@ravi agreed —I think it's much easier to highlight products being retired at the rate they experiment, especially given how much folks loved reader, but it's extremely difficult to compete with their core offerings.
@cory Having used Google privately and professionally I find the products very variable:
Gmail: searching, labels awesome. For private use I wanted more flexibility with domains, so went to FM. Also the Gmail app on Android stopped giving me new mail notifications, a problem that followed me across phones
@cory - Gsuit: The real time collaboration is awesome when working remotely with people.
Sheets: generally good and the ability to use SQL built in is cool if that's you're jam - charts are basic though.
Docs: Painfully basic. At work we're not allowed external extensions (because random, unverified code is bad, I agree) but until 12 months ago there wasn't even a built-in automatic table of content generator.
@hl oohhh I haven't had cause to use SQL in sheets just yet but that sounds fun. I suppose my comparison point of having used Apple's analogous apps for a while made Google's seem more advanced than they necessarily are.
Google Meet: Makes fans go brrrrrrr. It's ok, but makes most computers super slow. And instead of making it use fewer resources they added basically a Task Manager /into/ GMeet to show you how much system resource it was using.
GChat/Space - Trash fire
This has been my unexpected Google Apps TED Talk. Thank you.
@hl Hahaha all fair — part of me using Meet is also that I don't want to pay for a Zoom license when I can pay Google and get no ads + some other features and also that the more privacy-friendly/marketed/positioned options are met with bewilderment by folks on the other end of the invite.
@hl it’s reliable but unpleasant to use in my experience — I think it was on the upswing in adoption when the pandemic hit and rode that unique event to ubiquity. I've found it odd how many folks use Google apps and ignore Meet while throwing Zoom on top. I don't think it’s so much better that it warrants replacing that built in option.
@hl yeah, I love the searching and flexibility of labels — I even use the beta channel of https://github.com/timche/gmail-desktop for a consistent experience on desktop. For domains I've ended up wanting to manage/maintain DNS less and have a few forwarding over at forwardemail.net (plus I've found folks get confused when I try and provide them with anything non-standard which I suppose is something else I'm conceding by just using an (at)gmail.com address.
@cory Yeah, I've used Gmail since 2003, and since labels, the idea of using folders with multiple copies of the same email if it's relevant to two or more things is just stupid. There's /one/ feature I miss from Outlook - and that's being able to re-name the subject of an email you've received. Means you can rename all those mails you get with a useless subject like "Question about last week's meeting".
@cory I know this is the internet and I should muster some incendiary “how dare you” sort of thing, but in leaning exactly the other way I can confirm searching not-Gmail messages sucks and using Apple calendar to respond to Google Calendar invites is as elegant as responding to a Mastodon post via fax machine.
@mattrambles hahaha — it's a hill I've spent a long time dying on but the older I get the more I'm willing to concede the convenience and move on to something I actually enjoy dealing with.
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