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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

#261

Post by 1024core »

ryandvm wrote: post #93
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 soun…

They keep showing more and more (or bigger and bigger) ads. At some point, they'll hit the law of diminishing returns.

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

#262

Post by stcredzero »

Back in the 90's and 00's, I read some quips about how intra-company politics was starting to run counter to the welfare of Microsoft's user base.

In 2019, it seems like Google has succumb to the same pathologies, but unfortunately amplified by certain societal currents. (No matter how idealistic and noble the goals, activism entails grabbing power, and power attracts sociopaths.)

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

#264

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

blakesterz wrote: post #6
ChrisSD wrote: post #3

So essentially Google's constant stream of new products leads to older ones falling by the wayside unless they can make very large piles of cash. It's also worth highlighting this: > Google rarely does anything as a singular company. Instead, the industry giant is made up of autonomous product groups that develop and launch things on their own schedule.

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.

It's like Microsoft used to be.

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

#265

Post by stcredzero »

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…

GMail, YouTube, Search, GCP, Android, and others...deep down they’re frontends for search or advertising... Streaming game services, not so much.

Streaming games has tremendous potential synergy with advertising. Games are yet another form of media, after all. There is obvious tremendous potential synergy with YouTube. Also, if one can stream games, then why not stream other kinds of applications? There's tremendous opportunities for synergies there as well.

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

#266

Post by dreamcompiler »

Google has morphed into a boring low-growth sustain-mode advertising company that happens to employ a lot of very bright, creative people who really have no business working there any more. Thus we see a ton of hobby side projects that don't last. At this point if Google invented a Level 5 self-driving car, I'd probably just yawn until a more dependable company reinvented it.

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

#267

Post by TremendousJudge »

RPLong wrote: post #184
jacquesm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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'm no fan either, but their fanbase here HN has been criticizing the new macs for years now

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

#268

Post by Zarel »

tim333 wrote: post #201

I can understand why Google don't want to support a large number of small services but you'd think they could spin them off rather than closing them - maybe retain 60% ownership and option the rest to a team of enthusiasts? They'd have less annoyed customers and maybe make money out of it.

They did that for Wave. Reader was too integrated with Google's internal APIs for that to be feasible, though. I assume Inbox is the same.

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

#270

Post by prolepunk »

I'm sad to see Inbox go, I really got used to it, at this point I'm going down the path of de-googlification.

I've been gradually moving away from Gmail to using my own configuration with Postfix/Courier/Spamassassin/rbl/letsencrypt certs everywhere etc...

This has been my on-and-off side project for the past couple of months or so.

I find how well filters based on from/subject work. Tunderbird has really good desktop experience, on android K9 Mail works but is a little bit annoying.

The next thing I'm trying to automate my mail is to set up server-side mail filtering with courier/maildrop, because I haven't found a good way of synchronizing Thunderbird filters and I'm not willing to have a Thunderbird session just running all the time on a computer.

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