I disagree with the idea that shutting down products damages the brand. It's quite the opposite. Google+ has always been a joke, and migrating and merging products sounds just as wise as creating new ones that work. On a side note, I'm happy Google+ will be buried for good.
Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
111–120 of 427 posts
Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
#112Warning: 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…
Thanks, but to you and any other GOOGLE EMPLOYEES
Are you not internally aware of this?
Do you just carry on regardless?
What happens when you voice this issue internally?
As an ex-Google fan boy, the title of this article has been true for years and it's what poisoned me (and no doubt many others) against you. So you must be aware of it.
What's your take?
I'm super curious as to why you gave up tech (brand) leadership so seemingly nonchalantly.
Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
#113Warning: 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 understand this - but it doesn't mean I like it.
I could get through having two podcast apps on my Android (Google Podcasts, Google Play Music) that give me notifications for my podcasts, with no plans on phasing out one or the other.
I could get over having two different music apps - Google Play Music and YouTube Music - because it seemed like there might actually be a plan here - albeit we haven't heard anything in ages.
I could get over having two email apps - Inbox and Gmail - because I knew Inbox was just an experiment that was going to be a tease of cool features that may / may not be ported over...therefore I tried not to take the bait.
I could get over having a bunch of different messaging apps - I didn't like it, but 95% of my messages are SMS texts anyway, so it didn't impact me.
The FINAL straw was falling in love with a PixelBook that I bought during the Black Friday sales, as I moved into a role in an org that was 1) deeply invested in G Suite and 2) allowed me to do all my work from the browser - making the Chrome OS concept finally fit for me. THEN Google closes that part of their hardware division.
Now I just have angst over _any_ Google product / service that isn't the core that I use and "know" knock on wood won't go away (Search / Gmail / Chrome). Android wear? Google Home? Hell, I was seriously finally moving to a Pixel 3, as the tight integration with some Chrome OS features on my PixelBook would've been ideal - but I can't even trust that the Pixel phone line will last that much longer.
Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
#114Google'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.
You forgot probably their only actually good product: maps
It gets worse every year. Like every 8 mos they add an extra thing you have to touch/click past to actually see the map. But maybe that's just the mobile app...
Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My experience with Gmail is the complete opposite. It is far better at filtering spam/phishing - mails than all the other free mail services.
Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
#116Warning: 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…
This went into my decision not to accept a Google offer. AMP is a product that should not exist in the first place. Everything AMP does could be done in other ways—having Google Search measure load time, improving load times, working on webpackages as step 1 instead of an afterthought, etc. But because AMP is a coherent, well-defined product, and Google rewards launching it over accomplishing the same goals in less-obvious ways, the person behind AMP was incentivized to go that route for the sake of his own career at Google, and ruined the internet for the rest of us.
I didn't want to be subject to those engineering standards.
Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
#117Warning: 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…
The metric you need to keep in mind here is revenue per employee. Keeping one product up and running necessarily means withholding engineers from another. As an extreme example, ads engineers make Google many times their salary, benefits, and ephemeral costs, and even non-revenue-generating services like Photos and Assistant indirectly drive traffic to the money makers.
Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only a couple million users, mostly pointy-headed techie types, that doesn’t drive business to any money-making effort, with no alignment with any stategic effort, that could be reimplemented by a particularly talented and hardworking high school senior, staffed by about a dozen engineers. That product will be the first on the chopping block, if only to encourage those engineering resources to find more profitable employment.
Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
#118Closing 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…
I think it's combination of: * The person who pushed for the Inbox project got the promotion/raise they desired and move onto other new projects for further advancement. * Inbox was too good at quickly managing email, and Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads than getting this done efficiently. Call me cynical but that's where I'm at with Google at this point.
"Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads [...]".
What ads?
Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
#119Warning: 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…
Thanks, but to you and any other GOOGLE EMPLOYEES Are you not internally aware of this? Do you just carry on regardless? What happens when you voice this issue internally? As an ex-Google fan boy, the title of this article has been true for years and it's what poisoned me (and no doubt many others) against you. So you must be aware of it. What's your take? I'm super curious as to why you gave up tech (brand) leadersh…
Google employees in an individual-contributor role have limited power to change this if they want to remain Google employees. They're subject to performance reviews on this system, and the expected value of any individual advocating for a change is so tiny, compared to the expected value of playing along with the system and getting their salary and bonus check. If you want this culture to change, you need the people signing the checks to feel compelled to change it.
The practical effect is likely to be people leaving Google because they can get rewarded for maintaining existing products elsewhere.
Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
#120What is people's opinion on Tensorflow?