alt Hacker NewsWhich products are outstanding in their categories?
Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding.
They are all pretty par for the course. Google used to be outstanding... but I'm not sure of a single product they have that is outstanding (def: significantly better than the competition) anymore. On the other hand I rarely use any google products these days, so maybe I'm not the one to be judging.
Replies
Has hacker news lost it?
Maps & Gmail & Search all have plenty of accumulating flaws... but they also completely defined their product category and today are among the most popular software products ever made.
All of these are outstanding! In so far they are not singular or new anymore, well... If for the past ~20 years nobody has come up with something clearly better, then I would say that speaks to how outstanding the product that are being copied are to this day.
Search has degraded for sure, but still better than anything else? Maps - I guess you mean Apple ones are better? Can't tell, I am not on Apple, but if you don't use Apple products, there are not many alternatives to Google maps
> Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding
They were at the time.
Google Cloud is great, compared to legacy and fragmented AWS
I'm no google fanboy, but gmail is a very good web-based email, and google maps is a very good web-based map program. I would say "outstanding" with no reservations.
I think you’re talking about consumer products.
At the enterprise level, if you know of something better than Bigquery, please let me know.
Similarly, Kubernetes and Kubeflow are both outstanding - and Licenses Kubernetes has no meaningful competition for what it does - but Google did everyone a solid by making them open source, so you can get them from other sources than Google. But the Google managed versions are certainly extremely good.
As for the idea that Gmail, search, and Maps aren’t outstanding, an easy way to refute that is to ask what the outstanding alternatives are. I doubt there’s a single list that many people would agree on.
Ok. Apparently you missed the question from OP.
What are you comparing to?
I'm not a fan of Google, and also not attached to Apple or Microsoft, so this isn't me trying to stan for Google, but I'd like to request that you give examples of what competing products are categorically better (and, by what metric(s) you're judging - code quality? stability? robust set of features?) -- for Gmail, Docs/Drive/etc, Google Calendar, Maps, Classroom, YouTube.
As far as I can tell, if judged by the marketplace (and breaking ties with which product I like better), Google has run away with the ball on all of those, and Gemini seems to at least be competitive.
The only major product I'd say they've sunk below acceptability on is Search, which is demonstrably dogshit now...though I suspect it's more that they have changed their definition of what Search is for, from "helping users efficiently find other websites that are useful to them" to "A convenient on-ramp to, many times per day, capture the current user intent and steer them toward something that earns Google some ad revenue."