Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding.
They are all pretty par for the course. Google used to be outstanding... but I'm not sure of a single product they have that is outstanding (def: significantly better than the competition) anymore. On the other hand I rarely use any google products these days, so maybe I'm not the one to be judging.
As far as I can tell, if judged by the marketplace (and breaking ties with which product I like better), Google has run away with the ball on all of those, and Gemini seems to at least be competitive.
The only major product I'd say they've sunk below acceptability on is Search, which is demonstrably dogshit now...though I suspect it's more that they have changed their definition of what Search is for, from "helping users efficiently find other websites that are useful to them" to "A convenient on-ramp to, many times per day, capture the current user intent and steer them toward something that earns Google some ad revenue."
GMail and Google Maps were revolutionary when they came out, sure, but the vast majority of Google's products now are... fine? at best? And a lot of their "big products" were acquisitions that they absorbed in order to further the core goal of the business - to organize all the world's information and use it to serve ads to people.
Meanwhile, Google has a litany of products they've started internally, launched, ran for a while, and then let stagnate or canned entirely; anecdotally I've heard that this is because your bonuses at Google hinge on your ability to launch a product and not your ability to support a product, so it's beneficial to get something launched and then immediately leave to go launch another project rather than polish the one you just launched into something to be proud of.
I'm not sure if that's true, but it would certainly explain a lot; if Google launches something and it's bad or it doesn't click, they just give up on it. Google Wave, a half-dozen chat apps that I can think of, Stadia, and dozens of others. Things that Google launched, which had problems or didn't hit mass adoption instantly, and then just petered out and were retired with all of the time and energy and money put into them arguably wasted - products that people wanted, and wanted to succeed, but which weren't revolutionary successes at launch so they weren't worth further investment.
Meanwhile, they (and most of the industry) are pushing AI for some reason despite the fact that almost no one actually wants AI to be the only way that people interact with information.
This all reinforces what I've been saying about Google for decades: they're not creating things that users want to use, they're creating things that they want users to use. Sometimes those things align, but when they don't then it's not worth further investment (except, apparently, AI).
Personally I much prefer Fastmail to Gmail. The site is way faster and more cohesively designed. Fastmail supports jmap, and way more imap extensions (including push support on Apple mail). They have helpful humans handling support requests. And they do all of that with what seems like 1/10th or less the number of employees.
The only thing I like more about Gmail is their native mobile apps. Fastmail’s official mobile app is a web view.
I also can’t do wildcard filters on “to” or “from”. For example, in my GApps I have it set up to route all emails not associated with a specific user to my primary user. So that it’s easier to make throwaway emails. I want to filter all to:`X.X@domain.tld` to a certain folder. No can do.
It just feels restricted.
The last time i tried using gmaps i got ads and the thing could figure out where i was on the roads. It was comical as i always remembered google maps being better than apple. Today tho, apple beats them hands down.
Googles products that do not get cancelled are pretty mediocre in todays market. They can build useful things but if it doesnt have ads in it, it gets axed
Maps & Gmail & Search all have plenty of accumulating flaws... but they also completely defined their product category and today are among the most popular software products ever made.
"among the most popular" doesn't need either of those to be true.
Few here would argue that it’s an outstanding product.
Apple Maps and Waze is better for directions. Apple has better CarPlay integration and HUD. Google Maps is way better at searching for things like restaurants or local businesses but not as much the nav part.
I have to use Gmail at work and it is just terrible.
I don’t think it has a public interface, though. It’s really a developer resource.
They were at the time.
I guess those gaussian splats on Apple Maps could be p. neat.
OsmAnd’s UI really doesn’t suit me, and there are a few others that I personally liked even less.
But Organic Maps ticks enough boxes to come close. I’ve been using Organic Maps on iOS for driving, and it’s tolerable. And for offline mapping it’s a godsend.
If I’m dealing with adware either way, may as well use the best.
Not only does an upstart have to overcome the switching costs, they have to actually survive, and not just get hoovered up by acquisition and then Our-Incredible-Journeyed.
Support is part of the package when it comes to product and their support SUCKS.
I would absolutely NEVER use GCP for any business I was in charge of. Google cannot be trusted.
¹literally, phones can now demand you put them in A/C b/c they're dying
²I reported once that a jetway was 3D modeled as being like 8 stories high. Google couldn't confirm that, and closed the request. I reported a business as not being present, while my GPS showed me as being at the alleged address, that also couldn't be confirmed. My GPS trace would have seen me walk the whole block, twice!
³as designated navigator in my relationship, I can tell her "leftish" or "rightish", and she understands what I mean. Where I live a lot of the intersections' designs appear as if a civil engineer was given artistic license, and so sometimes the direction is "5-way intersection, left-ish". "Left" is a bad direction when there are two lefts. Of course … me & her have developed a fairly extensive lexicon over years of long road trips, too.
It has support for phones overheating in the sun. I don't think any phone can get to overwhelming temperatures by itself.
What are you comparing to?
Their ChromeOS hardware was nice but had lackluster software and by the time it was EoL'd, never got the love of ChromeOS-present.
Google TV generally gets outpaced by onn (Walmart's brand) on cost and value proposition.
And also the fact they have shown time and time again that they just kill products over and over again.
For example, their "chat" app has churned 3? 4? times now? Their assistant app has churned from whatever the OG assistant was to now Gemini. Wave churned to "+" in the social category, and that's dead now.
The default placement in Android probably helps a lot, or other things, like forced signups into adjacent products (e.g., like + was doing for a while).
I believe they’ve had at least 58 different products with chat / messaging.
https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googl...
I can't imagine that no other 'Google Workspace' organizations want to actually save their employee data rather than irrevocably delete it forever.
At some point GoogleTalk was one of the leading global text messengers, and then it was basically destroyed by Google itself.
All of them named "Hangouts" no doubt.
Well ...
Definitely not a developer machine based on how they presented it in google IO. So if you write software, it's not looking like it'll be relevant whatsoever. I hope to be proven wrong.
Why would I build my little web-apps and backends in the cloud when I can run things faster locally?
> Why would I build my little web-apps and backends in the cloud when I can run things faster locally?
Because in a lot of companies, your machine is actually just a portal to a remote desktop.
Not the first time an incumbent has four aces in hand and appears to be entirely unable to make anything of it.
> and if there are lessons to draw from that
Lesson 1: doing shit is hard
Lesson 2: money rules so milking the cow wins over taking the slightest risk
If you are, obviously you need the VM.
I use Claude Code CLI myself (inside a VM, to isolate it from the host) for >90% of my needs. For the remaining fraction - email scours, cloud drive searches, other third-party connections - the desktop application is surprisingly decent. I don't even have more than half a dozen connectors enabled. In the VM I have separate, personally managed access tokens available for various third-party services. Wouldn't really try to maintain more than 5-6, otherwise it gets too confusing. [ß]
The desktop application mostly Just Works[tm] with SSO. At least when M365 doesn't suffer from their 4-times-a-day auth outage.
ß: A lot of APIs and authentication systems were designed in the stone age. You either need a 1:1 permissioned access token that can do horrendous damage, or you deal with ultra-granular, confusing and ill-designed scoping jungle where nothing makes sense. Atlassian, I'm looking at you especially. At least an MCP server, provisioned with a reasonably done service account, doesn't have all of your powers to get things wrong with.
The answer is probably as simple as "no one thought not to do that."
---
I know different people work on these things so I can't do more than guess about how engineering culture cuts across teams, but given the sheer amount of carelessness and sloppiness in Anthropic's software I have to imagine they're burning investor money in training and inference because the code to do it is as bad as the rest of their software.
> Get an app to open this 'x-apple.systempreferences' link
> Your PC doesn't have an app that can open this link. Try looking for a compatible app in the Microsoft Store.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1rlc71n/claude_de...
1. micro VM
2. agent on the VM
3. software bundled into the VM
It's self-modifying apps that are sealed off from touching parts of the computer they shouldn't.
On my work computer, where I never manage any photos, have no iCloud account and never will, I have to keep this app installed and anytime I so much as AirDrop a png to my computer I am prompted to "Add to Photos" with it. No thank you.
The .app is actually only 41MB, so obviously they've moved the majority of it to some mystery-meat libraries or frameworks installed elsewhere anyway.
I frequently make this error when I talk. My brain thinks of different ways to phrase what I want to say, but when I speak it starts with one and finishes with another. The result is almost always wrong in the way the title is, ie some variant of a double negation.
Sometimes it happens when I type, though I try to read it multiple times so often catch it.
If I didn't know from experience that directed properly claude can be powerful, knowing that they used it to create that CLI would be instant runaway based on very reasonable heuristics - if they are not able to use their product to create a decent piece of software that is not even sophisticated then it seems futile for me to try.
I just do not understand. I feel like most HN could vibe code better claude CLI in claude than the CLI (and certainly just write one) than what we have to deal with to use subscription.
When management at $DAYJOB brought the hammer down and said, "Everyone has to use genAI all the time, OR ELSE," I expected to be blown away by the tool I was avoiding due to ethical concerns, aesthetic objections, humanism, and long-term thinking.
I was born away, but not in a good way.
The CLI is _bad_. I've seen it randomly fail to render anything at all on the terminal multiple times. It has a vim-mode, but it's painfully buggy, and I can literally outrun it - if I try to type too quickly after hitting Esc for normal mode, it just doesn't return to normal mode. It's I was keeping track of the bugs in the Claude TUI, but gave up because it was taking _too much of my time_ to do so.
If nothing else, I'd say Claude shows convincingly that success is not the default for vibecoding.
Yes, it technically does the job, and no, I don't think I've ever used a worse TUI.
There's a lot of opportunity to leverage LLMs to make codebases less bloated and less reliant on complex but human user friendly dependencies that not many people seem to be taking advantage of.
What major cross platform app isn't based on Electron or Tauri? Slack, Discord, VS Code, Teams, Notion...
I did consider experimenting with the Routines feature on the desktop app, but I'm leaning towards whipping together something with cron. I saw another poster here who has a daily PR summary routine that I think would be handy, as I have quite a few repos where I'm a sporadic contributor but would like to keep tabs.
The web app is definitely a bit of a problem. IF there is a native app on desktop or if claude cli is much faster, i haven't tried them.
After all, the last time I encountered Hyper-V it was in the context of copy protection that prevented crackers from observing or interfering with video game protection
But I almost always think of things from a talent-pool-first perspective. Perhaps there are actual technical issues like what Boris was referring to.
If they're too lazy to learn java, haxe has hxwidgets[0]. Haxe is pretty damn close to js. If a dev can't handle that, they should turn in their keyboard and get a job that doesn't require a brain, like being a senator or federal judge.
They are releasing at breakneck pace, it's pretty funny how vibed their products feel sometimes
Because they're vibe-coded ultra sloppy code. And it really shows.
Mythos, Fable, please do the thing with the VM. Make no mistakes.
My agent harness spins up a VM too, but it spins up on demand, cools down in 10 minutes and warms up when I focus back on the app.
The files it works on actually lives in a mount.
People take more time to type a prompt than the VM takes to spin up on a fast machine and on a slow machine, the cooldown naturally frees RAM back to the machine.
It seems like the VM is a core part of how you use the application.
Don't be naive and don't think they don't already do this.
Why not ask itself and see what it says about it. "Claude, why are you running in a virtual machine and what are you doing?".
/shrug
If you are using an AI system to read your codebase from your local folder and make changes, whether or not you have a VM running or not is inconsequential. The Claude extension and/or CLI doesn’t need a VM to send code back to the mothership, you’re already running an executable program and granting it directory access.
Whether you trust a company as a vendor is typically based on their privacy policy, EULA, and your contract with them (if applicable). Those are the bits that have legal enforceability.
Edit: yes, with WSL2 I believe in both cases.
I would have assumed almost everyone would get a Mac/Linux computer to use coding agents because Unix is their "native" platform. It's Bash tool calls all the way down.
Does anyone know a source for reliable data on what coding agent apps devs are using? How many are using Code Claude CLI vs Claude Desktop, etc?
I want tools that meet me where I’m at, not tools that demand I change up my entire UX to interact with them.
The assumption is not “what’s wrong with Windows that it doesn’t work with <technology>,” more “what’s wrong with <technology> that it doesn’t work with Windows”
Why wouldn’t you want your thing to be cross platform
Not no way not no how!
Currently "Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it"
Should be "Claude Desktop spins up a VM with no way of stopping it"
People are very foolish. The younger generation needs to watch the Terminator franchise - it is all explained there.
It is written in Rust™, surely it is better than the rest of them.
/s