Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead - <AUTHOR> https://secondbreakfast.co/google-blew-a-ten-year-lead <comment><USER3> No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily.

The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy.

They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely.

I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom.

We were making the move to docs and sheets, but it's basically stuck. Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs. For those of us who are older this is totally incredible - <USER2> was so anti-linux / cloud it was incredible, and now word in the cloud kinda works!

And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.

Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything? Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).

<comment><USER4> >Android / Chrome are amazing

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.

<comment><USER5> > the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.

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.

<comment><USER6> Have you tried Brave?

<comment><USER7> Brave is basically just Chrome with an adblocker, just like edge is chrome with a reskin. Obviously that's a bit of an exaggeration, but they are all chromium at heart.

<comment><USER6> It's a pretty big distinction don't you think. FWIW I also use FireFox...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I get the desire to abandon google services, and have done so myself for email and search, but there isn't much to this article.

An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just starting a new email address.

Airtable has some nice functionality, but I don't think it's head-and- shoulders above sheets and this article doesn't give me any reason to change my mind.

Same things goes for Meet vs Zoom.

Honestly, despite Google's history of trashing projects I'd put my money on gmail/docs outliving hey/notion and so he might just be planting the seeds of a painful switch later. When I switched my email I did it with a domain I own so that I can avoid the same fate.

That's not to say google doesn't have problems. Privacy aside, ads as a primary source of revenue can have a negative effect on usability of their products (like search), but I wouldn't call that "squandering a 10-year lead", it's more like "failure to find a second golden goose"

<comment><USER9> The article rings completely true to me. One simple example: folders in Google Drive.

* It's a constant struggle to keep documents in folders so that you can find them easily.

* Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. But I can't find docs if I don't know that they exist.

* Moreover, I can't ensure that important documents are reliably stored in folders where everyone else can find them easily as well.

I don't understand why Google does not get how important this is for business documents. It's a breath of fresh air to use Dropbox or Box at this point.

<comment><USER10> > _Yeah I get that I can do google search and find docs wherever they live. > But I can 't find docs if I don't know that they exist._

To illustrate this point more. I used to work in a company where everyone had to submit their timesheet via docs. And if you did not keep a link or copy or whatever they call it of your own sheet, it's essentially impossible to search for it, because now there are 1000s of identically named documents.

It also happens when legal tries to share a generically named file with you and you lose the link, so you search for it and find a file that looks like it, only to realise that is HR's own special copy.

<comment><USER9> This. I wish I had thought of your example first.

We have service agreements that go through revisions. We copy the whole directory when there's a new release to ensure we don't lose old templates. At that point search on service agreements brings up a bunch of identically named documents in a listing that does not distinguish the directory location. It's actually caused us to send the wrong doc on several occasions.

Google if you are listening please fix this. Just do what everyone else does. You don't have to be creative.

<comment><USER11> Docs has revision history.

For several of the concerns listed, I'm surprised to see how people are using the app.

Similar for asking every employee of a company to track their time in same name documents?

Perhaps poor processes and poor tool-to-solution matches contribute?

<comment><USER12> Arguably then, the documentation needs improvement. Most people learned the ropes on MS Word, and never bothered to unlearn habits/explore whatever else docs has to offer. So whenever docs has a feature that isn't present in word, I wouldn't expect people to know it's there

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy. May be this is just a natural outcome of that. This is one of the most damaging things Google and the people it influenced did to programming profession. There is a generation of programmers now who can do very well on leetcode, but god help those who maintain that code after them - I know this from personal experience working on projects left behind by people who ended at Google

<comment><USER14> All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always hard.

<comment><USER13> This may be true, but there have been articles in public since 2010s if not longer, that show general contempt for having clean code and code maintenance, like having clean code is what lesser engineers worry about. I'm saying that thinking seeped into universities where smart kids, who generally imitate the smart professionals in their profession first. Google may not be the only company guilty of it, there are places like Uber where backend code is held by so much duct tape , 3m shares rose up as a result.

<comment><USER15> That doesn't match my experience at all. If anything, Google suffers from the opposite problem: engineering teams spend enormous resources on migrations and rewrites that make their systems cleaner/simpler/more general, but have little or no business value. There are tons of teams that could be making incremental user-facing improvements, but are instead spending their cycles on projects that are mostly about internal development velocity.

<comment><USER16> I think it's changed, dramatically. I was there from 09-14 and then just rejoined last week. In 09-10 there was a huge problem of "launch and run" \- people would launch, they'd get promoted, then they'd be reassigned to other higher-priority projects to get them launched too, and their previous project would get shut down rather than maintained. Nowadays there seems to be a lot more emphasis on stability and long-term code-health, people are getting rewarded for internal cleanups rather than launches, and many people have multi-year tenures on the same team rather than lots of single-quarter launches.

<comment><USER17> are they getting _promoted_ though. successful promo packet for sustaining work would be a very big change.

<comment><USER18> I've seen a bunch of successful promo packets for work on code health, system reliability, etc. - including promos to L6.

The "trick" to successful L5 and L6 promos (and above) for this sort of work is to have credible estimates of the actual impact of your work. _Way_ too many engineers spend quarters or years refactoring or rewriting systems, and then go for promo with a case that's basically: "System X was kludgy, crufty, and engineers complained about it. I designed and lead implementation of a clean-up effort, and now people say it's nicer."

That's generally not going to cut it. You might get lucky, or you might get bailed out by a peer reviewer that provides solid data about the impact of your work, but you can't count on this, and you should be doing the legwork yourself.

You need impact estimates. That generally means you need some measurements, although the measurements don't have to be perfect. What metrics measure the pain that the existing system is causing? Some examples might be:

\- Average # of hours required to push a release

\- Average SWE-days/SWE-quarters/etc. required to develop a representative feature change

\- Average monthly user-reported bugs

Spend some time actually measuring this stuff. Write some queries, run an internal survey of the developers on affected teams, etc. Take it seriously. Ideally, do all this before you've actually started work on the cleanup you want to do. Write a proposal doc, get it reviewed by others, and make sure they find your estimates credible. If the numbers are smaller than you expected, reconsider whether the clean-up is worth the time you're considering investing in it.

After you've completed your project, measure again. If your project is amenable to an experiment-style launch, that's ideal, but pre- and post- measurements are fine too. Share the stats - advertise your team's success! Package them up in a nice doc you can link to in your promo case.

"How am I supposed to find the time to do this while I'm doing my normal job?" This _is_ your normal job. The opportunity cost of your time is $XXXk/quarter. The opportunity cost of your team's time is $X million-$XX million/quarter. The single most important thing you can do is make sure that time is being invested in a high value way. In your personal life, you would look for a lot of data before you invested that kind of money - you should be doing the same at work.

In general, as you move up you should expect to spend a higher percentage of your time figuring out _what problems you 're going to work on_. As a result, the fraction of your time that you spend actually designing and implementing the solutions to those problems will decrease, but it's still a net win because you and your team will be focused on tackling the really important problems.

In summary, it's possible to be really successful and quickly move up the ladder by doing "sustaining work". The catch is that you have to be rigorous about choosing the specific "sustaining work" to spend your time on.

<comment><USER19> Another ex-Googler here. This seems like a viable strategy, but it seems rather inefficient for the organization, don't you think? E.g.

> Write some queries, run an internal survey

> Write a proposal doc, get it reviewed by others

Even if one could convincingly claim a causal effect on those noisy metrics, that sounds like quite a bit of overhead. IMO the majority of cleanup or bug fixing work shouldn't require any sort of formal planning or justification. At other companies, we would just go ahead and do the work. Then if an IC's work shows a pattern of code quality improvements, the manager should take notice and make sure it's considered in any promotion decisions.

Moreover, the strategy you mention requires a concerted effort to improve the quality of a particular component in a short period of time. Ideally one should evaluate bugs and quality issues as they arise, and most of them should be fixed promptly. But if a Googler is optimizing for promotions, it seems better to let code rot for months or years, then fix many issues in a short sprint to create a nice dip in the metrics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It boggles my mind to imagine how many verticals in the technology space have been kneecapped because of google. There could be so many companies that could offer amazing services but they just can't compete with a half-assed "free" service made by Google, which is just a temporary cost center for all the ad revenue they don't know what to do with.

<comment><USER21> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_price](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_price)

<comment><USER22> >A limit price (or limit pricing) is a price, or pricing strategy, where products are sold by a supplier at a price low enough to make it unprofitable for other players to enter the market.

>It is used by monopolists to discourage entry into a market, and is illegal in many countries.[1] The quantity produced by the incumbent firm to act as a deterrent to entry is usually larger than would be optimal for a monopolist, but might still produce higher economic profits than would be earned under perfect competition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There was some point in the past year I read a comment here about the problem with Google is that when people wants to get promoted at Google to a senior or Staff (PE?) position they need to invent those big changes or projects. It results in adding bloat into existing software or abandon one. I am having that feeling at this point in my career. Without a moonshot project I wouldn't expect to get pass an assessment committee. It's sad.

One of my colleagues working for Netflix tells me that they don't have any fancy titles except senior SDE there. They pay you more if you're that worthy, though. I can't stop wondering what if tech companies follow this practice. Then, people would just focus on making stuff better instead of chasing the carrots waved in front of them.

<comment><USER24> > Then, people would just focus on making stuff better

And yet, Netflix had autoplaying videos at full volume that didn't even show trailers, but some random snippet from the movie/show

<comment><USER25> I actually close Netflix because of this.

However, Netflix is full of smart people, so I have to assume that they've tested it and it increases engagement. Perhaps we're the outliers.

<comment><USER26> FYI: You can turn it off in settings.

<comment><USER27> But it took them a long long time to add that setting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For Google Translate you should check out DeepL [https://www.deepl.com/translator](https://www.deepl.com/translator)

It's absolutely insane, blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy.

<comment><USER29>
      Translation to a single language back and forth seems to be really really good.

      Although quite impressive, it still suffers from the same problem that most other translator service have if you keep translating the same text between random languages.

I translate the following text from English to various other languages (without going back to english) 6 times and then I went back to English.

      The original text is

I wonder if the test you gave me was biased. My belief is that because I'm an elf, some questions are inherently biased. Water dwarfs would not have a problem answering the question: Are unicorns wet? But elves do.

The final English text is I wonder if the test they gave me was biased? I guess being an elf, there is a bias in the question. I'm sure the water gnomes would have no problem answering the question of whether the unicorn is wet. ? But the elves.

      Notice how drarfs became gnomes. The last sentence is not a sentence. Various other problems like a "?" by itself etc.

      Translation to a single language back and forth seems to be really really good.

<comment><USER30> This could be considered a "feature" if used for comedic effect. Anyone who has young children that are into Disney movies should check out this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bVAoVlFYf0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bVAoVlFYf0). This woman runs "Let It Go" from the movie Frozen through Google Translate a bunch of times and then sings the result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The author mentions switching to hey for email. Given all the press it's gotten recently, I decided to check it out.

I don't get the hype. This is how my gmail already works. I use priority inbox. New senders get high priority until I mark them as low priority, and then they don't. Gmail already has a snooze button so I can reply later (and also I have a reply-later tag that's easy to do with keyboard shortcuts).

You can do this search in gmail to replicate their sorted inbox: [is:updates in:inbox -l:important]. I just have a bookmark for that.

Finding attachments is easy. You just do [has:attachment]. I don't want all the attachments without their emails. The email provides context. Also, I can usually find it faster because I usually know who sent it or at least some words that were in the email.

What am I missing about hey.com? Why do people love it so much?

<comment><USER32> When you open the Hey inbox, it _only_ has the important stuff in it, not the messages of whoever decided to reach out to you today. It's a subtle difference but I love it.

Then when you have a moment, it's also very satisfying to just go through the screener list in bulk and click thumbs down/up and knowing you'll never see that sender again. Sometimes in GMail, no matter how many times I mark some thing as spam, the mail keeps on coming. Hey is the nuclear option to Gmail's fly swatter.

<comment><USER31> > When you open the Hey inbox, it only has the important stuff in it,

So does my gmail. It only shows things marked important.

> Sometimes in GMail, no matter how many times I mark some thing as spam, the > mail keeps on coming

That happens to me occasionally, but I just click on "filter messages like this" and then set it to never mark as important (or straight to spam).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Google's been improving G Suite a _ton_ , but just not "innovating" in the way the author wants.

What Google _hasn 't_ been doing is blowing up how word processors and spreadsheets work, like a "Google Wave" re-envisioning or something of them. Why? Because people _understand_ how Word and Excel and Docs and Sheets work and _don 't want change_.

What Google _has_ been doing over the past ten years centers around 1) interoperability, 2) business needs, 3) intelligence and 4) performance.

For example, interoperability: you can use Google Drive File Stream to access your Drive files like a local filesystem. Or being able to comment in PDF's, or edit Office files directly without first making a copy in Docs or Sheets.

Or business needs: Google Classroom lets you use Docs with your students. Or things like document diffs and approvals. These things don't seem "innovative"... but they're necessary.

Intelligence? Look at how Sheets will automatically analyze your data to try to produce meaningful graphs. Or how Docs now fixes your spelling mistakes as you type, vastly better than e.g. autocorrect on iOS.

And performance is mainly with Sheets -- it's _much_ better at handling large amounts of data than it used to be.

But yes, Google's been focused on giving users the features they actually need, rather than capital-I "Innovation". Because that's what users actually want.

I _don 't_ want Google trying to reimagine word processing and shoving it in my face or something.

<comment><USER34> 90% of the time, Sheets's recommended graph is exactly what I wanted, and is in general a much cleaner and enjoyable experience than Excel. Pivot tables too are much more obvious and usable to non-power users in Sheets than Excel

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Most of the stuff in the article is not really central to Google's business, in my view. Google's business is dirt-cheap high-performance computing. They are well ahead of everyone in this line of endeavor. They use their ads revenues to fund R&D in hardware and software and build out capacity so they can opportunistically enter new lines of business. Usually these are businesses that nobody else could profitably execute, like YouTube. Or they are businesses that are technically unique, like Cloud Spanner, to which I see no competitors.

So when I look at Google's health I look at the research they are doing to see if they seem to be staying on the cutting edge. Stuff like Snap/Pony or TPUs makes me think they are. It's possible that the capabilities Google is developing won't lead to any new profitable businesses, but their success in geospatial data and other computationally-expensive products like machine vision and translation are examples of their abilities. The latent ability to just jump into a new line of business is a strength of Google's, and products they developed more than a decade ago, like Docs and Sheets, aren't really that important to their future.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm sure these alternatives work for some, but I really don't find "Hey" a suitable alternatives to Gmail, nor "Notion" to Google Docs.

I think the innovation and updating in those Google products has stagnated a lot, but they're still better for actual work and business than the new hip things.

<comment><USER37> I don't know the name for it, but this seems like a "the market leader doesn't know what it's doing" fallacy. While I will concede that Google is not the market leader in many of these areas, It's Microsoft, not Airtable that's leading the way.

To me, Google has always been a relatively "boring" company, it's just that boring in the early to mid 2000s was a welcome change of pace. There innovations were almost entirely in back-end technology and simplicity, not innovative user experiences. Google docs was meant to be as boring as Microsoft word, because it turns out that most people know exactly what Microsoft Word does and like the single-purposeness of it. I love Notion, but I think the idea that Notion will every be as popular as word or docs is nuts. The vast majority of the market doesn't know what a Kanban board is much less want to embed one in their docs.

Making the argument that Google isn't as innovative as smaller startups is easy. Google is trying to appeal to the masses, not a niche. Saying they blew a ten-year lead is a stretch.

<comment><USER38> Google was the oppositive of boring:

\- GMail with "unlimited" (never-seen-before 1GB) of storage when everyone had 10MB quotas was a "holy shit" moment, and fast web mail was a fresh breath of air

\- Google Maps, yet another "holy shit" experience when you used Mapquest before

\- Google Translate, so much better than everything that came before

\- Google search - OK that's late 1990s but I remember the "aha" moment of trying the Google beta after needing to become a power user of lycos/altavista/askjeeves

You notice that all of these were more than a decade ago before their IPO. Larry and Sergei have gotten old and lazy, and so have their CxOs and VPs. No goals, no focus, no discipline because who cares if all the execs already have their private jets.

<comment><USER39> > You notice that all of these were more than a decade ago before their IPO.

I don't, and neither does wikipedia:

Gmail: April 1, 2004

IPO: Aug 19, 2004

Maps: February 8, 2005

Translate: April 28, 2006

<comment><USER40> GP is probably confusing the creation of Alphabet, Inc. with the IPO of Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I had the "pleasure" to work with Ex-Googlers which had "Project Managers at G" in their resume. Honestly, I do not wonder anymore why Google nowadays s#ck as hard as they do.

They made great presentations and a grand plans using some project management saas tools. But both of them neither understood the basics of projectmanagement (Who does what when and what do they need when?) nor could react when challenged.

Both of them were lower to middle management, but sure as hell anything that you hand them would end in total mediocrity if not fail at all.

On the other hand one of the most capable front end engineers I knew joined Google for 2 years. Where he spent most of his time - with a whole team - working on .... fold in and fold out animations (for a single mobile product)

He quit. Google now is one of his customers. His work has gotten much more interesting.

Google / Alphabet - the organization - did not scale well. My bet: There will be a huge crisis soon. Lots of G-people will loose their jobs.

<comment><USER39> You tell a nice story with the data, but I cannot dismiss the potential selection bias: perhaps these PMs were not up to Google's standards and were invited to leave?

<comment><USER41> yes, i am aware of it. on the other hand which PR-ides itself with one of the hardest hiring selection process on the market it might be a statement about this process.

<comment><USER39> Does Google's project manager interview panel have a reputation for rigor, or is this just the engineering panel reputation rubbing off?

<comment><USER42> I imagine it must be harder to hire PMs without making decision mistakes given that their job skills are harder to test for in an interview setting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > It's amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them.

They appear to me to have begun monetizing google maps. And it is awful.

<comment><USER43> What are the four monopolies?

<comment><USER44> I just want to say that I love how the response to this comment is several lists of 4, with search being the only one present in all of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> The 4 I was thinking of:

Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube

Chrome is arguably a monopoly if you segment desktop web traffic, but iOS Safari is such a large percentage that Safari can't be ignored.

People will disagree with email - but I challenge you to go look at email threads you're on and see what % of the emails are @gmail.com - not to mention G Suite addresses you don't know are Gmail. Outside of enterprise, there's no alternative.

Not bad either that Android and Chrome are duopolies at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning," whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the show. Chrome was the same thing, though the competitor was Microsoft. Google Docs? Same thing, Microsoft again.

Google is good at building things 90% as good as they could be. For Gmail that 90% was leaps and bounds better than the web mail alternatives of 2004 which included…SquirrelMail.

Does Google care that you're switching to Hey or Safari or whatever has replaced Google Sheets? No. Are they going to buckle down at finish the last 10% of all of these products? No. Is that an opportunity for all of us reading this story? Yes.

One way to think of Google's products as the equivalent of Microsoft Write — or Apple's iWork. Google's platform is not Windows or Mac OS or iOS: it is the Internet. Google's products come free in the shrink-wrapped box when you drive to Egghead Software pick a copy of "Internet" up off the shelf.

<comment><USER46> > ... SquirrelMail ...

Oh thank you for that trip down memory lane! Ran my own SquirrelMail servers for _years_...

<comment><USER45> Me too! It was bundled with OS X server, which I was running on the G4 Cube that got relegated to utility box status when I went all-in on laptop life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I am getting tired of these google articles. I know how this will go, users will pat themselves for using duckduckgo, open street maps, firefox and fastmail anytime now.

<comment><USER48> I've never met anyone who uses OSM. I have just shy of 500 edits on OSM because I kept going to use it, finding it didn't have what I was looking for, and making improvements.

It would be nice if there was a viable alternative to Google Maps. Apple Maps is apparently not too bad, but I'm using Android and Linux these days.

<comment><USER47> well, I use osmodroid. I am sure you can find many here. I do want to contribute more after I have other things sorted. Wish you didn't have to worry about being poor.

I agree with you that HN is a _bubble_ which is what I meant by my comment. We need to do something to take it mainstream than patting ourselves here over and over again. Talk about how ways we can do that. I don't like google articles because we waste time giving them feedback rather than to all the cool open source projects that deserve it.

<comment><USER48> >Wish you didn't have to worry about being poor.

What? Are you suggesting I don't use iOS and macOS because I can't afford Apple's hardware?

I have multiple Macs and iPhones in the house - I recently switched because I don't like Apple's direction. Not because I can't afford their products.

<comment><USER47> No. you are wildly misunderstanding me. I mean I can't devote more time to contributing to open street maps or other open source projects because of the worry.

<comment><USER48> Oh I see, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope things will improve for you soon.

It's understandable you would be focused on more important things. Lately I have been wondering if more people would get into open source if they didn't have bigger things to worry about like poverty and climate change.

I suppose I am privileged enough to do OSM contributions in my spare time. I'm not sure how to feel about that...

<comment><USER47> > I suppose I am privileged enough to do OSM contributions in my spare time. > I'm not sure how to feel about that...

You should feel proud and good imo. At least, I am proud of you that you choose to spend time contributing to something valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Google is only good at search. The only reason why I use everything else they create is because of their massive distribution, market penetration and inter- operability.

Thankfully there are solid alternatives in certain areas like fore example using iPhone instead of Android.

But for everything else I don't see a massive migration happening any time soon. Notion, Hey.com, DuckDuckGo are all niche products. My dad has Gmail and I can assure that's going to be the case for ever. He is never going to find out what Hey.com is. Even if he does he is not even going to consider it.

Google didn't blew a ten-year lead on anything.

<comment><USER50> Sounds like they're also good at interoperability, market penetration, and distribution. Do you not think they're good at video streaming, security research, email, or cloud hosting?

<comment><USER49> I think you missed my point. Of course saying that they are only good at search is a catch-all statement. They are probably good at many things but their relevance is tied exclusively to their search product. Products like YouTube are what they are because of Google's search expertise.

Also let's not forget that AdWords either subsidizes or leverages everything that Google builds. So I would add that they are also great at selling ads.

<comment><USER50> I understood your point, I just think it's incorrect. For instance, I don't think search is even close to the hardest problem YouTube is solving. I would say that magically streaming a crazy volume of video at the best possible resolution is a pretty tough technical problem, and totally unrelated to search. Ditto security research for the most part, modulo some of the work TAG does on finding 0days in the wild.

This is a common trope about Google; they're only a search company, only an ad company. It's simply not the case.

Edit: if you wanted to make a broad sweeping statement, I would say that they're only good at hard technical challenges. That's why they succeeded at e.g. search and YouTube, and failed at chat and social.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The adage "If you aren't paying for it, then you are the product" is a bit trite and worn out, but it in Google's case "If you aren't paying for it, you _aren 't_ the customer" is entirely accurate. While individual Google engineers are almost certainly motivated to do great things for end users, the company as a whole has little incentive to make a great consumer experience.

Google feels like it's in a very awkward "You can't get there from here" position. I think they'd like to move more towards having a direct financial relationship (Google Pixel, YouTube's ad-free service, are good examples) with their customers but can't quite figure out how to get there. Pivoting a free product like Docs into a for-fee product often creates a ton of bad feelings for a company.

</comment><comment> yt-sdb DuckDuckGo's rise feels like textbook "Innovator's Dilemma" stuff. By prioritizing privacy, something Google can't do because all the institutional values are misaligned with that goal, DDG were able to make headway into a niche market. Now they're established, and their results are getting better and better, even in the broader market. For example, I use DDG mostly because their results are visually easier to parse. It remains to be seen if they'll ever beat Google at their own search game, but Google certainly feels vulnerable for the first time in many years.

<comment><USER52> How do you know Duck Duck Go actually prioritizes privacy though?

People on HN have said that Duck Duck Go is a for profit corporation that doesn't open source or independently validate their privacy claims.

<comment> yt-sdb (1) From a branding perspective, I don't know how much it matters. (2) e.g. If they're using my location data, they're terrible at it.

<comment><USER53> FWIW Searx is actually a pretty decent alternative, plus it's open source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Imagine being a VC and hearing the pitch by Elasticsearch that you were going to make massive inroads in search (when they were early of course). I imagine most laughed at them like "How are you going to beat Google" ...

Imagine if they answered "we expect Google to just completely abdicate their role in search."

Google right now has a few wins but most of their projects fall flat. AWS is crushing it ...

</comment><comment><USER55> Google is famous for half-assing and then abandoning promising projects. (insert comparison vs other tech companies).

One example of a half forgotten project is something called Google Classrooms - for teachers and students.

It is missing so many basic features.

For example there is no way to automatically take attendance when students log in.

You can hack around it but for a project aimed at teachers it shouldn't be so painful.

While I am ranting: I am still thankful(/s) to Google for abandoning Google Hangouts integration with Youtube live streaming.

This forced me onto OBS full time and is actually a good thing.

EDIT: I speculate that this frequent failure of integrating between various Google properties must be because there is a strong silo effect by now at Google just like any other big corporation.

<comment><USER56> You can't take attendance in Google classroom because schools use MIS/SIS software to track attendance/assessment data etc. Without links back to the schools MIS data it gets held in a Google silo where it's not useful to anyone.

<comment><USER55> Thank you! Chesterton's fence strikes again. There had to be a reason for this misfeature.

Then the question is why would schools use Google classroom at all then if they have their own MIS/SIS.

As I was teaching to adults I was puzzled on how to effectively use Google Classroom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> They also lost the trust of their users. They didn't drop the "don't be evil" for nothing..

<comment><USER58> Is that actually true though? I've seen more and more regular people outside tech circles dismiss Facebook but Google? Not so much. In fact, outside of HN I haven't seen many complaints at all.

<comment><USER59> I've switched to Brave and duckduckgo. They are evil and I try avoid them at all costs. AMP is a good enough reason.

<comment><USER47> Why would you switch to brave but not firefox?

Genuinely curious given the amount of shenanigans they have pulled out and said oops. Most recent one - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027)

<comment><USER60> Firefox fired their CEO because he donated to a Christian group. So this guy went and forked the Chrome browser into Brave.

If you think Chrome is better than Firefox, then you'll think Brave is also better than Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> _The mobile Google results page is so cluttered that I switched my iPhone's default search to DuckDuckGo. The results are a tad worse, but I'm never doing heavy-duty searches on the go. And now I don't have to scroll past 6 ads to get the first result._

I use DDG as default search on my phone and it's measurably worse than google for the majority of searches I do and there are absolutely ads on ddg. I inevitably switch for at least half of my searches.

<comment><USER62> I use Firefox with uBlockOrigin on my phone to avoid all the ads. It works great.

<comment><USER61> I assume you're on Android. Is there a way to use uBO on iOS? Last I checked there wasn't.

<comment><USER63> I think your best option is AdGuard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I find it interesting how much of that article talks about features, but is about fashion and brand identification.

</comment><comment><USER65> They actually pushed ChromeOS and web services (GMail, Inbox, Docs, Sheets, ... ) pretty hard and realized that its not the way to go forward. While for lightweight tasks (like emailing and docs) it works pretty well, for heavy tasks (like video editing) and most importantly, as a development platform, chrome os din't do well.

So they pivoted to Fuchsia OS. A new OS to provide seamless experience across several devices (in home or in vehicle while commuting. Some of the resource can be living in cloud). Its a sort of networked OS. Streaming music to your Google Home, let me fetch that music form the Fuchsia Desktop's cache and stream it to Google Home, rather than fetching it all the way from Cloud.

With out applications, OS is not much of use. Here comes Flutter. Let the developers make apps for Android and iOS in Flutter (currently over 50k apps on Google Play store) and have them run the same app on Fuchsia OS. I believe it will take probably another year or two for Google to bring in Fuchsia to Pixelbook. Let's hope so! I would like an OS as open as Linux, with macOS like user experience.

<comment><USER66> > _and most importantly, as a development platform, chrome os din 't do well_

Microsoft completely lapped the industry on this with VS Code. It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend in a browser.

Edit: I thought I just read it just got to 53% market share. It was at 18% and growing fast in 2018, so it's plausible they have majority market share now: [https://triplebyte.com/blog/editor-report-the-rise-of- visual...](https://triplebyte.com/blog/editor-report-the-rise-of-visual- studio-code)

<comment><USER67> > It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend > in a browser.

You mean like X? Which was created in 1984 and at the canonical version (11) in 1987?

<comment><USER66> Yeah, but (presumably) much more latency tolerant.

I didn't mean to imply they were the first do build a development environment using a thin client.

I meant they are way ahead on in-browser / on tablet IDE's, which is surprising, since Google had a 10 year lead on the office suite side of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> _" Then something happened at Google. I'm not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software."_

Google desperately iterates on multiple side-projects to find an additional revenue stream comparable to ads, that's all. Whenever the new toy can't deliver enough it gets nixed, we all know the practice.

I believe they know how vulnerable they are. An unexpected virus may shutter their ads business, this quarter results may be first of a kind in their history. They don't have the iron grip on marketplace on Android as tight as Apple. They know that cloud business will most likely be a Coke vs Pepsi market. I believe their monopoly on browser market feeds the status quo in ads, but what if Edge steals enough market share and comes default with ad blocking? What if the new the new Apple chip shifts desktops and laptops to Apple more and they need to seek permission of a hostile Safari to show ads?

Ads, their main source of income, is not something the end user wants. That's Google's problem.

</comment><comment><USER69> Big Sur made me switch to Mail and Calendar (away from GMail and GCal in Safari).

Oh my god is it fast and snappy.

GChat within GMail kept me in the browser, but they ruined it. Now I use the standalone Chat "app", which is some webframe crap, but hey, corporate standard.

Big Sur is like iPadOS and I always use native apps on iPadOS/iOS.

Can't imagine what a truly native Figma, Slack, JIRA would be like.

<comment><USER70> You've switched to Big Sur because it's snappy? I just installed the beta and it's super buggy with periodic pauses for no reason. Are you using it every day now?

<comment><USER69> Yes, on my main work machine. MBP13, 2018.

Once you don't use browsers for everything, the machine is cooler and more responsive.

Seriously feels as if I bought new hardware.

I close Safari when not using it, same for all other browsers (have Brave, Chrome, ...).

<comment><USER67> Yeah, I'm not sure why the author was so excited about web apps. I have a 12 core Ryzen 3900x and all web apps are slow pieces of shit. I want native apps for everything and no, electron doesn't count.

It's crazy how people all the time say on HN that performance doesn't matter and how optimizing code is a waste of time while I'm simultaneously frustrated about how slow the majority of software I use is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> One of the problems with Google is that it's hard to evangelize their products anymore.

I used to evangelize Macs with my friends and family, since the mid 2000s (before the iPhone revolution) and it served me and the people I pushed it to well. At least until a few years ago with the whole new MBP fiasco with the touchbar and butterfly keyboard and no ports and a minimum price in the mid 2000s. But it's hardware and people can continue using what they already own for the most part till Apple fixed a lot of those issues.

But with Google I have been burnt. A lot. I got my family on Picasa to share photos, and Google stopped supporting it. Personally, Google Reader always stings. And whatever google did with GChat and Hangouts, which I pushed on all my friends, was embarrassing.

At least I gave up on recommending Google products before Allo and Duo. My friends who did that turn red when they are mentioned to this day.

And then there's GSuite. A clients company switched wholesale on my recommendation right at the beginning. They've been using it for almost its entire existence (right from the days when it was Google Apps? and the first 10 users were free). They've been spending a ton of money on it for so long, but they couldn't get a Google rep to offer them a discount on 5 accounts (basically they wanted tiered access and did not want to bring everyone onto the most expensive plans because a few users were not full time employees and using it for very basic purposes). It was a matter of a few hundred dollars a year, but between the fact that they could hardly get a rep to talk to them, and when they did the reps had absolutely no flexibility, MS reps swooped in, offered tiered access, discounts, and a full time rep and within a couple of months they were a complete O365 shop.

They still miss their email search, but overall it's been completely worth it.

It's still mind boggling to me how Google's managed to screw this up.

</comment><comment><USER72> Google has an Engineer-driven gene that is a double-edge sword. This enabled them to utilize worlds' most brilliant minds to solve some of the most technically challenging problems. But at the same time, the best engineers lose their interests and quickly move away from "plain and easy" problems, which in fact the consumers face everyday. And the straight-forward logical engineering mindset is often naive in understanding and solving deep human and societal problems. This is why Google has been notoriously good at solving technical problems like search and massive distributed systems, but bad at designing and improving consumer and social products. On the contrary, Apple has been relentless about improving even the tiniest thing in the user experience like a round corner on an icon. Google's lack of drive on delivering the best user experience will eventually bite them hard.

</comment><comment><USER73> _Microsoft has a new clear mission: The Cloud._

That's a clear mission?

<comment><USER74> Good question, but it's clear enough that it's also Google's mission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Credit where credit is due: I think Google colab is fantastic. I've used Repl.it for a coupe of years now, but for the past year it's been Colab pretty much 100% of the time.

Whenever I have to set up a new machine with dev. environment, I get a impending sense of doom. I get the "I really, really don't want to be doing this" feeling.

The fact that you can open up your browser, and start coding in just mere seconds, is just an incredible feeling.

In February I had to set up an older laptop with Python - I did this via Conda, which is usually a pretty smooth process. But I ended up spending 3 hours tracking down some persistent and conflicting DLL errors, which made numpy crash. Turns out some other applications on the computer caused this error.

</comment><comment><USER76> They were too busy grinding leetcode and focusing on "playing the game" and not growing or hiring innovators. The Max Howell incident is a perfect example. Creates legitimately useful software that everyone loves, can't invert a binary tree (because we do this all day right? this question is highly relevant to the job /s) so you can't work here.

Maybe at one point edit distance questions were useful in identifying the 2% of CS grads that actually paid attention in class, but now it just produces code bots.

Google gamified the interview, and in the process, became beholden and captured by its own madness.

</comment><comment><USER77> [Shameless plug] For anyone who uses DuckDuckGo but finds themselves using !g too and is curious how much their DDG vs !g search distribution is - I have made a small FOSS add-on for Firefox called DDG Stats[1].

I am planning on a Chrome port too (though, I would always recommend Firefox over chrome).

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg- stats/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/)

</comment><comment><USER78> I can use photoshop for free now, on the web. I do that. [https://www.photopea.com/](https://www.photopea.com/) \- The world is very different.

My family can use office for free now, on the web. We do that. [https://www.office.com/](https://www.office.com/)

Most of my family uses facebook.

We all use maps, youtube, google search, gmail (not me, although I have an account).

</comment><comment><USER79> I believe it's their corporate culture. Google just hires problem solvers, good engineers. It's a sort of dual of Apple, that prioritizes design and marketing.

The result is you get things that Just work (and nothing else). While Apple gets you things that Just works.

I don't see real vision in their products those days. None of them have real vision (Apple is too design centric and afraid to try new things, Google lacks creativity).

</comment><comment><USER80> Google has reached the mature phase of the corporate lifecycle. They have economic dominance and are putting the screws in to extract more money. The writing was on the wall when they got an ex-Goldman Sachs CFO, but it has become more and more externally obvious over the past few years.

[https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/fi...](https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/finance/business- life-cycle/)

The mature phase can last a long time so long as they keep buying the competition or use their position to shut others out. Or they can screw up and start to lose their grip to another company or group of companies that slice off their market share one service at a time.

In any case, Google was never actually trying to help the world, their marketing was extremely good though. Hopefully the advertising economy collapses as people realize the ads don't work and we have to find a model (such as public funding of essential services) that actually works.

</comment><comment><USER81> This article comes off as woefully naive towards the average user and frankly quite elitist.

You're forgetting that Google does not optimize for power users like yourself. Instead, they are just interested in adding the most amount of people into their ecosystem. Free, easy-to-use, and familiar products like Docs and Sheets will no doubt garner the most amount of users.

</comment><comment><USER82> I went through most of the comment and something I thought hasn't been mentioned yet.

May be those product should not have been built with Javascript in the first place?

I remember when Chrome OS was launched, people like the blog post author were all over it. It was the future!. And I was surprised he was an Apple user. I thought Apple users cared way more, and way beyond some high level abstraction convenience at the expense of quality.

I have been working with dozens if not hundreds of companies, and none of them use Google Sheet for anything serious. It is on Excel, and if it is on the web the trend is now Excel 365.

If you demand quality, there isn't even a single App built with Web Technology that is A Class. This may change when WASM is a thing. But for now there is simply no replacement.

Lots of educations were initially switching to ChromeOS and Google. They later switched back to iPad. Why is that? There is something about Google and ChromeOS's quality that is not up to standard. And the users knows it, they just couldn't explain it. But it was crap, at least compare it to their iPad. And it has performance hit on its user. Because they were not satisfied.

This isn't to say ChromeOS cant be Good. But Google, generally speaking has absolutely no taste on quality. They are even worst than Microsoft. In Microsoft you could still see a glimpse of product person fighting with ( sorry HN ) idiotic geeks solution and then came out with a compromise. And MS Product person isn't anywhere as good as Apple's in the first place. But you see ZERO User product design in Google. It is as if a product is designed by geeks, built by geeks, marketed by geeks, and feed into their own echo chamber how great it is.

And Android now is no different to Windows in the 90s.

I never took a serious look into Google's financial, but I am surprised they are a trillion dollar company while Apple is only worst 50% more.

</comment><comment><USER83> Not sure I want everything to be rewritten to run on a browser. How unoptimized is that..

Not all comparisons are equal there. Like youtube vs twitch? Talking about livestreaming? replays? I don't go to twitch to look up peoples vlogs, how to's, etc. Apples / oranges even though you can livestream on both.

Gmail clogged? Unsubscribe to some stuff or adjust your filters. I've had my gmail account since gmail became available and I have no issues keeping a clean inbox. Spam folder is massive, but I guess its doing its job.

I get what you're saying.. But thats how the industry works. Giants can't move as quick when they have billions of users that rely on 100% uptime and backwards compatibility. You can't upend your stuff all the time. Startups are scrappy and can do crazy stuff. But notice how many crazy things don't last.

</comment><comment><USER84> The biggest problem with Google is that they became so successful in search and ads. It confuses the hell out of the company who their real customer is.

What if instead of monetizing via ads, they had gone with premium accounts with personal search history and enterprise search products? That would have forced them to innovate on their core expertise and kept them empathetic to the end user. Right now, all they care is about usage stats.

Also Google never had a good design ethic right from the beginning. Early products like Chat, Groups were badly designed and very inconsistent. They cared more about scale and performance at that point.

The Google we see today is probably because of those early decisions made on the backs of runaway ad revenue. I hope the management has a change of heart, because I can see other companies chipping away at Google otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER85> This article doesn't say anything worth hearing. It can be summarized as, "Google has not done visibly big consumer innovation." Which is not that true either. Their "cluttered" search is adding a lot of value. Their main innovation has also been in AI, mobile and the cloud.

</comment><comment><USER86> Google never had a ten year lead, that's pretty naive. Google had a ten year _lag_. Microsoft already had office when Google appeared, and while fans have numerous reasons to like Google docs & friends, they were never better or bigger than Office.

Chrome OS has a tremendous lag on windows and Mac.

It's really hard to innovate once you start to be compared to a established brand. Go ask Bing.

Unless duck duck go becomes larger than Google, they never blew any lead, only were defeated in places opponents were stronger.

</comment><comment><USER87> > I'm a long shareholder of Google. It's amazing how they have four monopolies > and only monetize one of them. I'm confident they have a bright future > ahead.

What? Name me a company to make a comeback on the R&D-is-dead-slowly-killing- bussines front?[1]. Clearly Google (and Intel) are on the IBM train now, with only a lack of anti-trust possibly keeping them barely sentient in a few years. [I say "sentient" because they could continue to rent-seek into their feeding tube way after.]

And clearly this person is letting their investment guide their thinking rather than vice-versa. You almost get it, just a bit more!

[1]: Don't say MS, yet, they have embraced tons of web-era trappings and culture, but are they actually pushing the envelope or still assimilating?

</comment><comment><USER88> Google's main liability is that they can never, under any circumstances, prioritize user privacy.

The reason the products listed by the author have rough corners is that those products don't contribute much to the bottom line.

Google is an advertising company that happens to use technology. The problem is that too many people view it as a technology company that happens to be into advertising.

As browsers adopt ad-blockers by default, Chrome will be the lone holdout. As smaller companies and startups realize that you can "monetize" products by charging a price and adopting stringent privacy policies, Google will be stuck with its "free" business model.

Nothing Google will try to do in the years ahead will change the basic equation.

<comment><USER89> Google has the best software development tooling in the business internally. Their problems are not around technology. Their problems are product focus, commitment and follow through. Google is in fact primarily a technology company. They struggle with being a "product" company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Google has minimal interest in "apps" (which many companies can do an OK job at) and much more interested in planet-scale data/machine-learning/AI (which is much much harder and something that Google is still very far ahead of everyone at).

</comment><comment><USER41> Another micro example of how bad Google is nowadays:

The sitemap.xml API is deliberately broken for 1 1/2 years by now. The response does no longer deliver an indexed value back other than 0 or a frozen number form years ago. After I found out about it a few months later there was a tweet and blogpost about it.

The documentation was never updated ... [https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/search- console...](https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/search-console-api- original/v3/sitemaps#resource)

My guess, there is no one responsible anymore, hey it just is a 200k people company ...

</comment><comment><USER91> I feel like sheets and docs not changing for years is a feature not problem. I don't like innovation in these kind of apps. It's far too common, historically, for people to add all kinds of useless crap like Mr Clippy and rearrange the toolbars and whatnot. Once you're familiar with the tools the interface is consistent across docs, sheets and slides as well as over time. The programmability is also really good. I actually built an app for a friend using just sheets and its automation features to implement a web form for their national poetry contest.

</comment><comment><USER92> I ran a whole business for years with Google Sheets API and Python front end. I agree that sheets is slow and lumbering, but the API works perfectly.

I did a small layman's demo here recently[1].

[1][https://medium.com/@muddi900/use-google-sheets-as-a- database...](https://medium.com/@muddi900/use-google-sheets-as-a-database- with-python-30-days-of- blog-4-1d288c614163?sk=32ea57e789e2b4de396240a750c7f674)

</comment><comment><USER93> The new office online surprisingly works really great. Funny enough, office 365 works better online than desktop. I do thing Web OS is the future. User's are now spending 90% of their time in the browser. Basically browser === os. Apps like electron, react are proving that point. Chrome OS was maybe a start (I've never personally used it because I've never really felt the need to make such a huge OS transition), but at the present business incentives were weak. Why would someone pay (not monetary, but by opportunity cost) for just a browser?

</comment><comment><USER94> This is google in a nutshell.

I lived near google for many years and knew many employees and this drives them crazy. In order to have innovation and support for a particular product, google allows engineers to do what they want until nobody wants to touch the bloated pos and everyone walks away.

Gmail has thousands of hidden functions. To get gmail built they allowed each engineer to add what they wanted...and most of it was for them personally. Remember the gmail2 thteat from a number of years ago? They couldn't figure out how to force every user into a new platform.

</comment><comment><USER95> I'm surprised the author doesn't spend more time discussing Google's search engine.

I've been using DDG as my primary search for a while, because Google Search has been returning increasingly bad results already for quite some months.

For the past couple days I've tried Google's Search again, and, oh wow!, it is hilariously bad now, just laughable! It now entirely ignores search terms, and the AI and ad-based results work against me, not for me.

Google didn't blow a ten year lead, they blew a 20 year lead. AltaVista was better than this.

<comment><USER96> Yes, the entire world is raving about DDG results.

<comment><USER95> Let's revisit the topic three months from now. The change to which I refer probably occurred less than a month ago. Not that Google results hadn't already been going downhill for months prior, but it became dramatically worse at some point over the past month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> I've personally backed way off when it comes to putting everything in the cloud. I know some people love the convenience and I get that, but I spend a lot of time and energy creating what I create and I want to actually have some control over it. I also don't trust cloud companies at all when it comes to either privacy or continuity.

For similar reasons I've started data hoarding again. When I find an interesting video or podcast I tend to mirror and stash it on a NAS. Things disappear from the cloud quite regularly.

</comment><comment><USER98> Google Docs/Sheets is pretty crappy compared LibreOffice. But its collaboration features are really good and everyone has a Google account, so working together remote works like a charm.

</comment><comment><USER99> Not to mention they lucked out that DuckDuckGo is called DuckDuckGo.

I just can't believe such smart people could believe that is good branding.

What exactly were the brand names they rejected to go with DuckDuckGo?

</comment><comment><USER100> This is exactly right. You see the flashes of brilliance and the incredible untapped value in GDocs. But its slow, disorganized and stagnant. Google could be making its money the honest way, by providing genuine value, making people more productive and and collaborative. Its heartbreaking to see them instead massively profiting through spying and manipulating their users. They destroyed their brand and surely they are no longer an appealing place to work for those who can afford to have a conscience.

</comment><comment><USER101> > In 2010, I predicted that by 2020 Chrome OS would be the most popular > desktop OS in the world. It was fast, lightweight, and $0.

Sounds like your crystal ball malfunctioned on that forecast. I'll recalibrate it for you but will forecast it for this decade:

In 2020, I predict that by 2030, Fuchsia OS would be one of the most popular desktop and mobile OSes in the world and will replace Chrome OS and Android. It was fast, lightweight, and $0.

There you go. That makes much more sense according to my crystal ball.

</comment><comment><USER102> The choice of "alternatives" mentioned in the article, like "Hey", "Notion", "AirTable", etc. actually does more harm to the credibility to the article than good, because I can't think of any normal person using all these startup products for important tasks.

Hell, I think the only demographic who would have switched all their workflow tools to these would be people who live in Silicon Valley, just helping each other out.

<comment><USER103> My team (I am the director of software at my company) switched to Notion from Google Docs a little more than a year ago and I'm very happy with the change.

Google Docs addresses a slightly different use case than Notion. Notion is one document for a lot of people, owned by the organization. Google Docs are docs owned by many people, often duplicated. Notion is much better for building documentation and for storing institutional knowledge.

We still use Google docs for things that we don't need to share widely and don't need to be referenceable to a large number of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> This post is a summary of how I feel about a lot of google products as well. Especially email, yes google has amazing AI to figure out spam but the UX of gmail just feels like I'm still in 2012 or 2015 with email. I've been using Hey for about a week as well and wow, checking and responding to email feels less of a burden and having the Feed, Paper Trail, and Imbox is actually a good way to separate types of emails sent nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER105> "At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats for macOS Big Sur. It reminded me how much Chrome makes my machine go WHURRRRRR. Yesterday, I made Safari my default browser again."

I talk to developer friends in my circles and I'm pretty sure I'm on a crazy list for running safari, but I really do think it's the best Mac browser. Chrome is just an absolute hog and until there's some Camino-like renaissance for Firefox/Mozilla on Mac it's not going to work for me.

<comment><USER106> I use Safari for personal surfing, and separate Chrome accounts for my various business/work related surfing.

Keeps things separate and tidy, and I keep Chrome closed as much as I need it to be closed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this idea a lot. I've been using Station to stay logged in to all my various work web apps, and then Chrome (now Safari) for personal.

<comment><USER106> I use Mailplane for when I want to see all my email accounts, and Spark when I want to deal with all email accounts together.

Each work Chrome profile has a pinned Gmail and, maybe, a Slack.

So I can be universal, or targeted, where I want to spend my time.

That said, I'm also spread across too many endeavors, but that's a totally different problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> Seems to be their modus operandi to me, there have been some talks ranging from light ribbing to full on bashing regarding the new iOS update cause they have added features that have existed in Android for decades now. But what have they done with widgets in all this while other than letting it rot? Even Google services themselves don't bother with making a good widget and now Apple will do the same, possibly better.

</comment><comment><USER108> Google is a classic case of "show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome". Google's performance reviews and promotions are based on building shiny complex things, not on simple but grungy work that solves real problems. So they constantly come up with things nobody uses or cancel products that many use but aren't shiny enough to get a bunch of people promoted so no leaders want to own them.

</comment><comment><USER109> I have a Chromebook and I'm really found of it, but the Android and Linux parts seem half-baked and a depart from the Chromebook's initial proposition.

I really like this setup where my computer is just a thin client to my infrastructure. In the case of ChromeOS, this is all a closed/proprietary environment managed by Google, but nothing prevents challengers from implementing this setup based on open standards and user freedom.

</comment><comment><USER110> Here's a free idea for Google that would make my life better... you know these voice assistant thingys? I would love if they could tell me when things happen instead of having to ask them if something is currently happening. For example, "Hey Google, tell me when XXX announces a concert in town." or "tell me when YYY is on sale" etc.

Having to look these things up all the time really sucks.

</comment><comment><USER111> I had an early Chromebook (from I/O) and was never very impressed. I always felt the lackluster support for local storage would hold it back from ever seriously competing with my PC.

I saw its value as more of a dedicated device for people who do limited things on their laptop (e.g. sales team using only a handful of web apps), and even in that niche it had to compete with iPads, etc.

</comment><comment><USER112> I can relate a bit. I have been trying to 'degooglify' my life for sometime. Made these couple of shifts in the last two years:

* Chrome --> Firefox

* Google search --> DuckDuckGo

These are in pipeline:

* YouTube --> Newpipe (which is YouTube minus ads and tracking)

* Drive --> Mega.nz

* Gmail --> Protonmail

* Playstore --> F-droid (whenever possible)

At the same time, I have been using Google's Photos and Podcasts a tad more lately. Need to find good alternatives to these.

</comment><comment><USER113> Not sure why he called it "TheFacebook". That was an early name used way prior to even 2005. ChromeOS was released in 2010/2011.

<comment><USER114> Figma was released in 2016. The author must be some kind of prophet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> And yet the stock is at $1400+ this morning. I wonder if you did a survey and described Google without using the name Google, IE: single line of business responsible for 90%+ of revenue, limited switching costs for consumers, regularly kills products consumers like, would anyone think this is a stock worth holding? What weird times we live in.

</comment><comment><USER116> Google is an experiment in what happens when you give a bunch of smart people a 6-7 figure UBI (funded, of course, by search).

</comment><comment><USER117> Couldn't happen to nicer company. I've been disentangling my personal stuff and company's I host for from the google hive for less woke options. Hit em where it hurts.

When the people you pay start threatening to walk out because they don't like what you are working on you know you have a systemic problem.

</comment><comment><USER118> Google had (or still has) perverse incentives.

No incentive to do the boring work of maintaining and improving existing products.

Lots of incentive to create new things -- even if they overlap functionality of existing things -- which then must be phased out to make room for the awkward new things. Even if everyone preferred the old things.

</comment><comment><USER119> I can't totally agree with this. It may be true that Google Docs and Sheets get updated slowly, but they are functional and as long as they are maintained properly, I am a happy consumer.

Also, on Chromebooks having Microsoft Office 365 available as web apps provides higher level tools when you need them.

</comment><comment><USER120> Someday, Google will be a business school case study on the dangers of a) having all your money come from one cash cow and b) having too many self- directed engineers with no management vision. Google is a car with a 1,000 horsepower engine but which can't drive in a straight line.

<comment><USER121> Seems like it is easier for a smaller group of capable people to make a big change than a giant org of diverse talented people from different backgrounds

<comment><USER122> A small focused team of diverse talented people from different backgrounds, can make the biggest-impact.

Focus=speed. Focus is what's missing at Google, and why they have such a sprawling staff and politics.

<comment><USER121> You're right, diversity is fine, it's the lack of focus I suppose... but even with 'focus' I think the small size aspect is still important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER123> I've always cared about the privacy issues regarding Google's applications way less than I should, probably, but he definitely makes a good point regarding how increasingly outdated they're feeling.

I'm most likely gonna start switching out too.

</comment><comment><USER124> The author is forgetting that Google is a search monopoly.

AI was (and continues to be) the biggest threat to their success in search so they invested heavily in that (it was called ML back then).

Clearly they are still doing well even with subpar cloud software, so this has proven out.

</comment><comment><USER125> To Quote SJ: "The only problem with Microsoft is, they just have no taste"

Repeat that for Google.

</comment><comment><USER126> The future does not belong to Google and Facebook. Data privacy is too important to allow massive grow in ads, and they are not companies organized around selling software. As the article points out, we can live without both. It isn't 2009.

</comment><comment><USER127> "Then something happened at Google. I'm not sure what."

Occam's Razor would say that what happened is that they couldn't figure out how to make much money from these tools, and therefore directed fewer resources to them :(

</comment><comment><USER128> Someone once described the big tech companies this way:

Google is about solving tough/new engineering problems;

Microsoft is about building software;

Apple is about the consumer;

Facebook is about your attention span;

Amazon is about your wallet.

I thought that summed up their personalities pretty well so thought I'd share.

<comment><USER129> I agree with you for Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but I disagree about Amazon and Facebook.

Amazon's not about your wallet. They're frequently more expensive than other sites; they're about convenience and lock-in. If you need a Sprocket, you type sprocket into the search bar, click buy on the Amazon button, and you're done. The result will probably be a pretty good sprocket for an unobjectionable price. You don't need to worry about little details like who sold it to you or whether it's likely to show up functional. It'll probably work, and if it doesn't, you can return it. No need to do research, no need to drive to a store.

Facebook doesn't care about your attention; it just needs your eyes. That sounds like the same thing, but it's very different. If you're just scrolling through without really reading anything, that's absolutely fine with Facebook so long as you keep doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER130> There's a strange cognitive dissonance in how Google is both the most prestigious company that can employ you, and a maker of crappy, second-rate software. It seems like they can't both be simultaneously true.

</comment><comment><USER131> I'm still annoyed that they screwed up the release of Google Wave. The mistake was to make it a separate service instead of building it into Gmail and making it another "type of email" you can send.

</comment><comment><USER132> >I'm a long shareholder of Google. It's amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them.

Okay, but we don't want Google as a monopoly... or do we?

Breaking up the monopoly means throwing away the ten-year lead.

<comment><USER133> I think OC's point is that they're breaking up their own monopoly with a complete lack of product vision.

Google Wallet/Pay/Android Pay could have become Stripe, Venmo. Google Hangouts/Meet/Chat could have become Zoom, Slack, Teams, iMessage, etc. Google Finance could have become Robinhood, Mint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER134> > Then something happened at Google. I'm not sure what. But they stopped > innovating on cloud software.

What happened was they were printing money on the cloud software they already had. Classic innovators dilemma.

</comment><comment><USER135> Google is dying under the pressure to make everything they do connect to and be dominated by their ad sales. Google is what happens when you let he accounts start running the ship.

</comment><comment><USER136> I can't believe it's whatever year this is and Google Sheets can't remember that I just told it a particular sort range has a header row, or just figure it out by itself.

</comment><comment><USER137> Also in that timeframe the privacy landscape and people's sensitivity to it have changed a great deal. It's a much bigger concern amongst normies than it was 10-15 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER138> And it all coincides with Larry and Sergei stepping down. Google is very much just a cash cow being milked, zero innovation - just products rusting away.

</comment><comment><USER139> I don't understand how Notion can be used to replace a fully fledged word processor. Am I missing something?

</comment><comment> awinter-py love the cross-outs section

youtube remains un-crossed, but it will be replaced by better offerings in core categories: vloggers, how-to / structured / lego, and music / covers

love that this person is privacy-conscious but is making 'purchase' decisions based on the fact that the products just suck now

<comment><USER140> Privacy conscious yet uses Zoom. Hmm

<comment><USER141> Zoom is now offering e2e encryption for all users. What exactly do you have problem with?

<comment><USER140> They have a history.

\- running a secret local server on client machines (which incidentally led to several vulnerabilities including the one that enabled attackers to gain webcam and audio access, as well as login credentials)

\- lying about e2e encryption (or if you give them the benefit of the doubt, at the very least being disingenuous about it)

\- routing all calls through servers in China

\- not being explicit about the many conditions that disabled encryption (such as having a participant call in from a phone, recording the session, etc)

\- widespread data collection for targeting purposes

\- sharing said data with Facebook

\- automatically reinstalling the client after you have tried to delete it

\- a shady installer that uses preinstall scripts to install the app without the user ever having to click "install"

\- gaining root access in their installer

\- overriding the password prompt message to make it seem like the system is requesting admin rights and not Zoom itself

Many of these have been patched, to Zoom's credit, and others have been explained away. But you can't look at a company with a history like that and say that Zoom would knowingly be the app of choice for a privacy conscious user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER142> So because you started using other services that's mean Google is behind, what kind of logic is that

</comment><comment><USER143> This article brings to mind the saying "A poor craftsman blames his tools".

</comment><comment><USER144> Thank goodness ChromeOS didn't take over.

I'd like for my computer to be more than a toy.

</comment><comment><USER145> This article was weird. I started about ChromeOS and I was expecting a deep dive or interesting viewpoint on the OS market. Then it veered into "alternatives to Google" land, with a side promotion of HEY (of all things). It left me wanting, for an article about Google's OS strategy.

</comment><comment><USER146> Still can't copy a folder full of docs in google drive and it's so frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER147> I am starting to think everything is an ad for Hey on hacker news these days.

</comment><comment><USER148> Owning the software they build doesn't seem to scale.

</comment><comment><USER149> This feels like an ad for HEY more than anything else...

</comment><comment><USER150> I'm still upset they shuttered inbox and reader!

</comment><comment><USER151> The same article will fit well for Waymo as well.

</comment><comment><USER152> You lost me at tiktok

</comment><comment><USER153> Google hasn't had any major new products for 10 years.

<comment><USER154> Stadia?

<comment><USER153> Stadia is a cloud gaming platform. Like Nvidia Shield, Microsoft xCloud, Sony PS Now, OnLive, and the rest.

Gmail, maps, page-rank based search, and other pre-2010 Google tech were category makers. Every competitor has to massively step their game up to make something as good.

Stadia is not a category maker. There's no massive competitive advantage or leading position for anyone else to catch up to. It's nowhere near the pre-2010 Google products.

<comment><USER96> This is getting old now.

Tensorflow, TPUs, Spanner, Photos, Waymo. Just keep shifting the goal posts.

<comment><USER153> I've never spoken to you before and goalposts have always been. You just think every product is major. No, Spanner is not equivalent to Google Maps or Search.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER155> (This comment grew so much, I actually posted it too [https://snir.dev/blog/google-10-years- lead](https://snir.dev/blog/google-10-years-lead) )

Initially, I thought this is because Google targets only big business customers, competing with Microsoft 365. Other product innovations do not scare them, they still offer a package with mail, video conferencing, docs, sheets, drive, etc' etc'. Great for big business collaboration tools. They just don't care for things like Notion or HEY. It's not their target and they don't make money from it.

But then I thought, this is an example targeted against Microsoft with a similar offering. What about Google Cloud? What about Android? They are both innovative. What happened there?

Then I saw it. Google consistently follows the market preventing its competitors from achieving market control. And in Google's case, "the market" is Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook.

We'll start with Microsoft since they were the first. And beating them down took place ~10 years ago, that's why it seems like the tech from back then never progressed much. Because the hit already strike.

Microsoft dominated the corporate world with its mail software Outlook, and with its Office suite, Word, Excel, etc'. Google is native to the web and they leveraged their position to slowly hit Microsoft in this spot. Gmail first, then Google Drive, and then Chrome to kill IE as a final strike. And it was successful.

Amazon got big into the tech business through AWS. Google went out to a fight through Google Cloud. Not only the offering is cheaper, it also provided technologies you can't explain any other way than just to hit AWS. Kubernetes as an open platform is against any business textbook to lock in customers. But it will allow for an easy way out of AWS in the long run, preferably to GCP but it can be any other cloud provider that provides Kubernetes service as well. It is strategically more of a hit to the front runner, Amazon, then a benefit to GCP.

These priorities order of first hit the front runner, then everything else is also seen with the Apple case. Android came after the iPhone. It has a much larger market share, and yet, it generates far less revenue to Google then the iPhone is to Apple. That's because the main goal is to prevent Apple from winning the market. And in that, it is successful.

Google Buzz. Ouch. Google Plus. Double ouch. Google spent so much effort into hitting Facebook as hard as they can. They were not successful here, but from the history of things it is obvious how Google try to hit Facebook. They did not try to create a new social platform, no. Otherwise they would come up with something that is not.. well, exactly like Facebook.

Google home initially released at 2016. Amazon Alexa in 2014.

I have so many more examples that comes to mind as I write, but the point is already clear.

On a final note, I'll say, Google is not only trying to bend down competitors. Google Glass is one new product market they tried to create. The self-driving cars initiative is another example the comes to mind. They do innovate.

They just have so much money, blocking out other big tech companies is a strategy they are not willing to give up. And when this is the strategy, well, Google sheets already took a huge chunk from Microsoft, what more does it need?

</comment><comment><USER156> To be clear, this is a stealth ad for Hey email service wrapped in a rant against Google. #1 on HN 20 minutes after posting. It's quite impressive, actually.

<comment><AUTHOR> (author here) i promise this is not an ad for Hey haha, have no affiliation with basecamp and wish i was that good at content marketing.

<comment><USER157> It's kind of fishy this is the only comment OP responded to. And OP's other most recent comment was on a basecamp thread

<comment><USER158> You really don't know DHH or BaseCamp. I can guarantee you that he has enough of a reach and platform not to engage in shady guerrilla marketing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER159> Photoshop->Figma :D that's hilarious!

<comment><USER160> Why? I guess it's because Figma has fewer features, but if OP used PS for web/app design, wouldn't this be fair?

<comment><USER159> Because photoshop is primarily a complex software for professional raster image editing/designing. Those who use it for that purpose will not think of Figma as its replacement. Figma is a SVG based UX design tool and those who do UX design in 2020 most likely (hopefully) aren't using a heavy/complex raster graphics tool like photoshop.

<comment><USER160> No, I understand and agree with all of that, I sometimes design UIs and I wouldn't touch PS with a laser pointer for that purpose.

But the article talks about software from 10 years ago to now. I remember even as Sketch had been rising for a while, something like 52% of UI designers still used PS. Pretty sure that wasn't even close to 10 years ago!

So I guess that's why I thought PS->Figma was a reasonable jump in that context. Even if they used Sketch in the interim or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER161> Google has a clear mission and it's advertising, duh

<comment><USER162> exactly this. The only reason the other services exist is to feed more data into the advertising (search?) machinations. Because the company is so myopically focused on Advertising dollars and everything else as loss leaders(or under monetized), they are unable to see a potential reversal of roles where the other products become ends unto themselves

</comment></comment><comment><USER163> > At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats

> I started using HEY last week

refreshing to see a person who 's not suggestable and easily swayed by fads

<comment><USER164> My gauge is okaying up, is this sarcastic?

<comment><USER163> yes [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNy_GNWwhQk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNy_GNWwhQk)</comment></comment></comment>


'05 Annual Performance Review: Albert Einstein - <AUTHOR> http://www.norvig.com/performance-review.html <comment><USER2> Similar: Einstein's report card for his seconday school examinations [http://bobwise.tumblr.com/post/5894827109/albert- einsteins-r...](http://bobwise.tumblr.com/post/5894827109/albert-einsteins- report-card-from-his-secondary)

For those who cannot read German, the subjects are German speech and literature - 5, French - 3, English - None, Italian - 5, History - 6, Geography - 4, Algebra - 6, Geometry (Planimetric trigonometry, stereometry and analytic geometry) - 6, Projective geometry - 6, Physics - 6, Chemistry - 5, Natural history - 5, Art drawing - 4, Technical drawing - 4. Points go from 1 to 6

Einstein was apparently an excellent student, at least in secondary school. Also, he got a lot more geometry and maths than I did in secondary school.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. The whole "Einstein was bad a school" seems to be a myth based on a misinterpretation of the 1-6 system (apparently Germany and Switzerland had them reversed). Some more discussion to the origins here: [http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/956/was- einstein...](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/956/was-einstein-a- poor-student)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It shows that a poor performance review measures the reviewer as much as the reviewed.</comment>


AMD releases new Catalyst drivers for Win 7 Firefox 4 users - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/win-7-firefox-4-users-take-note-amd-releases-new-catalyst-drivers/12568

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is true care for your customers. And kind of acknowledgement where we're heading with GPUs.</comment>


What do you think of this idea? - <AUTHOR> http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/660365/could_cyberspace_kill_the_hollywood.html

<comment><USER2> I'm not a game theorist, but wouldn't people just game SpecArena the same way spammers game digg and reddit now? By 'game' I mean automatically rate the competition with low scores and have voting-gangs/bots give their own submissions high scores.

Except it would probably be worse because there would be more at stake.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've often thought about applying a similar model to the book publishing industry.

Technologically, this is fairly simple. The hard part is getting people to use it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I actually like it a lot.

I had a little to do with movies (a friend of mine was nominated for an Oscar two years ago and we had some discussions about starting a company together in the film biz) and my (limited) experience would suggest that you would run into the following problems:

\- They are a dead conservative bunch. It is hard to convince them to try something new.

\- There's a lot of politics and who-knows-who that you would have to overcome

\- Instead of having just a few people read through a script maybe it should be free for all to read through and rate. That way you will have a good selling point to Hollywood - "hey - 500.000 people read this script and rated it, they will all go see the movie when it comes out. And bring their friends and family!"

\- Marketing will be the hard part. You actually have to get people to use the damn thing...

I think that you income model should probably be to take a cut of the selling price for a script. They aint cheap you know...

Just some thoughts...

<comment><USER4> > Instead of having just a few people read through a script maybe it should be > free for all to read through and rate. That way you will have a good selling > point to Hollywood - "hey - 500.000 people read this script and rated it, > they will all go see the movie when it comes out. And bring their friends > and family!"

That worked for "Lord of the Rings" but would it have worked for "Sixth Sense"? How about "Blades of Glory"?

Did it work for "300"?</comment></comment>


Vast costs of Arctic change - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v499/n7459/pdf/499401a.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Overlooked by most churnalists yesterday was this: _The release of methane from thawing permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea, off northern Russia,_ alone _comes with an average global price tag of $60 trillion in the absence of mitigating action — a figure comparable to the size of the world economy in 2012 (about $70 trillion). The total cost of Arctic change will be much higher._

Methane can be converted to (much more environmentally friendly) methanol: [http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Methane_to_methanol](http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Methane_to_methanol)

There have been recent and successful field tests of fuel production/extraction of methane hydrates, with the bonus of performing carbon sequestration at the same time. This financial year, we're spending the princely sum of $11.5 million on further research: [http://energy.gov/articles/us-and-japan-complete- successful-...](http://energy.gov/articles/us-and-japan-complete-successful- field-trial-methane-hydrate-production-technologies)

Original news report from 2010 on ESS emissions: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/04/us-climate- methane...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/04/us-climate-methane- idUSTRE6233ZU20100304)

Current releases of methane worldwide are about 600m tons per annum, though some of this is cyclical. [http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html](http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html)</comment>


Ask HN: How long it took you to master a foreign language and how do you do it? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I became fluent in Russian after 2-3 months of living in Moldova. I had a crash course in Russian beforehand, but couldn't say a whole lot more than basic phrases before I got to Moldova and couldn't understand much either. Obviously you need to study (grab a good grammar book). But I ended up studying less than an hour a day when I was there. What I did do was speak Russian as much as possible. You have to force yourself to use the language. What set me apart from the people I was working with (in terms of using the language) was that I was not afraid to fail. I just continued on and tried my best. I gave myself no chance to fail. If you aren't living in country that speaks the desired foreign language it is a lot harder. I took French in school for over 10 years and another two years in university and I still can't speak it. My grammar is very good in French and I can read it fairly well, but can't speak much.

<comment><USER3> Immersion is key. My English got much better after I moved to the UK.

About Moldova, what's the ratio of Russian vs Romanian? Did you actually speak Romanian before? I was thinking that if Romanian is widely spoken in Moldova and you knew the language, it might have been more difficult to immerse yourself into Russian as you'd have an "easy way out".

<comment><USER2> In Chisinau (the capital), where I spent roughly a year, I would say that you hear Russian even a little more than Romanian (although there are definitely more Romanian speakers and people really like it when you try to speak Romanian). I would say the actual ratio in Chisinau is 65/35 in favor of Romanian speakers, but you tend to hear Russian a little more because the Romanian speakers learn Russian, but the Russian speakers don't learn Romanian nearly as often. The other city I lived in, Balti, has a much larger percentage of Russian speakers.

I didn't know Romanian beforehand though, so going with Russian was easy enough. I did work with some other Americans who learned Romanian and didn't have the easiest time in Moldova just speaking Romanian. They would often run into people who only spoke Russian and they had no way to communicate. As a Russian speaker in my two years this happened very rarely to me and then it was usually only people from villages and young kids (even then they were familiar with Russian and I picked up enough Romanian to communicate).

It's a very interesting dynamic in the country between the two languages. It's not as controversial a topic as some people would have you believe. People definitely like hearing Romanian more (for the Romanian speakers), but they are ok with Russian too. I got yelled at one time by a drunk guy on the bus for speaking Russian, but literally everyone else on the bus defended me and the guy I was talking too. They all knew we were Americans based on accent haha. Overall though, it's not that hard to immerse yourself in Russian in Moldova in the bigger cities, but if you already knew Romanian you would have to be disciplined because it is still widely spoken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Started "French Immersion" in BC in kindergarten, then in Grade 4 moved to an entirely French school in Ontario for two years. After that, more immersion. Missed two years of French classes in highschool, so was catching up when I started university. A "minor" in French (I think I was one course away from getting it) fixed that nicely. I consider myself fluent, but I don't get enough practice to be able to use it professionally.

Over the last two years I've been immersed in Tagalog, with the help of one introductory book (basic vocab and grammar). Tagalog is easier than French so far because people speak mixed English and Tagalog (Taglish) all the time. I can follow conversations 50% of the time due to context and the odd English word. That's letting me learn organically without really trying. Next step is I need to spend a few minutes per day going over phrases from the [http://tatoeba.org/](http://tatoeba.org/) database.

EDIT: I use French because "Canada", and I use Tagalog because of family.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been working at it for 20+ years. I did it by moving to the US at 9 years old.</comment>