They haven't wielded this advantage as powerfully as possible, but changes here could signal how committed they are to slaying the search cash cow.

Nadella deservedly earned acclaim for transitioning Microsoft from the Windows era to cloud and mobile.

It will be far more impressive if Google can defy the odds and conquer the innovator's dilemma with search.

Regardless, congratulations to Google on an amazing release and pushing the frontiers of innovation.

Weirdly Google is THE AI play. If AI is not set to change everything and truly is a hype cycle, then Google stock withstands and grows. If AI is the real deal, then Google still withstands due to how much bigger the pie will get.

I'm going back and forth between the different models seeing which works best for me but I'm trying to learn how to read and use other people's feedback in making their decisions.

Video production is just not big enough of a market to make a difference in the AI race. I don’t understand why any AI company would spend significant amount of resources matching Sora when I don’t really think it will be a 10 billion dollar product (yet).

Plus Google is well positioned to match it anyway, since they have YouTube data they can probably license to their AI gen video training.

You mean by shifting away from Windows for mobile and focusing on iOS and Android?

For example; those little AI-generated YouTube summaries that have been rolling out are wonderful. They don't require heavyweight LLMs to generate, and can create pretty effective summaries using nothing but a transcript. It's not only more useful than the other AI "features" I interact with regularly, it doesn't demand AGI or chain-of-thought.

This doesn't match my experience of any Google product.

I don't think Google (or really any of FAANG) makes "good" products anymore. But I do think there are things to appreciate in each org, and compared to the way Apple and Microsoft are flailing helplessly I think Google has proven themselves in software here.

Or how would you describe their handling of Stadia, or their weird obsession about shipping and cancelling about a dozen instant messengers?

The IMs post-Hangouts are less explainable, but I do empathize with Google for wanting to find some form of SMS replacement standard. The RCS we have today is flawed and was rushed out of the door just to have a serious option for the DOJ to endorse. This is an area where I believe the United States government has been negligent in allowing competing OEMs to refuse cooperation in creating an SMS successor. I agree it's silly, and it needs to stop eventually.

Have you actually compared these services first hand? Stadia was miles ahead of the competition. The experience was unbelievably good and ubiquitous (Desktop, phone, TV, Chromecast...), and both mouse and gamepad felt like first class input methods.

Microsoft's Xbox game streaming is a complete joke in comparison. Last time I tried, I had to use my mouse to operate a virtual gamepad to operate a virtual cursor to click instruments in MSFS. Four levels of nesting. Development progress is also extremely slow. Not sure where you're seeing laser focus there.

> I do empathize with Google for wanting to find some form of SMS replacement standard

Why did Google out of all companies have to come up with an SMS replacement? Absolutely nobody asked for this! They started out with XMPP, which was federated and had world-class open source implementations, and after what feels like a double-digit number of failed attempts they arrived at SMS over SIP from hell that nobody other than themselves actually knows how to implement and only telcos can federate with (theoretically; practically, they just outsource to Google).

I find it really hard to believe that this is anything other than a thinly veiled marketing plot to be able to point at an "open standard" that Google is almost exclusively running via Jibe (not sure if they provide that for free or are charging carriers for it).

The contortions they went through to decouple their "Allo" and "Duo" brands from Google accounts (something almost everybody has anyway to send email!) for absolutely no benefit and even more significant customer confusion...

And now look at Gemini. It looks like the exact same story to me from the beginning: Amazing technology backed by a great team (they literally invented transformers), yet completely kneecapped by completely confused product development. It's unreal how much better it is queried through the API, but that's unfortunately not what people see when they go to gemini.google.com.

The context window of Gemini 1.5 pro is incredibly large and it retains the memory of things in the middle of the window well. It is quite a game changer for RAG applications.

Google's marketing wins again, I guess.

The fact GCP needs to have this page, and these lists are not 100% comprehensive is telling enough. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/deprecations https://cloud.google.com/chronicle/docs/deprecations https://developers.google.com/maps/deprecations

Steve Yegge rightfully called this out, and yet no change has been made. https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/dear-google-cloud-your-depre...

Google Cloud grew 35% year over year, when comparing the 3 months ending September 30th 2024 with 2023.

https://abc.xyz/assets/94/93/52071fba4229a93331939f9bc31c/go... page 12

The balance sheet shows (income on days from 2024-07-01 through 09-30) is 1.35 * (income on days from 2023-07-01 through 09-30)

These are different because with heavily handwavey math the first is growing 35% in a single quarter and the second is growing 35% annually (by comparing like-for-like quarters)

I used both azure and AWS to show that GCP has lost significant markshare because of its deprecation policy. Enterprises don’t trust GCP won’t deprecate their services.

Some guy had to do it for Azure, then he went to work for them and it is now deprecated itself

https://blog.tomkerkhove.be/2023/03/29/sunsetting-azure-depr...

The challenge is trust.

Google is one of the leaders in AI and are home to incredibly talented developers. But they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products.

It's hard to justify committing developers and money to a product when there's a good chance you'll just have to pivot again once they get bored. Say what you will about Microsoft, but at least I can rely on their obsession with supporting outdated products.

Incredibly bad track record of supporting products that don't grow. I'm not saying this to defend Google, I'm still (perhaps unreasonably) angry because of Reader, it's just that there is a pattern and AI isn't likely to fit that for a long while.

My main issue with Google is that internal politic affects users all the time. See the debacle of anything built on top of Android and being treated as a second citizen.

You can’t trust a company which can’t shield users from its internal politics. It means nothing is aligned correctly for users to be taken seriously.

Bus factor et al. is literally CS 101.

No, Reader was killed because it:

- was free

- didn't contribute to revenue growth from ads

It is for a company where the promotion culture rewards new initiatives and products and doesn't reward people maintaining products. Which was most certainly the company culture around the time reader was killed.

This isn't some minor consumer play, like a random tablet or Stadia. Anyone who has paying attention would have noticed that AI has been an important, consistent, long term strategic interest of Google's for a very long time. They've been killing off the fail/minor products to invest in this.

I think we all acknowledge this.

The question is seldom "why" they kill it (I'd argue ultimately it doesn't matter), it's about how fast and what they offer as a migration path for those who boarded the train.

That also means the minute Gemini stops looking like a growing product it's gone from this world, where Microsoft backed alternatives have a fighting chance to get some leeway to recover or pivot.

Microsoft bought FoxBase in 1992. FoxPro never took the world by storm but it had a dedicated group of devs and ISVs who used it and it solved their needs. The last version was released in 2004, long after Microsoft had released.Net and C# and SQL Server. Microsoft officially ended support for it in 2015.

Google? If the product doesn't become an instant #1 or #2 in its market and doesn't directly contribute to their bottom line in a way which can be itemised in their earnings call, it's gone in less than 3 years guaranteed.

Like how many different instant messengers did they make at the same time only to abandon them all instead of just making one and supporting it?

That's irrelevant to me as a user if I've already invested my time into the product.

To an extent all companies do it. Google just does it much more, to a degree that I tend to ignore most Google's launches because of this uncertainty.

I'm sorry.

After Reader, it was Currents, Google TV, Picasa, Google Now, Spaces, Chromecast Audio,Inbox, GCM, Nest, Fusion Tables, Google Cloud Print, Google Play Music, Google Bookmarks, Chrome Apps, G Suite....

Reader keeps coming up because after Reader, Google's motto turned into "Do be Evil"

Have you seen Google Bard anywhere recently? Me neither :)

Now I'm not sure if are you arguing that a name change is not supporting a product or that Gemini is a different product with a different feature set?

With that being said, I am extremely bullish on Google AI for a long time. I imagine they land at being the best and cheapest for the foreseeable future.

[1] https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai

[2] https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai/use-policy

https://www.xda-developers.com/google-developer-account-ban-...

If their fraud AI is wrong there is now human to talk to.

That day I learned an important lesson: pimpin' ain't easy.

Gemini: Yes, there is a potential risk of your Google account being suspended if your SaaS is used to process inappropriate content, even if you use Gemini to reject the request. While Gemini can help you filter and identify harmful content, it's not a foolproof solution.

Here are some additional measures you can take to protect your account:

* Content moderation: Implement a robust content moderation system to filter out inappropriate content before it reaches Gemini. This can include keyword-based filtering, machine learning models, and human review.

...

* Regularly review usage: Monitor your usage of Gemini to identify any suspicious activity.

* Follow Google's terms of service: Make sure that your use of Gemini complies with Google's terms of service.

By taking these steps, you can minimize the risk of your account being suspended and ensure that your SaaS is used responsibly.

---

In a follow up question I asked about how to implement robust content moderation and it suggested humans reviewing each message...

As an attacker, instead of DDoSing a service we could just upload a bunch of NSFW text so Google kills their infra for us.

Other providers, like OpenAI, at least provide a free moderation API. Google has a moderation API, that after the free 50k requests it is more expensive than Gemini 1.5 flash (Moderation API costs $0.0005/100 characters vs Gemini 1.5 flash $0.000001875/100 characters).

  > Google is one of the leaders in AI and are home to incredibly talented developers. But they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products.

We do run some non-customer facing assets in Google Cloud. But the website and API are on AWS.

https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/wpq0eg/what_is...

The top comment in that page is:

  > CLI is the new name for the SDK.The reasoning and strategy was explained in great detail in this podcast:
  > https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5mZWVkYnVybmVyLmNvbS9HY3BQb2RjYXN0/episode/NTI5ZTM5ODAtYjYzOC00ODQxLWI3NDAtODJiMTQyMDMxNThj?ep=14

  > Google Podcasts is no longer available
  > Listen to podcasts and build your library in the YouTube Music app.

Eh... I don't know about that. Their tech graveyard isn't as populous as Google's, but it's hardly empty. A few that come to mind: ATL, MFC, Silverlight, UWP.

I can write something with Microsoft tech and expect it with reasonable likelihood to work in 10 years (even their service-based stuff), but can't say the same about anything from Google.

That alone stops me/my org buying stuff from Google.

And even if C++/CX and C++/WinRT aren't that great, with worse tooling than MFC and in maintenance mode, you can easilly create an application with them today.

Hardly the same can be told of most Google technologies.

I don't know about that: my wife built her first SME on Google Workspace / GSuite / Google Apps for domain (this thing changed names so many times I lost track). She's now running her second company on Google tools, again.

All she needs is a browser. At one point I switched her from Windows to OS X. Then from OS X to Ubuntu.

Now I just installed Debian GNU/Linux on her desktop: she fires up a browser and opens up Google's GMail / GSuite / spreadsheets and does everything from there.

She's a happy paying customer of Google products since a great many years and there's actually phone support for paying customers.

I honestly don't have many bad things to say. It works fine. 2FA is top notch.

It's a much better experience than being stuck in the Windows "Updating... 35%" "here's an ad on your taskbar" "you're computer is now slow for no reason" world.

I don't think they'l pull the plug on GSuite: it's powering millions and millions of paying SMEs around the world.

To be fair, it's not that they're bad at it -- it's that they generally have an explicit philosophy against it. It's a choice.

Google management doesn't want to "pick winners". It prefers to let multiple products (like messaging apps, famously) compete and let the market decide. According to this way of thinking, you come out ahead in the long run because you increase your chances of having the winning product.

Gemini is a great example of when they do choose to focus on a single strategy, however. Cloud was another great example.

As a user I always still wish that there were fewer apps with the best features of both. Google's 2(!) apps for AI podcasts being a recent example : https://notebooklm.google.com/ and https://illuminate.google.com/home

> hard to deny that their LLM models aren't really, really good though

I'm so scarred by how much their first Gemini releases sucked that the thought of trying it again doesn't even cross my mind.

Are you telling us you're buying this press release wholesale, or you've tried the tech they're talking about and love it, or you have some additional knowledge not immediately evident here? Because it's not clear from your comment where you are getting that their LLM models are really good.

Although I do still pay for ChatGPT, I find it dog slow. ChatGPT is simply way too slow to generate answers. It feels like --even though of course it's not doing the same thing-- I'm back to the 80s with my 8-bit computer printing thing line by line.

Gemini OTOH doesn't feel like that: answers are super fast.

To me low latency is going to be the killer feature. People won't keep paying for models that are dog slow to answer.

I'll probably be cancelling my ChatGPT subscription soon.

About a year ago, I was saying that Google was potentially walking toward its own grave due to not having any pivots that rivaled OpenAI. Now, I'm starting to think they've found the first few steps toward an incredible stride.