[crsv]

I feel like the GSuite product experiences outside of Mail and Calendar still feel really unrefined for a company of the size, scale, and capability of Google. They've had the opportunity to absolutely crush the productivity / work suite of apps, and yet somehow for all their resources and prowess, they've not been able to produce products that are truly _compelling_ options vs Office and Slack. Maybe there's a "yet" at the end of that, but as time marches on, it feels less likely for some reason.

[blacksmith_tb]

Are you including gDocs and gSheets in that? They seem adequately polished to me (I know the serious Excel user won't be switching any time soon, but for lots of "just put it in a spreadsheet" uses gSheets is fine). And of course time will tell if they have managed to finally make a Slack-killer with Hangouts Chat[1].

1: https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/

[nkw]

The primary roadblock for us is gDocs. Sheets would probably meet our needs because spreadsheet aren't really a core need, however word processing/documents are our lifeblood. While gDocs has improved it doesn't come close to Word for us. It isn't just that it is a web app -- the Office 365 web based Word actually would be usable for us vs. the desktop apps. That fact is actually pretty amazing to me, I would not have anticipated that to ever be the case when Microsoft first put out their web based version of Word. As it happens a while back I mentioned on here one of the big bugs/lack features that kept us from using the web based Word and some guy from Microsoft asked for more details and then the issue was resolved a few weeks later. That was pretty surprising and impressive to me.

I have no doubt Google has the talent and ability to make Docs competitive, but for some reason it is just not a priority for them.

I'm going to look at Hangouts Chat, but we had a particularly painful process (for no technological reason) when we migrated from using Hangouts for IM to Slack and I don't really look forward to the eye-rolls that are going to come with "Remember Hangouts? We're going back..." even if the Hangouts Chat is an entirely different product. But that is our issue.. Kudos to Google if it can eliminate the need for Slack.

[ben_jones]

Is it possible the "movers" (individuals with the passion, drive, skillset, etc. to push a product forward) avoid GSuite and similar projects like the plague? Google undoubtedly has a lot of talent at their disposal, what are they working on? GCP? Cars?

[fh973]

It probably sounds odd, but I think Google is not good at doing large complex projects that require considerable man power and time.

And that's what you need to refine products to the next level (or go into billion dollar markets).

It's partially due to the promotion system, partially due to bring allergic to top down management, paired with some arrogance.

Best example are their numerous failed attempts to do payments. Apart from search and ads (which have strong leadership) the examples are legion.