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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

#341

Post by scarface74 »

omnifischer wrote: post #333
scarface74 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone 5s from 2013 can run the latest OS. The latest version of MacOS supports computers back to 2012. But while the Mac is not a huge percentage of Apple’s revenue, by itself, it makes enough money to be a Fortune 100 company.

Yes, you can run latest iOS. But it is dog slow. Try to use it with at least 3 apps. For a typical user with > 10 apps it is useless.

Not according to reviews. According to reviews, IOS 12 is very performant for 5s. I know it works well on the 6s series.

The number of applications installed doesn't matter. iOS will purge apps if they are running in the background and take up too much CPU or memory. You're not going to have > 10 apps running in the background. More than likely, you won't have any third party apps using CPU time in the background besides playing music or VOIP.

EDIT:

Just realized that you may be referring to macOS. In that case, that would be RAM and/or disk dependent (SSD vs spinning hard drives).

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

#342

Post by pradn »

geofft wrote: post #130
jfasi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's an interesting viewpoint and makes a lot of sense, but still - why couldn't Google have accomplished this goal through web search policies? Have the crawler say that if it sees JavaScript with certain behavior it will be de-prioritized compared to a similar website with less annoying JavaScript. Which, to some extent, you get just by focusing on load time: if the crawler emulates a normal browser and measures…

Measuring load times and ranking sites that way produces a relative ordering of fast and relevant sites. (Slow sites can still do well if they're faster than other sites.) Making sites implement AMP absolutely ensures that the site is fast.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on any AMP related stuff.

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

#343

Post by pradn »

tikkabhuna wrote: post #31
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…

I completely agree. Gmail doesn't seem to have that much customisation. I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them. The Inbox bundles seem to be slightly renamed categories that Gmail has, but with the ability that they're always on the main page and being able to create your own. Why couldn't this be easily ported back over to Gmail and tweaked…

I venture that customization isn't important for 98% of users, especially less technically minded users. That's why Google consumer products are pretty simple. Moreover, at scale, every customization opportunity needs lots of work to support on every client and backend.

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

#344

Post by pradn »

cc439 wrote: post #161
annodomini2019 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably Google Drive as well.

Good point. Funny enough, the Google Drive desktop application was killed and replaced with Drive File Stream which broke the offline usefulness of Google Drive.

The Drive File Stream app lets you pin files for offline use.

Disclaimer: I work on it.

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

#345

Post by mvexel »

kian wrote: post #332
blihp wrote: post #302

Customers/users/developers don't care what the reasons are, only that it continues to happen. What is especially irksome to many is that they are shutting down products/services that found an audience... just not one large enough, fast enough to Google's taste. The more they shut down products, the longer many are going to wait before even considering using one of their new products/services especially if there's a c…

I couldn't agree more here. If only they had a habit of keeping services in beta until they could earn a net profit, and then released them. Then, if for some reason they can't find the level of profits that Google wants for them, they could spin the product off as a separate company and forget about it instead of shutting it down.

That reminds me of the early days of Flickr, which was very visibly in beta for years (it was on the logo). That gave me an appropriate level of anxiety about the longevity of the service. (Well, that and the fact that all the page urls still had a .gne extension, suggesting that Flickr was perhaps not their end game.) Then they went into 'gamma'!? for another couple of years before it finally became just Flickr.

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

#346

Post by erik_seaberg »

IshKebab wrote: post #129
josteink wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money (like Chromecast Audio) I got the Chromecast audio and think it is great. That this was discontinued was news to me. When did that happen? Do you have any links to the announcement?

I don't know why they didn't just add an audio jack to the normal Chromecast. Other than that aren't they identical?

Chromecast Audio was cheap and had multi-room sync. The latest Chromecast can also sync, but sends the audio over HDMI.

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

#347

Post by cpeterso »

throw_away wrote: post #192
jfasi wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel this is a sort of corporate Dutch Disease. Highly profitable sectors drive out investment in the rest. I get this, but then why even launch if there's no vision at all beyond cancel it in a couple years since they're not willing to even try to drive new revenue with these? No profits, burnt goodwill—cynically, I wonder, is it just make-work to keep restless engineers happy and out of the arms of potential upst…

For people (like me) who hadn't heard of Dutch Disease:

"In economics, the Dutch disease is the apparent causal relationship between the increase in the economic development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

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

#348

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

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…

Hmm, I’m thinking whether this is an example of Goodhart’s law (when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure - the measure being the number of product launches) or “tragedy of the commons” (i.e. some sucker will do the maintenance, I’m going for the promotion!).

Either way, it’s frustrating as a user. I will never forgive them killing Google Reader.

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

#349

Post by saagarjha »

rifung wrote: post #281
bad_user wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the product looks is a very superficial criterion. As developers we understand the value of the ecosystem and we want to invest in products that last longer that one or two years. Also I own Apple and Thinkpad laptops that are between 1 and 7 years old and all of them are still working fine. Laptops last longer than smartphones so you want to ensure the platform will be supported for the next 10 years. Can you ho…

> Can you honestly say that Google will support Chrome OS for the next 10 years? Personally I doubt it. I work for Chrome OS, opinions are my own. I think yes it will be supported because Google is trying very hard to diversify its revenue streams and Chrome OS actually makes money and is still growing quickly. Note that Chrome OS is an entirely separate PA (product area) from Hardware.

How does Chrome OS make money? Are there licensing fees involved?

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

#350

Post by taormina »

Who else is here is using Firebase? What are the odds of the whole thing getting canned with 2 years? For all of the "we promise GCP isn't going anywhere" comments from the Googlers in this thread, I'm seeing nothing about, well, GCP's equivalent of Inbox.
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