Smartyflix

Yup. We stopped using Hangouts a long time ago because Google couldn’t figure out if it was Hangouts, or Chat, or Workspaces, or…

Google doesn’t really take remote productivity seriously. It’s just another thing they dabble with.

I literally have no idea what Google’s branded payment/wallet thing even is anymore. I stopped caring about anything they were doing years ago. All I know is I hold my phone up to the gas pump and it works, that’s as much of a relationship as I can care to think about with regard to Google’s payment ecosystem.

A Google beta service you say? This will definitely still exist in two years…

I don’t need to play the latest AAA title at 4K resolution with ray-tracing and everything else. I really just want to play games made in the last year or two at 1080p and I don’t want to spend $500 on a GPU to do it. If Intel can deliver decent performance in a card that costs less than $200, I’ll give them a look.

Also, it has to work well with Linux. AMD has a really good track-record here. Nvidia…not so much…

I just leased my own VPS and use Nextcloud for my family as a replacement for Google Drive, Docs, Hangout/Chat, etc. Even works as a replacement for Google Play Music (RIP).

Google has an internal culture where you don’t get ahead by creating long-lived, customer-focused products/services. You mostly advance by coming up with "the next big thing" and getting some exec buy-in on it to spin a team up. This is why so many half-baked ideas get abandoned after making a splash at Google I/O and also why customer-support is simply not a focus. If Google wants to improve in this area, it will require a total sea-change in organizational priorities, starting from the top.

Google almost appears to have a goal of never interacting with the customer. Some of that probably comes from their roots of not really being a B2C company, and I think some of it comes from their big assumption that they can automate all things, including human customer support. Whatever the reason(s), they have vastly under-performed in delighting customers from a support standpoint. Search, Android, YouTube…most of those are a success because it’s simply Google building an interactive service that works the same for everyone and is centrally-controlled. They fall down quickly any time you have to bend a bit to work with a customer’s unique situation.