I agree that Google is well-positioned, but they were also well-positioned to take advantage of these synergies with Google Assistant for many years and I would say that that did not meaningfully materialize in a way that was helpful to me as an Android and Google ecosystem user.
"Its mobile and OS efforts essentially amount to parallel operations in the company; neither one is likely to become Google's new core, but more to layer on what that core is."
It's only partially true today - Android is good extension of several google products, like GMail, Maps and Calendar and they need to keep pushing that and making it better - for example the music store that'll automatically sync everything shown off at Google IO.
I don't use much in the way of Google-branded apps, so that category of integration isn't important to me. I know for others, like yourself, it is and I recognize that gap.
The idea may be that android benefits a lot more from integration with other google products. Although I'm not sure on how inter-alphabet cooperation is going.
I agree that Google Assistant is a strong differentiator for marketing the Pixel phone, but, I think Google is making a mistake not pushing it to more Android phones. For that matter, perhaps they should try to make it available as an app on iPhone and iPad ASAP also. I find the Google App to be very usable on my iPad, so why not update that same app to support Google Assistant?
It was long and boring presentation, so maybe I missed something this time but over the years Google keeps promising amazing stuff on Android and yet I'm to see someone doing something on Android that my iPhone can't(maybe they have the extra features, it's just that no one seems to be using those).
Oh and this stuff was amazing years ago, now it's boring. They apparently did some RAG applications that is usually a niche, specialised applications that small companies will do as SaaS. I doubt that any of this will see wide adoption, therefore I expect everything to be dropped and added to the list of "Killed by Google".
IMHO, Google needs to focus. Stop throwing things to the wall and see what sticks, instead do something substential and stick with it.
I believe, their history of messaging apps, makes it very difficult to rely on Google in this area. Organizations that are already in Google's ecosystem will probably use it, but I doubt it will have any significance otherwise. As long as you don't have a need to use it towards other organizations it should work (but don't ever expect Google to implement a feature that is requested by their customers).
Indeed, focus is a great thing. Although weirdly enough, Android is still part of Google as well; you'd think that'd be a prime candidate to move alongside Google as its own venture.
But regardless, I didn't say "Google dragged their feet" I said "Google has an incentive to drag their feet". It's the incentive that scares me. I still trust Google to some degree, but not unconditionally.
I am worried that so much of the "integration" people are calling for is integration with the services of just one company, Google. And most people that want to replace the built-in iOS app defaults want to replace them with Google apps so they can use more Google services. Is that healthy for the web?
Now, Google offers the best-in-class web services in a number of domains. But I've never been very fond of many of them, and where Google apps are less than great I prefer to use the alternative--Yelp instead of Google Local, standard IMAP email instead of Gmail, Wolfram Alpha for some searches, etc.
To Google's credit, it is easier to use an alternative search engine with Android than it is to use just about any alternative service on iOS. But I don't think we're going to see Google Now integrating with Bing maps or Duckduckgo or Yelp anytime soon.
I don't think they'll chop it because it's critical to the GSuite business side of things.
But it's probably not receiving love as whilst Ai has seen things like Photos revamped and the emergence of Google Assistance, the applicability of this to the business stuff is more difficult for compliance reasons and politics, etc. It's easier to focus on consumer when innovating.
The weirdest bit of all of the Google offerings, is the ever-diverging difference between the capabilities of the consumer Gmail accounts and the GSuite accounts. Google's tagline of "One Account, All of Google" is long dead in reality, and with it there seems to be a very different focus, innovation happens to the consumer and not to the business side, and never the twain shall meet.
Consumer accounts cannot use Google Calendar's "Find a time", and business accounts cannot fully use a list of products so long that it's boring listing them.
Google Calendar is central to how I run my life... I even logged phonecalls with links to the audio files uploaded to Google Drive, as well as scans of post received (and categorised in Google Drive but linked from Google Calendar).
But the usefulness is being reduced, silo'd, splintered from the general usefulness of Android and the Google related family of products due to the split of Google into consumer-focused vs business-focused with less overlap.
I've not bought a Pixel phone for this reason either. What's the point when so much of it's selling point is software and that software doesn't work with GSuite accounts.
Think about the type of deep integration that Apple-owned
Siri has on iPhones, or Google-owned Gmail has on stock
Android phones, for instance. Those apps operate much more
contextually and fluidly, and far more powerfully, on
those phones than 3rd-party apps downloaded from an app
store would.
While I understand the point about Siri, Gmail (of all the Google apps)
seems like a terrible example of the same thing on the Android side (Maps and
its incestuous relationship with Play Services might be a better fit). What does
Gmail do that Microsoft's Outlook app couldn't do if Microsoft were willing to
invest the effort? Maybe I'm missing a feature I don't use, but the best I can
come up with is being bundled with the device, but even there if Microsoft struck
a deal with, say, Verizon, I don't think there's much Google could do about it.
That may be true with Apple (WebGL please?), but I haven't felt that way about Google before. I've always seen Android as a means to an end for them, to get more people using the web. Any further reading?
reply