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Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#51

Post by Hamcha »

criley2 wrote: post #10

Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for people with long-standing accounts is untenable. The kitchen-sink approach of gmail has created a website/app that wants to meet every need and honestly meets none. In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly rolled up and ideal notifyin…

The Inbox shutdown made me finally make the switch from Inbox/Gmail back to a mail program (Mailspring, but anything else could work), which is definitely good for me on the long term, as it means that switching to another provider will be completely seamless. I wonder if Google will ever learn that it can't teach users to like something they don't.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#52

Post by vitaminCPP »

criley2 wrote: post #10

Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for people with long-standing accounts is untenable. The kitchen-sink approach of gmail has created a website/app that wants to meet every need and honestly meets none. In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly rolled up and ideal notifyin…

Inbox was a dream come true for the zero-inbox mentality. Sadly, I've yet to found a replacement for this tool.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#53

Post by heavymark »

Ever since Google shut down reader, always associated Google with a company that could shut down any of their products at anytime so in general to look else where for most everything other than Gmail. Use Docs and Drive which seem to be here to stay at least as well.

Other companies like Apple shut down Ping and such but very rarely and most are things that were DOA unlike Google. The problem is Google tries everything but doesn't give it enough love to fix the issues and make successful, unless a product is successful. Which is a bit of a catch 22. People know a lot of these smaller initiatives may go away and/or have missing features/bugs so people don't heavily invest in them, and thus Google kills them since not enough interest. Also now people associate Google with privacy issues even though they do some incredible things with that data.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#54

Post by mbesto »

That's because Google is built like an accelerator. Look you can argue that Google's brand is being damaged but you know what's worse than a few dents in your brand? Destruction to your brand. Look at a company like Kodak who missed the boat on digital cameras (despite having created the first one). Google makes 100 bets a year so that it doesn't miss the next digital camera, or phone, and so on...

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#55

Post by alangpierce »

chii wrote: post #15
blakesterz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting quote, makes more sense now. I guess they're running things more like a university than a business? All the internal drama and products make perfect sense now.

> more like a university than a business which is wrong for google to behave this way, as the focus of university is to produce _new_ research, and a business's focus is to produce sustainable service for profit. Google should have a graduation mechanism for a product they launch, where they publicly announce that a product is out of beta, and can be depended on to exist. And if the product isn't ready to be supporte…

> Google should have a graduation mechanism for a product they launch, where they publicly announce that a product is out of beta, and can be depended on to exist. And if the product isn't ready to be supported, they should continue to have the 'beta' moniker attached to the product name.

They do this, at least for their cloud offerings. A number of their products here are explicitly listed as beta:

https://cloud.google.com/products/

And here's an example of an announcement of something going out of beta:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/python-37-for...

I can't find a reference from some quick searches, but I remember reading that part of GA is a guarantee that if they do decide to discontinue the service, they're required to give quite a bit of notice and support.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#56

Post by nerdjon »

m-p-3 wrote: post #32
nerdjon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still upset about that. That single service being shut down is what started me to distance myself from all google services except search when possible (including making the decision to actually pay for services when necessary)

I pay for an Inoreader supporter account. It's cheap, it works, I don't have to maintain it, and it ensure some revenue to the developers to keep it going. I'm keeping my gmail.com because it's my main personal online identity, despite hating the UI. If I could pay to retain access to Google Inbox if I could like I'm already paying for Google One to hopefully gain some resemblance of support if shit hits the fan.

I use Feedly pro and the Reeder app on my iPhone for RSS now. Only because Feedly made migrating away from Google Reader super easy when that whole thing was happening.

I stick with iCloud for my email, cloud stage, documents, and etc (with the 2TB plan)

The last thing I am mulling over is moving my "professional" email away from Google Apps (or whatever its called now) to Amazon email or something... but the fact that I can't decouple that google account from the email has stopped me so far (Thanks to bad past decisions and single sign on).

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#57

Post by annodomini2019 »

meddlepal wrote: post #35

Google's two (maybe three) core Google-branded products to non-tech people are Search, Gmail and maybe Chrome. I don't think non-techies could even tell you what some of the other products are or did. I would also wager most people outside of tech don't realize YouTube is owned by Google. Tech people pay a lot of attention to this stuff, but casual user's don't notice or don't care.

Probably Google Drive as well.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#58

Post by theshrike79 »

Isn't this purely about their internal incentives? No one gets promoted or advances their career by doing boring upkeep tasks on an existing product.

The only way to really advance your career inside Google is to launch a new product. (And then let it slowly rot as you and your team are promoted and moved to launch a new product)

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#59

Post by chrisfinazzo »

criley2 wrote: post #10

Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for people with long-standing accounts is untenable. The kitchen-sink approach of gmail has created a website/app that wants to meet every need and honestly meets none. In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly rolled up and ideal notifyin…

To my mind, Gmail has always been broken because it utterly fails at being able to delete messages when acting as an IMAP backend.

On iOS, this problem has generally been solved, but on the Mac, it remains a clusterfuck. I have no hope it will ever be fixed.

While my primary account is still there, I moved my personal domain address to Fastmail.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#60

Post by chrisfinazzo »

meddlepal wrote: post #35

Google's two (maybe three) core Google-branded products to non-tech people are Search, Gmail and maybe Chrome. I don't think non-techies could even tell you what some of the other products are or did. I would also wager most people outside of tech don't realize YouTube is owned by Google. Tech people pay a lot of attention to this stuff, but casual user's don't notice or don't care.

Last I checked, YouTube was/is kind of a big deal.
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