I'm glad you wrote this. I am STILL constantly pasting rewritten email text into Gmail. The prompt interface in Gmail consistently fails basic prompts. So my workflow is: Screen shot the thread into GPT or Claude, type a very short query, paste back into Gmail, remove formatting, send. Do I really need to write my own agent to do this or will someone at Gmail fix their broken, terrible composer? I could also rant on GSheets AI, which gives me "can't do that" more than it does something useful.
As a former Google Workspace eng director I have to sadly agree with all the broken user experiences you pointed out here and have a few of my own pet peeves. There is a lot Google can do with AI. I hope they deliver!
I would guess, that like Microsoft, Google is run by engineers who think that everybody is impressed by the capabilities enough to struggle with the software to get to the capabilities. Both companies only have respectable products that are old enough to have the rough edges knocked off.
Except Windows that still isn’t as good as a twenty year old Apple OS.
I’ve seen much worse in banking. Engineer driven culture tend to pivot towards solution, sometimes leading to great product with mediocre UX and detachment from business impact.
But I think with more devs leveraging AI, they will develop better product sense. Same with designers and PMs, these three role might overlap more with the help of AI.
I worked at Google for the past 10 years and I think you have made some really great points.
These are my 2 cents:
- Google's size today is creating silos between organisations and complexity for navigation
- rapid hiring and increasing layers mean slower decision making process & politics
- Google's investor influence and size means it needs to be more cautious than any other startups in every move it takes
- there's growing disconnect between Google's senior management with the world today
Having said that, I think Google is well-aware of the issues and is trying to address the issues. The AI race is gonna be a marathon instead of a sprint, so we will see!
Products reflect founders. Company culture permeates more than we expect. Startups optimize for the user experience. Google (and most big tech) optimizes for how it operates on their platform and meets internal requirements. We all know this. And yet we somehow think maybe this time Lucy won’t pull the football away from Charlie Brown at the last second.
Wouldn't AI Studio be analogous to OpenAI Playground? But I guess Google promotes AI Studio more.
Here's another weird quirk: as a developer, if I want to prompt based off a YouTube video, it's possible using Google's APIs! But not Gemini's API, you have to use Vertex AI, obviously...
I'm glad you wrote this. I am STILL constantly pasting rewritten email text into Gmail. The prompt interface in Gmail consistently fails basic prompts. So my workflow is: Screen shot the thread into GPT or Claude, type a very short query, paste back into Gmail, remove formatting, send. Do I really need to write my own agent to do this or will someone at Gmail fix their broken, terrible composer? I could also rant on GSheets AI, which gives me "can't do that" more than it does something useful.
As a former Google Workspace eng director I have to sadly agree with all the broken user experiences you pointed out here and have a few of my own pet peeves. There is a lot Google can do with AI. I hope they deliver!
I would guess, that like Microsoft, Google is run by engineers who think that everybody is impressed by the capabilities enough to struggle with the software to get to the capabilities. Both companies only have respectable products that are old enough to have the rough edges knocked off.
Except Windows that still isn’t as good as a twenty year old Apple OS.
I’ve seen much worse in banking. Engineer driven culture tend to pivot towards solution, sometimes leading to great product with mediocre UX and detachment from business impact.
But I think with more devs leveraging AI, they will develop better product sense. Same with designers and PMs, these three role might overlap more with the help of AI.
"stop hiding behind XYZ"
I worked at Google for the past 10 years and I think you have made some really great points.
These are my 2 cents:
- Google's size today is creating silos between organisations and complexity for navigation
- rapid hiring and increasing layers mean slower decision making process & politics
- Google's investor influence and size means it needs to be more cautious than any other startups in every move it takes
- there's growing disconnect between Google's senior management with the world today
Having said that, I think Google is well-aware of the issues and is trying to address the issues. The AI race is gonna be a marathon instead of a sprint, so we will see!
Products reflect founders. Company culture permeates more than we expect. Startups optimize for the user experience. Google (and most big tech) optimizes for how it operates on their platform and meets internal requirements. We all know this. And yet we somehow think maybe this time Lucy won’t pull the football away from Charlie Brown at the last second.
Wouldn't AI Studio be analogous to OpenAI Playground? But I guess Google promotes AI Studio more.
Here's another weird quirk: as a developer, if I want to prompt based off a YouTube video, it's possible using Google's APIs! But not Gemini's API, you have to use Vertex AI, obviously...
Sometimes what you build is secondary to why …
They are unfortunately poised to have their Zoom-pandemic moment and become an MBA case study:
Everyone communicating virtually but the tool everyone uses remains unchanged ->
Everyone using AI to write text but the tool everyone uses remains unchanged