Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 427 posts

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

#181

Post by RPLong »

jfasi wrote: post #117
throw_away wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This comment makes it sound as if you don't think generating massive amounts of goodwill among your most passionate customer base "drives business." Google Reader was the loss leader that drove me deeply into Google's whole suite of applications and made me a paying customer of theirs.

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

#182

Post by s3r3nity »

datguacdoh wrote: post #180
s3r3nity wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

You're basing that on pure speculation so be careful what conclusions you're drawing from it. Chromebooks have historically gotten very good support, even though they tended to be relatively underpowered - the pixelbook isn't so I wouldn't expect support to stop anytime soon.

I don't know if it counts as speculation when a number of outlets are reporting on 'roadmap cutbacks,' including asking employees in the Pixel group to look for other roles. [1]

Is it 100% confirmed? No, but that's part of the brand trust referenced in the original post: where there's smoke, there is probably fire, and it would be beneficial to brand trust if Google provided a longer-term roadmap for these products.

Before someone comments "Why doesn't Apple need that type of roadmap?": because Apple has the hardware brand trust that, say, the iPhone isn't going to go away next year simply because the engineers working on it wanted to create an iMessage competitor.

[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/03/13/google-h...

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

#183

Post by radarsat1 »

criley2 wrote: post #165
radarsat1 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Inbox rollup: Set it up once, magically works forever Gmail label: Create a filter for a label. It works only for that. New emails need to go in. Manually and annoyingly update the filter. Works only for that. New emails need to go in. Manually and annoyingly update... You get the point. If I went and bought something from a new store and got it shipped, the receipt automatically appear in "purchases" in inbox. I did…

Sorry, I was responding to,

> create custom tabs via filters

which as you say, labels are created by filters.

I have no idea how "Inbox rollups" work if they are different than that and than the tabs in gmail, since I haven't used it.

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

#184

Post by RPLong »

jacquesm wrote: post #72
johannes1234321 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Damaging? Its very clear the damage is done. In the HN community certainly, but also for consumers?

If you lose your early adopters you lose everything in the longer run. Every new product needs early adopters.

That is such a wise and important point. I am no fan of Apple, but the one thing they have going for them is that they have never forgotten how to please their core fan base.

I was such big Google fan that they actually featured me on their blog over a decade ago. They have destroyed everything that I ever liked about them, piece-by-piece and replaced it with advertising, the scourge of humanity.

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

#185

Post by geofft »

fjabre wrote: post #179
jfasi wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want to speculate too much on the legals of the situation, so I won’t talk about anticompetitive matters. As for why not do this in indexing, of course they’re doing that. They’ve been doing that for a very long time, but that approach can only go so far. There’s a constant cat and mouse game between websites and search providers, and AMP is a way to end it once and for all. It’s important to stress that the…

Google's only obligation is to its shareholders. AMP serves its interests. So does building covert search engines to help root out chinese dissidents. That 'cat and mouse' game is the natural order of things. There is no stopping that other than making things anti-competitive which is what Alphabet clearly wants to do. Google has become evil and we should expect nothing less from a multibillion dollar conglomerate li…

What is a "company like Alphabet"? Can any company of the size and scale of Alphabet, or aiming to be such one day, avoid these pressures? Why isn't this the Google we grew up with, given that this is what Google was growing up to be all along?

A serious question is whether a young company in roughly the state Google was in the early '00s can reasonably commit to never becoming a multibillion-dollar conglomerate.

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

#186

Post by Squithrilve »

geofft wrote: post #116
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…

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-…

This is not the only example. I never ceases to amaze me that Google dropped XMPP because of non-mobile-friendliness and it was proven wrong by a single developer (see: Conversations.im).

It seems in a lot of cases Google just want to go on an easy route of creating fake "standards" (AMP) instead of long way of working with broader community for common good.

Maybe that's just me but the Google I remember back when Android was announced and the company it has become now it's like two totally different entities.

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

#187

Post by ben7799 »

ashelmire wrote: post #68
99052882514569 wrote: post #8

They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money (like Chromecast Audio), and they improve features that detract from the user experience and muddy the waters in terms of ads/monetization in their view (YouTube annotations). They run their company as a constant stream of trial-and-error product launches, some of which succeed wildly and make them billions, others fail and are killed off. Makes sense t…

> They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money It seems they also discontinue products that make them money and continue products that lose them money. Their exchanges with the SEC [1] seem to suggest that YouTube loses money (otherwise why wouldn't they publish the numbers?), and if that becomes known public info, it may open them up to a host of legal and political problems. Regardless, if you d…

They discontinue stuff even if it makes money because it's a blip compared to ad revenue.

Someone looks at a product like Chromecast Audio and decides it's not really helping ads so there's no point in spending money on maintenance for it, especially with the previously mentioned stuff that Google's corporate culture does not reward sustaining/maintenance/support work.

If a money-losing product is have a positive effect on ads somehow it probably gets to live.

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

#188

Post by StaticRedux »

datguacdoh wrote: post #180
s3r3nity wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

You're basing that on pure speculation so be careful what conclusions you're drawing from it. Chromebooks have historically gotten very good support, even though they tended to be relatively underpowered - the pixelbook isn't so I wouldn't expect support to stop anytime soon.

The entire point of the original article is that Google's constant killing of products makes everyone fear what will be next, bc even seemingly popular products get killed off for little to no reason. The entire point of this article is that Google's own actions are fanning the flames of this speculation.

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

#189

Post by akhilcacharya »

TheTruth1234 wrote: post #112
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…

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…

>Thanks, but to you and any other GOOGLE EMPLOYEES

> Are you not internally aware of this?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his [exceptionally generous] salary [and RSUs, bonuses] depends upon his not understanding it!"

- Upton Sinclair (approximately)

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

#190

Post by VonGuard »

I once asked Diane Greene straight up, when she took over Google Cloud, "How can you possibly win enterprise customers when there are 12 deprecated APIS in Google Cloud right now, and you haven't even started to turn the thing around." She dodged and said there were no deprecations.... I literally had the deprecated services listings from their site up on my phone. I think this is one of the reasons she moved on: it's never going to stop, there. They'll always leave things and move on to the next thing, not worrying about the old customers.
Post reply on HN