I’ve been complaining for years about Google’s various UI/UX problems.

As the most recent example, I got a notification that I had over 10,000 views on the site yesterday. Cool. Well, except I had those views on Wednesday, and got the alert yesterday.

Yes, they have a service called traffic “alerts” that doesn’t send an actual alert until 24 hours later. That’s not an alert. That’s a report—barely.

But no big deal. Probably an easy fix, right? Let’s just let them work on it? Nope. I and others have been complaining about this same exact problem for over 6 years, including sending support emails into the least monitored inbox in the Sol planetary system.

They don’t care, and even worse, they don’t seem to realize that they should. A recent Hacker News post asks an important question: If Google Sucks So Bad, Why Are People Still Using It?

Good question, and I think the answer is quite simple—Google’s features and stability have thus far been more compelling than its faults because there hasn’t been a strong enough competitor.

I think Cloudflare is changing that.

Clouflare is Borging-up tons of internet spaces that used to belong to other companies. And they’re doing it while providing stable services and a modern UI.

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They’re cutting into the WAF space, third-party web integrations, zero trust, internal VPNs, content distribution, DNS hosting, and countless others.

Importantly, they are constantly innovating and—check this out—they answer support requests. They’re responsive. They’re listening and they’re adjusting to what they think customers need.

This is the Star Trek opposite of Google doing all these same services. For them, they build a cryptic UI, that people struggle to use, and they proceed to not change that UI for years and years. Best part of it? There’s no one to email. No one to call. It’s basically saying:

Hey we made a thing without any care for how easy it is to use, but it’s kind of the most stable thing out there because we’re Google. Maybe you’ve heard of us. Oh, and don’t complain because nobody’s listening. You’re welcome.

How I Imagine Them Talking In My Head

We accepted that. I accepted that. Despite saying for nearly a decade that I was done with Google. I never left because I never could.

And I can’t shake the feeling that Cloudflare knows this, and that they’re working to pull all these core-internet-infrastructure services from them.

I hope they do.