I think if there is one "value" that stands out from Google's culture (as it is reflected onto its customers) it is tremendous lack of empathy.
- Google maps appears to be designed by non-drivers. Much of hte time it is impossible to find out the name of cross streets near one's location by zooming in. Pins get added accidentally and are hard to categorize and find, there is no notion of neighborhoods, and the voice directions say the same redundant thing over and over (and it is often misleading). No intelligent person could design the product that way if they actually used it.
- Google's parental control features in android lack granularity, and the bias is toward kids watching garbage content as there is no way to share curated lists or for creators to become curators of high quality youtube content, etc. For anyone with young kids this is a must have feature and Google has ignored this kind of thing for years. Also if your kid's phone dies there is no way to remove it from the FamilyLink app! Someone really tested it thoroughly!
- Google Home / Nest. Exceptionally buggy devices. Basic functionality like shared speakers (all Nest over Nest wifi) are buggy and slow. "Hey Google" takes an extra few seconds to respond compared to Alexa and none of it is compatible with Google Advanced Security (Google's own feature!). Nobody building this tech is using it at home or else they would be furious about these big oversights.
- Gemini in Gmail is a total dud. It can't tell me what upcoming events are listed in my email inbox. It biases toward searching the inbox, and GMail inbox search has been highly broken for years. I participated in a user study at Google a while back and the PM admitted it was broken and would not be fixed.
Google is now a cash cow advertising business and thanks to Eric Schmidt (a brilliant but morally lacking individual) it has become a major defense contractor.
Thanks to OpenAI and others, Google search is already dead. The market hasn't caught up with this yet. I sincerely regret making gmail my main email, as the company seems to have completely lost its way. In spite of a lot of brilliance the lack of empathy with users and the need to deliver products that solve problems continues to persist.
- Google maps appears to be designed by non-drivers. Much of hte time it is impossible to find out the name of cross streets near one's location by zooming in. Pins get added accidentally and are hard to categorize and find, there is no notion of neighborhoods, and the voice directions say the same redundant thing over and over (and it is often misleading). No intelligent person could design the product that way if they actually used it.
- Google's parental control features in android lack granularity, and the bias is toward kids watching garbage content as there is no way to share curated lists or for creators to become curators of high quality youtube content, etc. For anyone with young kids this is a must have feature and Google has ignored this kind of thing for years. Also if your kid's phone dies there is no way to remove it from the FamilyLink app! Someone really tested it thoroughly!
- Google Home / Nest. Exceptionally buggy devices. Basic functionality like shared speakers (all Nest over Nest wifi) are buggy and slow. "Hey Google" takes an extra few seconds to respond compared to Alexa and none of it is compatible with Google Advanced Security (Google's own feature!). Nobody building this tech is using it at home or else they would be furious about these big oversights.
- Gemini in Gmail is a total dud. It can't tell me what upcoming events are listed in my email inbox. It biases toward searching the inbox, and GMail inbox search has been highly broken for years. I participated in a user study at Google a while back and the PM admitted it was broken and would not be fixed.
Google is now a cash cow advertising business and thanks to Eric Schmidt (a brilliant but morally lacking individual) it has become a major defense contractor.
Thanks to OpenAI and others, Google search is already dead. The market hasn't caught up with this yet. I sincerely regret making gmail my main email, as the company seems to have completely lost its way. In spite of a lot of brilliance the lack of empathy with users and the need to deliver products that solve problems continues to persist.