[z2]

This all feels like a race where the model companies try to solve doing work locally in a way that doesn't suck, before the major operating systems companies figure out AI integration into their OS that doesn't suck. It also makes me wonder why Google which has both Gemini and Android can't figure this out, and if there are lessons to draw from that.

[newobj]

Google is historically terrible as a product company (and has succeeded in spite of that) As their technical innovations become less of a moat (we're already there) they won't be able to win on engineering alone (they are no longer winning on engineering alone)

[stevefan1999]

But Kubernetes, being a former Google project whilst donated to CNCF, is still one of the mainstream container orchestrator if not the biggest one (I believe we need to go over to supercomputers for that). Nomad is kind of dead and Apache Mesos is basically dead. Leaving Kubernetes as a natural moat, plus Google employees are still seemingly actively maintaining it.

And also Go. While I'm not a Go guy (speaking as a C# and Rust guy, I did wrote a good amount of Go before) it has a huge dominance in Cloud-Native application. For one, Zitadel, an alternative to Keycloak, is written in Go and only takes a fraction of what Keycloak needs.

Flutter/Dart is catching up, but the ecosystem is still relatively weak.

[kelnos]

Kubernetes and Go are not moats of any sort; Google doesn't make any money off of them, and they doesn't get them any useful user data like Gmail, Docs, etc. do.

[coldtea]

>Leaving Kubernetes as a natural moat, plus Google employees are still seemingly actively maintaining it.

Neither Go nor Kubernetes are even remotely moats.

[pjmlp]

Kubernetes makes me want to go running to WebSphere 5 XML configuration files (version 5 is relevant here).

Whereas Go only exists because a bunch of renowed Oberon and UNIX heads did not want to keep using C++ for their work, and got twice lucky, first with their line manager, secondly with Docker and Kubernetes getting adoption after their rewrites into Go.

[locknitpicker]

> But Kubernetes, being a former Google project (...)

You are confusing Kubernetes, the software project with Kubernetes, the container orchestration system.

There are many Kubernetes distributions out there which are not maintained in any way by Google. Even Canonical provides its own Kubernetes implementation.

Nowadays Kubernetes is a keyword much like Unix or Unix-like.

[ryanisnan]

Honestly, Kubernetes has no moat. Give me a better, more simple alternative any day.

[a34729t]

Please, Kubernetes is the Chlamidya of infrastructure software. Ever hear of a large K8s migration going well? No, because it needs to be completely re-implemented under the hood for anything halfway serious. Mesos was pain in the ass to use, but was mature when K8s arrived. Nomad was cool though.

Dart is also complete shit: Speed of javascript with verbosity of Java. Who the hell though that was a good idea?

[shaklee3]

I've seen lots of successful large k8s installs. This same argument from the nomad crowd comes up constantly. There's a reason why nomad lost, and it's not because it's better.

[stevefan1999]

> Ever hear of a large K8s migration going well

...well, AI infra stacks are more or less k8s/cloud native, especially on the inference side. Nvidia GPU operator plus KubeFlow makes deploying models easy, and I did that manually as well using just the ollama, llama.cpp containers and especially vllm operator. I'm not sure about what's the measuring notation of "large" is, but OpenAI had a blog post about how to manage 7500+ nodes Kubernetes (https://openai.com/index/scaling-kubernetes-to-7500-nodes/). That's 5 years ago and I speculate it will only be even more.

> completely re-implemented under the hood for anything halfway serious

...an example please? I'm building a platform to deploy hundreds of open source apps on Kubernetes, you know, the boring thing you can do with a VPS and maybe use Docker Compose to start -- with an ergonomic twist. I relied on so many features of what Kubernetes and its ecosystem provided, especially with persistent volume, volume snapshot, CRDs and cron job, and all of it is just composed from open source and cloud native software...I'm not sure if that sounds "half way serious" to you.

I know those boring monolithic apps can be done with a VPS, as I exactly came from that background, and I know what the shitty points of having just a VPS are. You don't have a clean control plane, you don't have HA, you don't have distributed storage, and you have to be super aware of the apps that you are deploying with Docker Compose.

What you would think "completely re-implemented under the hood for anything halfway serious", perhaps it means that you don't want to get in the fuzz to manage the complexity and prefer to trade for a far simpler but more primitive solution, and that's totally fine.

Pro tip: Codex seems to love generating great Helm charts so much for some reason unknown. I tried GPT-5.4 high in codex and it easily beats Opus 4.7 max on my own internal helm chart generation benchmark evaluation, which measures HA, deployment and app-specific probes. I've given source code to both Codex and Opus and research about the app config structure, and Codex did so well to just generate secret key-value and convert it to JSON and environ, while Opus insisted on using a dynamic generator at runtime.

> Nomad was cool though

Ahem. I used to deploy Nomad too, but I found it too underwhelming, especially with the networking side of thing.

Consul is perhaps one of the most hated thing in my entire career that I would call it bullshit. I know that later Nomad has its own Raft mode, but the Consul brain rot to me is already very sickening such that I don't want to touch Nomad no more. Vault is fine though, but I prefer OpenBao now.

> Dart is also complete shit: Speed of javascript with verbosity of Java

I don't get where the "speed of javascript" is from. Dart/Flutter is JIT on dev mode, and AOT compiled on production, is that you didn't get the compiler options right?

[torginus]

As a person who gets paid to make Chrome (CEF really) do its bidding, I would say Chrome is really as close to an OS as it can get, as in I've found API or service typically an OS or an external tool would provide, that wasn't built into Chrome.

[hparadiz]

The Chromium source code is used to build ChromeOS so you're spot on.

[ozgrakkurt]

They did build chrome, gmail, docs and search afaik so that is a pretty impressive list imo.

I don’t specifically like these but they are much better than microsoft for an example

[pragmatic]

Yes, two decades ago.

Docs was acquired (writely)

[itsdavesanders]

And throughout those two decades they also canned a ton of projects, including maybe some good ones.

I’d say they are batting .250 like everyone else.

[Henchman21]

Could they do it today? Or have they squandered the trust they created?

“Don’t be evil”

[scuff3d]

On a semi-related note, I bought a Pixel phone about a month ago, and I'm shocked by how unpolished it is. I've had so many little annoyances pop up, issues I never had on other android phones. Keyboard hiding/appearing when it's not suppose to, bluetooth dropping, WiFi dropping, network switching taking forever, screen becoming unresponsive... It's mostly all small things, but they really start to add up after a while.

[sherr]

Mine's been mostly fine. Second hand Pixel 10 (previous 2nd hand 8a) and I am extremely happy with an excellent phone. No problems like you've had.

[not_a_bot_4sho]

Interesting. My pixel experience has been the opposite; very polished and pleasant. 10A. Wonder why the variance?

[thirtygeo]

Same. I was excited for a Pixel (assuming a much better Android experience) but had same experience as you

[amazingamazing]

People say this but it is wishful thinking. What are some actual metrics here we can use. Let’s compare google’s products with others.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> Let’s compare google’s products with others.

Gmail: Reliably excellent spam filtering (for most users).

Outlook.com: Reliably excellent at losing validation emails.

that said, Gmail finds lots of other ways to inflict misery (Gemini beat-downs) and I'd rather work in Excel online that Sheets.

[schainks]

lmao this is a terrible take. Google is the only company with AI deployed in every market where AI can exist, and _all_ of their products in those segments gush money.

[HeavyStorm]

?

[jstummbillig]

How are Google products anything but outstanding in their categories? What are you comparing to?

[spott]

Which 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.

[xp84]

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."

[danudey]

The major differentiating factor that Google has had in every product category is that their products are free and you have to deal with ads (and they monitor your behavior for profiling you and your interests).

GMail and Google Maps were revolutionary when they came out, sure, but the vast majority of Google's products now are... fine? at best? And a lot of their "big products" were acquisitions that they absorbed in order to further the core goal of the business - to organize all the world's information and use it to serve ads to people.

Meanwhile, Google has a litany of products they've started internally, launched, ran for a while, and then let stagnate or canned entirely; anecdotally I've heard that this is because your bonuses at Google hinge on your ability to launch a product and not your ability to support a product, so it's beneficial to get something launched and then immediately leave to go launch another project rather than polish the one you just launched into something to be proud of.

I'm not sure if that's true, but it would certainly explain a lot; if Google launches something and it's bad or it doesn't click, they just give up on it. Google Wave, a half-dozen chat apps that I can think of, Stadia, and dozens of others. Things that Google launched, which had problems or didn't hit mass adoption instantly, and then just petered out and were retired with all of the time and energy and money put into them arguably wasted - products that people wanted, and wanted to succeed, but which weren't revolutionary successes at launch so they weren't worth further investment.

Meanwhile, they (and most of the industry) are pushing AI for some reason despite the fact that almost no one actually wants AI to be the only way that people interact with information.

This all reinforces what I've been saying about Google for decades: they're not creating things that users want to use, they're creating things that they want users to use. Sometimes those things align, but when they don't then it's not worth further investment (except, apparently, AI).

[harrall]

I just don’t think your opinion is shared by most people.

Gmail is the most popular email service in the world, people are always telling me how they prefer Google Docs over everything else and their only competition is Microsoft.

Yes it’s free but there is no other service that I rather switch to, and I actually pay for additional storage.

[wvenable]

> GMail and Google Maps were revolutionary when they came out, sure, but the vast majority of Google's products now are... fine? at best?

Is that... good? I mean take maps -- what more can possibly be done to that product that wouldn't just make it worse? It's done. The fact that's the default choice for mapping and just works is fantastic really. There aren't any competitors doing anything revolutionary either because there isn't anything revolutionary to be done.

[sakex]

I worked at google for 3 years and can confirm what you've heard. Obviously, every org is somewhat different.

[xahrepap]

I think it’s a major feature gap that Gmail (paid or free) cannot create filters on headers.

I also can’t do wildcard filters on “to” or “from”. For example, in my GApps I have it set up to route all emails not associated with a specific user to my primary user. So that it’s easier to make throwaway emails. I want to filter all to:`[e-mail]` to a certain folder. No can do.

It just feels restricted.

[no-name-here]

> I want to filter all to:`[e-mail]`

You can filter based on the to: field, yes.

For many years I’ve been creating filters on free Gmail for to:, from:, subject:, etc. I set them up on desktop web.

Perhaps there is something more specific you’re trying to do?

> a major feature gap that Gmail (paid or free) cannot create filters on headers.

You can create filters on header fields like from:, to:, and subject:, so I am guessing you mean something different than “cannot create filters on headers”?

[rustystump]

This so much this. Gmail overall is pretty meh and then it has these stupid footguns that make it awful.

[rustystump]

Funny. Search is the only thing that is outstanding as it is the big revenue arm, that and youtube.

The last time i tried using gmaps i got ads and the thing could figure out where i was on the roads. It was comical as i always remembered google maps being better than apple. Today tho, apple beats them hands down.

Googles products that do not get cancelled are pretty mediocre in todays market. They can build useful things but if it doesnt have ads in it, it gets axed

[Gander5739]

> the thing could figure out where i was on the roads

Is this missing a "not"?

[josephg]

> but I'd like to request that you give examples of what competing products are categorically better

Personally I much prefer Fastmail to Gmail. The site is way faster and more cohesively designed. Fastmail supports jmap, and way more imap extensions (including push support on Apple mail). They have helpful humans handling support requests. And they do all of that with what seems like 1/10th or less the number of employees.

The only thing I like more about Gmail is their native mobile apps. Fastmail’s official mobile app is a web view.

[luma]

> Gmail, Docs/Drive/etc, Google Calendar

MS is the overwhelming favorite in each of these markets if you only consider paying users.

[Hammershaft]

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.

[Dylan16807]

"defined their product category" means it used to be outstanding, not that it currently is outstanding.

"among the most popular" doesn't need either of those to be true.

[stouset]

As a concrete example, Windows defined the product category. And it is still the most popular desktop operating system in the world by far.

Few here would argue that it’s an outstanding product.

[shimman]

Wow I wonder why maps and gmail are extremely popular by the company that controls the largest browser, search, android, and advertising. It's based solely on their merits and not abusing their monopolistic position to thwart competition right?

[aeyes]

They are popular because they are free.

I have to use Gmail at work and it is just terrible.

[wil421]

Garmin was and is better than Google Maps and Mapquest was better than Google Maps when you needed to print directions. If Google didn’t have Android would maps matter as much?

Apple Maps and Waze is better for directions. Apple has better CarPlay integration and HUD. Google Maps is way better at searching for things like restaurants or local businesses but not as much the nav part.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding

They were at the time.

[dijit]

I think that is very much GPs point.

[adi_kurian]

Is there a better Maps app?

I guess those gaussian splats on Apple Maps could be p. neat.

[cadamsdotcom]

Apple Maps is - or soon will - show ads. A trillion dollar company that charges thousands for the device. So that’s out.

OsmAnd’s UI really doesn’t suit me, and there are a few others that I personally liked even less.

But Organic Maps ticks enough boxes to come close. I’ve been using Organic Maps on iOS for driving, and it’s tolerable. And for offline mapping it’s a godsend.

[SllX]

No. I just switched away from Apple Maps too when they added ads.

If I’m dealing with adware either way, may as well use the best.

[HypnoticOcelot]

I've been using Magic Earth, which is paid, but has worked pretty well for me so far.

[HDBaseT]

Bing still has maps, although I wouldn't say its better.

[7tythr33]

Time moves on …

[deathanatos]

… sure, but until someone creates a competitor that is good enough to overcome the switching costs, people are going to stay with Google. Most of Google's then-competitors in the categories listed are not just inferior products, they're dead. ISPs no longer do email, Alta Vista & Ask Jeeves are gone, MapQuest is a thing that makes us that used it sound old.

Not only does an upstart have to overcome the switching costs, they have to actually survive, and not just get hoovered up by acquisition and then Our-Incredible-Journeyed.

[oytis]

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

[ChrisMarshallNY]

MapBox[0] does a good job. I think they use OSM maps.

I don’t think it has a public interface, though. It’s really a developer resource.

[0] https://mapbox.com

[antonvs]

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.

[neonstatic]

What is better than Google Maps? It's the only Google product I don't see myself abandoning any time soon. I agree on everything else.

[jstummbillig]

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.

[rvnx]

Google Cloud is great, compared to legacy and fragmented AWS

[tcoff91]

Yeah it's great until they absolutely destroy you like Unisuper or Railway.

Support is part of the package when it comes to product and their support SUCKS.

I would absolutely NEVER use GCP for any business I was in charge of. Google cannot be trusted.

[rvnx]

I tend to agree :/

[dijit]

I agree, but it’s definitely getting worse. It’s a lot less focused than it was.

[BeetleB]

What's wrong with Maps?

[deathanatos]

It's … okay … but it still falls down in a fair few areas? It's crap at finding restrooms. Finding a stop on the road is also difficult, as it seems like it just defaults to a basic radial search, when as a driver you want things down-route, not radially out. All the AI in the world can't seem to figure out when I'm looking for gas or food that closed businesses are not results I want to see. It eats enough CPU to melt phones, such that Android now has built-in support for this?!¹. Attempting to report things often goes in vain². Some of the notifications need work ("object in road ahead" … I'd kill for what lane! this one is just anxiety in a notification), and it'd be nice to see the lane designations ahead of time (it only shows them once you're like <1mi out). I've never gotten the AI-home detection to work. Attempting to navigate to the house of anyone with an Irish name gets me a bar, and the forced-voice-navigation when in a car means I have to be able to pronounce the destination. Google does not seem to grok that sometimes … there's a person in the car who is designated navigator. They can type, it's fine. Some turn directions could be better if you incorporate more precise language into them³. Some directions could be abbreviated "Navigate to I-4 North": I live here, I don't need step-by-step hand-holding to the interstate, but I'd like to plug in the destination before the car is rolling.

¹literally, phones can now demand you put them in A/C b/c they're dying

²I reported once that a jetway was 3D modeled as being like 8 stories high. Google couldn't confirm that, and closed the request. I reported a business as not being present, while my GPS showed me as being at the alleged address, that also couldn't be confirmed. My GPS trace would have seen me walk the whole block, twice!

³as designated navigator in my relationship, I can tell her "leftish" or "rightish", and she understands what I mean. Where I live a lot of the intersections' designs appear as if a civil engineer was given artistic license, and so sometimes the direction is "5-way intersection, left-ish". "Left" is a bad direction when there are two lefts. Of course … me & her have developed a fairly extensive lexicon over years of long road trips, too.

[Dylan16807]

> It eats enough CPU to melt phones, such that Android now has built-in support for this?!

It has support for phones overheating in the sun. I don't think any phone can get to overwhelming temperatures by itself.

[anjel]

After 20 years of consumer GPS goog offers Sub-Garmin quality navigation service, and a generous helping of UI non-intuitives.

[pjmlp]

What about showing tractor roads, military compounds, or farmer fields as roads I should be driving on?

[Auracle]

I find Apple's Maps directions to be slightly better, nowadays. They're more intuitive.

[stevesimmons]

... 20 years of not remembering that I only ever want to see distances in km

[fortran77]

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.

[reddozen]

Ok. Apparently you missed the question from OP.

What are you comparing to?

[saltamimi]

The Pixel series outside of security (to which their own flavor of Android doesn't even take advantage of like we see with GrapheneOS) doesn't have any particular outliers that would make it any more or less enticing than another company's phone.

Their ChromeOS hardware was nice but had lackluster software and by the time it was EoL'd, never got the love of ChromeOS-present.

Google TV generally gets outpaced by onn (Walmart's brand) on cost and value proposition.

And also the fact they have shown time and time again that they just kill products over and over again.

[danudey]

A big part of why Stadia was cancelled is because it didn't get traction, and a big part of why it didn't get traction was because of how many people assumed it was just going to get cancelled.

[vmasto]

Ah, hardware products.

[adastra22]

Other than search, in its heyday of the early 00’s, every google product success was either a 20% time project (e.g. Gmail) or an acquisition (YouTube) or a direct clone of someone else’s working product (android).

[deathanatos]

I think both can be true. Google has a history of annoying churn while still being good enough (or just … being large enough) that switching to competitors is still too high a cost for most.

For example, their "chat" app has churned 3? 4? times now? Their assistant app has churned from whatever the OG assistant was to now Gemini. Wave churned to "+" in the social category, and that's dead now.

The default placement in Android probably helps a lot, or other things, like forced signups into adjacent products (e.g., like + was doing for a while).

[nerdsniper]

> For example, their "chat" app has churned 3? 4? times now?

I believe they’ve had at least 58 different products with chat / messaging.

https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googl...

[ramijames]

Have you tried to admin a large team using Google's admin? :(

[danudey]

Do they have any supported way to export a user's account (e-mail, calendars, etc) for offline archiving yet? I used to have to reset their password, disable their 2FA, log in as their user, initiate a 'Takeout' request to export their account data into an archive, wait until the request was done (between minutes and days depending on the account), download it manually (often in chunks if it was large enough), store it somewhere, and then delete it and delete the account.

I can't imagine that no other 'Google Workspace' organizations want to actually save their employee data rather than irrevocably delete it forever.

[shit_game]

Arguably, "exceptional" products are not ones that can vanish on a whim, like a great, great many of Google products have. Or they actually compete with other products in the same space, like a great, great many of Google products have not. Also, one would argue a good product is not one that is bought out and then deliberately destroyed to prevent its expansion into or development of a market for itself. Google is an advertising company with tremendous reach because of a handful of very aggressive and very fortunate business decisions that successfully exploded. It now uses its massive influence to exert market pressure, but the market does not always bend to its whim because sometimes it does things wrong, some of those products it pushes fail, and I can only assume some products are slaughtered because of projections on their performance regardless of their quality or utility.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

[majormajor]

Most of their best products are VERY old. Gmail, Search, Docs/Drive, Maps, Street View, Chrome, all solid but old consumer apps. A lot of early entrants/market defining products, too! Most of them are still very good. Calendar is... fine. Gmail/Calendar as corporate products in some ways feel like downgrades compared to the functionality of the older Office desktop suite, but they integrate nicely into a lot of things.

The bad rep Google gets now is because while they've polished their nice money machine very well, they haven't done much to pioneer new segments and the old stuff is pretty stagnant. When's the last time Gmail gained a must-have feature? Maps?

Ok but maybe those old products are just mature and there's not much room for product innovation? Even if we assume that's the case (though there are third party email and calendar apps that I use instead of Google's first-party ones on my phone), let's look at some newer stuff:

Android was a copy of Blackberry that turned into a copy of Apple before being launched. It's done well numbers-wise, particularly in lower-cost markets, but hasn't got a lot of novel product stuff going on in the last decade or more. Less luck as a tablet platform. A lot of the nifty novel stuff in mobile space (wireless earbuds, "find my" stuff, mobile payments, magnetic wireless charging) was done first by Apple.

Meet vs anything else - well, Meet is cheap if you're already on Gsuite, at least.

Voice/Hangouts/Chat/Duo/Whatever - whole lotta abandonware or dead attempts.

Google Plus - famously mis-targeted product.

Google Assistant - Siri copycat then with Alexa copycat hardware. Didn't do anything novel.

Chromecast - nice novel product, caught on decently well, lost the market to a combo of set-top boxes (Roku, Apple) and native-TV integrations. Tried doing Google TV as that native platform with a copycat pivot vs the original Chromecast, no particular success.

Stadia - abandoned quickly, never set itself apart from the things it was copying.

Smart home hardware (like alarms and smoke alarms) - dramatically scaled back and now pretty unambitious.

Gemini - copycat of ChatGPT which is particular damning since so much of the original research came from Google in the first place!

[7tythr33]

An email client (Gmail app) that is 500mb? What’s _outstanding_ about that? Almost everything Google makes now is terrible. Try some alternatives.

[robotresearcher]

Honest question: what's a candidate for better? The search needs to be really good, as that was always a strong point for Gmail.

[josephg]

I really like Fastmail. It’s just - clean and lightweight. It loads much faster. Has all the features you actually need. No mystery meat. And the UI doesn’t churn every few years for no reason.

[7tythr33]

You're probably not going to like my answer — I swapped to Hey shortly after it came out, and I'm very happy with it. I check my choice every now and then; recently taking a look at Tuta and Proton. Tuta just isn't there yet, and Proton is just Gmail but in Switzerland. Meh.

[dist-epoch]

The about 7 different text chat applications they had?

At some point GoogleTalk was one of the leading global text messengers, and then it was basically destroyed by Google itself.

[danudey]

Depending on what you mean by 'chat', Google has had a lot, but this list includes a lot more than 7 text chat services. https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googl...

[chuckadams]

> The about 7 different text chat applications they had?

All of them named "Hangouts" no doubt.

[otikik]

Maybe you are not counting the products they kill.

[danudey]

A lot of the products they killed were promising, it's just that Google just has no stomach for investing in anything for the long haul if it's not going to either capture the entire market or prevent someone else from capturing the entire market.

[elorant]

Search for one is absolutely horrendous. It used to be great, but not so in the last years. Nowadays it’s filled with spam sites that they don’t seem to be able to filter out. And don’t get me started on the crappy AI overview that hijacks all queries.

Just today I tried a query for water filters and 1/3 of the results were ads. The other third were product pictures, or businesses in close proximity based on my ip. Then there was a box with related products/services, which was completely irrelevant to my needs, a second box with places, yet more product images and so on and so forth. Practically 70% of the real estate of the page was occupied by things I didn’t ask for. All I want is a list of relevant sites to go there and judge for myself. I don’t want Google to spoon feed me.

[shevy-java]

Outstanding?

Well ...

https://killedbygoogle.com/

[ddarolfi]

They are releasing AluminumOS with their Googlebooks, which is a AI forward OS. If its good or not we have yet to see.

[elxr]

It's looking like a slightly updated reskin of chromeOS with gemini features built in.

Definitely not a developer machine based on how they presented it in google IO. So if you write software, it's not looking like it'll be relevant whatsoever. I hope to be proven wrong.

[reactordev]

If everything is in the cloud and you are just prompting agents to code for you, what exactly is “a developer machine”?

[elxr]

I'm obviously not just prompting agents for everything. What are you on about?

Why would I build my little web-apps and backends in the cloud when I can run things faster locally?

[dotancohen]

  > Why would I build my little web-apps and backends in the cloud when I can run things faster locally?

Because the company that designed and built your Chromebook made that the easy path.

[wholinator2]

And one interesting aspect is the number of children getting these types of neutered machines as their first learning tool. I read another thread comment saying people that started with react actually feel that using straight html is more complicated. My professors say that the best textbook is the one you've read. The next generation is being indoctrinated into this way of thinking

[danudey]

Up until they stop subsidizing things and you have to pay what things actually cost.

[esseph]

> Why would I build my little web-apps and backends in the cloud when I can run things faster locally?

Because in a lot of companies, your machine is actually just a portal to a remote desktop.

[reactordev]

The Venn diagram of “Corporate” vs “Company” definitely has VDI and ServiceNow at the center of it.

[elxr]

Not in my personal experience. Never been in that situation, and I've worked in full-stack, FE, and BE teams.

[pjmlp]

Because timesharing is back, big tech only wants to sell terminals.

[geodel]

as AI native developer I need VS code forks for AI to be pre-installed. Also every single command or work need to be vetted by AI by default. I am going hardcore now.

[caycep]

"What do you mean, an Aluminum Falcon?!"

[drummojg]

"WHO'S 'THEY?????'"

[ls612]

The only lesson I'm taking away is that we are still very early in the AI era. AI workflows look entirely different today than they did 18 months ago and I wouldn't bet on them looking the same in 18 months from now.

[HeavyStorm]

Scary that your first shot is Google with Gemini instead of copilot and Microsoft who are certainly in a better position to make this happen. I guess nobody escorts msft to lead anything anymore.

[z2]

I put Microsoft in the camp of operating system maker, as they are only able to run others' models. The "Give them three tries" meme can play out well for them yet!

[dist-epoch]

Don't you read HN? Nobody wants AI in their OS, especially in Windows. Common complaint that Microsoft is forcing AI into every corner of Windows.

[ericd]

I absolutely want AI in my OS. I just want it to be one I can trust to serve my interests, and not the company's. I'm literally in the middle of baking one in as I type this.

[uhhjkhgttgkjb]

You can’t have one without the other. Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but any AI baked into the OS will be so in favour of the company, not you.

[ericd]

I'm running open models on my own hardware, on linux. So, I don't think so?

[Danox]

Microsoft implementation of Copilot is bad. It’s like they’re trying too hard and the reason they’re probably trying too hard is that they have no real presence in mobile computing, like Intel they have a hard time competing when the playing field is level.

[danudey]

They were too late to the party on music players (which people wanted), mobile devices being any good (which people wanted), and cloud services (which people wanted), so now they're going to be damned if they're going to be late to the party on AI (which nobody wants).

[mrandish]

Re: AI OS integration: I recently retired so most of my LLM use is just implementing and fixing fairly mundane OS and networking things along with light scripting for OS automation (AHK) and Home Assistant. So far, I just use web chat and cut-paste to the OS which is fine for little things but it starts to suck after the 15th round back and forth. For example, debugging intermittent Windows crash logs on my wife's laptop by doing multi-line PowerShell incantations from browser chat window, paste into PowerShell window. Cut multi-line error messages back to browser. Rinse / Repeat.

I'm leery about just giving an LLM free run of my laptop, but with reasonable restrictions on which app(s) it can access and how many steps it can do before checking in, and maybe even a throttle on how fast it works, I'd be fine (I'm not in a hurry and I can learn by watching it work at double-speed). It doesn't have to be mil-spec locked down, it's not like I have production code accessible or millions in crypto keys, the biggest downside would be a few hours hosing out and restoring the laptop, which would be annoying but not the end of the world.

I get those that say, "just spin up a VM and run it there", but I 'spin up a VM' rarely enough that the versions have changed and UXs drifted enough that it's exactly the kind of thing I'd actually want the LLMs help to do without me being a cut-paste bot. I'm mostly Windows at the moment and I don't understand why MSFT insists on spamming LLM features everywhere except the one place I'd not only use it, but pay for it. The usage model could be as simple and intuitive as a Zoom remote desktop share with a collaborator. That's already constrained and users have a mental model for the interaction pattern.

I asked Gemini earlier today to search recent user reviews of the latest 'drive my Windows desktop for me' and it reported that the capability is still slow, expensive, and prone to getting lost navigating the interface or interpreting window boundaries etc.

Anyone have any suggestions for my lightweight, casual use case?

[jondwillis]

Yeah unironically just let an agent harness rip with full admin access without monitoring anything it does or using a VM. It’ll be fine, probably. “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the AgentDOS and Only Exfiltrate Secrets Occasionally”

[snarfy]

Microsoft has Copilot and Windows. Look what happened.

[Bombthecat]

Because the framework and base is and firmware is freaking huge? You would need any AI hook on every setting/ action.

It seems easier to do just a screenshot and click.

[Melatonic]

Google is probably already doing and releasing the most actual research into this (like the work that went into Gemma 4)

[sidewndr46]

would "before the major operating systems companies figure out AI integration into their OS that doesn't suck" including running a process with its own address space, like every other thing?

[lloeki]

> why Google which has both Gemini and Android can't figure this out,

Not the first time an incumbent has four aces in hand and appears to be entirely unable to make anything of it.

> and if there are lessons to draw from that

Lesson 1: doing shit is hard

Lesson 2: money rules so milking the cow wins over taking the slightest risk

[rbalicki]

Folks that are interested in a way of doing work locally that doesn't suck, but which integrates LLMs, may be interested in [Barnum](https://barnum-circus.github.io/). The TLDR is that it's a programming language whose frontend is a DSL in TypeScript that is well suited for managing async and parallel work, focused on control flow, from which it is easy to invoke LLMs, and which is easy for LLMs to write. I use it to autonomously ship a very large number of PRs.