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In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

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Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#271

Post by coldtea »

colbyh wrote: post #224
fiblye wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The above poster said few, not zero. Google has killed off dozens upon dozens more officially launched projects.

the four listed are the biggest products in the world in their space. the first three would be multi billion dollar companies outside of Google. not to mention Search itself, Docs has become a fantastic product as has Photos. of course they have killed hundreds of potentially great projects (RIP Reader) but give the company their due - they know how to build products.

>the first three would be multi billion dollar companies outside of Google

Gmail got popular because it's free (and had large space for a free client). If it wasn't to be outside of Google, it would make an insignificant amount of money through ads, or started to charge (in which case users would flee).

Ditto for Chrome. There are 4-5 free browsers, nobody would use a browser that's not free (a required for it to be a multi-billion dollar company). At best they'd sell their search bar default setting, like FF does, which is less than a billion IIRC.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#272

Post by ATsch »

hueving wrote: post #256
colbyh wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the four listed are the biggest products in the world in their space. the first three would be multi billion dollar companies outside of Google. not to mention Search itself, Docs has become a fantastic product as has Photos. of course they have killed hundreds of potentially great projects (RIP Reader) but give the company their due - they know how to build products.

Gmail would not be a multi-billion dollar company. It doesn't make money (remember they don't target ads on email content anymore). You'd have to roll in Google apps for business to get to the money making part. Chrome definitely isn't a multi-billion dollar company. There is no revenue stream there. Firefox only exists by selling the search bar and being a non-profit.

I think that it's pretty obvious that products like chrome are not designed to make money. They are simply designed to enable control of the platform.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#273

Post by coldtea »

shaklee3 wrote: post #210
sharmi wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of open source project, * if the maintainer is no longer able to take the project further, the code is still there an can be used as is, maybe with a few bugfixes. (ala, thunderbird). The code does not disappear overnight. r. * All the associated data is still yours and available. So no information is lost. * If it is very critical, you can develop it yourself further I am not an user of Inbox, but I can…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but inbox shared your same content as Gmail, right? If that's the case, nothing was lost.

People didn't use Inbox for unique content over Gmail. Both always had just their mails.

It's the UI interactions (plus some metadata), and those are gone.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#274

Post by coldtea »

thebooglebooski wrote: post #95
andrewstuart wrote: post #7

Google's shutdown of products and APIs seems to have led to critical level of trust loss amongst developers and influencers. It's time for Google to either fix this or get out of providing services and APIs to developers. Google doesn't seem to put any weight at all on the outcry every time its shutters another service/API. The trust must be restored. Google doesn't seem to understand that when they shut service X, t…

"The trust must be restored." Playing devil's advocate, what happens when the trust doesn't become restored? The company loses ad revenue? Developers flee in mass droves to...Yahoo and Microsoft? Look what happened when people "lost trust" in Facebook. Shares are down 4% relative to a year ago. Is the company permanently crippled? Are people revolting and moving to alternate forms of social media? Fewer of the people…

>Look what happened when people "lost trust" in Facebook. Shares are down 4% relative to a year ago. Is the company permanently crippled? Are people revolting and moving to alternate forms of social media? Fewer of the people immediately connected to your local graph are probably using Facebook. But that local loss of users gets completely offset by the new users they grow internationally.

The idea that because things are some way now they will be forever thusly hasn't panned out historically.

Once dominant IT companies are now dust. The same thing can happen to any company, including FB and Google is they piss enough people off.

And that's incremental. Today's annoyances matter.

Once all-mighty 99% of the Desktop Microsoft now has the more lucrative 5% of the desktop eaten by Apple, and is irrelevant on mobile and web services (search, mail). If they had gathered goodwill back then (like they strive to do now) things would have been different.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#275

Post by coldtea »

O_H_E wrote: post #251
ladzoppelin wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is in trouble man, I am amazed the outcry of general public. Its all circumstantial evidence but the amount of people in my circle who are talking about leaving, creating fake profiles and getting their kids pictures of the platform is profound. Edit: IMO.

The problem is that all HN reader's outer circles would never constitute 1% of Facebook's user base

Teenagers have abandoned Facebook in favour of other social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram, according to a study from the Pew Research Center.

Just 51% of US individuals aged 13 to 17 say they use Facebook – a dramatic plunge from the 71% who said they used the social network in Pew’s previous study in 2015, when it was the dominant online platform.

In this year’s study reported Facebook use was, according to Pew, “notably lower” than the percentage of teens who said they used YouTube (85%), Instagram (72%) or Snapchat (69%). In the previous study, just 52% of teens said they used Instagram, while 41% said they used Snapchat.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/01/facebook-...

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#276

Post by coldtea »

UncleMeat wrote: post #143
andrewstuart wrote: post #7

Google's shutdown of products and APIs seems to have led to critical level of trust loss amongst developers and influencers. It's time for Google to either fix this or get out of providing services and APIs to developers. Google doesn't seem to put any weight at all on the outcry every time its shutters another service/API. The trust must be restored. Google doesn't seem to understand that when they shut service X, t…

This is bizarre to me. Pivoting is seen as a tremendously good thing in the startup community. If you have a product that isn't working and isn't getting users, you do something different or your company dies. You simply cannot keep throwing developer time at such a product. Google has a lot more money than a startup and can afford to waste developer time, but it still isn't good. "We tried this thing out and it didn…

>This is bizarre to me. Pivoting is seen as a tremendously good thing in the startup community.

What's good for the startup community is not the same for the entrenched behemoth community.

>. If you have a product that isn't working and isn't getting users, you do something different or your company dies. You simply cannot keep throwing developer time at such a product.

Google however can. But instead of developing their product further, they announce it as the next thing, get millions of users, and then forget about it, don't update it, don't promote it anymore, and eventually close it pissing off all those users and failing to attract more users due to their own inaction.

(See the ex-googler's comment above about how this process goes).

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#277

Post by lazyjones »

mattkevan wrote: post #75
omosubi wrote: post #16

I used to be a Google fan boy but am starting to dislike them more and more. This, they killed off reader and the creepy data collection they do is why I've started to look into alternatives for their products - anyone have any good suggestions?

After being a keen Google user in the late 2000s to mid 2010s, I’ve been in on a process of extracting them from my life now their true creepy colours are on display. YouTube => Deleted Google plus => Deleted Gmail => Deleted, switched to Soverin [0], works great, less than $4 per month for 25gb email hosting Drive => Deleted, moved to iCloud Docs => Deleted, use iWork for docs and Bear [1] for text Search => Duck Du…

The sad thing is, you just confirmed they‘re doing the right thing. They probably still make money with you as youtube, analytics, adwords „user“ and they never got a dime from you with the products you stopped using (except ads on Search perhaps). Their net income from you probably increased when you stopped usig their free products.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#278

Post by bklaasen »

jgtrosh wrote: post #21
omosubi wrote: post #16

I used to be a Google fan boy but am starting to dislike them more and more. This, they killed off reader and the creepy data collection they do is why I've started to look into alternatives for their products - anyone have any good suggestions?

There's a variety of “de-googlifying” services provided by https://www.framasoft.org you might be interested in

Thanks for this. They've come up on my radar a few times. I'd love to hear from anyone here who uses these services.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#279

Post by mcintyre1994 »

_wp3r wrote: post #129
ronnier wrote: post #88

Google Inbox did one evil thing. To delete an item in iOS's Inbox, you swipe left to right, whereas pretty much every other app in iOS you swipe right to left. This has thrown me into such confusion now in all apps that I'm happy to see Inbox go away.

You can customize each direction of swipe in the Gmail app.

How do you do that? Just opened Gmail for the first time in ages and it has both swipes to archive as default.. which is stupid.

Re: In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users

#280

Post by dredmorbius »

snaky wrote: post #265
gonyea wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get this. Features complicate products and require maintenance. By your logic, features would never get built because they’d carry a lifelong burden.

It's not linear. GCD haven't got traction (and billions of revenue) it might have now because of shutdown of some products like Reader. And that's oversimplified example actually. People's minds are not linear, especially when they make decisions. The only market when you can do well with raw numbers only is cheapest 10%, when all competition is about price, and customers have zero loyalty whatsoever.

GCD?
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