Google, institutionally, still seems to have not realized that many users are now customers and not (or at least, in addition to) product. If you are receiving money from somebody, they are your customer, and you have a responsibility to provide at least vaguely good service.
I feel like Google is having difficulty internalizing concept of maintenance, of making what was theirs continuously theirs through recurring interventions. "Feature complete and not obsolete" seems like a common theme among some of killed by Google products, in line with this.
> Google, institutionally, still seems to have not realized that many users are now customers and not (or at least, in addition to) product. If you are receiving money from somebody, they are your customer, and you have a responsibility to provide at least vaguely good service.
I still use Google reflexively, but its quality is so low these days...for most of my searches ("[local business I don't know the URL of]", "[foo] wikipedia", "[foo] reddit", "[some library] docs") I'm pretty sure Bing or DDG would work fine.
YouTube is uncontested. Let me throw in a couple of others: for desktop maps, AFAIK Google is still tops (on my phone I use Apple Maps and it's...fine). For free email, AFAIK GMail is still the standard (despite various UI changes over the years that have made it worse).
I cannot tell you how many times I've seen a video I wanted to watch on Youtube and had it disappear on reloading the page/clicking another video and going back. Even opening in another tab doesn't work sometimes? (It registers a regular click rather than ctrl-click and loads the link normally rather than in a new tab.) Don't get me started on the way it takes control of your keyboard input on video pages in completely unintuitive way. Will the right arrow track forward or raise the volume? Depends on YT's mood, I guess.
It survives solely on network effect. I can't wait for a competitor, and several are waiting in the wing.
> for desktop maps, AFAIK Google is still tops (on my phone I use Apple Maps and it's...fine)
I use Apple Maps on desktop as well. In my area (Denver) they seem to have about the same number of unique issues, but
1. Mobile Google Maps is so, so terrible in terms of screen-space utilization, look and feel, and also its behavior doing turn-by-turn. I've never been anywhere close to as angry at my iPhone then when Google Maps confused me into a parking lot and the low-quality synthetic voice got nearly a minute behind in micromanaging my way out
2. Desktop Google Maps is a lot less usable if you refuse to give the entirety of Google.com precise location access. The move from maps.google.com -> google.com/maps marked the last time I asked it for directions.
Not sure if it's a US vs Norway thing but Google Maps keep confusing me by saying "keep left at the fork". Like what fork?! Oh, you mean don't exit the freeway...
Google search has basically zero objective advantage over other free alternatives. The only thing keeping it so dominant is the public's lack of reason to experiment with others.
I disagree on search: I use DDG most of the time, and it uses Bing. I'll turn to Google (using "!g" in DDG) occasionally if I'm not finding what I want, but for most searches, DDG is sufficient.
However, I'll also say that sometimes the alternatives to Google aren't very good, though they do of course exist. Anything that requires an Apple device is a no-go for me, for instance, so things like Apple Maps are out. Google Maps for me is a must-have, for instance; I use it for navigating Tokyo on a daily basis and something like OsmAnd isn't going to work here at all (Google Maps finds businesses, tells me when they're open, and tells me exactly how to get there on public transit.) Google Docs is pretty useful for some things too; I don't use it for anything too important (I use LibroOffice at home for that), but for something I want to be able to access from my phone or work computer, it's great. The competition seems to be MS Office 365, and I'm not going to use that: I hate MS and I see no reason to pay for a subscription service here when Google's free offering is fine. Google Calendar is really useful too, and lets me share my calendar with others easily.
Comcast is truly evil and horrible, but since the US loves monopolies and lets companies like Comcast establish local/regional monopolies, people there are stuck with them. In better-run countries like where I now live, this doesn't happen, because there's tons of competition for internet service.
YouTube really is pretty close to a monopoly though; it's not like you can just go to Vimeo and find the same videos.
Oh they don't care because people keep paying or they make money from the customer data they sell to others. At my employer we just switched away from google because they decided to double our monthly bill because we didn't want to enter into a contract. We could never reach our account manager or anyone at support that was helpful, they are just too big to care now.
We are still dealing with stupid Google issues like any time our mail relay sends mail to Gmail servers it's 50/50 whether they decide to block it saying we aren't authenticated properly even though our SPF record is indeed valid.
