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

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

#361

Post by pavel_lishin » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 8:54 PM UTC

jumelles wrote: post #354

pavel_lishin wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm dying to know more information about Google Music. I'm one of the people who uploaded their entire library up there, and while it vaguely exists as a backup of a 20XX version on a hard drive somewhere, losing access to it would be pretty crippling to my every-day listening. I'm absolutely not interested in a Spotify-like subscription to a revolving library that I don't control; Google no longer letting me listen…

It's very expensive but check out Roon.

I don't think this is what I'm looking for.

> In the transition from physical to digital media, something has been lost. We have more convenience than ever, but no feeling of excitement or engagement.

> What you get is a searchable, surfable magazine about your music.

I don't want excitement or engagement, or a magazine. I want to listen to music on my phone.

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

#362

Post by MayeulC » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

I would even risk saying that what Google has been saying is damaging the trust in the industry, especially online services (if there ever was one).

I reflected on my gut aversion to stadia, and realized I had the same to most walled-garden online services. To be fair, Google is far from the only one shutting services down (and users out of it).

My solution is to use open source software, with a preference for federated or distributed solutions.

Discord/Skype/MSN/Hangouts/etc -> Matrix/Mumble

Twitter -> Mastodon

YouTube -> PeerTube

Etc. Those are the most recent ones I used. I still have some work to do before hosting a collabora online instance to offer to my family as an alternative to Google docs.

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

#363

Post by tdeck » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:02 PM UTC

president wrote: post #251

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 mindset is commonplace in most of the jobs I've held in the last 10 years. Personal gain trumps morals, company values, and even company performance. It's what happens when you put a bunch of high-performers in a box and let them play the corporate ladder game.

I think that's a bit of an unfair way to characterize what's going on here. In fact, it's Google's values (as expressed through internal incentives) that govern this process. If the company wanted people to, say, make X better rather than killing it and launching a completely new X, all it would have to do is reward that rather than setting up a system that punishes it through reduced career growth.

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

#364

Post by PopePompus » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:03 PM UTC

jfasi wrote: post #293

compiler-guy wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were saying this about Google+ for years. "It's a 'bet the company' level of commitment." Yet here we are.

Maybe from the outside it seemed that way, but from the inside just about everyone except Vic Gundotra and his org, no one considered it a serious contender. Just about everyone I know knew Google+ was misguided and orthogonal to the business, meanwhile the consensus internally is that GCP is an obvious extension of the infrastructure work that is going to get done anyway.

So what you're saying is that when an organization is considering using a Google product, it needs to track down some Google employees and speak with them privately, to see if the company is really serious about supporting it?

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

#365

Post by tdeck » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:06 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?

That's consistent with my own experience at Google. It's not that working on improving a thing isn't rewarded, but it's just much easier to demonstrate impact when you can use the word "launched" in your self-assessment Launching is in itself an accomplishment, while optimizing requires you to also collect data, do analysis on the data, and show a positive impact. "Impact" here is one of the buzzword categories that goes into an assessment of your performance as an employee.

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

#366

Post by ocdtrekkie » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #360

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't know SpatialOS was attached specifically to Google Cloud. This seems like a risky business move, people should've learned from the fine example of companies built exclusively on the Facebook platform by now. https://www.hadean.com/ is presumably a direct competitor to SpatialOS then, I take it? And it's tied to Azure, I believe.

Hadean looks interesting. But there's no documentation available, just hype. Their demo was big, but very simple - it's a FPS in space. They demoed Hadean on Azure, but it's not clear that it's tied to Azure. The problem is basically distributed cache coherence. You have many small data objects shared between a large number of machines. Often, one needs access to an object on another machine. How do you do that effic…

I was having a hard time finding the statement that SpatialOS can't run apart from Google Cloud, but they do not allow self-hosting, meaning you are tied to wherever they put their servers which is Google according to the parent's source.

I suspect Hadean is similar, they've listed Microsoft as a partner, and presumably it's a cloud service that they are offering, so wherever they host it is where you get it, you're never directly dealing with the cloud provider or it's billing.

It's plausible, arguably, that both could shift to alternate cloud providers if they wanted, but I get them impression their customers have no choice in the matter.

Also, they do get a little further into the weeds, but it's hidden behind a hamburger menu: https://www.hadean.com/developer/how-to-get-started-with-aet... though a code example without access to the library or cloud service isn't a whole lot of use for testing out!

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

#367

Post by Jasper_ » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:33 PM UTC

jfasi wrote: post #293

compiler-guy wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were saying this about Google+ for years. "It's a 'bet the company' level of commitment." Yet here we are.

Maybe from the outside it seemed that way, but from the inside just about everyone except Vic Gundotra and his org, no one considered it a serious contender. Just about everyone I know knew Google+ was misguided and orthogonal to the business, meanwhile the consensus internally is that GCP is an obvious extension of the infrastructure work that is going to get done anyway.

> No one expects an instant success. But even if this week’s launch evokes snark or yawns, Google will keep at it. Google+ is not a product like Buzz or Wave where the company’s leaders can chalk off a failure to laudable ambition and then move on. “We’re in this for the long run,” says Ben-Yair. “This isn’t like an experiment. We’re betting on this, so if obstacles arise, we’ll adapt.”

> “I don’t really see what Google’s alternative is,” says Smarr. “People are going to be a fundamental layer of the internet. There’s no going back.”

From Inside Google+, published in Wired Magazine in 2011. As the article mentions, Google started dismantling Google+ in 2014. Three years appears to be the upper limit of their patience for "the long run". https://www.wired.com/2011/06/inside-google-plus-social/

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

#368

Post by Jasper_ » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:36 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 crappy, JS-heavy websites on search results and as a result makes people less likely to install adblockers.

The slowest, most resource-intensive web sites I visit are, in order: Slack, GMail, and Google Play Music. If Google wants others to take web performance seriously, they should start with their own internal stuff.

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

#369

Post by amelius » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

Their hunger for data is also damaging their brand.

It's disappointing to see that there seems to be no force whatsoever from the inside of Google to change from ad-based monetization (disrespecting a user's privacy) to a paid-for product.

But I get it, having real customers is a pain, and most Google employees are happy without them.

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

#370

Post by iainmerrick » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

jfasi wrote: post #293

compiler-guy wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were saying this about Google+ for years. "It's a 'bet the company' level of commitment." Yet here we are.

Maybe from the outside it seemed that way, but from the inside just about everyone except Vic Gundotra and his org, no one considered it a serious contender. Just about everyone I know knew Google+ was misguided and orthogonal to the business, meanwhile the consensus internally is that GCP is an obvious extension of the infrastructure work that is going to get done anyway.

Just about everyone I know knew Google+ was misguided and orthogonal to the business

I agree with that, but even so, the company leadership bought into Google+ in a big way, for a long time. It's incorrect to say it didn't have a huge effect on the company's direction and (perhaps indirectly) on just about every developer working there.

the consensus internally is that GCP is an obvious extension of the infrastructure work that is going to get done anyway.

Why then is it so far behind AWS in feature set and market share? Google's data centers and internal infrastructure were way ahead of the competition for years, but they were slow and reluctant to open them up.