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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

#401

Post by phjordon »

_ptgt wrote: post #167
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…

In my experience at a different FANG, the same culture exists here. If I had to guess, I would say it probably applies to the others as well.

I work at Amazon and I don't believe that applies here. There certainly is an expectation that you can coordinate increasingly broad efforts as you rise through the ranks, but the focus isn't on launching new products (in my experience). Impact can be anything that is positive and measurable. At the end of the day if you make the company $1million then it doesn't really matter where you do it.

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

#403

Post by mkstowegnv »

With all the shutdowns, Google is also foolishly throwing away what will be an increasingly important asset - distinguishing between real human identities and bots. False bot negatives waste Google computing resources, while false bot positives waste users' time.

I would happily opt in to having Google use AI on each of their services to see if I behave like a real human and then combine that information across services to give my identity a low-bot-risk rating. As it is I am constantly asked to Captcha prove myself (probably because I perform a large number of unusual complex search queries).

Black hat AI will make bots harder and harder to detect and cybercrime (and disinformation dissemination) easier and easier. Detecting fake identities will soon become crucial and yet almost impossible - and Google could be best positioned to provide that information.

But instead they will let MBA twit bean counters ruin the company. My advice to all corporations - keep MBAs in dungeons, bring them out occasionally for advice and never allow them to make decisions.

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

#404

Post by abvdasker »

For the last 6 years or so I -- foolishly it turns out -- chose to make Play Music my primary music platform. I was uncomfortable with subscribing to a music service and wanted to be able to keep my own library since the collection of music I own is a form of self expression for me. Google Play Music let me put my library in the cloud and listen to it on any device.

Now it's looking like I will probably lose a big chunk of it when Google Play Music gets replaced with YouTube Music since Google doesn't really let you download everything you've uploaded. I'm upset enough by this I am motivated to find a way to move away from other Google products to the extent that it is practical to do so.

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

#405

Post by hcnews »

PopePompus wrote: post #107
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…

It may be that GCP isn't going anywhere, but when our organization was choosing a cloud service, we chose Amazon over Google specifically because of Google's flakiness. Google could drop cloud services tomorrow, and it would not be out of character.

FYI, GCP can't be dropped tomorrow because of legal/toc. Even dropping/changing non-beta features requires a looooong notification period (think 1+ year). Enterprise customers really like to secure their bases.

Source: Xoogler

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

#406

Post by honzzz »

bad_user wrote: post #232
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 disagree. Google killing Reader was very shortsighted because they’ve hurt the open web in an effort to promote Google+. And it was all an effort to promote Google+, nothing more. Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained. Don’t tell me that Google couldn’t spare an intern for the occasional fix. And I don’t have any numbers however I’m willing to bet that Reader was, as a social netwo…

I used Google Reader and Google Notebook. Since they discontinued both, I avoid committing to any new Google products - I don't want to rely on a company I consider unreliable. I even stopped using Firebase after they were acquired by Google. I wonder if they have any metric for that - can they measure how much business they lose because of the trust damage?

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

#407

Post by Moru »

linsomniac wrote: post #166
PopePompus wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be that GCP isn't going anywhere, but when our organization was choosing a cloud service, we chose Amazon over Google specifically because of Google's flakiness. Google could drop cloud services tomorrow, and it would not be out of character.

We are in the same boat. My boss came to me last week saying he had lunch with a friend that just moved their services all to GCP and got big savings. But we just recently were impacted by the sudden, unexpected Maps 14x price increase.

We got stuck there too, moving away everything to alternatives. Just analytics left to remove now.

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

#408

Post by sgift »

ernopp wrote: post #276
Animats wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streaming game services, not so much. Yes. The game industry is very reluctant to use Improbable's Spatial OS, because, through a deal with Google, they force you to host your game, expensively, on Google's servers.[1] Nobody wants to spend $100 million developing an AAA title using that system, and then suddenly get an email that Google is discontinuing the product. (Spatial OS is technically interesting, and, hopef…

> then suddenly get an email that Google is discontinuing the product. Google is unlikely to discontinue GCP

The list of discontinued things that people said that about is getting longer by the day. That's kind of the point here.

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

#409

Post by arashThr »

FabHK wrote: post #77

My list of degooglifying actions (mostly from my older post [1]) * switch default search engine to DuckDuckGo (one can still use the !s bang when one wants to see what Google has) * use tracking blockers (uBlock origin, BlockBear on iOS) * use anonymous/private/porn mode browsing most of the time (except for sites I actually want to be logged in permanently) * use Zoho as a replacement for shared Google docs * use Yo…

As an alternative to YouTube I use NewPipe and I'm quite happy with it.
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