It’s incredibly clear from the outside that Google is an organizational mess that struggles to make product decisions and keep them. From the surprisingly bad UX of a lot of their services, to the random creation and destruction of services and apps. It all reeks of bad political infighting.
A few weeks ago someone here (or was it on Reddit?) explained this: Since Google found advertising to be a huge hose where money pours out like crazy, they're trying to find another such hose.
I think that explains a lot of their behaviour and why they're even shutting down seemingly successful (from a user's view) services - because they don't earn enough money.
Another big point is that to be successful at Google, you have to create new projects. Nobody gets promoted by maintaining existing projects. Also, it seems as if there's no communication between groups. So if a group gets reassigned or key people leave, their project (e.g. the umpteenth messenger app) gets sunset, too.
I don't think this is all political, but rather they're aimlessly throwing projects at the wall to see which stick.
> Since Google found advertising to be a huge hose where money pours out like crazy, they're trying to find another such hose.
Other than advertising, which scales like crazy and has negligible unit costs, there isn't much that would meaningfully move the needle at Google scale. Cloud computing would work there, but it's definitely a lower margin business than selling ads online, since there are actual costs for hardware and ongoing software maintenance.
> I don't think this is all political, but rather they're aimlessly throwing projects at the wall to see which stick.
Which is kind of funny, because a decade or so ago, Larry Page said that they'd put "more wood behind fewer arrows." [0] That article even mentions Google+:
> Can Google still push the creative envelope without a testing facility? That’s yet to be proven. Although last month’s successful launch of Google+ could be taken as an early indication that Google’s knack for inventiveness will live on outside of the lab.
I guess that's move fast and fail fast for you. It's like a weed generating lots of tiny seeds to make sure as many potentially fertile spots as possible get explored.
Speaking of organizational mess and product decisions...
I find it shocking how bad Hangouts is.
It's so convenient. Chat, built right into Gmail. It works. But. BUT.
- It does not support video. Drop in a video, and you get a bizarre error message telling you to try "JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, and HEIFimage files" (sic) instead. https://twitter.com/dcposch/status/1303193761313206272
- Tiny little chat windows. No replies, no reactions. Basic UX that feels like abandonware from 2010.
- If you have Google Fi, you can take phone calls thru Hangouts, but you cannot send or receive text messages (??)
I just feel bad for whatever rump team of a few engineers has to maintain that product. They are plainly caught on the wrong end of some strange and gross internal politics.
Google has a self-defeating practice of emphasizing "new products shipped" in their promotion packets. That probably explains why their army of PMs has, instead of improving Hangouts for a billion Gmail users, chosen to create the following instead: Google Meet, Duo, "Google Chat", and an endless parade of now-cancelled apps like Allo.
Is Google Maps an example of this? I think it's very clearly an app which dominated the market by offering best-in-class service for untenable prices (Maps API used to be free for developers up to an absurd amount) and is adding monetization elements now that it dominates the market.
Yes, of course, except that the decision-making has shifted towards priorities that do not benefit the customer, though they used to.
I have no interest in seeing where the nearest McDonalds is, unless I search for it. POI markers for places I need to go (via bookings/appointments) are good, but POIs for places I have never been are bad.
For whatever reason I can never see the street name I want to see anymore. Between the excessive labelling, there is simply no space, and Maps decides to prioritise other labels instead of the STREET NAME.
When I am navigating, I really _really_ need to know the street name.
> For whatever reason I can never see the street name I want to see anymore.
It's been this way for years, and it's my #1 gripe with Maps. It's particularly bad in a dense grid like NYC, where some streets only appear for a block or two. If Maps doesn't decide to print the name on that block...I guess I'm not allowed to know what street that is?
Yes, you're right, it's been aggravating me for years.
I vaguely recall reading about this on HN when it happened, and the consensus was that the logic for determining whether to print the street label had been changed for aesthetic reasons.
Peak form over function.
Anecdotally, I don't see any rhyme nor reason for whether it decides to show the street name or not. Oftentimes, it will value a side-street over the main street, and in _some_ cases this makes sense (e.g. you are on the larger street, and want to see intersecting streets), but Maps doesn't seem to read contextual clues... if I am not navigating, or zooming in from further away, showing larger streets first would be better.
I don’t think I’ve seen any mapping program show dense streets that well, from MapQuest to Microsoft Streets to maps.me to Google Maps.
I’ve worked on similar problems and it’s not the easiest to solve. And I’ve never solved it because it was never that important of problem to solve and we just moved on to the next issue.
I would say the other POI markers do serve one value, and that is with regards to finding a place... if you notice it's right behind the McDonalds, then you know you are close when you see the big M from the street. Similar for strip malls.
That's true, but it's not Google's intent. It's just another source of ad/promotional revenue. The POIs show up before I search anything. A more user focused solution would wait until I selected a destination, detect that where I'm going is a less frequented, and then display something along the lines of "Hey it looks like this location can be difficult to find, here's some near by stores to look for <insert recognizable brands>."
