On the outset, you might think with such ridiculously high compensation there would be an expectation of quality, but I think that's an error.

Google operates as an ad-company that happens to employ ridiculous amounts of exhorbitantly compensated individuals to engage in market and technological research, particularly to open or expand markets for their ads.

They didn't create mail, docs, drive et al in order to create productivity apps, they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same. They don't really care what content is in the browser so long as it is browser-based content the user consumes and not native apps. The more browser time spent, the higher the likelihood of being served Google ads, or providing Google with data, and similar.

This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite as a paid service, and "everyone uses the same service at home that they do at work" has clear advantages, whether or not there is advertising in your gmail. Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite (or "google apps for domains", as they called it then - horrible).

This is clearly false. The screenshots in this Time article show gmail having advertising from day one.

https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/

IMO ads were a distraction to enable the data harvesting, which drove Adsense targeting. Even today, the ads I see on GMail are pretty low quality. Some lovelorn guy used my email address unintentionally to sign up for a 55+ dating site 3 years ago. The most targeted ads I get are for similar sites.

Of course YMMV.

It's not obviously false when advertising makes up something like 80%+ of their revenue:

https://theatlas.com/charts/n8ea9MPE0

GSuite exists, at least in part, to break down the model of the walled corporate intranet. There are just too many people behind the corporate veil to ignore; and as a bonus, the browsing and cloud app usage habits they develop at work will tend to translate to their usage habits at home.

Also, as noted by another responder, GMail has had ads since launch. I was a beta user from day 1, and I recall the ads.

Edit: worth noting the historical difficulty of getting open source software into the business environment because corporate purchasers were wary of anything that was "free"; putting a price on something makes it more palatable to corporate adoption.

This was before other GSuite components even existed.

Their lack of customer support is border line criminal.

IBM has 352,600 which is about 3x the number of employees that Google has.

Give it time. My guess is Google will be well over 300,000 by 2030.

Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data.

This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all.

Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating systems, then it's +1 for them and -1 for the competition.

I am a vocal Google critic, but I have yet to see any evidence of them selling my data. Unlike a number of other companies and organizations Google serms to have realized long ago that they are totally dependent on user trust.

I'm not saying they are smart (judging by the ads they have sent me the last 13 years, the killing off of Reader, the nymwars and then killing off Google+ after it turned out to be nice) or nice (the way they keep trying to crush the open web, the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model of pushing Chrome relentlessly until they almost have monopoly, then try to remove the possibility to run adblockers etc etc)

So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?

StarOffice was developed by a company that was trying to sell it the old fashioned way but became Open Source because Sun was trying to keep its Unix workstations viable (no way we'd see "Office for SPARC") and also challenging Microsoft with Java.

Oracle bought Sun. Oracle kept Sun products alive because they know one reason people $$$ for Oracle is support.

Once it got renamed and spun out of Oracle, LibreOffice has been kept alive by various stakeholders such as companies that have big fleets of heavily hacked instances, Eurocrats who wish they could break the hold of American software monopolies, linux distros who want another piece of shovelware to list on the box, etc.

A typical end user might not perceive that leaving an issue on GitHub is not good customer service, even if some people enjoy the liberty of fixing things for themselves.

---

More seriously, Libreoffice is software you run on a computer you control (e.g. your desktop, a cloud server, whatever, ...) Since you are paying for the computer, you don't have conflicts about how generously to provision hardware.

Libreoffice is a ship in a bottle. 1000 years from now somebody might dig up an optical disk from a landfill and boot Libreoffice, but it is hard to believe Google Docs will last that long.

So the idea was you were the product, "sold" to the non-MS-Windows/Intel companies in te hopes of you being retained or transferred to a non-MS stack.

LibreOffice is post Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but the idea is still the same.

I worked on a Sun at NOAA in the 90s in Hawaii and the computer we used for bathymetry imaging was a Sun and the ships used Suns.

Most of that equipment was replaced with a little Linux and Windows Servers.

Latex still had it's place in academia, and would continue to dominate academic publishing for quite some time, but for 'ordinary' daily productivity needs first MacWrite and MacDraw, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and later Word and Excel were becoming the staples.

With both software being ported to the PC/Mac platforms, and Linux starting to make inroads into the Unix compute workloads, Sun needed an answer fast to stop the bleeding.

Their inability to transform their high tough / high margin business model would do them in eventually as the commodity / thin margin model of the PC ecosystem grinded them into dust. But before that, they would try several things one of which was an attempt to 'complete' the offering of a single box solution which would have to include an 'office' package so as to keep the Mac / PC of the desks.

In the case of web-based tools that are owned and operated by big advertising companies, I think it's a fairly safe bet. As always, think critically about each instance and consider the implications of the software and products you use.

On the other hand, looking at the coin from the other side you could also argue you’re paying with your time and effort and not your money.

The quote is pithy but assumes some context - the [something] is being provided below the marginal cost to produce and therefore being provided with an expectation of benefit for the provider.

Acquiring LibreOffice is not $0 marginal cost but they have a big "DONATE" button top-right corner of the website and The Document Foundation turns a small profit from donations.

That's silly. Paid office suites use just as many computing resources, and Google docs use plenty resources through your browser as well.

I think the "if you don't pay for it, you're the product" quote is fine. You just have to exclude free and open source software.

But yeah, good point that my argument didn't make sense.

It is still about stuff other than open source software.

You can't expect some Internet quote to apply universally. Just know the exceptions and use it when it applies.

And they are quite public about scanning documents written using the free drive service, as they are proud that they take down documents with content they or the government consider inappropriate, as discussed on HN recently.

Or are you saying they don't actually share any data learned from docs and drive

This might not be a good look for me to be confused by this as a web dev/programmer, but I does that mean they are securely or otherwise hashing everything they store on all users? Drive, Gmail and other Google services have tons of data. After THats they are also still only checking hashes?

I think the complaint was they scan your entire doc, for all it's content.

This is ~super common with things like copyright violations and child porn. You store a database of hashes of copyrighted or pornographic data. And specifically you can use visual-similarity hashing to detect even somewhat perturbed documents.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA)

No, I think they wanted to make money from it directly via Enterprise sales.

MS Office is the #1 source of profit for MS for a long while.

In the 2000's it seemed 'everything was going cloud', naturally Google thought they could leapfrog MS into that space.

But it didn't work out.

Chrome has been deteriorating in performance and power usage - on OSX at least, I recently switched back to Firefox because it was that bad (Safari is a step too far as I want to work on non-Apple platforms). Firefox has slipped from the mainstream and it's very obvious - so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) - the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.

And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation. Implementation is ridiculously inconsistent across OS versions and HW vendors - I was trying to create a WiFi management API for some industrial application that would connect to controller specific networks - Android has 2 layers of terrible and depricated API with documentation that was misleading at best, a new API that only worked on 10+ without backcompat, and the actual implementation was inconsistent across four Android devices we tested. We gave up on the project as the Matrix of features missing and hacks needed for every platform we could find was just not practical to maintain.

I've been preaching this for a while:

- Chrome is dominant line IE was.

- Chrome - like IE - doesn't care about the standards because they know developers will adapt to them.

- Chrome - like IE - is starting to fail.

Unfortunately, meanwhile Mozilla has been busy tearing apart a number of the things that made Firefox shine, especially the extension API. They've also been busy trying to destroy the massive trust many of us had in them by doing stupid things like injecting a silly ad extension and lying (IIRC) about the Pocket thing (nothing against Pocket, they just shouldn't have lied about it, many of us are looking for ways to fund FF development.)

Edit: I still use and recommend Firefox. For me it is still the best browser out there in more than one way, I just feel it could have been so much better.

Ho ho ho. You haven't even touched the worst that Android has to offer.

- The bluetooth stack. My god the bluetooth stack. A mix of absolutely awful APIs trying to disguise state machines, APIs trying to simplify GATT (but awfully failing at it), the Android lifecycle making you tear your hair out when you want any kind of long lived connection.

- Camera. Thankfully, CameraX from the AndroidX team makes it much easier. But a few years back? I'll just let Google's very own Camera2BasicFragment speak for itself. https://github.com/googlearchive/android-Camera2Basic/blob/m... . 1100 lines of basicness.

- Well, speaking of lifecycle, here's the Fragment lolcycle: http://boloorian.free.fr/_Media/complete_android_fragment_l_...

- The java.io.File API is basically gone. The reasons themselves are "good". The replacement, SAF is a horrible, slow, inconvenient API that breaks pretty much every file manager.

- Looking at the bug tracker is a whole other level of sadness. What's that, You'd need your testing library to ba able to instantiate a Fragment in an arbitrary Activity ? radio silence since 2019

You can report sites that are broken in Firefox at https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla engineers will debug the broken site and try to contact the site's developers. Firefox also ships some site-specific workarounds (such as spoofing Chrome's User-Agent string or tweaking some CSS). You can see the current list of site workarounds in Firefox's about:compat page.

I find this really interesting, and would like to hear more. I've been a Firefox ESR user for almost a decade, and apart from some breakage on some videoconferencing sites, and sometimes having to disable uBlock Origin, I've not faced an unusable site. And this is on ESR!

This drove me nuts with my Nest Minis until I tried out Apple's Homepod.

People hate on Apple for moving slow in the "connected home" space, but my Homepod sounds great, can distinguish between my wife and I, and can handle BOTH personal and work calendars for the two of us. I'll take the polish over my actual use cases, rather than rough edges around a wider set of uses, most of which I never will use.

And neither of us use iCloud for email! It blows my mind that a Google can offer email/calendars for both personal and work use can tie both to you as an individual, but _somehow_ can't make your "smart" speaker do the same.

I mostly chose the homepod because of privacy and better sound. If the privacy story was the same on google or amazon, I'd probably be using that right now instead.

You are in for a surprise. Office 365 (at least Excel and Word) looks like a toy compared to the desktop versions. I'm not talking about niche features or VBA, I'm talking about things like naming a table, which is explicitly only supported in the desktop version. Ah, of course! You need the table's name to use it in their Power Automate platform. Microsoft 365 is a mess right now. I hope it improves.

All told, it's pretty good.

Here's another Office 365 Web surprise. Last week we had 5 team members working in a shared Word document with track-changes; A) There is no "view final markup" option, and B) after a while the web-app crawled to a halt.

The web version is intended for basic/common use cases, not power user functions.

They did. Sundar ran both Android and Chrome, and now he's CEO.

I mostly use YouTube to watch series - PBS Space Time, World War Two, Crash Course etc. YouTube is absolutely horrible at navigating through these series - it is difficult to find where you left, it is difficult to find the next episode, there is absolutely no user comfort.

But then if I quit a video _that I played from a playlist_ and check my history _the playlist itself is listed, and not the actual video_

It is, indeed, a mess

That is a really strange false equivalency. Not even the slightest bit relevant, yet it reads as if you believe that protesting for social change is a bad thing.

It's like this was a low hanging fruit of finally cleaning up some old mess in Chromium, Google ignored it for years, and MS team just did it.

I don't work at Google these days so I can't offer the exact reasons why, but it shouldn't be surprising then that the two don't play well.

Amazon, on the other hand is not contractually obligated to create this silo. For it, your GSuite account is just another third party account, no different from your GMail account.

Yes this is an undesirable outcome, but when business users choose to buy GSuite services with the assurance that the data won't be available to Google for general purpose learning, this is the price they pay for that privacy.

It's like they develop products just enough to get people using them so they can squeeze out some more meta-data and connect the dots back to a Google account, and then they stop development because it's not going to add more revenue.

And if they can't figure out how to push advertising with it, they drop it.

Absolutely. Just look at Google Maps these days. Google Maps used to be the only map app I'd use for everything. Now it is so littered with ads once you zoom in that I find it useless for anything other than directions.

This is not a new trend for Google, the advertising company that occasionally builds things.

For example: About a third of the streets that show on GMaps for my previous town don't actually exist - they're paddocks. Every other map is correct: HERE, Apple Maps, OSM, TomTom, etc. As Google notoriously has no support, there's no way to get it fixed, so I simply had to instruct everyone coming to visit me that they needed to download and use a different map software in order to find me.

Our general sense is that whatever MS is using for autoscaling the Sharepoint instances that run the service doesn't work. During busy work days Word loses its connection to the service constantly.

This is totally unnecessary. Striking is a serious matter and not just getting company paid days off for some lazy egineers.

It uses a pseudo-compatible Java 8 subset, with no official roadmap to ever move beyond that, everyone is supposed to move to Kotlin, while they keep fixing the slower developer experience and broken tooling introduced by adding Kotlin support.

NDK requires a great resistance to pain with a development experience that occasionally still makes me miss Carbide/Symbian C++. It took them 10 years to introduce any kind of packaging support for NDK dependencies, there are still no tools to improve the developer experience calling Android APIs, one has to manually write JNI wrappers, or use their unsafe C bindings to APIs that are actually written in somehow safer C++.

I lost count how many stuff introduced as one year amazing IO stuff, is already deprecated the following year. Latest example, all the GUI layout editing tools still being worked on, which will be eventually deprecated when JetPack Composer hits stable.

Critical libraries like Oboe, that are just dumped into Github, instead of having first class support on the SDK and project templates.

Team that puts critical information everywhere on the Internet except on Android's official documentation.

Very small rant, 10 years have a lot of stuff to rant on, so amazing? Not really.

> now word in the cloud kinda works!

is the overstatement of the century. I am stuck with this horrendous product, with its unbelievably bad live collaboration which constantly overwrites what other people are doing, its terrible SSO implementation, its penchant for presenting the least navigable UI I have ever had the misfortune to experience...

Google Docs has stagnated, I agree, Office is light years away from having its seamless sync.

Glad you brought this one up. I had an issue with an enterprise account where I was attempting to access work and code I had contained in a doc I created for the client. I was the owner and creator of the doc, but somehow I got stuck in a loop where I had to request permission from myself.

Google "Support" was basically nonexistent - I had to ask our company adminstrator, who told me only they could get access to speak with a human, and even that wouldn't be able to be done immediately.

I ended up redoing all the work. AWS and Microsoft, in comparison, have had excellent enterprise support.

I get it for free, but g suite is valuable enough to me that I'd pay for it. The thread implies that paying for it wouldn't help.

Which led me to experimenting with migrating off my legacy gsuite, and with the API rate limiting, it seems it would take upwards of 30 days. I can download that data in 10 minutes if it's unhindered.

Personally, I think web based office is something Microsoft wants to drive subscription revenue, but isn’t something customers want. Office is probably the best and most complex fat client app in the world, why sacrifice that?

IMO, Office will embrace add on supplementation and value add to the Office apps.

The Google Calendar app from my Google Pixel merges all my accounts but yet, the assistant is linked to my Google Account instead of my device.

It's useless because I'm using multiple calandars on multiple accounts.

Like why even doesn't sheets and docs have the exact same table cell formatting options?

Following that, why can't a sheet seamlessly embed to a google doc.

Namely, the things that directly contribute to the ads business.

The Hangouts move is still one of the most infuriating things I've seen in tech anytime in the last decade. Remember how Google was actively contributing to an open and interoperable spec for chat, and then just proceeded to go full Ayn Rand about it?

There's a pretty strong argument to be made that if any major players were still backing XMPP as a standard, we wouldn't all have a bunch of people in our lives who have said some variation of "I would quit Facebook right now if I didn't need Messenger"

What's that got to do with it? Are you suggesting this is the reason things aren't shipping? I saw the "strikes" as another symptom of a company that is now deaf. Employees can't get their voices heard as individuals anymore.

Android / Chrome are providing what is primarily a platform, not a product. That's a very different mindset and way of working.

Mmmmmm, Wave. (drooling dead-eyes Homer impression).

https://killedbygoogle.com/

So tell me again why I would use google products when they are all so interlinked that one affects the other? No thanks