I use GSuite at work at a FAANG company, and Google slides with 50+ pages is so slow (multi-second pauses when changing slides) to be practically unusable. Finding documents in Google drive is hard to impossible, and good luck keeping track of comments or tasks assigned to you in multiple unrelated documents.
I’m sure at some level consolidating their offerings is a right product move, but I don’t think Basecamp or Calendly should be particularly concerned.
Teams is not the best messaging/videoconferencing program by a country mile, yet it shows the most growth YoY [citation needed].
I worked for a few companies who dipped a toe into the Microsoft waters and their products drowned everything else out; this was not because the offering was technically superior or cheaper.
Microsoft and Google have a fundamentally different approach to enterprise software than Google. Microsoft is the mediocre Apple of enterprise tech, before Apple even got that reputation.
EVERYTHING IS INTEGRATED. Microsoft makes it so insanely easy to stay within the microsoft ecosystem, that using a mediocre software created by Microsoft is always a better option than a 3rd party tool. (See slacks getting clobbered by teams, despite slacks being significantly faster)
Part of what makes MSFT click is that they they go above and beyond to create a tool everyone can use. Additionally, they are obsessed with customers to a point that their tools lose all personality. This is bad if you want something that is opinionated in exactly the way you want (see Obsidian vs OneNote), but great for companies that want to offer an inoffensive tool that is serviceable for all its employees.
An incumbent is fearsome when it uses every little advantage in its greater product offering to embed itself as the obvious option. (Apple for consumer tech, MSFT for enterprise tech). Google has refused to implement the kind of top down organizational structure needed to enforce such integration in its product lineup. This is the company that couldn't sync its grocery lists with google keep. As long as it stays true, Google will never be able to leverage the advantage of an incumbent. It's a shame too, their products are honestly quite good.
March 31, 2020: 75 million DAU [0]
March 31, 2021: 145 million DAU [1]
0: https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2020/04/30/mi...
1: https://twitter.com/jeffteper/status/1387141320519557120?s=2... (https://twitter.com/bdsams/status/1387146648678244356?s=20)
"Do you already have O365? Yes? Then you already have Teams!"
That's a hard place to sell a competing solution to =)
We just had our first Teams meeting this morning, in fact... we could not figure out how to simply view the person speaking. Seems like it's always in split view, or that goofy "Together" view. Nothing makes you want to turn off the camera more than having your face on everybody's screen through 100% of the meeting.
This! I can't wrap my head around on how impossible is to search for things in drive.
Staggeringly bad for, you know, a search company.
But I have found a weird workaround for this. After installing Google Drive File Stream locally and searching for things with the file explorer, it doesn't seem that bad all of a sudden.
Yep, and I'm building something to sit on top of google Drive, to manage files, and make it easier to collaborate as a team. That's not something new, similar, to what Confluence, Notion are offering, ...
The reality is that google sucks at B2B, everything they do don't work. There are a few exception like google Workspace because Gmail was number 1 in B2C and they were the first to get Words and Excel in the browser and Google Analytics.
The reality is that, innovation for a big company is hard, Microsoft was able to build Teams from scratch to compete with Slack and managed to it, and that's an amazing achievement, not something that we are used to seeing.
Teams is complete shit though, they didn't compete on quality of their offering. They're competing because every org already pays Microsoft a lot of money and they may as well use Teams because it's "integrated"
Then why is Apple innovating more than anyone else?
Try searching for "followup:actionitems" in drive.
Disc:Googler.
What other tools would you suggest in place of GSuite (email, calendaring, collaborative document building, searching/finding docs, etc...)? O365 is all that comes to mind.
I've personally never found a better alternative to Google Meet.
Is that the HTML version? Because the normal GMail is also horribly slow.
Next perfectly viable Google product on the chopping block: Stadia
Seems like this is how all "enterprise-grade" software becomes a pain to use. Usability and performance get short shrift below getting the next 100 bullet-point-features and before you know it the only computers in the world that can run it decently are the developer's, where it still is frankly only on the edge of usability and far from where it would be a joy to use.
I’m sure Google has high quality engineers working more or less on every product. It’s just the solution space of products with big surface area and many interdependencies is really large. When you are more steps removed from your customers, and can’t move fast (comparing to a small nibble team), finding the optimum becomes a very non-trivial exercise.
Most successful products at big corps have laser-focused teams with highly influential leaders. Anything else results on mediocrity.
The people who made Gmail are either still working on Gmail, working somewhere else, or working on a pet project because they bought the proof-of-competence to choose their project. Google's management structure basically doesn't have anything that says "Hey, you were successful at X, can you work on (thing adjacent to X)?" and incentivize the employee to do that if the employee wants to do something else.
There's no reason to assume the people working on Slides, Spreadsheets, Drive, Docs, &c started particularly overlapped (though I'm sure there's consolidation these days). Similarly with GCloud; all the pieces of GCloud started as independent initiatives (App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Compute Engine, &c). All of these started separate and only began using consolidated resources / providing consolidated UX frontends and APIs as they were forced to by a management chain ad-hoc'd together after Google decided "Cloud" was a space they wanted to do business in as an organized front.
GMail is TRASH for me. It's the slowest, most ressoruce intensive site/app I've ever had the "pleasure" of using. I'm using Fastmail now and it's mindblowing how slow Gmail is in comparison.
Its clunky and annoying in so many ways.
* Be notified when packages are coming via "e mail"
* Send your own "e mail" to other people
* Organize events by date in a "calendar"
* Write an episode of Stranger Things in a "document", or if you don't happen to own the Stranger Things franchise, write about your viewing experience
* Write down a list of band names
* Sum the number of times a given child poops in a day in a "spreadsheet"
* Take part in a "meet", which is a sort of phone call but with video
I hope that clears it up.
I’m still puzzled at what’s new and what’s different from what people with (free and paid) Google accounts have.
Also Google's spreadsheet program is dogballs compared to excel.
Basically, Workspaces is failing so they're trying to open it to a wider audience in the hopes that it won't fail. It'll probably be abandoned by October and shutdown in a year or two.
If you open Word or Excel directly, does the main page show you a list of appropriate documents to open? I have found the amount of times where the workflow requires navigating to a document through teams first to be extremely minimal. If the document isnt on the list, typing a couple characters into the Word/Excel search bar does the trick.
Like you, I can't fucking stand it, and I make the same mistake at least once a day.
Disclaimer: I work at msft etc etc.
1. a switchover to Chat (apparently some hybrid slack/discord/I can't figure out)
2. serious plans to compete with microsoft office via more enterprise capabilities
3. availability of (previously) paid gsuite-only features to individuals for $10/mo
all bundled together in a mash
I feel that they have neat product ideas, but organizationally maybe the are oriented around engineering lines, so product might lack focus, and product marketing is an afterthought.
Remember Google+ ? Nobody knew what it was.
Remember Wave? Nobody really knew what it did.
How does the biggest company on earth fail to understand how to communicate basic things?
This product page has way too much text, and not nearly enough 'what it is' 'what it can do' and especially 'why'.
As such, it's hard to get the word out organically.
Information spreads like a virus, you want a high R0 which comes with clarity, consistency and authenticity.
Not a lot better, but still better. There's a gif of basically integrated workflow between email, chat and document editing... I think.
The rebranding from "Google hangouts" and "Gsuite" to "Google Workspace" and everything inbetween I have to say has been a tremendously terrible marketing job, given the talent of the people at that company.
Again presumably, the GSuite Admin Dashboard would thus likely be integrated into the SPA as well (i.e. this SPA would now "be" GSuite) — but for the people only paying for a Google Workspace, not a GSuite org, they'd probably see a version of the GSuite Admin dashboard where most of the more complex functionality related to domains / group policy / etc. is hidden, with the stripped-down version matching something more akin to a Slack team's admin panel: user management, group management, storage management, and app/integration management.
Google Chat to Hangouts to Hangouts Chat and now back to Chat. Amazing.
Announcement here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/helping-bus...
Sadly for me, it seems like a re-brand like you said. It also seems like they may be planning on evolving the communication suites Email, Chat, Video Chat, to be a more integrated experience a la Microsoft Teams or Front?
Dev: "OK, I finished the user story for migration from a free account to a paid account this sprint, but, again, there's a story for migration from a paid account to a free one and that'll involve compromises X and Y and there are a couple Hard Problems involved since usage may have exceeded free tier limits, and we physically migrate the account in ways that will be hard to undo since we cut corners to get this shipped, which will make it even harder. That's going to be a big chunk of work, and I think we'll need to break it up into smaller stories. Will we be going over that today?"
PM: "Ummmmmmm... yeah..." presses big red button that throws an inconvenient story into the "on ice" bucket that may as well represent "deleted" "Putting that 'on ice', we'll definitely get to it... some day."
I'm really glad I didn't try signing up for it when I was trying to setup my custom domain to host mail.
Possible I'm doing something wrong so I'd love to know what it is, but as far as I can tell, I can't get my free tier back.
Which makes it a no-go once you have a family, EOT. So now the entire family have Apple services instead for the same price.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
It took me over two weeks of dedicated hourly time slots, a few automation, and many manual deletions to clean up everything. I also end up deleting essential documents that I should not have (I did have backups).
I wrote down my frustration, the horrible experience deleting all the photos (some tips included that will help if you are planning to do so) - How to delete all Photos and get off Google Photos - https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get...
I do have the grandfathered legacy Google Domains for Apps (may be about 10 or odd domains) and I pay for about 5 domains Google Workspaces. Teams find it easier to use Google Products (especially Gmail, and Calendar).
I do it by connecting drive to Google colab and using bash/python as if it's a normal filesystem but admittedly even then it can occasionally behave weird (especially with bigger files). However, you can at least add whatever retry and double checking logic you want.
I've still got old accounts with photos etc on that I cannot move, and the only reason I moved from GAFYD is because of so much functionality being missing.
GAFYD https://lifehacker.com/what-does-google-apps-for-your-domain...
...and I cannot, unless they all have my domain.
By the way, you can sort-of "move" your photos by adding them to shared album and "saving to local" on the other side. But then, if the original account is removed, the photos are still removed (AFAIK).
I really do wish I hadn't moved my domain over to them - but my Google Calendar, email, and Google Play purchases are all in there.
You can't use family sharing on a Google Apps/G Suite/Workspace account at all, whether they share your domain or not.
Google is happy to drop you, mostly for an obnoxious up-sell. You're a statistic, and if they drive your business under, that's a statistic too.
I shall attempt to explain what this announcement actually means, since it doesn't do a great job:
1) "Starting today, all of Google Workspace is available to anyone with a Google account" there are a lot of individual business owners that have signed up for free Gmail accounts and use them to run their business, now they can pay a subscription fee to upgrade those accounts to include Workspace functionality (like Google Chat rooms, Meet recordings, Calendar appointments, ML assisted writing, device management and other business features).
2) Google Chat (their competitor to Slack) and Docs suite are getting more deeply integrated in Gmail. Enabling the ability to bring in Docs/Sheets/Slides inline with a Chat "room" for collaboration without leaving Gmail. This will only be available for Workspace users (business, enterprise, education or the new individual plan).
(Unless you're like me and still have grandfathered unlimited storage).
One of these days, I’m going to self host it. Just need to figure out what’s the best way so my e-mails don’t get bounced back or get flagged as spam
Thanks!
Google removed that functionality, borked my entire system, and lost all of my trust that they know (or care about) what their customers want.
Probably more Microsoft or whatever.
In any case, I wasn't going to pay Google $72 a year just to get a trickle of email. I signed up for the Zoho free plan and I'm starting to wonder why I stuck with Gmail so long. It's making Gmail look like it's from 2004. Granted, the free plan you can only use their web app or mobile app. But it's like $12 to step up to a full plan with POP/IMAP I think.
https://medium.com/builduniversity/how-to-hook-up-a-custom-d...
Google Apps for Your Domain --> Google Apps --> Google Apps for Business --> Google Apps for Work --> G Suite --> Google Workplace
Same thing happened to Hangouts/Chat/Meet.
I really just want custom domain hosting with Gmail and ignore everything else.
At the moment, they still have dis-joined paid offerings, for example Youtube Premium, Google Play Pass, Google Workspace, etc. - with many Google products, such as Android or GMaps, there is still no way to pay your way out of tracking/ads (at least that I know of). Instead, there should be a single paid subscription, for all Google services.
I left Google a while ago[1] but if the "privacy subscription" offering became a thing, I would be back in no time.
[1] My main Google account was deleted and replaced with a combination of Mailinabox, Nextcloud, Duckduckgo etc. - but I have an alt account only for Youtube, linked to my wife's Youtube Premium Family plan.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8637365 (2014)
https://contributor.google.com/v/beta
But it was never very publicized and I'm not sure how well it worked. It seems you can't sign up as a user anymore but they're still fielding individual publishers?
I would assume it just wasn't very popular, but feelings on programmatic ads have shifted and it's definitely worth trying again IMO.
Ideally Google One would bundle all this (YT Premium, Play Pass, etc.) for the users who want that, but offering them separately might make more sense for many users.
Will google Docs suddenly be limited to documents no longer than 3 pages or 3 collaborators unless I pay for a subscription to "Google Workspace for Individuals"?
Apparently, I was wrong.
I can think of Hangouts, Gchat, Messages, Duo, Wave. Now Workspace.
How many years until the next one? I'm guessing 1.25.
Here's my list:
- Talk
- Hangouts
- Hangouts Chat (now called Chat)
- Allo
- Messages
- Voice
- Google+
You could arguably throw Groups, Inbox, Wave, and Gmail in there, as well, I guess.
I don't know if the product/branding people at Google need to be fired or to be taken seriously for the first time in the company's history, but I wish one of the two would happen.
Groups could already sign up to pay for Google Workspace, that doesn't change.
Individuals could also sign up for Google Workplace group account that only a single person would use or use a lot of features in their individual account.
The announcement could be more straightforward about what's actually changing.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/next-evolut...
For me this is a classic case of a great idea that for the life of me I would never decide to depend on because Google has so thoroughly trashed their own reputation for supporting something that it would literally be more hassle to recover from their inevitable sun-setting of the project after I had invested in it, or done the ransom thing where "now I need to be on a 'pro' plan to use that for only $x/month."
[1] https://marcellusdrilling.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/luc...
Cool. So when are we (admins - or heck even users!) going to be able to edit, or delete, or hide, or restrict access to, rooms/Spaces?
I'm just glad I make enough money that I can keep my GSuite and my personal separate. The one mistake I made is paying for this Google One shit which I don't know what it is but I'm too afraid to let it go in case they delete all my photos and email.
Literally the most half-assed platform of all time. But the features are so good I'm pretty sure I'm paying three times for them and not upset. It's the risk of losing the data that scares me.
Also, love ya grandma... :)
Which sucks, because thats the only way to get Google Voice, which we still dont have here outside of Workspace.
Is this the used-to-be google apps?
is this g-suite?
is this google for education stuff?
