Google Workspace Updates

Personally I hate GMail.

1. Threads are collapsed into a 1-dimensional list making moderately complex discussions hard to follow.

2. Deleting many messages is very slow. With Thunderbird I can mash <Delete> while scanning subjects and pause for a second to see the actual message body. I get a lot of email that I need to sort through or be aware of so my morning generally consists of quickly (15min) going through up to 100 conversions and getting quick status updates or just deleting uninteresting threads. For whatever reason doing this in GMail is a complete slog. (I'm not sure why, they have the <y> shortcut to archive and have a preview pane but it is just way slower, maybe they need to precache a few messages on either side of the current one?)

3. Threads are based on subject meaning that unrelated messages get grouped together. (Apparently this was changed in 2019 (https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/threading-changes-in-gmail-conversation-view.html) but I've definitely seen this issue for at least a year after that announcement when I stopped using GMail)

I do admit that most of GMail is pretty good. But for me these limitations are enough to really impede my workflow. I've found that Thunderbird is the least-bad option for me. However Thunderbird's performance is quite poor. I do have 350k messages downloaded locally but even opening my empty inbox sometimes causes lockups. IIUC this is because Thunderbird is mostly single-threaded but apparently there…

The competitive gap with Discord in terms of media quality is probably something like:

* Need a low-latency SFU. This should be very doable; not only are there a lot of good FOSS SFUs to build on top of these days, the history of the Matrix team is actually that we built VoIP stacks fulltime before we shifted focus to Matrix, and we've built MCUs and media servers of all flavours in the past. MSC3401 should also give us a competitive edge given latency will be automagically minimised by using the physically closest decentralised SFU, thus letting anyone bring their SFU to the party.

* Needs a SFU with good rate control (and/or FEC). This is probably the single most important thing to get right in terms of quality. Signal wrote up a good overview of why: https://signal.org/blog/how-to-build-encrypted-group-calls/

* Excellent noise cancellation (and background noise elimination, microphone scratch noise elimination etc). Ideally you need something like https://krisp.ai/ or https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/06/background-noise-reduction-cancellation-update.html in the mix - but doing this in an E2EE-friendly and privacy preserving manner is Hard. However, just like we solved E2EE full text search by doing it clientside and making the indexes gossipable between your clients (https://github.com/matrix-org/seshat), we'll have a go at doing something similar for this problem too.

* Excellent automatic gain control. The importance of normalising/compressing…

I do not find your pricing any more desirable or palatable

I currently use DocuSign, for my plan, it would be more expensive to use this

I really want a self hosted, self branded, embedded solution with API access. You have this, but it is only available in the most expensive Enterprise plan. I'm not an enterprise and there is no discount for self hosting

My plan, given the open core alternatives are missing the mark for me, is to use the Google Workspace solution included in what we already pay (https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/08/esignature-google-docs-google-drive.html)

I'm open to reconsidering if you offer the right features at an acceptable price. I'd prefer a fixed price for self hosted, rather than something based on users and docs sent counts

...thoughts from a potential customer...

On the extreme end, a web app can do all of its own rendering in a canvas with WebGL/WebGPU. Some apps do exactly this: Figma, Google Maps, Google Docs. Just to name a few. (edit: Earlier I claimed PDFjs uses canvas, but it does not. I was confusing it with Google Docs [1].)

It's a thing you can do. But it is very bad for extensions and extension developers for the same reasons that Java applets, Flash, and Shockwave were bad for the web. These apps are difficult for end users to customize. It's a real bane to tinkerers. And it's a shame that "view source" has slowly grown completely useless over the decades.

[1]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Based-Rendering-Update.html

> It’s going to be extremely hard to get even decent results without targeting real DOM instead of going pure-canvas, and you can’t get excellent results without doing so.

Sure you can. Google Docs switched to canvas three years ago: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Based-Rendering-Update.html

This wasm application renders to canvas and works fine for me: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/

This one too: https://flutterweb-wasm.web.app/

Flutter and Google Docs gave up on the DOM because they couldn't get it working well enough, consistently enough across browsers. When you draw to canvas you get more consistent results because you control all the drawing.

From the discussion linked in the Webkit repo:

--- start quote ---

Philip: First, google slides is written in svg, so that won't change with this. But google docs is using canvas, so they might be a candidate.
… they might want to integrate this peicemeal, this API allows them to start to adopt the feature slowly,

--- end quote ---

This reads to me like "Google Docs decided to go with canvas sometime ago [1], found it to be too hard, so pushed Chrome to have a way to support HTML in Canvas. The rest is just post-hoc justifications"

[1] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Based-Rendering-Update.html