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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

#281

Post by ssijak »

tb303 wrote: post #192
Gatsky wrote: post #131

There is always so much vitriol on HN about these kinds of announcements. I've never understood why. Google presumably has lots of data and feedback from people using Inbox, and determined that it wasn't useful enough or widespread enough to justify ongoing investment. Why is this surprising or shocking? This happens all the time in commercial and open source software. The internet is great, but unfortunately has the…

Hi (ex-googler here, although i wasn't on this project). Product usage isn't a one-way street. It requires coordination from marketing, customer support, and ongoing product development. Inbox was yet another product that Google spent years on internally, launched with a bang, and then basically forgot about while the PMs got their promo and moved on to new projects, and so on. To make a bad analogy (sorry) in respon…

Did you put Google and customer support in the same sentence?

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

#282

Post by lunchables »

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…

I'm not saying Facebook is collapsing tomorrow, but ...

"More than 1 in 4 American users have deleted Facebook, Pew survey finds"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/05/more-th...

And is there really a generation of new users ready to take their place? I'm not sure:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

No tech company of this size dies overnight. And they might be diversified enough to be fine for a very long time (WhatsApp, Instagram) but these are very real problems for facebook.

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

#283

Post by SSLy »

sseth wrote: post #213

Those (like me) who like using Google products know the bargain. Until a product reaches critical mass, it could get canceled. Wave died. G Suite has succeeded. Chrome succeeded. Reader died. Google+ is in a coma. Hangouts and Google Photos which came out of the ashes looks like they will stay, though what they are doing with their chat tools is a real mystery. In hardware, Chromecast succeeded, Nexus faded away as d…

Drive and Photos are data vacuums, these won't go away.

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

#284

Post by ItsMe000001 »

ATsch wrote: post #272
hueving wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Context, please? OP reacted to a specific comment in this thread.

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

#285

Post by dredmorbius »

coldtea wrote: post #270
dredmorbius wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maps was significantly enhanced thorough a bought company: Keyhole. https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2005/04/google-maps-and-key... Intermediated by the CIA; https://pando.com/2015/07/01/cia-foia-google-keyhole/

And Chrome was based (and later forked off) on Webkit, after Apple had already done the hard work (and KHTML laid the groundwork).

Good point.

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

#286

Post by ItsMe000001 »

coldtea wrote: post #274
thebooglebooski wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 thin…

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

I'm not refuting (because I don't really know) but questioning this statement.

Technological progress is a confounder, apart from that I think people and organizations behave as they always have. Okay, enslaving and murdering people has become harder - in the "modern" parts of the world at least. The "system" still favors not paying too much attention to the human side, and to do whatever you can get away with regardless of cost to society, I think.

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

#287

Post by tmaly »

roneythomas6 wrote: post #187
8ytecoder wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Google cloud for example is the most technologically advanced. But no one in my company would touch it with a ten foot pole. Google can and will shutdown things is just ingrained - even when we pay, things will change so drastically or be not supported any more that you just can't assume anything.

But Google Cloud deprecation policies and other SLA's for generally available products.

They had an internal search box you could setup to crawl your intranet. They have shut this down and order all companies to turn it off. SLA does not matter

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

#288

Post by sumeno »

coldtea wrote: post #275
O_H_E wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, acco…

Considering Facebook owns Instagram this sounds like great news for Facebook. Facebook the company owning the product teens are using instead of Facebook the product seems like a good long term strategy.

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

#290

Post by freehunter »

jsjohnst wrote: post #157
freehunter wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it's mind boggling how Google managed to work their way into such major corporations and organizations. At a company I used to work for Google massively (massively) undercut Microsoft for Gmail and Google Docs vs O365. I guess like with Android, no one stopped to wonder why they're giving it away practically free?

> no one stopped to wonder why they're giving it away practically free? Practically free!? Google Apps for domains is either $5 or $10+ a month per user, depending on feature set. That’s roughly the same price as most other commercial email providers. I don’t know for sure, but my guess is they make a profit on every account just on those monthly fees.

Office 365 is literally double the price of Gmail, and full-blown Exchange is even more expensive. I wouldn't call double the price "roughly the same".
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