Google's Go

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:hjgopn$1i7g$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Roman Ivanov" <isroman-del at ete-km.ru> wrote in message 
>> news:hjftkk$3up$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>> Roman Ivanov Wrote:
>>>> They get lots and lots of undeserved attention. Even when the final 
>>>> products are not that great, and occasionally when the people praising 
>>>> them would be hostile towards the same kinds of products from smaller 
>>>> companies.
>>>>
>>>> Reception often border on being an outright hysteria. It's mostly the 
>>>> fault of the people who react this way, but both companies put a lot of 
>>>> effort in creating this effect via various kind of marketing too.
>>> Also, a lot of Google's recent software initiatives are really weird 
>>> stuff with highly questionable value. However, because of the reception 
>>> mentioned above, they kind of bend the existing software infrastructure 
>>> and culture around themselves. Not in a good way too.
>>>
>>> For example, I really don't like the idea that Wave is going to be a 
>>> replacement for the aging email infrastructure. (Which might not happen, 
>>> but that's how it's marketed.) I don't like the idea of an 8-gig 
>>> operating system that's designed to run one application. (Not entirely 
>>> true, but close enough to reality.) Those things might be of high 
>>> quality, they may be reliable in their own way, while still having 
>>> negative effect on software industry as a whole.
>>
>> Agreed on all the above.
>>
>> And personally, I'd add a few more points:
>>
>> 1. I'd add "cloud computing" to the list of questionable initiatives (or 
>> at least questionable outside of certain niche use-cases that I'm sure 
>> probably do exist).
>>
>> 2. Their software generally reminds me of Apple software (no offense, or 
>> bait, intended to any Mac-users here) in that, IMO:
>>
>> 2.1. They tend to have lousy attention to detail (Google Code looks clean 
>> and pretty, and maybe it's reliable, but trying to use it absolutely 
>> drives me nuts. Plus, the stuff I mentioned about google maps in another 
>> post).
>
> Google and Apple on which planet are you referring to? Far as I can tell 
> they set the _standard_ on attention to detail, and Microsoft and others 
> are desperately catching up!

First of all, I never said that MS or other companies were good at 
attention-to-detail, so let's not get into that strawman.

Apple *used to* set the standard on attention to detail (or so I've heard), 
but that era was over when OSX came around. Also, any current 
attention-to-detail from either Google or Apple is typically limited to 
visual style.

Just some off-the-top-of-my-head examples of shitty attention-to-detail from 
Apple and Google:

Apple:

- iPods have a Power button, but they cannot be turned off via the so-called 
Power button. They are turned off by holding "Up" for a few seconds. Easily 
wins the lifetime award for "Dumbest Interface Design Choice I've Ever 
Seen".

- How long did it take the iPhone to get basic copy/paste? (I'm not sure, 
but I know it was a ridiculously long time for such a basic feature. 
Handspring, for instance, had smartphones with copy/paste from day one, and 
that was years before the iPhone was ever announced.)

- Last I looked, OSX didn't have any way to set up a light-on-dark color 
scheme, or any color scheme for that matter, at least not beyond wallpaper 
and selection-color.

- iTunes installs an iPod service which it restarts whenever it detects it's 
not running (and it polls for it every few seconds), and there's no clean 
way to for people who never use an iPod on their system to permanently 
disable it.

- iTunes: Right-click a song, and "Show in Windows Explorer" opens *two* 
explorer windows to the given directory (with the second one opened roughly 
10 seconds or so after the first). That's persisted for quite a while, and 
I've never seen it in any other program that launches an explorer window.

- iTunes: Took forever before it finally supported audio CDs that had data 
for Track 1. (Ex: Many early CD-based videogames). Never saw another CD 
player (software or hardware) that had that problem.

- "Error code -(some number here)"

- The "Hover Zoom" dock effect that Apple's been so proud of essentially 
amounts to turning some of the most frequently-used-buttons into moving 
targets. They obviously didn't think that one through.

Google:

- Google web-apps in general: There's been many times I've had that 
"Loading" box at the top of the page (the one google often uses on their 
web-apps) just hang without ever loading a thing.

- Maps: Search for an address, and when it shows up, it will be centered 
wrong. *Then* it will slowly scroll to the correct orientation. Unbelievably 
hacky "solution" to a trivial bug, and it's persisted for a long time.

- Maps: Cannot switch between JS version and non-JS version without going 
through contortions to force a new session. I've never seen a non-google 
website have that problem. Everywhere else, all that's needed is a page 
refresh.

- Maps: If I search for one address, and get one tick-mark result, why would 
I want a quarter of the resulting map to be obscured by a bubble telling me 
exactly what I already know darn well that I *just* searched for? And why do 
I need that to happen *every single time*? At the very least they could have 
had the sense to provide a user setting to disable obnoxiousness like that, 
but...nope, can't have that either.

- Code: See the wonderful attention-to-detail in this screenshot (been like 
this for quite awhile): http://www.semitwist.com/download/GoogleCode.png

- Code: Has "search within" constraints for all issues, open issues, and any 
of your own issues that are still open, but there's nothing in that box for 
just simply searching your own issues (which is what I want 90% of the time 
I do a ticket search on a Googe Code project). Also, just plain can't search 
on closed issues without also searching open ones (or if you can do it, the 
UI makes it pretty damn obscure).

- Code: When the results of a ticket search span multiple pages, there are 
no links to get to any page other than "Next" and "Prev". No "Last", no 
"Page 3", just "Next". Those are pretty damn standard links for paged 
results, but Google Code doesn't have them.

- Code: A number of very-trivial-to-get-right things are broken when JS is 
off. Submitting a ticket, for example, is rather buggy with JS off even 
though there's nothing needed beyond the same damn HTML forms that even 
novices have been able to write ever since the 90's.

There other things for both Apple and Google, but those are just the 
(non-hardware) ones from off-top-top-of-my-head.

>
>> 2.2. They're annoyingly slim on configurable settings (stuff I mentioned 
>> about google maps in another post, and why in the world they think I 
>> should be force-fed a non-standard custom skin in Chrome).
>
> Well yeah a better maps application is... oh, wait. Google maps is the 
> best by a huge margin.
>

Since when does "best" automatically imply "good"? And sure, I'll grant 
there *is* a lot of good about google maps (although most of the good stuff 
has already been copied by the competitors by now), but there's also a lot 
that's not good (see above).

>> 2.3. For their desktop apps, they like to force useless always-resident 
>> services onto my system.
>>
>> 3. Heck, Google is a web-oriented company, and I just hate modern web 
>> technology. ;)
>
> 3 contradicts 2.3.
>

Let's not get overly literal.

"Google is *primarily* a web-oriented company"

Better now?