That lasted 2 weeks. Being locked out of or requiring special considerations for the first calendar invite, or video conference, or collaborative document was a complete unnecessary pain. “But you can make a google account with your external email” barf.
Its sad because Zoho is trying so hard too. Imagine planning and working on all those equivalent products. lol
Speak like a human for fuck's sake.
We are very sorry that the spam filter is giving you such trouble. It has self-learning capabilities, but algorithms are not always perfect. If you could send us your account details and the headers for some of the emails, we will look into this right away. Please send us an email at support (at) zohomail (dot) com when you have a few minutes and we will dig into the details.
(1) Look at other responses from people directly responding to issues from customers here at HN. Look at how specific, authentic, and action-oriented those responses are. Then look at yours again.
(2) Notice how they don't use the royal "We." It's 2020, we're all working from home with small spots of clean behind us for zoom, the royal We has to die. Unless the speaker is actually a committee or Borg, please use I.
(3) "not always perfect" is garbage. It failed the user at its basic job. Say so. Any apology without admission isn't an apology. Actually, kill the entire sentence. Nobody cares about the capabilities of a system that doesn't work right.
(4) They've already said that they tried you and you failed. Explicitly ask for a chance to make it right. Why would they bother working with you again, if you don't even ask them? They'd be doing you a favor. Ask for the favor.
(5) Nit: The last two sentences redundantly ask for the customer to contact you. Combine into a single request for an email with (btw, you don't have to explicitly "send us an email" when you're giving them an email address to contact -- it's a side-ways way of talking down to the customer's intelligence) account "details" (Which details? The account name? Credentials? What?) and headers.
As for the royal we...I think you are right. In 2020, with the world the way it is now, I think everyone can use more personalization and less of the anonymity provided by we. I take your point, and will do my best to implement it.
Again, thanks for your time, and for your passion. Have a great one!
One last bit of unsolicited advice: your job is writing. This is the best writing book I've ever read that deals with the issues I saw in your writing: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction...
You can tell the author knows what they're talking about because the book is a really easy read!
Quite the opposite, it's still much harder to not use Excel if you exchange data with a lot of business partners.
yeah I'm aware. if you have a choice on a new organization, low budget but still able to access good, fast and cheap, use Gsuite.
Nobody who can afford to pay for a reputable webmail provider should be on Gmail. If not for privacy, because its design is terrible.
If you use Google Chrome, or Youtube, or Google Docs, or Google DNS, or an Android device, you should not use Google Search. That's too much data to hand to one company. I use DDG, and when it's not good enough, I use Bing (and if I used Windows, I'd rule Bing out, too).
Aside from privacy considerations, Google search quality has been declining for at least a year. I want to skate to where the puck is going, not where to where the puck is a mountain of ads followed by nonsense.
"I left Google" is going to be the 20's version of "I left Facebook."
So you mean it will be all the rage to talk about in tech forums but somehow the number of active users will continue to go up every quarter?
Over the next decade, downloading and storing and processing such dumps of leaked data will continue to become quicker, and require smaller devices.
Over the next decade, mobile devices will shrink, resulting in smart glasses much more powerful than today's smart phones.
Put that all together...
It's 2030 and you're walking down the street. You pass by a stranger wearing Apple Glasses.
The stranger once spent an hour installing an "Intel on Everybody!" app, and downloaded 100 TB of random leaked data from a torrent site on everyone in the world.
As you enter the stranger's view, the glasses use the leaked data to facially identify you.
Now that the glasses know who you are, they automatically alert the wearer of the types of data they know about you.
The bored stranger occupies himself by reading your gmails from 2022, perusing compromising photos you saved, checking out your medical records, reading arguments you had here in the comments of HN, etc etc.
Maybe my understanding of technology and security is wrong somehow, but that future seems awfully plausible to me.
If the downside to minimizing my footprint is that I use DDG instead of Google, the upside is worth it.
I think that there will be a new form of entertainment which will basically generate a soap opera-like experience from real lives based on aggregated camera data, recorded conversations, and the blanks filled in by guessing.
I've adapted a different strategy from you, however. I have accepted the new privacy terrain, and I lead my life as if someone is always watching, which means I try to be my best self at all times. :)
- technology is getting more powerful and smaller
- large companies can be hacked
- leaked data is easily available on the net
- smart glasses will become more common
- apps can be made to facially id people using leaked data
Are any of those statements outlandish?
The only realistic attack on Google would be some targeted/filtered dump of celebrities or perhaps entire GSuite organizations' emails and files - and even then it would only make headlines, not cause any real trouble for Google outside of <1% of their regular user base ditching for protonmail or what have you.
I find it hard to imagine Google being leaked
The sheer amount of data
my first computer had a two Megabyte Harddisk - around twenty years later my Phone has a 256 Gigabyte MicroSD card
it's going to happen
websites that host the leaked celebrity nudes are torn down constantly. I can't imagine that you can upload that chunk of data or that app onto any platform without repercussions. On top of that, my tin-foil hat take is that internet access will eventually be completely de-anonymized. Social security or gov. ID to sign on.
It becomes much harder then to spread TB of personal information. Especially since even in 2035 I can't imagine there being very many hundred(S) of terabyte datasets being passed around social circles.
websites that host the leaked celebrity nudes are torn down constantly
internet access will eventually be completely de-anonymized. Social security or gov. ID to sign on.
It also is possible someone will force Apple to permit third parties to run app stores.
I should point out that while I chose Apple in my comment, there will be other brands with fewer restrictions.
My take: it won't be something everybody does (unless provided by some service, which looks illegal at least under GDPR) but be prepared for extensive profiling by whoever really cares about doing it.
As outlandish as my comment may come off, all the pieces (maybe aside from Google leaking data) leading to such a future are conventional takes. As far as big companies leaking data, it's not that it happens every day, so much as it is the cumulative nature of leaks: each leak adds to the pile.
I don't know the likelihood of this all going dystopian, but I did realise a while back that it isn't hard to pick a not-google option early when a thing is new. Rather than attempting to go cold-turkey you can just stop growing more locked in. After a few years you notice you're not stuck any more.
It is true that, as you point out, the majority of Google users probably prefer a less literal algorithm. Do the ways Google Search is changing benefit people who aren't me?
One way that Search is changing does align with what the average user wants: it increasingly interprets results semantically (synonyms,contextual data,domain-specific knowledge,etc) instead of just 'grepping' text content.
The other way Search is changing is user-hostile. Google is an established monopoly now, whose founders have ridden off into the sunset. As its competition and idealism have waned, so has its willingness to put search quality above profits and strategy.
It does not serve the user to include more paid content, to find excuses to personalize search, to cross-promote other Google products, to make Privacy settings inscrutable, to steer customers to AMP pages, and so on. Google has "actually, it's a feature!" rationalizations for these changes, I am sure. No matter!
If the only metric Google cared about were customer satisfaction, I would agree that their surveys, statistics, and A/B tests matter. Sadly, Google seems increasingly concerned with attributes that are at odds with their users: advertising revenue, marketing, etc.
In my judgment, even for normal users, Google Search's bad changes already outweigh the good. I reckon the bad incentives will remain in effect for years to come, too, which does not bode well for Google users.
Bit annoying to have your email, documents, cloud services, analytics, and video conferencing all go out at the same time, especially when everyone is working from home.
I was supposed to have a Meet call with someone from the UK this morning, I couldn't join the call and they couldn't email me (I could still email them though, as I don't use G Suite for my email).
If our VPN was down a week we might not switch because we have an alternate workflow, but if our production servers were down for a few hours we'd switch.
Also, I missed one really important email and that's all it took to switch the hosting for that.
It's easier to switch than you think.
If Google's security measures had an outage ...
Yeah, you won't. Stop being hyperbolic. You're amazingly served by google and you'll forget this 20 minutes after service is restored.
It makes me wonder, what duration of outage is necessary for people to actually switch?