> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much

Ok, I mean this sincerely.

You must never have used Microsoft tools.

They managed to get their productivity suite into schools 30 years ago to cover UX issues, even now the biggest pain of moving away is the fact that users come out of school trained on it. That also happens to be their best UX.

Azure? Teams? PowerBI? It's a total joke compared to even the most gnarly of google services (or FOSS tools, like Gerrit).

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hansmayer 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I do agree with you. Teams are a cancer and Azure UI sucks too. I do not use much MS products since essentially Win7 I have mainly used Linux as my work environment. But one thing MS used to be good at at least, was the documentation. If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support. With google its like...not even that.

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datadrivenangel 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

With continuous delivery and access to preview and beta features, the documentation is fragmented and scattered and half of it technically is for the previous version of the product with a different name but still mostly works because microsoft can't finish modernizing most software...

And the customer support is not great until you start really paying the big bucks for it.

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ghaff 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There was also MSDN. But it was also a different world at the time.

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dijit 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support.

But even then, contemporaries outclassed Microsoft by a lot.

It was culture back then to provide printed user manuals, I still have some from Sun Microsystems because it was the best resource I found to learn how storage appliances should work and the technical trade-offs of them.

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hansmayer 3 days ago | parent [-]

Fair enough, everyone delivered software in boxes and with 500 page manuals. I still maintain MS did invest a lot in the quality of their documentation and they cared about developers - otherwise the Petzold series would have never happened (or the MS Press for that matter).

	▲	dijit 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ah yeah, fair, the Microsoft Press had some absolute bangers.

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hnlmorg 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I hate Microsoft with the passion of a thousand burning stars, yet even I still think Google products have worse UX than their Microsoft counterparts.

MS Teams is definitely terrible. But I’d take that over Google Meets.

Google Docs isn’t even remotely as good as Office 365.

And Azure, for all its many faults, is still less confusing than GCP.

Thankfully I seldom have to touch either other these companies half-baked UIs.

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dijit 3 days ago | parent [-]

> I’d take [teams] over Google Meets

What? Why?

Honestly your entire comment is almost exact polar opposite to how I feel.

GCP Makes total sense if you know anything about systems administration, Google docs is limited for things like custom fonts (IE; not gonna happen) but it's simple at least and I can give people a link to click and it's gonna look the same for them.

But, honestly, the Teams one is baffling. I can't think of a single thing Meet does worse than Teams.

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ipdashc 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah that seriously whiplashed me too, I'm genuinely confused. Google Meets has always worked completely fine for me, good performance, works well on mobile, Firefox, etc. Nothing special but it works. Probably my favorite of all the meeting apps.

Teams meanwhile is absolutely my least favorite, takes forever to load, won't work in Firefox, nags me to download the app, confusing UI. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they like teams.

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hnlmorg 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because it’s a low bitrate micky mouse toy.

MS Teams might have its issues (and let’s be clear, i agree there are a great many issues) but it has most, if not all, of the Enterprise features you need from a video conferencing suite.

Whereas Google Meets feels more like a cut down toy you’d give to your grandparents.

It’s the same thing with Google Docs. They’re technically impress for the era they were launched, but they’re stuck in the 2010s. Doing anything outside of the basics quickly becomes far far more frustrating than using O365.

Microsoft might write a lot of terrible software with some questionable design choices, but they understand enterprise uses far better than Google.

Even Google Workspaces is severely limited once your business grows beyond 50 people.

I guess if you only work in startups then Google might seem like an easy win. But for any business that’s more established, you just constantly run into huddles with Googles suite of software.

As for GCP, I’ve been burned too many times with their support processes. 7 days to approve a GPU quota. Account managers literally trying to steal business secrets (when I worked for an AI start up and Google were stagnating in the AI space). And so on and so forth. Though I’ve not been hugely impressed with Azure either; they constantly break managed services and ballsup scalability promises and then refuse to admit it until we present them with empirical evidence. It really feels like the best cloud engineers have left Microsoft (or maybe never joined?).

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kiwijamo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've used Meet a few times for video calls and I was amazed at how poorly it worked given the amount of resources Google has at their disposal. I've never had a good video call on Meets. I've had a few Meet calls where over time the resolution and bitrate would be reduced to such a low point I couldn't even see the other person at all (just a large blocky mess). Whereas Teams (for all its flaws) normally has no major issues with the video quality. Teams isn't without its flaws and I do occassionally fall back to ZOom for larger group video calls but at the end of the day Teams video calling sort of just works fine. Not great but not terrible either. YMMV of course.

	▲	dijit 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've had the complete opposite experience. Meet has been rock solid for me whilst Teams has been an absolute nightmare. The thing is though both Meet and Teams use centralised server architectures (SFUs: Selective Forwarding Units for Google, "Transport Routers" for Teams), so your quality issues likely come down to network routing rather than the platforms themselves. The progressive quality degradation you're describing on Meet sounds like adaptive bitrate doing its job when your connection to Google's servers is struggling. The reason Teams might work better for you is probably just dumb luck with how your ISP routes to Microsoft's network versus Google's. For me in Sweden, it's the opposite ... Teams routes my media through relays in France, which adds enough latency that people constantly interrupt each other accidentally. It's maddening. Meanwhile, Meet's routing has been flawless. But even if Teams works for your particular network setup, let's not pretend it's a good piece of software. Teams is an absolute resource hog that treats my CPU like a space heater and my RAM like an all-you-can-eat buffet. The interface is cluttered rubbish, it takes ages to start up, and the only reason anyone tolerates it is because Microsoft bundled it with Office 365. Your mileage definitely varies... sounds like you've got routing that favours Microsoft's infrastructure. Lucky you, I suppose, but that doesn't make Teams any less dogwater for those of us stuck with their poorly-placed European relays.
	▲	Orphis 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		As someone who worked on Meet at Google, it seems that it could have been networking to the datacenters where the call is routed from, some issues with UDP comms on your network which triggered a bad fallback to WebRTC over TCP. Could also have been issues with the browser version you used. Since Teams is using the very old H264 codec and Meet is using VP8 or VP9 depending on the context, it's possible you also had some other issues with bad decoding (usually done in software, but occasionally by the hardware). Overall, it shouldn't be representative of the experience on Meet that I've seen, even from all the bug reports I've read.