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No. Google’s hardware is lackluster, their services come and go and are bloated with telemetry, their search is worse than ever, there’s no live customer suppo

No. Google’s hardware is lackluster, their services come and go and are bloated with telemetry, their search is worse than ever, there’s no live customer support person to talk with in the event of a problem, and there’s no unified vision. Engineering is good, leadership is abysmal.

nullgeo 4y ago
Every year I scan through their Google I/O website to see if anything catches my eyes, not many things they're presenting catch my eyes. I did look at Flutter 3, but probably won't try it out. And the Google hardware ecosystem just does not appeal to me.
- saidinesh5 4y ago
  Their hardware used to be good though. Nexus 7, Nexus 5 were good unlocked, inexpensive devices. After that i really hoped their project Ara (block phone) to take off but they abandoned it.
- lodovic 4y ago
  Only the Chromecast is interesting, but that is really becoming less and less every day due to their aggressive advertising.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    I am still pissed off since buying a Chromecast just to realize there was no way to watch videos on a harddrive on the home network.
    - ngrost24 4y ago
      You might want to check Videostream for Chromecast ? There's both a mobile app that links to your PC and also a desktop app. Last time I checked, VLC also allowed casting of videos on your PC(although iirc was more iffy with subtitles, etc) though not sure if there's mobile support, and I believe there are also other paid apps that can be used to cast videos. If you're referring to seeing videos directly from a hard drive without a PC, a TV with usb support should take care of that (long time ago, I had even a Bluray player that had usb and was used in similar fashion to cast videos from a usb flash drive)
      - rightbyte 4y ago
        At the time, like 4 years ago, I could make nothing work except poor screencasts. That functionality should be native. It is easier to just plug a laptop into the TV than using a Chromecast. Maybe I should give it another try.
    - Raphael 4y ago
      BubbleUPnP for DLNA/Chromecast
    - marak830 4y ago
      On my PC I can open chrome and stream to the Chromecast on my network. I drag videos from the desktop onto chrome and it plays fine. Only reason I have chrome installed lol.
  - mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
    Being kind of a cheapskate, I've tried chromecast and the Amazon one and then bought an AppleTV device. I haven't had issues like I did with other dongle-like devices with having to restart them when there was a hiccup or crash of some kind - which is especially annoying when watching live sports. I now have two AppleTV devices (I use the word 'device' because they also have a streaming product called AppleTV+, which btw has some really good shows, and I think you can get the streaming service w/o the device)
sofixa 4y ago
> there’s no live customer support person to talk with in the event of a problem There is, if you own a Pixel or pay for it (Google One, combines extra Google Drive/GMail storage and customer support). It's not great that you have to pay for it, but at Google's scale it doesn't really make sense, purely financially, the staffing required to support every free user. Are there many companies that operate under a freemium/freeware business model that provide free support to anyone?
- he_is_legend 4y ago
  > but at Google's scale it doesn't really make sense, purely financially, the staffing required to support every free user. This seems to get trotted out often whenever Google providing support gets mentioned. But I don't think anyone is asking Google to suddenly offer support for every customer question under the sun. Maybe they just need to provide a little support for some of the big problems: like algorithms banning people from all of the Google services that they have used for many years, for non-discernable reasons with zero comebacks. They spend plenty of money getting people on board their services (and extracting as much data as they can from them) but none on retaining customer loyalty after an algorithm gets it wrong.
  - gerikson 4y ago
    > none on retaining customer loyalty after an algorithm gets it wrong Textbook monopoly.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    If they offer support for some cases, especially complicated cases like those, they'll get bombarded with all sorts of questions anyways (if you've never heard an IT person get asked about coffee machines "because they're tech" or to help out with somebody's personal phone/PC/whatever, i suggest you visit Reddit, more specifically r/sysadmin and r/talesfromtechsupport. It makes for fun, albeit sad reading. And discarding that, it's a tough balancing act between helping users recover accounts without helping malicious actors takeover accounts and/or helping malicious actors keep malicious accounts. It'd take effort to train personnel and establish policies to do all that properly. And regarding customer loyalty, why do you think Google care about that? It really doesn't seem like they do, and financially, their revenue per customer is negligible for that to make a difference.

nullgeo 4y ago

Every year I scan through their Google I/O website to see if anything catches my eyes, not many things they're presenting catch my eyes. I did look at Flutter 3, but probably won't try it out. And the Google hardware ecosystem just does not appeal to me.

saidinesh5 4y ago
Their hardware used to be good though. Nexus 7, Nexus 5 were good unlocked, inexpensive devices. After that i really hoped their project Ara (block phone) to take off but they abandoned it.
lodovic 4y ago
Only the Chromecast is interesting, but that is really becoming less and less every day due to their aggressive advertising.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  I am still pissed off since buying a Chromecast just to realize there was no way to watch videos on a harddrive on the home network.
  - ngrost24 4y ago
    You might want to check Videostream for Chromecast ? There's both a mobile app that links to your PC and also a desktop app. Last time I checked, VLC also allowed casting of videos on your PC(although iirc was more iffy with subtitles, etc) though not sure if there's mobile support, and I believe there are also other paid apps that can be used to cast videos. If you're referring to seeing videos directly from a hard drive without a PC, a TV with usb support should take care of that (long time ago, I had even a Bluray player that had usb and was used in similar fashion to cast videos from a usb flash drive)
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      At the time, like 4 years ago, I could make nothing work except poor screencasts. That functionality should be native. It is easier to just plug a laptop into the TV than using a Chromecast. Maybe I should give it another try.
  - Raphael 4y ago
    BubbleUPnP for DLNA/Chromecast
  - marak830 4y ago
    On my PC I can open chrome and stream to the Chromecast on my network. I drag videos from the desktop onto chrome and it plays fine. Only reason I have chrome installed lol.
- mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  Being kind of a cheapskate, I've tried chromecast and the Amazon one and then bought an AppleTV device. I haven't had issues like I did with other dongle-like devices with having to restart them when there was a hiccup or crash of some kind - which is especially annoying when watching live sports. I now have two AppleTV devices (I use the word 'device' because they also have a streaming product called AppleTV+, which btw has some really good shows, and I think you can get the streaming service w/o the device)

sofixa 4y ago

> there’s no live customer support person to talk with in the event of a problem There is, if you own a Pixel or pay for it (Google One, combines extra Google Drive/GMail storage and customer support). It's not great that you have to pay for it, but at Google's scale it doesn't really make sense, purely financially, the staffing required to support every free user. Are there many companies that operate under a freemium/freeware business model that provide free support to anyone?

he_is_legend 4y ago
> but at Google's scale it doesn't really make sense, purely financially, the staffing required to support every free user. This seems to get trotted out often whenever Google providing support gets mentioned. But I don't think anyone is asking Google to suddenly offer support for every customer question under the sun. Maybe they just need to provide a little support for some of the big problems: like algorithms banning people from all of the Google services that they have used for many years, for non-discernable reasons with zero comebacks. They spend plenty of money getting people on board their services (and extracting as much data as they can from them) but none on retaining customer loyalty after an algorithm gets it wrong.
- gerikson 4y ago
  > none on retaining customer loyalty after an algorithm gets it wrong Textbook monopoly.
- sofixa 4y ago
  If they offer support for some cases, especially complicated cases like those, they'll get bombarded with all sorts of questions anyways (if you've never heard an IT person get asked about coffee machines "because they're tech" or to help out with somebody's personal phone/PC/whatever, i suggest you visit Reddit, more specifically r/sysadmin and r/talesfromtechsupport. It makes for fun, albeit sad reading. And discarding that, it's a tough balancing act between helping users recover accounts without helping malicious actors takeover accounts and/or helping malicious actors keep malicious accounts. It'd take effort to train personnel and establish policies to do all that properly. And regarding customer loyalty, why do you think Google care about that? It really doesn't seem like they do, and financially, their revenue per customer is negligible for that to make a difference.