I’ve maintained this idea for a while as well. It’s really only after Pichai took over that Google and Android both have started scrapping useful programs/apps/services, made needless change to make products worse, and in general just haven’t really innovated much at all. At least when compared to how the company was run when Larry Page and Erik Schmidt were running the company.
This dude has made Google boring.
And evil.
That was Eric
Evil-er
Wait, there are two Erics?
I also have the impression that google jumped on the feature treadmill that microsoft is on. Working with Google ads + analytics in 2016 was a pleasant experience, it was fairly simple and it worked. I could easily maintain it as a side project next to my main job, but a few years later and it had become a feature treadmill where all new features seemed to have 3 goals in common: waste my time by making me migrate settings to basically end up with the same end result, make the product more convoluted to use + milk more money per customer. Add to that, that facebook campaigns were both easier to run and resulted in more good leads for us and it doesn’t look good for Google.
Enshittify👏Enshittify👏Enshittify👏Enshittify👏
Gemini👏Gemini👏Gemini👏Gemini👏Gemini👏
Apple pie 🥧 Apple pie 🥧 Apple pie 🥧 Apple pie 🥧 Apple pie
I wonder if this correlates with my recent desires to de-Google my life. I’m steadily growing less happy about daily using their services and them holding all my info.
I’m open to suggestions for cloud photo storage/management on par with Google Photos if anyone has some. I’m looking into FOSS but would rather pay for the service in the long run. These days I’m too busy to learn to be an effective server admin and keep up with the technology.
Proton, has email, cloud storage and VPN services.
I’ll second Proton. It sucks to have to pay for services again to have something that matches the generous free shit that we got before… but seems those wild west days of the internet, unless you were grandfathered on or have to give up a lot of info in return… are now long gone.
If you’re not paying for a service, then you’re the product. I never understood the expectation that people should just provide you email and storage for free, because?
This saying is actually horseshit, though. The profit motive and infinite growth model of capitalism guarantees that even if you are paying for a product, your data and attention — everything that can be — will be monetized eventually.
The saying should be “if the service isn’t open-source and E2E encrypted, you’re the product”
It should be noted, though, that the “if you aren’t paying, you’re the product” mantra isn’t always true. FOSS exists.
And I know that seems obvious to anybody reading this on Lemmy, but I’ve had people refuse to use good open source software because they fundamentally refuse to trust something being provided to them for free.
You can also feel good about supporting Proton. They are literally bootstrapped as a service and only rely on what we pay them. They never took any money from vc or other sources.
If you have more than one person who should/would/could move over to Proton, they have a family plan and every so often they bring back their visionary plan which is a better version of the family.
I’m particulay looking for.the functionality of Google Photos, not just a cloud storage solution but a photo catalogue integrated with my camera among other things. Does Proton offer this?
No, Ente has more photo gallery functionality though. Not sure about it being “integrated” with the camera. What do you mean by this?
The photos I take on my cellphone are instantly catalogued, scanned for metadata, and synchronized with my gallery. The app then gives me fun photo displays and reminders of my past daily.
I do nothing but take photos and pay a small fee.
There is a self hosted alternative for google photos if you have NAS. I don’t remember the name and it’s not nextcloud but that project have web and mobile apps to sync and they catalog photos with face and name similar to google. If you are specifically looking for storing and syncing photos mega.nz is decent but pricey alternatively pClound offers one time purchase during holiday season which is much more affordable.
Immich, is probably what you’re thinking of.
Yeah, thanks for reminding the name.
PhotoPrism is kind of that thing on self hosted NAS.
Or alternatively both biggest NAS makers Synology and Qnap have their own things for that.
Self hosted immich is by far the closest. It has many if the same features but all runs locally
Me too, trying to figure out what I’m gonna do about Gmail.
Lots of people here say Proton, but I’d also consider selfhosting my email on either a home server or the cloud, whichever meets my criteria for redundancy to stay online vs cost
I hear self-hosting email is a really complicated thing if you want it secure and all that. I never tried, just hearsay.
The only problem with self-hosting is that big coorps like google or microsoft will put you on their spam list, so your e-mails will land in the spam folder when you send emails to gmail or outlook addresses. Other than that it’s not a huge hassle as stuff like https://mailcow.email/ or mailu or mail-in-a-box exist.
google or microsoft will put you on their spam list
Ah, wow. Yeah. That’s a big problem, or would be for me anyway. No time or energy to deal with that issue.
Just make sure you add DKIM and all that. Mail in a box will do it mostly for you and it should take care of the spam issues at least until someone reports your emails as spam. For a personal email that shouldn’t happen.
Basically sending emails without DKIM is like serving a webpage on HTTP; nobody should trust the page you got was not altered and the domain is properly registered.
Safe yourself some time and use virtualmin if you want to host mail yourself.
I’ve considered the same, but the Google Photo smart auto-tagging is just too useful
make an issue on immich
That already works.
I’m an iPhone user, and i’ll probably stay that way, but I’ve tried to de-google my life as much as possible and I’d consider de-appleing if there was an alternative that wasn’t google’d up. What do anti-google self-host folks do about smartphones? Android is “open” i guess, but it’s crammed full of adware and trackers and all sorts of garbage.
Linux for desktop is an easy-peasy transition; linux for mobile, no so much
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Ai summary of the article if you don’t wanna click the link:
A recent poll found that 76% of respondents agreed that Google CEO Sundar Pichai is comparable to Steve Ballmer, who led Microsoft during a period of decline. Both men took over from revolutionary founders as business managers focused on profits rather than innovation. However, under Pichai’s leadership, Google has lost its dominance in areas like search and AI, with competitors like OpenAI making strides. Many argue Google search has become cluttered with irrelevant results, while former employees say visionary leadership is lacking. There is a sense that Pichai’s Google is no longer the innovative company it was and risks losing further ground to emerging technologies if it does not recapture its start-up spirit.
Good bot. I will say Google never had public dominance in AI products, only research.
Sundar is less entertaining though.
Sundar is ballmer with less cocaine
And less sweat
And less mass
And less of my axe
And more hair
I agree. It’s time Sundar hits retirement and they put someone more visionary at the top.
Google has become seriously stale.
I was just remembering how back in 2010 on my iPhone 4S I could receive a text message while driving and tell Siri to read it to me, with no internet connection. And it would, and I could reply by Siri as well
But my current Android phone (I love Android it’s really great overall) cannot do that if I don’t have an internet connection!
Why??? Why haven’t they baked certain basic offline capabilities into Assistant and only need internet for search queries? Makes no sense but it’s one of those small indicators that Sundar is not paying attention.
Because they use every reason to bring you online asap. Only then they can get as much data as they want. For example your location, no matter if via GPS or nearby Wifis.
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And I swear to god, when they released the pixel 6, they said Assistant could do things much faster and without an Internet connection because all the processing for certain tasks (like language recognition, timers and sending messages) was all done on-board.
What the hell happened to that? Assistant has felt slower than ever for everything and more unhelpful every day
I can offer some insight. A friend of mine recently switched to the new one plus and he’s finding all sorts of little things he misses from his pixel 6 pro. The background music discovery was one, as was the camera processing stuff.
It does feel like Google is on a nosedive with all its major products except for Gmail.
Gmail is no exception.
Maybe not but I haven’t noticed any worse change at all.
They put ads in.
Oh, that’s why I didn’t notice lol
I’m an Apple user, for the most part, and I’ve noticed lately that in the last 6-12 months Google Maps has deteriorated significantly for me while Apple Maps has gotten better and better. Even things you’d think would be similar, e.g. satellite imagery, for my area Google’s imagery is now a half-decade out of date while Apple’s is current.
It really does feel like most of Google’s consumer-facing products are languishing.
Google Maps has gotten worse and worse.
It’s now actively bloating a map with random businesses, making it difficult to use. And worse, it’s obscuring random businesses from search. I noticed it a while back if I googled “Chinese food”, a few places aren’t showing unless I zoom in really really close. And these are places with 100+ reviews.
Yeah it’s started inserting “totally not advertisements” like “take a left in 300 feet, past the McDonald’s”. More enshittification.
Five years ago, I would have said, “Nah, they can throw money at it and make it better. So we should stay.”
But now, Google has a massive history of giving up and killing products. Devs and open source are making comparable alternatives. The general public is turning on even Google Search. And even my own job is considering Google alternatives.
The next five years are going to be anybody’s game.
Using Google products is starting to feel like watching season 1 of a Netflix produced show - I don’t want to invest energy into something that’ll just get cancelled.
Couldn’t have said it better.
I still have an existential crisis whenever im faced with the decision of giving out my google voice number vs my normal one.
That’s honestly good to hear!
He’s really sweaty?
He yells a lot?
Lol being the top boss is not easy when you’re a Technical guy. He comes from a technical background hence the sweat. I can relate but these top jobs are best suited for guys from sales coz they know how to talk and play with words.
aRe YoU tElLiNg Me StEvE jObS wAs A sAlEs GuY¿?¿?¿?¿?¿?¿?
Lol its like comparing apple to oranges. Read about Sundar and Steve to get more info. About their background.
Does he “love this company!” tho?
I dunno, has he thrown any chairs at anyone yet?
I don’t know if OpenAI of all things is the contrast needed to show this. 😂
