[gumby271]

I would say we're reaching new levels of incomplete and rushed to market though. The original Google Search, Maps, Docs, etc. weren't feature rich, but what they had worked well. I'm not saying they were perfectly built, but they weren't falling apart to the degree Gemini and other Google products are. And Google gets to do this now, no one can compete or leave them, so why do anything well.

When Google first added Gemini to Sheets, I tried it and it completely hallucinated transaction data on the bank statement I was testing it on. It's worse than incomplete, it's broken and dangerous. But Google gets to slap a disclaimer on Gemini that says "results may be fucked" and they get a pass to ship it.

I have no expectation that Google can improve its new products since everything they've been doing is going in the opposite direction. You're not seeing pushback on embracing new technology, its purely about Google not being trusted to do things well.

[ajross]

> I would say we're reaching new levels of incomplete and rushed to market though

The year 2001 called, it was laughing hysterically and I couldn't quite make out what it was saying.

[gumby271]

I think I'm too stupid to understand what point you're trying to make, sorry.

[ajross]

It was that the AI boom/bubble is a new technology in its infancy. It's not comparable to the stuff you mention, which were all[1] second wave "Web 2.0" products being introduced into an established market. The proper comparison would be to the period in the mid-late 90's up until the dot com burst, when "internet" technology was sudden and gestational.

And it sucked. Nothing worked. TCP was "established" technology that needed tweak after tweak. The whole stack failed regularly and catastrophically, at every level from backbone routers to browser rendering. People were gluing together solutions to problems using tools written on 1970's teletypes because the "new" stuff from Microsoft was even worse.

It was glorious. But it sucked. And the same is true right now. Nothing you use is going to do what you want exactly. And we all get to figure out how to make it not suck together.

[1] Except Google search itself, which was a comparative latecomer (anyone remember DEC and Altavista?) but still part of the initial rush. And thus is sort of the exception that proves the rule: the one product in the infancy rush of a new technology wave that doesn't suck (or sucks least) gets to be the next tech giant. Seems like the smart money right now is on Anthropic, but we'll see.

[gumby271]

> And we all get to figure out how to make it not suck together.

Well I appreciate your optimism I guess ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

[jaapz]

Youre looking at the past with rose tinted glasses.

[gumby271]

Were there features in original Google docs that would insert random garbage? I'm not saying those products didn't have bugs in 2001, but I don't recall them having features that were both barely functioning while also being touted as the most advanced amazing thing ever, and that's what modern Google is doing.

[isityettime]

I used Google Docs before Google bought them. They were created by a startup called Writely. I don't remember bugs that inserted random garbage.