Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by michaelt » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

o10449366 wrote: post #99

jtloong wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could argue that youtube's rate of innovation is low. But when it was launched it was Flash-based sub-10-minute low-resolution prerecorded videos that paid creators nothing, and so on.

Now it supports long videos, 4k, streaming, html5¹, pays content creators enough there are a bunch of them doing it full time², has an ad-free premium option, it isn't at war with music labels, and it hasn't been bankrupted by bandwidth costs.

Seems a fairly good track record to me.

¹ Arguably Youtube was one of the big forces getting decently working video out of flash and into browsers. Along with Apple refusing to ship Flash on iOS, that is!

² Admittedly at the whim of fickle algorithms, so not the best financial security there

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

#142

Post by otabdeveloper1 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

jfasi wrote: post #126

geofft wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Ehh, I disagree with your assessment, and to illustrate why I think you need to focus on asblockers. AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disincentivizes crappy, JS-heavy websites on search results and as a result makes people less likely to install adblockers. Google is terrified of adblockers going mainstream, to the point where they’re willing to risk anticompetitive suits by creating their own. AM…

> AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disincentivizes visiting a non-Google branded site.

Fixed it for ya.

P.S. Google sucks balls.

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

#143

Post by nevir » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

noneeeed wrote: post #105

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…

Is this basically why things like Inbox, and the endless attempts at messaging, all come out as seperate products rather than enhancements to existing products, because that way you get to say you launched something new?

IMO yes: the promotion culture (technical complexity, impact) push people to come up with Big Ideas.

The thing with Big Ideas, is that they're often iterations of existing ideas, but just different enough that you can make a case for a fresh start. (And who doesn't want a greenfield project) Plus, the cost of experimentation is far less while you're not supporting a massive userbase.

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

#144

Post by v7p1Qbt1im » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

This again. Not a week goes by without someone mentioning this. When a product is used by 0.001% of your user base you have to think about putting engineering resources towards that service. It just so happens that non-core products are often used by a vocal early adopter tech crowd like people on HN. Also 0.001% of Googles User base might still be 20,000 people.

The other thing is Google's business practices. I always think of Google as hundreds or thousands of startups. Small agile team builds up a new service. Where are we within 3 to 5 years. Over a billion users yet? No? Ok scrap or integrate it somehow.

One big problem of big slow boring corporate entities is that they always miss the next big thing that's gonna disrupt them. Google did it to many incumbents. So it makes sense that they might be worried to be next to be disrupted.

Also I think it's important to differentiate between consumer and commercial offerings with SLA's. There is no difference between the service discontinuation policies in GCP vs AWS and Azure. And also, gaming is way to important to abandon. Plus they have first mover advantage now as opposed to G+.

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

#145

Post by cfontes » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

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…

Yeah I also was sad about Inbox, it really solved all my problems. I loved it.

Now back in gmail and it sucks, it's just a cluster of emails with no way to filter thru without a lot of effort.

Specially the reminders and the automatic message bundling is terrible missing, the travel bundle feature were great as well.

What drives me crazy about it is that it is an awesome product, that I would probably pay a couple bucks if asked to but nothing can be done to save it.

I am at loss at how to migrate and where too.

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

#146

Post by cfontes » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:50 PM UTC

duality wrote: post #118

Goronmon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

some ads are also disguised as emails, thankfully AdBlocks picked this up.

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

#147

Post by radarsat1 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

FreakyT wrote: post #85

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.

Inbox’s custom categories were created using simple filter rules. You can technically do that in GMail also, but only for folders, which are independent of the social/promotions/etc tabs. It seems to me that the ability to create custom tabs via filters would not be a particularly unreasonable feature.

That sounds a lot like what I do using 'labels'. Other than the position on the screen, what's the difference?

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

#148

Post by semperdark » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

HALtheWise wrote: post #76

ryandvm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say they run it like a marketplace. If a product isn't generating revenue, it gets axed. Which, given the size of Google is probably about the only way to run things. Hierarchies don't scale indefinitely. How many companies have we seen collapse due to an inability to react to ever changing market demands? Besides having an oracle for a CEO, I'd say running your company as a bunch of autonomous business units is…

Having worked at Google, this really isn't the case, at minimum because a large number of their business units are not and are never expected to be profitable. It is a bit difficult to describe what system is used to coordinate between business units, but it doesn't really resemble an economic marketplace.

> It is a bit difficult to describe what system is used to coordinate between business units

Well, now I'm interested. Could you try elaborating?

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

#149

Post by chrisfinazzo » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #134

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually discovered recently Gmail has a setting for configuring this behavior over IMAP. But yes, countless times I discovered emails I had deleted on my Windows Phone just got archived silently. I wish their default was to behave like IMAP is supposed to, but my guess is they wanted to err on the side of not deleting data.

The settings exist, but at least on the Desktop (e.g, in a web browser), I have no confidence that the application will honor those selections.

The disappointing part of all this is I specifically remember when they fixed this in iOS 3 with one 'Archive' toggle switch that in combination with Google settings actually did what I wanted.

I'd be curious to know how G employees handle email inside the mothership given these constraints - do they fix it server side?

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

#150

Post by s0rce » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:58 PM UTC

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #139

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it's Google subsidized free existence killed the market for alternatives Did it? IIRC, there were at least six decent alternatives available when Reader closed. More if you count desktop and mobile applications.

I tested a few that appeared from the ashes. Ended up not liking most of them but eventually found bazqux and pay them money.