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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

#371

Post by munk-a »

wvenable wrote: post #330
user5994461 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled. Microsoft doesn't consider a product unless it can generate more than $100M a year. It's a general mode of operation for big companies, not limited to Google.

Yet, for some reason Microsoft keeps updating calculator and notepad in Windows.

Really? I'm on windows 10 and I couldn't tell you what they've changed in notepad - did they fix legacy mac EOL support (i.e. `\r`)?

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

#372

Post by iainmerrick »

neilv wrote: post #304
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…

How common are career ambition incentives like this, among engineers (not middle management) right now? It sounds like, in Google's case, it's very intentional. Other than the job-hopping that I started hearing about when dotcom IPOs started, engineers, from what I (perhaps naively) understood of my anecdotal experience, seemed to mostly just like to do engineering, and/or also had a sense of obligation to their proj…

Not necessarily common, but the ambitious engineers are the ones who get promoted and they're the ones who get to set the technical direction. So the incentives on offer to (over-)ambitious people are very important.

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

#373

Post by codeflo »

jfasi wrote: post #153
geofft wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I think you're being too generous. The usability of AMP sites on an iPhone is utter garbage with their extra address bar and broken scrolling. It's not necessary to break scrolling in order to create fast loading websites, in fact, quite the opposite. It's clear that users were a very low priority here.

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

#374

Post by iainmerrick »

RestlessMind wrote: post #211
dna_polymerase wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google doesn't care for most services as they do not depend on any of those. Sure Android, GMail, and YouTube will stay, because they serve their core business: ads. Everything else could be over at any time. This is supported by their recent push for China. Suddenly employee voices aren't worth anything anymore (remember the drone story, that was over after employees pushed back). Maybe they have realised by…

I am willing to bet on GCP's life-span - it will be around for 10 more years at least. What would you like to bet for?

GCP in its current form, though?

In 10 years, will you have to choose between the deprecated version and the version that doesn't work yet?

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

#376

Post by Twirrim »

mvexel wrote: post #345
kian wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> and the fact that all the page urls still had a .gne extension

What's significant about .gne as an extension? Not sure I've consciously come across that one before.

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

#377

Post by derefr »

scarface74 wrote: post #311
user5994461 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled. Microsoft doesn't consider a product unless it can generate more than $100M a year. It's a general mode of operation for big companies, not limited to Google.

How much money do you think AWS loses still supporting old deprecated services like running EC2 instances outside of a VPC and SimpleDB? I’m not aware of a single feature on AWS that has ever been abandoned.

I don't think they lose any money at all. They pass the entirety of those costs onto customers.

That's why, for example, newer EC2 instance types cost less than older ones: whenever they decide to cut their margins to increase volume, they essentially do it across-the-board first, and then they back up and increase the costs for the legacy instances to reflect their increasing support burden. (It just happens to look like the legacy instances hovering at a static pricing while the modern instances get cheaper.)

Also keep in mind that when you're selling B2B SaaS, legacy services are mostly kept around because there are big enterprise accounts that pay to keep them around. If there are only three customers left on non-VPC deployments, but one of those customers is IBM, you're not going to pull the plug.

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

#378

Post by mz00 »

Twirrim wrote: post #376
mvexel wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> and the fact that all the page urls still had a .gne extension What's significant about .gne as an extension? Not sure I've consciously come across that one before.

It’s an allusion to Game Neverending, which eventually led to development of Flickr

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

#380

Post by notamy »

Vinnl wrote: post #127
vitaminCPP wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inbox was a dream come true for the zero-inbox mentality. Sadly, I've yet to found a replacement for this tool.

Heck, not just zero-inbox, but zero-todos. By being able to set reminders, I had a single point for all my own todos, and the ones sent to me by others (aka emails). Now they advice you to add a separate pane with Google Keep or Tasks, which means you're managing them separately. I also have no idea what will happen with the reminders I've set for later than today.

Even more so since my Google Keep reminders would show up in Inbox! Gmail doesn't do this afaik and it's frustrating.
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