alt Hacker NewsI remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. Google's stock was about $60 at the time. I look forward to reading this post and chuckling a few years from now. Doomers really do get more engagement, though. I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously?
The one point I will make though is: these people complaining about Google shutting things down is really just funny. It's like complaining about people having abandoned side projects. A healthy organization tries things. Not everything works out or is cashflow positive. That's life.
For reference Google has more employees than all Y Combinator companies combined. Keep in mind there are thousands of dead Y Combinator companies.
A better complaint about Google would be the lack of polish on many products. Take Gmail. Google made haste in adding the "AI Inbox", and yet you can't even read threaded emails in reverse chronological order. People have been complaining about this for nearly its entire existence. With the talent, and now AI - there's no reason such a thing couldn't be fixed tomorrow. It's just CSS and there are tons of chrome extensions that implement this. C'mon...
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Yeah, IBM is nothing like Google, it's a weird comparison.
> I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. [...] I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously?
Can't you even consider the possibility that the reader shutdown and the death of RSS might be causally related?
What kind of sicko wants to read an email thread in reverse order? I worked on gmail for years and never heard the first whiff of this being a thing that any sane person wants.
I would be willing to allow that there are probably some highly vocal people conditioned by OWA trauma who might have demanded this, but by no means a grassroots army.
If you only use IMAP gmail is just good old email. I learnt about the AI inbox from your comment.
I was thinking the other day that it's particularly weird that Gmail is so bereft of features after all this time. It's not that they've left it completely as-is "this is great, there is nothing to do"—but just that the things they have tried have been... kinda uninteresting and quite simple? It's weird to me that with the other AI features they've tried (including suggested responses and such in drafting new emails) there isn't anything, say, to make really good proactive suggestions for like "apply this label to all incoming emails like this."
That sort of stagnation, though, and lack of their "trying things" really moving the needle compared to their decades-old ads product, makes me think they really are becoming the new IBM. IBM, in my estimation, has largely been irrelevant to the future of computing since the early 80s when MS ended up owning the PC story, but they have still had some quite solid stock prices runs at times over the decades (10x in five years at the end of the 90s, say). You can make a lot of money with a no-longer-that-interesting business.