diverging states.

Various features like "auto install apps I installed on other devices" want to hide this away, but they fail. For example, they will install apps I installed on another device, but they won't install them in the same position on the screen (something very important for me), and they won't delete it.

Also many apps, including apps made by Apple, do not use iCloud to store their settings and data, or use it inconsistently (e.g. only for data, but not for settings). One spectacular example is the messaging app, which doesn't show SMSs received on all devices (although it shows SMSs received on other devices before I made the backup, making it even more confusing). Of course, the messaging app shows iMessages. So some messages work, but others don't.

i would not trust any apple service to host/preserve my images. just have had way too many instances where images just disappear. and afaik they still haven't really explained the connection between all the celebrity phones being hacked when they were all using icloud (if someone has a link that'd be nice)

Yes Apple did explain what happened.

http://www.apple.com/pt/pr/library/2014/09/02Apple-Media-Adv...

Whilst there was a security issue in iCloud it wasn't the root cause behind the "fappening" scandal. It was purely social engineering.

To add to this, Apple also doesn't bother to make it clear to users that there are limitations to backing up their photos using iCloud. You can get pictures out of Photo Stream whenever but that's only the last 1000 photos or 30 days. For Camera roll that actually stores the backup of all of your photos, you can only access your backup if you restore it to a new or reset device. If you get a new iPhone and don't immediately restore from iCloud then too bad, you either have to wipe your new iDevice or buy a new one in order to get to your backup.

I have a similar story.

Google really had momentum. They bungled it terribly. I just use an iPhone now. It works, no bloatware, no bullshit, no need for useless tweaks.

I should have switched years ago.

I am a Google Fi user, the Pixel is by far the best phone I have ever owned, and I have zero complaints so far. To contact customer service, if I ever need to, it takes less than 10 seconds. I almost always have service, if I don't have tower service I swap to WiFi and have the same and full capabilities. I dont have any issues as it stands, though I have been using Google products since 1997 and might be a bit of a fanboy... =P

You can contact customer service right now because they're promoting the heck out of Pixel, and are happy to sink lots of resources into it.

Once it becomes a legacy party of Google (hey, remember the original Pixel that Google made? The premium laptop that they no longer support at all? I own it.), chances are they'll drop all that support, just like everything else at Google.

Same happened to me a long time ago. This is kind of why I think "apple is dead" is a little early...

I've never had an eyePhone and switch to Android from Palm's WebOS. But for years I've always used 3rd party ROMS (Cyanogen mostly).

Google has a vested interest in not fixing Android's brokenness. They make a lot of money off phones that needs to be replaced every 2 years. With their strict control over OHA, they can easily mandate PC style platform standards to reduce e-waste, fight planned obsolescence and offer real security updates:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/

But they don't. I feel like I'm through, but I don't want an Apple phone either. Ubuntu Mobile has no device support and Plasma only supports two devices (neither with an SDCard option). I wish we had real open hardware :(

>They make a lot of money off phones that needs to be replaced every 2 years.

No... they really don't. They make a lot of money off search traffic and the app store. Android licensing amounts to approximately $0.75 per handset. That's not even a rounding error on their balance sheet, and SURELY not something to "intentionally break android" over. Broken android is a great way to drive people to other platforms. There's nothing to be gained for them in that.

more to the point, why do you think they released the Pixel line-up? They got sick of vendors screwing up Android by skinning every premium handset on the market (and skins are the primary source of broken garbage). And in that endeavor they've been wildly successful. The pixel is by far the best android handset I've ever owned. You pay for it, but it's worth it if you like android.

And yet the Pixel is itself a custom skin of Android.

Google Assistant? Not available on my Nexus 5X, which I received less than a year ago. Search button behaves differently, Allo behaves differently, "night mode" removed Nexus 5X build and added to Pixel build.

I'm upset because I thought switching to a Google-designed Android phone would rescue me from fragmentation and give me access to the best, cleanest Android experience.

Then they released the Pixel and removed a feature from my phone and fragmented their own operating system's features to differentiate a new device.

That's not a custom skin... it's an app. And while I can understand complaining they didn't enable it on the 5x, if you REALLY want it, it's extremely easy to enable on a 5x.

I've used it exactly 1 time, and if my choices were a 5x or a Pixel and that was the only feature I cared about, I wouldn't spend the money in a million years to enable it.

Allo is useless to me, so I guess I don't really have any comments there. No desktop app? No multi-device? I'll stick with hangouts.

None of the things you mentioned would be worth upgrading for. And I REALLY don't think you're missing anything. The camera and the build quality are what make the pixel awesome. Assistant, night mode, and allo functioning slightly differently don't even enter into the equation on the price hike being justified.

Well it is a custom skin built into the Google App. I have the Nexus 6p and enabled it by making a change so my device identifies as a Pixel to Google. There was no additional software installed and that was all I did to enable it, make a small text change from "Nexus 6p" to "Pixel XL".

Okay, sure not off direct licensing of the OS. But total revenues are $31 billion. That's a significant number on their balance sheet.

http://www.androidauthority.com/how-does-google-make-money-f...

The Pixel doesn't have an sdcard slot, which is a deal breaker for me. (I don't rent my music, so I have a 200GB micosd card with my collection on it). Even their 128GB model simply won't cut it.

You're now making a completely different argument. You started out claiming they intentionally break android to force you to upgrade every 2 years. Now you're pointing out they make a ton of money off android from revenues and search... which is exactly what I said. And not at all what you said.

I'm not sure what to tell you on the sdcard slot or how it applies to the discussion. I simply said the Pixel is a clear example of the rest of the android ecosystem not living up to Google's expectations of a premium phone. There will NEVER be a phone that is all things to all people, if an sdcard is a dealbreaker for you, don't buy one. I think it's ridiculous to claim you need 200GB of songs on your phone, but that's your choice. Of course, google will let you upload 50,000 songs for free over google music, so even that excuse doesn't hold water, but I'm sure you'll find another reason to complain.

> Of course, google will let you upload 50,000 songs for free over google music, so even that excuse doesn't hold water, but I'm sure you'll find another reason to complain.

I mean, not OP here, but my music library is ~140 GB, and I don't think it's unreasonable to want to have that available without internet access. I run with a 64gb iPhone, so I'm definitely not the guy arguing for massive SD cards on everything, but I don't think you can say it's totally ridiculous to have a use case for that much storage.

They know what they are doing. The whole point is to get you to use their cloud services. But now, if you are a Project Fi user, they are charging for data access to your own content you upload to Play Music.

So now I am back to managing music files on my device and changing them out and feeling like I jumped 10 years back to the past.

Right, which is why in every google app they give you the option to cache songs offline, and set your phone to only play streaming music while on wifi. They're TOTALLY trying to get you to spend more on data - which they make basically nothing off of. That's as ridiculous as saying they intentionally break android to have you buy a new phone to make the whopping .75 per handset.

> They make a lot of money off phones that needs to be replaced every 2 years.

Someone is vested in making money every 2 years alright, but it's not Google - it's Qualcomm.

> With their strict control over OHA, they can easily mandate PC style platform standards to reduce e-waste, fight planned obsolescence and offer real security updates

Unfortunately due to Linux's intentional lack of a stable driver ABI, the ability to upgrade Android depends on Qualcomm's willingness to write drivers for old chipsets on newer kernel versions, but that is a rather unattractive proposition for Qualcomm since they want as much demand for their new chips as possible. Qualcomm is a member of the OHA, but they are effectively a monopoly and I doubt Google could push them around.

Qualcomm owns CDMA right? I think they require using their SoC if you're in the US on Verizon or Sprint and are on Android

'eyePhone'? Is there supposed to be some meaning behind that?

I suspect it's meant to be a reference to a Futurama episode and meant to denigrate Apple somehow?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GklO9RIj0JA