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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

#91

Post by Kaiyou »

fixermark wrote: post #46
mywittyname wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google will be "fine," but I've stopped investing in Google products and I'm sure a lot of the tech-savvy community feel the same way. This will make it more difficult for them to get new products off the ground in the future. They make excellent products, but they just don't want to invest in them long enough to gain widespread appeal. Inbox was a killer app. Now that I've experienced what brilliant email looks like…

From my point of view, if it's a choice between an ecosystem of tools that Google could kill at their whim and an ecosystem of tools floated and maintained by startup companies that could dry up and die at any time, it's a bit of an illusory choice.

Go for open source tools then. If they are good enough for people to get use out of, they usually stay around. At least I can't think of an example where one disappeared for good.

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

#92

Post by ssully »

vitaminCPP wrote: post #52
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.

Going back to Gmail, it is pretty baffling the features it is missing from inbox. Lacking bundles is bad, but having no equivalent to archive/mark all as read is terrible. I used to do a quick scroll through my junk to verify I didn't actually need anything, then click "archive all". Now I have to individually select each individual email to do a group archive/delete.

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

#93

Post by ryandvm »

jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

I totally agree that this is frustrating for erudite tech users, but I'd say calling Google a "disorganized mess of a company" is kinda stretching things. The last quarterly earnings for GOOG were up 21% year/year. That's pretty insane for a company of this size.

The way they operate is annoying when it's one of your favorite products that isn't pulling it's weight, but it's hard to argue that the strategy isn't sound.

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

#94

Post by criley2 »

Hamcha wrote: post #51
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.

The reason I don't want a mail program is because 99.9% of my email is utter garbage, so the idea that I need to take up bandwidth and diskspace and processor time on my machine to basically download gigabytes of unwanted advertising, scams, phishing attempts, etc, is ridiculous.

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

#95

Post by throw_away »

jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

> you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately.

I would love if they followed this strategy. Instead, you have products like reader and inbox with many passionate users, which demonstrate some wall stickiness, and they're killed rather than monetized.

Monetize me. I recognize that the things I like cost money. Figure out how to make money off me! I would have accepted ads in reader or inbox. Hell, I would have paid dollars to make those ads go away even.

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

#96

Post by fixermark »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #79
radarsat1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them. Isn't this because it's a categorization they do using global information, like spam filtering? If so they would only be able to support the specific categories they are trained for across all users, so they couldn't support custom categories.

I don't really see how the four categories would help with training spam filters. "Social" is half spam, half maybe not. "Promotions" is mostly spam, though Google would rather see it as ham. "Updates" and "Forums" are mostly not spam.

I believe the parent poster meant that the classifiers that train into the baked-in categories are trained like a spam filter and use cross-account global knowledge. In other words, it's a model that works if there's a small number of buckets and a huge dataset to train the bucket-targeting against and breaks down if every individual user has their own buckets with their own conflicting understanding of what those buckets should contain.

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

#97

Post by jtloong »

o10449366 wrote: post #36

There isn't a single new Google product that I'm excited about. Even if there was, at this point I would be apprehensive at best given their track record of abandonment. It seems to be that they've forgotten how to innovate compared to their competitors. Facebook, despite their controversies, bought Instagram and managed to recapture the young market with new features and improvements. Amazon has been making strides…

I mean Facebook buying Instagram isn't really innovation. In terms of business strategy and feature enhancements, for sure its been great. But that's not really what I'd call innovation.

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

#99

Post by o10449366 »

jtloong wrote: post #97
o10449366 wrote: post #36

There isn't a single new Google product that I'm excited about. Even if there was, at this point I would be apprehensive at best given their track record of abandonment. It seems to be that they've forgotten how to innovate compared to their competitors. Facebook, despite their controversies, bought Instagram and managed to recapture the young market with new features and improvements. Amazon has been making strides…

I mean Facebook buying Instagram isn't really innovation. In terms of business strategy and feature enhancements, for sure its been great. But that's not really what I'd call innovation.

I used Instagram as an example because I think Facebook has done a lot more with it than, say, Google has with their YouTube acquisition. YT has been largely stagnant in the face of competition from Twitch, Netflix, Spotify, etc. and I see fewer and fewer content creators using it, whereas Instagram continues to grow.

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

#100

Post by michaelbuckbee »

throw_away wrote: post #95
jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

> you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately. I would love if they followed this strategy. Instead, you have products like reader and inbox with many passionate users, which demonstrate some wall stickiness, and they're killed rather than monetized. Monetize me. I recognize that the things I like cost money. Figure out how to make money off me! I would…

Google reader is the one that kills me. Not only do they not monetize it / promote it, but it's Google subsidized free existence killed the market for alternatives. Then Google+ and their failed social efforts killed Reader and RSS feeds have now disappeared from the landscape leaving us with only proprietary options.
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