They really just don't seem to have a very well thought out strategy & roadmap for much of anything new/rebranded/merged.
I have no idea what the decision making looks like for this internally, but my impression as an outsider is that there's a lot of short-term empire building. A new product manager/AVP/VP shows up and wants to gather power or just make their mark, so they rebrand or merge or kill a project to show they've done something. If something new is created, it immediately becomes subject to this dynamic.
The only Google products I use that I feel I can rely on for daily use without fearing the rug getting pulled out are Gmail, Gcal, Search, and Docs. (And I don't know how they make money on Docs so I'm still nervous there) I'm not a PaaS users/decision maker so that doesn't apply to me, but if it did then I would still be very reluctant to invest there unless it was part of an easily migrated multi-cloud strategy. I though Music was safe and got burned on that with the YT migration, which is a much inferior player. Even basic things like shuffling a play list and having it endlessly play through it don't seem to work.. at some point it wanders off to some random suggested song I don't own and don't want to listen to.
It will be years before I could feel comfortable making any other sort of Google service a daily driver for a given task, assuming they get their act together.
This behavior is typically because management at the top is technically detached and focused only on financial aspects. This means actual technical strategy gets distributed to large number of desperate managers as opposed to getting systematically aggregated at the top. This same thing happened with Ballmer, Scully and now Pitchai. I think Pitchai and likely others are MBAs as well :).
Aaron Patzer, founder of Pando Daily has said that businesses should subtract $250K for every MBA and add $500K for every engineer. When you have MBA at the top, subtraction weight grows exponentially. I know I shouldn't so severely generalize MBAs so much but here we are... Just like Gates and Jobs, Larry Page chose an MBA to run the business while praising need for "product person" all their lives. All of these CEOs will show continuous revenue growth and doubling of profits somehow while products will linger in the limbo.
It is quite funny that Google has (or had) 6 different meeting apps and during COVID they are no where on the map in this business!
>It is quite funny that Google has (or had) 6 different meeting apps and during COVID they are no where on the map in this business!
I wouldn't call "adding 2 million users per day" nowhere on the map... Google Meet is growing tremendously and seeing huge attach rates, even as Zoom continues growth apace as well.
Anecdote: the company I work for has largely moved from GoToMeeting to Meets. It's better than GTM in almost every way, and we were already paying for GSuite.
I’m still sore about Google Music going away. That combined with Photos going paid was the one-two punch for me. In the process of migrating to roll-your-own solutions. There are a lot of good options in 2020!
Google Music was decent. This new replacement is not so good. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" mix was generally right. The YT versions are good for about five songs and then trail off into Do Not Like. No amount of thumbs down seems to be making a positive change.
I'm still sore about Reader too. Fortunately Inoreader is about as good.
I'm surprised thumbing things down isn't helping you - it was the thing that fixed YTM for me. I wasn't thumbing things down enough, now anything I don't want to hear again I thumb down, and I mostly listen to the personalized and discovery mixes. You might need to switch/reload stations for it to take effect. And IIRC the discovery mix only updates on Wed.
Google Reader has been gone so long that I really don't remember all the features that it had.
One thing that I seem to remember it having was a social aspect. Twitter doesn't treat its lists very well but it is possible to find somebody that you want to follow, then see what lists they're on. Maybe that leads you to other people that you want to follow.
The thing about blogs is that typically the signal/noise ratio is higher than Twitter accounts.
I was an ardent supporter of Google Music. Their web app sucked. It literally took like 10 seconds just to show up! So many missing features and recommendation was worse than someone coded it up in weekend. I still stuck with them, keep paying them and keep suffering. Then they decided to migrate the damn thing to YouTube Music and everything became 10X worse overnight. Now somehow YouTube vides is same as my music! Simple features like proper playlist management were entirely missing. Obviously, lot of empire building is going on here.
So that was final nail in the coffin for Google Music. I moved everything to Spotify (thanks Soundiiz!) and realized what I was missing. I thought I would now unsubscribe and stop paying Google Music so someone up there will noice. Guess what? They had no way to unsubscribe for Google Music anymore because they rolled the whole thing to YouTube Premium. So upper management will never know that customer left in droves. The empire builders who are working in this part of Google are super smart but they only use their smartness in building empires.
I was looking at OwnPhotos, Lychee, and Piwigo, but just today I turned up PhotoPrism which might be just the thing (haven’t really checked it out much yet but looks promising...Lychee seems like the tried and true open source solution afaict).
I’ve already dumped Google Drive for self-managed p2p file-sharing so it’s just a matter of hooking it up to a nice interface for family use.
If your photos are scattered over several drives and you need something to sweep then into one neat pile, try PhotoStructure (I'm the author). The current beta release is available for free in exchange for your feedback.
PhotoStructure looks awesome. I like how your site is almost a blog about the why-how etc, it showed me that your product is deeply aligned with my goals for a self-hosted photo solution.
I think you should prioritize in your “about” the ease of import from Google Takeouts (which is the killer feature for me personally at this moment anyway). You might also want to have a section that explicitly names the other “big” players in this space, since I didn’t turn up your solution when googling for “self-hosted Google Photos” when I first started down this path.
The one necessary feature that prevents me from choosing this right now vs some of the other open source solutions is a story about how to safely browse my photos using a logon with on any Internet connected device.
Speaking of, this might be a perfect use case for SQRL[0], although I’d be happy with a simple HTTPS username/password story.
Not making any promises, but let me know if you’d accept any help with your to-do list.
As a paying Google Workspace customer, I've found changes and improvements there to be well-thought-out and well-communicated. Google Cloud also has an entire deprecation policy, so I'm pretty comfortable relying on those services too.
I have no idea what the decision making looks like for this internally, but my impression as an outsider is that there's a lot of short-term empire building. A new product manager/AVP/VP shows up and wants to gather power or just make their mark, so they rebrand or merge or kill a project to show they've done something. If something new is created, it immediately becomes subject to this dynamic.
The only Google products I use that I feel I can rely on for daily use without fearing the rug getting pulled out are Gmail, Gcal, Search, and Docs. (And I don't know how they make money on Docs so I'm still nervous there) I'm not a PaaS users/decision maker so that doesn't apply to me, but if it did then I would still be very reluctant to invest there unless it was part of an easily migrated multi-cloud strategy. I though Music was safe and got burned on that with the YT migration, which is a much inferior player. Even basic things like shuffling a play list and having it endlessly play through it don't seem to work.. at some point it wanders off to some random suggested song I don't own and don't want to listen to.
It will be years before I could feel comfortable making any other sort of Google service a daily driver for a given task, assuming they get their act together.