[hiptobecubic]

This is also why Google sucks at so many things, despite having the best offering on paper. GCP is honestly great, but a terrible product. Stadia? Zillion chat apps? Google Inbox by Gmail by Google? Google wallet pay Android pay wallet? They all work great and would be best in class if they were decent products and you could figure out how to get them to work at all.

[osigurdson]

It feels like someone with great ideas started working on Gmail and quit before it was finished. Whatever they are doing to organize emails in a "smart" way is super confusing. I kind of get it but it just doesn't work. They should either finish it or just revert back to organizing emails by date of arrival.

[v3ss0n]

Paul Buchheit was core developer of gmail , who left gmail in 2006 - where its become shitty afterwards. He founded friendfeed and then got acquired by Facebook - and he left facebook to become angel investor / he is also main Partner of YC . he invested in many great startups like Twitch . On the opensource part , he build tornado web framework which is really important async framework for python ecosystem. Jupyter is built on top of tornado . He is active in HackerNews .

[singhrac]

Gmail quality dropped off a cliff all of a sudden. In particular, many many emails get sent to spam now, including emails sent by Google itself! Notifications about calendar invites regularly get sent to spam at inconvenient times.

I can't tell if this is just some sort of temporary spam filter tweaking error and oversight or an emergent property of a content-based filtering system that they won't revert.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Funny, I have the opposite problem, which could actually explain your problem.

I never used to get spam through GMail's filters, but in the last six-ish months I now get a couple every day. They're almost always the same format, too - frequently just a link, and often coming from an outlook.com email address.

So a possible hypothesis is that spammers got good at evading GMail's filter, so in tweaking it to catch these new spam techniques they could be causing more false positives.

[enos_feedler]

I have observed the same thing. I _never_ saw a single spam message in years. Suddenly I am seeing strikingly obvious ones at the same frequency you are. This must be on Google's plate to fix. Surely they see it.

[grey_earthling]

Would fixing it improve their ad business?

I'm still surprised by how often people (not necessarily you!) forget about misaligned purposes: your purpose for using Gmail is to have a good email service; Google's purpose for running Gmail is to make money, _not_ necessarily by providing a good email service.

When purposes misalign like that, you get users bewildered about why such a competent company would be “incapable” of providing a less crappy service.

Compare with Thunderbird: they make money to pay the bills but no-one's getting rich. Their only way of getting money is by building a good email client — by building features that companies will pay them to build; or by making a general-purpose email client good enough that users will donate.

(I know Thunderbird is not directly equivalent because it's just a client, not an email server, but the email client part is comparable.)

[hiptobecubic]

Ideas from the gmail ads team regularly get shot down by product because it would make gmail suck too much and piss everyone off.

I feel pretty bad for the ads team honestly. Like, their job is to basically just ruin products. Literally no one likes anything they do, ever. Their justification for everything is always just "You have to let us do this because $$$" and no one respects that, even though everyone knows that it's how the world works.

[vineyardmike]

Not just google specifically, but making a product better is good for business. Eg making gmail better means more gmail users who log in more often and see more ads.

Practically speaking, most big (tech) companies probably have split teams for UI/Product and Ads. So there’s most likely a team of product managers and engineers at G who’s entire job is to make Gmail better - regardless of the ad team in the next building over. So those people literally don’t care about making G money per se, as long as they’re not introducing bugs into the ad showing logic or making it worse (see first point).

[singhrac]

So interestingly I think "better spam detection" has a relatively straightforward interface (e.g. connect this app to Gmail's servers via SMTP, move emails between folders), but I assume you need almost Google-scale (or at least more than startup-scale) metadata and spam report collection to be able to do half as well.

One of the rare areas where barrier to innovation isn't market access but actually product quality. That being said I wouldn't pay a lot for this as a standalone service, though I would definitely pay for a standalone email client at this point.

[dotancohen]

  > Surely they see it.

Do you use the Report Spam button? Because that is how they see it.

[enos_feedler]

Every damn time. But until the issue is resolved, I will assume that button is just a NOP designed to make people feel good.

[ectopod]

I use Thunderbird. Does gmail take notice of me moving messages to the spam folder?

(Question not directed at you specifically.)

[astrange]

I’ve been getting lots of extra spam and it particularly seems like anything with “invoice” in the text won’t get sent to spam.

[lrem]

Funny, I have neither. But think your analysis makes sense too and I just got lucky.

[cal85]

When?

[sosborn]

It always amuses me that we try to complicate things that should just be a simple list ordered by date.

[butterNaN]

I switched to basic HTML gmail the moment it tried to predict what I wanted to type (incorrectly, I should add).

I sometimes accidentally open the 'modern' view and it feels so bloated. Everything is so against intuition, it feels like someone's fresh-out-of-marketing-school design.

[bambax]

> just revert back to organizing emails by date of arrival

You can choose to do that: Settings / General / Conversation view off

It's so much better to simply have emails in the order they arrive instead of hunting them down in "conversations".

[ghaff]

I understand that emails can get buried but threaded views are so much better for me (especially at work) than my inbox being buried by conversations/threads that I have zero interest in. My alternative would probably be to more aggressively filter but that would effectively mean I never even saw lots of things I might actually care about.

[butterNaN]

I switched to basic HTML gmail the moment it tried to predict what I wanted to type (often incorrectly, which worsened my experience)

I sometimes accidentally open the 'modern' view and it feels so bloated. Everything is so against intuition, it feels like someone's fresh-out-of-marketing-school design.

[galaxyLogic]

I was trying to find sent mail and only way I found it was by searching mail where I was the sender.

Smart but not obvious.

[ngrilly]

You’re cherry-picking examples. Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and Chrome are extraordinarily successful products.

[latexr]

Depending on one’s point, it can be argued that listing Google’s successful products is the cherry-picking: https://killedbygoogle.com/

[pessimizer]

Why would you argue? Selecting only the successes is the literal definition of cherry-picking. I'd say that every one of those cherries is very arguable, though, especially if one's definition of successful has any relation to being profitable.

[hiptobecubic]

True, although I feel like none of those products have made positive product-oriented changes in many years now. Gmail at least is spiraling down the product toilet, which makes me really sad.

[ThalesX]

Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business...

[Closi]

> Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business...

Assuming this post is sarcasm, Are we really going to criticise Google Search for not being profitable?

Google has an ad business because of these products, not seperate to them.

[marginalia_nu]

Google doesn't have an ad-business, it is an ad-business.

You can't separate Google from its ad business. All of their major products exist in service of the ad business, search, inbox, even Chrome. If the services don't exist to help build a profile of you, they exist to help build a profile of web traffic and detect ad-fraud, or to simply shape the landscape into one that isn't hostile to google's ads.

[grey_earthling]

I'd say that Google has these products (really, services) because of its ad business, not the other way round.

Someone more familiar with Google's oeuvre can probably answer this: all those well-liked services that Google unceremoniously cancelled — were they the ones that didn't help (or harmed) Google's ad business?

[samstave]

Dont forget Goog literally owened the anti spam industry with gmail after their integrating POSTINI purchase in like ~~2006

And now in 2022 any gmailinbox is fn full of spam...

[lstodd]

Because you have to support products, esp. antispam, while goog is generaly known for doing the other thing.

[samstave]

Uh, they literally paid MILLIONS for the antispam company POSTINI and thats what the original anti-spam features for GMAIL are based on... in the last 18 months or something, google apparently deleted that tech from their stack, I posted about this when I first started having so much spam inbox my gmail....

So yeah - THEY _supported_ the product by paying millions for it...

Then they did "the other thing"

[threatofrain]

Why is GCP bad?

[XorNot]

Personally I'm real suspicious from the time I was on a project using AppEngine, we got sandwiched between Google deciding "1 year" was an appropriate time to declare AppEngine v1 deprecated, but AppEngine v2 was still in "beta" and was removing a bunch of APIs we depended on, while basically saying "oh yeah, setup something completely different if you want something like this" (appengine datastore or whatever vs. "it's gone, um, redis maybe?")

So we were stuck with a product which we were writing against something that the official word was would no longer be supported by the time we launched, while being told to develop against the platform which is "beta" and they don't want to commit to supporting the feature set of - and which plain couldn't be used yet at the time they told us this.

This is just a ridiculous way to run a commercial platform offering (aka: why I always tell people to use boring VMs for as long as possible).

[vineyardmike]

> (aka: why I always tell people to use boring VMs for as long as possible).

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Take whatever nice features you can “for free” as tech debt, and if that api inevitably disappears… push it down the stack and own a bit more of it.

If you have to build everything from first principles it’ll take way longer to get going.

[dasz]

I think the usual retort is that at any moment and for any inexplicable reason your entire infrastructure can be deleted for some reason you barely know let alone comprehend. This seems to be the case for apps at least.

I neither support nor deny this belief but it's an increasingly common impression.

[lokar]

GCP tends to be designed for customers that are staffed with mostly Google engineers.

[latchkey]

Source? This comment seems absurd, at best. I am no 'google engineer' (is that supposed to be a bad thing?) and I've been using and loving GCP for well over a decade. Built several extremely successful businesses on it.

[jedberg]

What they're saying is that Google is opinionated. They determine that their way is the right way and you will do it their way. As opposed to Microsoft and Amazon, who both ask their customers, "how do you want to solve this problem?" and then build what the customers want.

If the way Google has decided you should build something happens to work for you, great, but for most people, they want a product built around how they like to operate, not get told how to do it.

[lrem]

I work in Google and think I can share: in fact we do ask our users a lot. To the point that I would be very surprised if any major development in GCP is allowed at all without extensive focus groups, or coming out of cooperation with some major customer.

[jedberg]

Maybe lately, but certainly not at first. I was one of those early customers, and when I would say, "We want to do it like this", they would say, "Well we think this is how it should be done" and then ignore me. So yeah, they talked to customers, and just told them they were wrong.

But also Google has a trust issue. I think GCP makes a superior product, but I would never use it. I'd be afraid that one of my former employees leaves the company, does something Google doesn't like, and they shut down my entire GCP account because my gmail is associated with the gmail of someone who did something bad, even though they don't work for me anymore. (Yes, this is a real thing that happened)

I can't trust Google not to just shut down my account and then give me no human to talk to to get it fixed.

[latchkey]

I think that early days they were more opinionated. The design of the datastore is extremely google centric scale. Exposing it to end users was a matter of just "learn to use it, or not".

AppEngine had a lot of limitations, like the version of Java you could use, because they had to basically hack at the JVM to get it secure enough.

These days though, things like Cloud Functions, are effectively just simple containers and http endpoints. I could move them off to another provider with a days work.

[seanhunter]

This "well over a decade" claim needs some qualification. GCP only became gevnerally available in Nov 2011. Before that, there was App Engine and Cloud Storage, but not GCP.

[latchkey]

I jumped onto AppEngine as soon as I saw it announced (probably here on HN). Probably sometime around late 2009.

Quickly convinced my friend Jeff to get onto it... we saw a need for a datastore wrapper and he (and I a tiny bit) wrote Objectify, which is one of the most widely used tools for AppEngine out there.

Look at the license.txt... Feb 6, 2010, 13 years old...

https://github.com/objectify/objectify

[antaviana]

Do you mean they should have said instead "within 9 months after GCP became generally available" to be more precise in their statement?

[jack_pp]

I suspect that if at some point you had an issue with it you would've been frustrated as hell by your inability to do anything about it and would've sworn them off forever. But you were the survivor that didn't have issues and can't seem to comprehend that as a business it is absurd to rely on a company that can kill you off without reason or recourse because you were the unlucky one that pissed off the algorithm.

You're right, it is FUD, but it's not malicious FUD spread by us to spite google, it is actually rational FUD based on real reports that is entirely google's fault

[latchkey]

Shrug, seems like an inherent risk with any SaaS provider. I worked for a large porn company and a web analytics product, we were one of the largest customers of, got sold to a Mormon company. Our account was terminated.

I guess I'm lucky that I haven't pissed off the GCP algo yet.

[bruce511]

>> seems like an inherent risk with any SaaS provider.

If you see risk as binary, then yes there is risk in any SaaS provider, or indeed any part of your company supply chain. Risk though is not binary, it is measured on a scale of 0 to 1.

There is risk every time you get in a car. But some cars are safer than others. Some are renowned for putting safety first.

The vast majority of people survived their Ford Pinto, no doubt some loved it, but the perceived risk of driving it (rightly or wrongly) was higher than say a Volvo.

Google is the Pinto of SaaS. Whatever the actual risks are, they are perceived as being higher risk than other SaaS providers. Thanks to their "no support" policy, the penalty for failure is total extinction. With most SaaS businesses there are humans in the loop who can make human decisions.

[trog]

For me it's partially because the interface is insanely slow and painful to use. Maybe this is a "I'm in Australia" problem but it feels like I'm wading through mud to perform the most basic tasks.