Google gets away with GSuite feature postponing

5 points by vucetica 6 years ago | 3 comments

Our organization uses GSuite for emails and Google Drive.

About a year ago, we were thinking about implementing Slack and Confluence, but looking at google's offerings at the time (new Google Sites and Hangouts Chat), we postponed this migration and decided to stay with GSuite (use unfinished Google products in the meantime).

Unfortunately, Google keeps pushing them further into the future, and I don't mean "next month", but years into the future.

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/google-sites-improvements-new-roadmap.html

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/08/updates-to-hangouts-chat-migration.html

It seems to me like a deceiving tactics to keep customers on the hook.

Not sure what to do about it, though. Leaving GSuite is one option, but it comes with a cost and, of course, that cost is almost fatal for us, while I don't think that Google cares about losing a small customer like us.

Anyone else with the same problem?

finsrud 6 years ago |

Yes!

We've held off on adopting Slack because Hangouts Chat seemed promising. But here we are almost 3 years since it was introduced and there's still no integration with Gmail. Argh!

To add insult to injury, while we're stuck using crusty old Google Chat, (due to its integration with Gmail), Microsoft Teams is adding features regularly and has blown by Slack in terms of DAU.

Google Sites is even worse. "New" Google Sites was introduced in June of 2016. Since then, it's received very little attention in terms of ongoing development.

Meanwhile, companies like https://www.notion.so/ are completely eating their lunch (Notion has only 27 employees last time I checked). It's hard for me to believe that Google employees use Google Sites internally in its current state when there are so many better options out there.

I've lost all hope on Sites. I'm still hopeful that Google will make Hangouts Chat competitive with Slack and M$ Teams.

All that said, Gmail, Gcal, and Google Drive are still really really good. Even Hangouts Meet has improved significantly over the past year.

vucetica 6 years ago | |

Since we already use MS Office (and paying for Office 365 subscription), moving to MS "ecosystem" looks like more and more likely option.

The only problem there is video conferencing (Skype is awful), but we use some other solutions for that, anyways (as enterprise customers we are dealing with are really not accustomed to meet.

Can't believe that MS looks agile compared to Google when it comes to these things. It seems that Ad business is eating up all the talent over there...

finsrud 6 years ago | | |

> It seems that Ad business is eating up all the talent over there...

Yes, and trying to catch up with Amazon on cloud services.