When will Google shut down Stadia? • Hacker News Board

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#211

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #38

What is going on with Google? I used to think Google had the best product team in the world. In some ways I thought they defined what modern product management is/was. Now I have no clue what they are thinking with their product launches as of late. All of their products (and marketing) invoke this conservative, risk-adverse blandness that tries to appeal to everyone and in turn appeals to no one.

Google was really good long ago, before the IPO, when their motto was still "Don't be Evil", and for a short time after that.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#212

Post by robbrown451 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #99

robbrown451 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webster agrees with me, it should be two words, not a single word. That was my point (and is the point of the "notaverb" site).

Language is defined by how people actually use it. If people are generally using and understanding "shutdown" as a verb (which has been true in the computer industry for at least 30 years), then it's a verb regardless of what language prescriptionists say.

I'm generally a descriptivist vs. a precriptionist, but this is a different thing. Is there anyone arguing that, just because many people write "there" when they mean "their", that we should consider it correct? To me this is the same.

Can you show me anywhere "shutdown" is used as a verb (in the computer industry or otherwise) where it appears as a choice rather than a simple error? Like in the title of a well circulated article, or otherwise in something that has been subject to professional editing?

https://twitter.com/apstylebook/status/1087717834975789056?l...

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#213

Post by liquidgecka » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

arcticfox wrote: post #117

roland35 wrote: post #14

This makes me shed a solitary tear for Google Reader :'( And another solitary tear from the other eye for Google Inbox :,(

I set up my whole company's communication on Google Wave. RIP Slack, FWIW, is actually quite a bit like Wave was. I feel like if Google didn't screw the launch up so badly, and iterated on the product, they could have had Slack about 5 years before it actually existed.

Oh lord. I knew Google Wave was going to be a disaster from the get go. It was a secret project inside of Google that was not required to follow any of the normal google product design. This meant that it could use whatever database technology it wanted. This lead to some really terrible design decisions that would make sense at a very small startup but not for a large multi-million user product.

At the time I was working on the mail delivery infrastructure and they basically reached out to us at the last minute asking about email functionality. That was horrible because its not easily to wedge into a product after the design phase.

It annoys me so much because it was such a cool idea but the tech stack was badly implemented from the start. =/

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#214

Post by ProfessorLayton » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

username90 wrote: post #83

kllrnohj wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also note that many who play for example COD does it on TV's and consoles which has hundreds of ms already without people noticing it This is just straight up not true in the slightest. There's a reason HDMI ALLM exists, and it's not because "nobody notices hundreds of ms." 80ms is very noticeable, it's like moving around in sludge. hundreds of ms is straight up unplayable. This is no where close to what consoles &…

I didn't say that specific people didn't notice it, just that a most people are surprised if you tell them that they have hundreds of ms latency when they play on their console because they thought it was practically instant because their brains tricked them. The fact that console gaming is so popular despite it having such horrendous latency is proof that latency is not an issue for streaming services to go mainstre…

This is incorrect. Furthermore, just about every consumer TV has a “Game Mode” setting to further minimize latency by turning off post processing — a feature that wouldn’t exist if people didn’t care about latency.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#215

Post by zerocrates » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

"Google kills all their products" is a bit of an overused meme trotted out at any launch... But for Stadia it's a pretty legitimate concern, I'd say.

The model where you're still "buying" the games ties you to the ongoing operation of the service much more strongly than in many of their services where an eventual migration might be a little painful, but it's still possible.

The counterargument would be that they've deployed a ton of network capacity and GPU resources for cloud computing anyway, and so Stadia is just riding on those coattails... But it's certainly not a promising track record.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#216

Post by ape4 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

inetknght wrote: post #39

fjabre wrote: post #25

Google’s different brands remind me of MSFT of the early 2000s. No rhyme or reason. More chaos and throwing spaghetti at the wall. No issues changing or deprecating APIs and products like this on a whim. They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades.

> They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades. Even Gmail is a giant blob of garbage.

There is a hamburger icon (top-left), 9-dot icon (top-right), gear icon (top-right) and 3-dot icon (top-left). What do they all do? (I actually know).

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#217

Post by ceejayoz » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

inetknght wrote: post #166

shadowgovt wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW though, setting up a mail server is difficult. Setting up a mail client with reasonable spam filtering to make email usable is also difficult. Compare the list of steps on either of those tasks to the list for getting email via Gmail: "1) Sign up to a Google account, 2) visit gmail.com"; it's obvious almost all users are going to do the latter (or its equivalent at a Google competitor).

Setting up a mail server isn't difficult. It's about as easy as installing and configuring a web server, and just about as technical. Email has been around for decades. The fact that Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and many paid services have had one-click email addresses for twenty-plus years should demonstrate that it's not difficult . Businesses just don't want to make it easy for lay people to do it.

The services you mention all have entire large teams devoted to tackling spam, reputation, uptime, etc. That it's easy and cheap on a marginal basis for them to add one more inbox to their millions doesn't mean the overall infrastructure is easy to keep running.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#218

Post by iforgotpassword » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

rurp wrote: post #161

marricks wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder about the damage Google does to any potential start ups in a field. How much buzz can you get when everyone’s first thought is “how could this be any good? Google already tried that and failed...”

I don't know, Google has failed at all kinds of products that other companies have achieved massive success with. This includes some really ubiquitous tools like a social network (Google+) or messaging apps (too many to list). I think at this point most people assume a failed project from Google has more to do with the company than the concept itself.

But these are all things where Google was late to the game and didn't succeed in taking someone's crown. So it's an interesting question: How does Google failing at some product that isn't already a well established concept impact the consumer's sentiment towards the idea behind it.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#219

Post by horsawlarway » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

leoh wrote: post #56

inetknght wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades. Even Gmail is a giant blob of garbage.

What?

Eh, I agree with him. I've been with gmail since middle school (going on... a LOT of years now, back when it was invite only).

Somewhere in the last 10 years or so it feels like the gmail team switched from "Make a good email client" to "Shove all the enterprisey things into gmail!".

It's gotten SO slow to load and is incredibly bloated.

I was a happy inbox user until... drumroll... they shut that down too.

I still use Gmail because old habits die hard, but I won't ever suggest a google tool at work. Fool me once, shame on you...

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#220

Post by ben_jones » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

juped wrote: post #93

dopamean wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm crazy but I've never thought google had a good product team. Has there ever been a coherent vision for their collection of products? Edit: just to be clear. I'm not saying google doesnt have good products. I use and enjoy lots of them but for a long time it has seemed like even google isn't sure how all their products fit together. Perhaps that leads to weird forays into territories that don't fit which the…

Has a Google product ever been good? - Search (was once good, now just "marginally better than Bing") - Reader (was good, the highest profile victim of Google Death Syndrome)

Some of the Google Cloud Products are quite good in my opinion. Spanner, BigQuery, GKE. They have pretty high price points, but that's what you get to have with a good product. With GCP Google gets to show off what it is actually top of the world at, with these one-off consumer products Google Employees are just being naive to what their strengths really are.