For as long a I am a “wanna-be founder”, I used to be afraid of working on ideas that compete with (parts of) Google business. That feeling is no more.
I use GSuite at work at a FAANG company, and Google slides with 50+ pages is so slow (multi-second pauses when changing slides) to be practically unusable. Finding documents in Google drive is hard to impossible, and good luck keeping track of comments or tasks assigned to you in multiple unrelated documents.
I’m sure at some level consolidating their offerings is a right product move, but I don’t think Basecamp or Calendly should be particularly concerned.
You aren’t really competing on quality when you go up against these kinds of products though, you are competing against “free and good enough” which is actually quite compelling in a lot of cases. If you’ve ever been up against Microsoft in a deal for example they just ignore your product and keep throwing more unrelated free stuff into the enterprise agreement until the client acquiesces.
Yep, but workspace is not free. Or good for that matter. It’s maybe cheap, but with so many asterisks that I, and lot of other, starts to be unwilling to commit to anything Google
Teams is not the best messaging/videoconferencing program by a country mile, yet it shows the most growth YoY [citation needed].
I worked for a few companies who dipped a toe into the Microsoft waters and their products drowned everything else out; this was not because the offering was technically superior or cheaper.
Microsoft and Google have a fundamentally different approach to enterprise software than Google.
Microsoft is the mediocre Apple of enterprise tech, before Apple even got that reputation.
EVERYTHING IS INTEGRATED. Microsoft makes it so insanely easy to stay within the microsoft ecosystem, that using a mediocre software created by Microsoft is always a better option than a 3rd party tool. (See slacks getting clobbered by teams, despite slacks being significantly faster)
Part of what makes MSFT click is that they they go above and beyond to create a tool everyone can use. Additionally, they are obsessed with customers to a point that their tools lose all personality. This is bad if you want something that is opinionated in exactly the way you want (see Obsidian vs OneNote), but great for companies that want to offer an inoffensive tool that is serviceable for all its employees.
An incumbent is fearsome when it uses every little advantage in its greater product offering to embed itself as the obvious option. (Apple for consumer tech, MSFT for enterprise tech). Google has refused to implement the kind of top down organizational structure needed to enforce such integration in its product lineup. This is the company that couldn't sync its grocery lists with google keep. As long as it stays true, Google will never be able to leverage the advantage of an incumbent. It's a shame too, their products are honestly quite good.
We literally just dumped Zoom at work. Why? Because Teams was "free" (Included in our o365 agreement), and it was just good enough. We have had both for a couple of years now, but nobody ever went to Teams for a meeting, and everybody is pissed... because it really wasn't as good.
We just had our first Teams meeting this morning, in fact... we could not figure out how to simply view the person speaking. Seems like it's always in split view, or that goofy "Together" view. Nothing makes you want to turn off the camera more than having your face on everybody's screen through 100% of the meeting.
Same here. 100-slide decks open without a problem for our entire org. And drive search is spot on 99% of the time. There are other issues, but these aren’t it.
I mean it's Google. You'd think they'd have nailed the concept of "searching" by now. :)
But I have found a weird workaround for this. After installing Google Drive File Stream locally and searching for things with the file explorer, it doesn't seem that bad all of a sudden.
I don't have this experience at all - first, I have slide decks that have 100s of slides and it works fine. I have no issue finding documents either - however I do struggle with the invites to documents inside of Gmail.
Yep, and I'm building something to sit on top of google Drive, to manage files, and make it easier to collaborate as a team. That's not something new, similar, to what Confluence, Notion are offering, ...
The reality is that google sucks at B2B, everything they do don't work. There are a few exception like google Workspace because Gmail was number 1 in B2C and they were the first to get Words and Excel in the browser and Google Analytics.
The reality is that, innovation for a big company is hard, Microsoft was able to build Teams from scratch to compete with Slack and managed to it, and that's an amazing achievement, not something that we are used to seeing.
> Microsoft was able to build Teams from scratch to compete with Slack and managed to it
Teams is complete shit though, they didn't compete on quality of their offering. They're competing because every org already pays Microsoft a lot of money and they may as well use Teams because it's "integrated"
Point of note, Teams wasn't built from scratch it was more like a remodel of skype which they already owned. If you start looking under the hood at various aspects of teams one will start to see Skype all over the place.
GSuite is downright horrible compared to alternatives and its only saving grace is GMail. And its the same with GCloud which makes doing the most basic things slow and annoying. It really feels like most of those GSuite products are there JUST so that Google can say they have it.
I've used GSuite for years and find it fine. I do think it performs best using Chrome though. The document collaboration works well, and search works when I need it. Much better than something like Confluence.
What other tools would you suggest in place of GSuite (email, calendaring, collaborative document building, searching/finding docs, etc...)? O365 is all that comes to mind.
Don't be afraid to compete with Google on anything short of products like ads and YouTube. You shouldn't be afraid to compete with them unless their product is making billions of dollars. They'll kill a highly profitable product without hesitation if it looks like it won't win them the NBU (Next Billion Users). They're smart cookies, but their ethos is win big or fuggedaboutit. They have very little stamina or patience for middling products.
Next perfectly viable Google product on the chopping block: Stadia
out of curiosity, what kind of machine are you using ? I expect it's not network io causing the slowdowns, but i'm curious if even latest machines can't handle google apps
I'd lay money it's not the engineers, but management. If management doesn't put performance as a top-tier requirement, there's no way to stuff enough features into a program for something like an office suite (already half-crippled by having to run in a browser) and keep the performance high. It's too much work for even the engineers who care to take it on in the cracks & edges around their other projects... it has to be something management prioritizes.
Seems like this is how all "enterprise-grade" software becomes a pain to use. Usability and performance get short shrift below getting the next 100 bullet-point-features and before you know it the only computers in the world that can run it decently are the developer's, where it still is frankly only on the edge of usability and far from where it would be a joy to use.
People use to laugh at PMs (disclaimer: I’m a PM), but making right product decisions in a big Corp, with multiple parties to align with that had competing interests, is hard.
I’m sure Google has high quality engineers working more or less on every product. It’s just the solution space of products with big surface area and many interdependencies is really large. When you are more steps removed from your customers, and can’t move fast (comparing to a small nibble team), finding the optimum becomes a very non-trivial exercise.
Most successful products at big corps have laser-focused teams with highly influential leaders. Anything else results on mediocrity.
The people who made Gmail are either still working on Gmail, working somewhere else, or working on a pet project because they bought the proof-of-competence to choose their project. Google's management structure basically doesn't have anything that says "Hey, you were successful at X, can you work on (thing adjacent to X)?" and incentivize the employee to do that if the employee wants to do something else.
There's no reason to assume the people working on Slides, Spreadsheets, Drive, Docs, &c started particularly overlapped (though I'm sure there's consolidation these days). Similarly with GCloud; all the pieces of GCloud started as independent initiatives (App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Compute Engine, &c). All of these started separate and only began using consolidated resources / providing consolidated UX frontends and APIs as they were forced to by a management chain ad-hoc'd together after Google decided "Cloud" was a space they wanted to do business in as an organized front.
GMail is TRASH for me. It's the slowest, most ressoruce intensive site/app I've ever had the "pleasure" of using. I'm using Fastmail now and it's mindblowing how slow Gmail is in comparison.
If you have a normal google account, once you sign up for workspace, if you decide to no longer subscribe, you can't get your original free account functionality back. No more gmail, calendar, keep, etc. Learned the hard way
Hahaha, makes me feel so much better about my own work when I see this kind of laziness out of the rich-as-hell giants.
Dev: "OK, I finished the user story for migration from a free account to a paid account this sprint, but, again, there's a story for migration from a paid account to a free one and that'll involve compromises X and Y and there are a couple Hard Problems involved since usage may have exceeded free tier limits, and we physically migrate the account in ways that will be hard to undo since we cut corners to get this shipped, which will make it even harder. That's going to be a big chunk of work, and I think we'll need to break it up into smaller stories. Will we be going over that today?"
PM: "Ummmmmmm... yeah..." presses big red button that throws an inconvenient story into the "on ice" bucket that may as well represent "deleted" "Putting that 'on ice', we'll definitely get to it... some day."
And Google Workspace still doesn't play nice with Google Home, Photos, etc. I used to pay for GSuite and switched back to Gmail because of all the services I was ironically locked out of when I paid for them.
That's the funny thing about Google Workspaces, it's really a downgrade when you look out at all the Google services you are cut out of.
Google Homes does not work, which is utterly shocking to me. I pay Google for Google Workspace and fancy smoke detectors and WiFi devices and they don't integrate with each other.
I signed up using my free account while it was gsuite. Gsuite changed to Workspace, I stopped paying for Workspace and now I can't use my original free services, and I get a blurb explaining this is because I unsubscribed from Workspace.
Possible I'm doing something wrong so I'd love to know what it is, but as far as I can tell, I can't get my free tier back.
I like Google, but their product teams desperately need to talk to each other. I had been a 2TB Plan subscriber for quite a while. While trying to prune and free up some space, I realize it is practically impossible to do it any way that is easy and correct.
It took me over two weeks of dedicated hourly time slots, a few automation, and many manual deletions to clean up everything. I also end up deleting essential documents that I should not have (I did have backups).
I wrote down my frustration, the horrible experience deleting all the photos (some tips included that will help if you are planning to do so) - How to delete all Photos and get off Google Photos - https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get...
I do have the grandfathered legacy Google Domains for Apps (may be about 10 or odd domains) and I pay for about 5 domains Google Workspaces. Teams find it easier to use Google Products (especially Gmail, and Calendar).
For Gmail, the only thing that works for me is the regular Google Takeout. POP3 takes months to download all messages, IMAP is... well, IMAP and not e-mail archiving protocol. Fortunately Takeout exists so that you can just download everything to a safe place and free some space.
>While trying to prune and free up some space, I realize it is practically impossible to do it any way that is easy and correct.
I do it by connecting drive to Google colab and using bash/python as if it's a normal filesystem but admittedly even then it can occasionally behave weird (especially with bigger files). However, you can at least add whatever retry and double checking logic you want.
Google Workspace was formerly known as G Suite, which was formerly known as Google Apps. It's the business version of Google products that includes additional functionality that consumer accounts don't have. https://support.google.com/a/answer/6043385?hl=en
I shall attempt to explain what this announcement actually means, since it doesn't do a great job:
1) "Starting today, all of Google Workspace is available to anyone with a Google account" there are a lot of individual business owners that have signed up for free Gmail accounts and use them to run their business, now they can pay a subscription fee to upgrade those accounts to include Workspace functionality (like Google Chat rooms, Meet recordings, Calendar appointments, ML assisted writing, device management and other business features).
2) Google Chat (their competitor to Slack) and Docs suite are getting more deeply integrated in Gmail. Enabling the ability to bring in Docs/Sheets/Slides inline with a Chat "room" for collaboration without leaving Gmail. This will only be available for Workspace users (business, enterprise, education or the new individual plan).
I'd like to point out that 'all of Google Workspace' leaves out 'minus creating shared drives' - shared drives don't count against account storage whatsoever and would probably require a large rework to become compatible with regular G accounts. Even Google Workspace for Nonprofits, which enforces a 30GB/user limit, gives accounts the ability to set up shared drives with no per-user storage limit or limit across the org.
So for people who pay 5$/user/month for having Gmail on their own domain (which is really the main use a lot of individuals have for Gsuite), this is no-op?
I believe if you're using Gmail on your own domain and paying, you're already using Workspace. I think the new individual plan is aimed at the folks with consumer @gmail.com accounts, using them for business purposes and want to upgrade.
Do not use a Google Workspace account for personal use. Just get a Gmail account. There’s far too many restrictions and caveats that they’ve manufactured in the past few years (for no good reason). I’ve used Google Workspace since 2008, long before any of these restrictions existed and I wish it wasn’t a nightmare to migrate 12 years of context to a Gmail account. Google put me in lose-lose position. Don’t put yourself in one.
Agreed. I've got email set up for my family via Google Workspace and we're not allowed to manage our Nest with them. All sorts of weird "oh you're a second-class citizen" spots in Google's systems.
> Transfer Your Content is only available to authorized G Suite for Education Accounts. Please contact your administrator, or sign in with another Google Account.
It would be nice if they provided a route to getting old GAFYD users over to a standard Google Account.
I've still got old accounts with photos etc on that I cannot move, and the only reason I moved from GAFYD is because of so much functionality being missing.
The most annoying thing is that I got married and I now want to share my Google One account with my family
...and I cannot, unless they all have my domain.
By the way, you can sort-of "move" your photos by adding them to shared album and "saving to local" on the other side. But then, if the original account is removed, the photos are still removed (AFAIK).
This is one of the many reasons I'd never use Google in any business setting. I had GSuite / free-edition set up for my family. Now, new members don't have access to basic features like Google Voice without shelling out $6/month. A lot my family signed up, so I'd be looking at thousands of dollars per year.
Google is happy to drop you, mostly for an obnoxious up-sell. You're a statistic, and if they drive your business under, that's a statistic too.
As a paying customer, I built my entire family photo sharing and storage scheme on the longstanding ability to sync images between Google Drive and Google Photos.
Google removed that functionality, borked my entire system, and lost all of my trust that they know (or care about) what their customers want.
I have absolutely no idea what this announcement is actually announcing. It takes seven paragraphs to actually get there, and then announces something that I'm 99% sure was already available. My wife doesn't have a work Google Workspace account, but she can still use docs etc. What's actually changed?
I've got you covered. I watched the video, and here's what you can now do with Google Workspace:
* Be notified when packages are coming via "e mail"
* Send your own "e mail" to other people
* Organize events by date in a "calendar"
* Write an episode of Stranger Things in a "document", or if you don't happen to own the Stranger Things franchise, write about your viewing experience
* Write down a list of band names
* Sum the number of times a given child poops in a day in a "spreadsheet"
* Take part in a "meet", which is a sort of phone call but with video
Remove one thing or two and this looks like the script of an Apple computer ad in 1985. Google is an Ad monopoly with a searcher tacked on, and many short-lived projects created to justify the promotions and roles of their overqualified work force. Although judging by examples like this one, I dont think all of them are over-qualified,
I think Workspace is Google's attempt at a Teams/Slack/Wave product. I have to use Teams at work and can't fucking stand opening Word/Excel docs in Teams. That interface forces you to focus on one thing at a time and provides no easy way to navigate between work streams while maintaining state. Why would I want that?
Basically, Workspaces is failing so they're trying to open it to a wider audience in the hopes that it won't fail. It'll probably be abandoned by October and shutdown in a year or two.
It is by no means failing; at least from what I see, their adoption is higher than it's ever been. They are making a lot of pointless changes while ignoring all the real problems they have, though. Like the fact that group Chats are still unusable for organizations with... you know... users.
>I have to use Teams at work and can't fucking stand opening Word/Excel docs in Teams.
If you open Word or Excel directly, does the main page show you a list of appropriate documents to open? I have found the amount of times where the workflow requires navigating to a document through teams first to be extremely minimal. If the document isnt on the list, typing a couple characters into the Word/Excel search bar does the trick.
Th Teams lack of tabs experience is remarkably similar to the IE6 experience, and their giving it away free to try and kill Slack is similar to how IE established dominance.
She can now pay for it? The fun part is the claim that Google Workspace was designed around security and privacy, followed by a screenshot of Gmail, which until 2017 actively scanned mails for ad personalization. I can't wait for McDonalds to announce that it was founded on the principle of a healthy vegan diet.
This is a huge point. Google is funny in how inconsistent their messaging is.
I feel that they have neat product ideas, but organizationally maybe the are oriented around engineering lines, so product might lack focus, and product marketing is an afterthought.
Remember Google+ ? Nobody knew what it was.
Remember Wave? Nobody really knew what it did.
How does the biggest company on earth fail to understand how to communicate basic things?
This product page has way too much text, and not nearly enough 'what it is' 'what it can do' and especially 'why'.
As such, it's hard to get the word out organically.
Information spreads like a virus, you want a high R0 which comes with clarity, consistency and authenticity.
Everyone knew what Google+ was. It was Google's attempt at cloning Facebook. In contrast to Wave, I don't recall any confusion on that point at or after launch.
Readit News
I use GSuite at work at a FAANG company, and Google slides with 50+ pages is so slow (multi-second pauses when changing slides) to be practically unusable. Finding documents in Google drive is hard to impossible, and good luck keeping track of comments or tasks assigned to you in multiple unrelated documents.
I’m sure at some level consolidating their offerings is a right product move, but I don’t think Basecamp or Calendly should be particularly concerned.
Teams is not the best messaging/videoconferencing program by a country mile, yet it shows the most growth YoY [citation needed].
I worked for a few companies who dipped a toe into the Microsoft waters and their products drowned everything else out; this was not because the offering was technically superior or cheaper.
Microsoft and Google have a fundamentally different approach to enterprise software than Google. Microsoft is the mediocre Apple of enterprise tech, before Apple even got that reputation.
EVERYTHING IS INTEGRATED. Microsoft makes it so insanely easy to stay within the microsoft ecosystem, that using a mediocre software created by Microsoft is always a better option than a 3rd party tool. (See slacks getting clobbered by teams, despite slacks being significantly faster)
Part of what makes MSFT click is that they they go above and beyond to create a tool everyone can use. Additionally, they are obsessed with customers to a point that their tools lose all personality. This is bad if you want something that is opinionated in exactly the way you want (see Obsidian vs OneNote), but great for companies that want to offer an inoffensive tool that is serviceable for all its employees.
An incumbent is fearsome when it uses every little advantage in its greater product offering to embed itself as the obvious option. (Apple for consumer tech, MSFT for enterprise tech). Google has refused to implement the kind of top down organizational structure needed to enforce such integration in its product lineup. This is the company that couldn't sync its grocery lists with google keep. As long as it stays true, Google will never be able to leverage the advantage of an incumbent. It's a shame too, their products are honestly quite good.
March 31, 2020: 75 million DAU [0]
March 31, 2021: 145 million DAU [1]
0: https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2020/04/30/mi...
1: https://twitter.com/jeffteper/status/1387141320519557120?s=2... (https://twitter.com/bdsams/status/1387146648678244356?s=20)
"Do you already have O365? Yes? Then you already have Teams!"
That's a hard place to sell a competing solution to =)
We just had our first Teams meeting this morning, in fact... we could not figure out how to simply view the person speaking. Seems like it's always in split view, or that goofy "Together" view. Nothing makes you want to turn off the camera more than having your face on everybody's screen through 100% of the meeting.
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This! I can't wrap my head around on how impossible is to search for things in drive.
Staggeringly bad for, you know, a search company.
But I have found a weird workaround for this. After installing Google Drive File Stream locally and searching for things with the file explorer, it doesn't seem that bad all of a sudden.
Yep, and I'm building something to sit on top of google Drive, to manage files, and make it easier to collaborate as a team. That's not something new, similar, to what Confluence, Notion are offering, ...
The reality is that google sucks at B2B, everything they do don't work. There are a few exception like google Workspace because Gmail was number 1 in B2C and they were the first to get Words and Excel in the browser and Google Analytics.
The reality is that, innovation for a big company is hard, Microsoft was able to build Teams from scratch to compete with Slack and managed to it, and that's an amazing achievement, not something that we are used to seeing.
Teams is complete shit though, they didn't compete on quality of their offering. They're competing because every org already pays Microsoft a lot of money and they may as well use Teams because it's "integrated"
Then why is Apple innovating more than anyone else?
Try searching for "followup:actionitems" in drive.
Disc:Googler.
What other tools would you suggest in place of GSuite (email, calendaring, collaborative document building, searching/finding docs, etc...)? O365 is all that comes to mind.
I've personally never found a better alternative to Google Meet.
Is that the HTML version? Because the normal GMail is also horribly slow.
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Next perfectly viable Google product on the chopping block: Stadia
Seems like this is how all "enterprise-grade" software becomes a pain to use. Usability and performance get short shrift below getting the next 100 bullet-point-features and before you know it the only computers in the world that can run it decently are the developer's, where it still is frankly only on the edge of usability and far from where it would be a joy to use.
I’m sure Google has high quality engineers working more or less on every product. It’s just the solution space of products with big surface area and many interdependencies is really large. When you are more steps removed from your customers, and can’t move fast (comparing to a small nibble team), finding the optimum becomes a very non-trivial exercise.
Most successful products at big corps have laser-focused teams with highly influential leaders. Anything else results on mediocrity.
The people who made Gmail are either still working on Gmail, working somewhere else, or working on a pet project because they bought the proof-of-competence to choose their project. Google's management structure basically doesn't have anything that says "Hey, you were successful at X, can you work on (thing adjacent to X)?" and incentivize the employee to do that if the employee wants to do something else.
There's no reason to assume the people working on Slides, Spreadsheets, Drive, Docs, &c started particularly overlapped (though I'm sure there's consolidation these days). Similarly with GCloud; all the pieces of GCloud started as independent initiatives (App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Compute Engine, &c). All of these started separate and only began using consolidated resources / providing consolidated UX frontends and APIs as they were forced to by a management chain ad-hoc'd together after Google decided "Cloud" was a space they wanted to do business in as an organized front.
GMail is TRASH for me. It's the slowest, most ressoruce intensive site/app I've ever had the "pleasure" of using. I'm using Fastmail now and it's mindblowing how slow Gmail is in comparison.
Its clunky and annoying in so many ways.
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Dev: "OK, I finished the user story for migration from a free account to a paid account this sprint, but, again, there's a story for migration from a paid account to a free one and that'll involve compromises X and Y and there are a couple Hard Problems involved since usage may have exceeded free tier limits, and we physically migrate the account in ways that will be hard to undo since we cut corners to get this shipped, which will make it even harder. That's going to be a big chunk of work, and I think we'll need to break it up into smaller stories. Will we be going over that today?"
PM: "Ummmmmmm... yeah..." presses big red button that throws an inconvenient story into the "on ice" bucket that may as well represent "deleted" "Putting that 'on ice', we'll definitely get to it... some day."
I'm really glad I didn't try signing up for it when I was trying to setup my custom domain to host mail.
Possible I'm doing something wrong so I'd love to know what it is, but as far as I can tell, I can't get my free tier back.
It took me over two weeks of dedicated hourly time slots, a few automation, and many manual deletions to clean up everything. I also end up deleting essential documents that I should not have (I did have backups).
I wrote down my frustration, the horrible experience deleting all the photos (some tips included that will help if you are planning to do so) - How to delete all Photos and get off Google Photos - https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get...
I do have the grandfathered legacy Google Domains for Apps (may be about 10 or odd domains) and I pay for about 5 domains Google Workspaces. Teams find it easier to use Google Products (especially Gmail, and Calendar).
I do it by connecting drive to Google colab and using bash/python as if it's a normal filesystem but admittedly even then it can occasionally behave weird (especially with bigger files). However, you can at least add whatever retry and double checking logic you want.
I shall attempt to explain what this announcement actually means, since it doesn't do a great job:
1) "Starting today, all of Google Workspace is available to anyone with a Google account" there are a lot of individual business owners that have signed up for free Gmail accounts and use them to run their business, now they can pay a subscription fee to upgrade those accounts to include Workspace functionality (like Google Chat rooms, Meet recordings, Calendar appointments, ML assisted writing, device management and other business features).
2) Google Chat (their competitor to Slack) and Docs suite are getting more deeply integrated in Gmail. Enabling the ability to bring in Docs/Sheets/Slides inline with a Chat "room" for collaboration without leaving Gmail. This will only be available for Workspace users (business, enterprise, education or the new individual plan).
Which makes it a no-go once you have a family, EOT. So now the entire family have Apple services instead for the same price.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
https://takeout.google.com/transfer
I've still got old accounts with photos etc on that I cannot move, and the only reason I moved from GAFYD is because of so much functionality being missing.
GAFYD https://lifehacker.com/what-does-google-apps-for-your-domain...
...and I cannot, unless they all have my domain.
By the way, you can sort-of "move" your photos by adding them to shared album and "saving to local" on the other side. But then, if the original account is removed, the photos are still removed (AFAIK).
I really do wish I hadn't moved my domain over to them - but my Google Calendar, email, and Google Play purchases are all in there.
You can't use family sharing on a Google Apps/G Suite/Workspace account at all, whether they share your domain or not.
Google is happy to drop you, mostly for an obnoxious up-sell. You're a statistic, and if they drive your business under, that's a statistic too.
Google removed that functionality, borked my entire system, and lost all of my trust that they know (or care about) what their customers want.
* Be notified when packages are coming via "e mail"
* Send your own "e mail" to other people
* Organize events by date in a "calendar"
* Write an episode of Stranger Things in a "document", or if you don't happen to own the Stranger Things franchise, write about your viewing experience
* Write down a list of band names
* Sum the number of times a given child poops in a day in a "spreadsheet"
* Take part in a "meet", which is a sort of phone call but with video
I hope that clears it up.
I’m still puzzled at what’s new and what’s different from what people with (free and paid) Google accounts have.
Also Google's spreadsheet program is dogballs compared to excel.
Basically, Workspaces is failing so they're trying to open it to a wider audience in the hopes that it won't fail. It'll probably be abandoned by October and shutdown in a year or two.
If you open Word or Excel directly, does the main page show you a list of appropriate documents to open? I have found the amount of times where the workflow requires navigating to a document through teams first to be extremely minimal. If the document isnt on the list, typing a couple characters into the Word/Excel search bar does the trick.
Like you, I can't fucking stand it, and I make the same mistake at least once a day.
Disclaimer: I work at msft etc etc.
1. a switchover to Chat (apparently some hybrid slack/discord/I can't figure out)
2. serious plans to compete with microsoft office via more enterprise capabilities
3. availability of (previously) paid gsuite-only features to individuals for $10/mo
all bundled together in a mash
I feel that they have neat product ideas, but organizationally maybe the are oriented around engineering lines, so product might lack focus, and product marketing is an afterthought.
Remember Google+ ? Nobody knew what it was.
Remember Wave? Nobody really knew what it did.
How does the biggest company on earth fail to understand how to communicate basic things?
This product page has way too much text, and not nearly enough 'what it is' 'what it can do' and especially 'why'.
As such, it's hard to get the word out organically.
Information spreads like a virus, you want a high R0 which comes with clarity, consistency and authenticity.
Not a lot better, but still better. There's a gif of basically integrated workflow between email, chat and document editing... I think.
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