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Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

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Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#91
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they were intrusive, I'd just stop using it. The internet is full to the brim of videos from other platforms. YouTube isn't the only game in town. I use it mostly because it's convenient. If it became much less convenient (and, honestly, they've made a number of "enhancements" lately that have made it a bit less convenient), the cost/benefit ratio would no longer be favorable.

Isn’t it? Vaguely I hear of Vimeo being used for art videos but I kind of got the sense that the network effect and technology at Youtube was very strong. Where else do people go to watch videos? Where else can you host a live stream?

You can host videos on demand or live streams at Mux.com as well.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a community engineer at Mux.)

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#92
post #18

I'd guess that it's a combination of things, but I think what sticks out to me is that a) they probably hit a plateau and felt like they needed to do something to break out of that (and didn't really have a good idea so they started "mixing things up"); and b) messaging seems like a product that everyone wants to solve, but doesn't necessarily offer amazing monetary returns. I loved GChat. It was simple. I could use…

> Likewise, one of the great things about GChat was that it felt so un-monetized.

Maybe it felt un-monetized, but discovering reality that it’s not caused me to dump almost all Google products immediately.

When chatting with my friend I introduced him to several new concepts and products over the course of a conversation. We found that immediately after discussing said product, he would get advertisements for said product on Instagram.

I know when things are free, you are the product, but that was way too efficiently creepy.

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#93
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘ because the marginal cost is nothing.’ Who pays the utility bills?

Once the machine is running and the CPUs are in C0 the marginal cost of scheduling some less-important thread into the otherwise-idle cycles between active bursts of your main service threads is literally zero. Even if you have to wake a core from C1 to run the random thread, the marginal cost is still very close to zero.

Even an idle computer consumes power. How could it be literally zero? As it could have been shut off otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#94
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once the machine is running and the CPUs are in C0 the marginal cost of scheduling some less-important thread into the otherwise-idle cycles between active bursts of your main service threads is literally zero. Even if you have to wake a core from C1 to run the random thread, the marginal cost is still very close to zero.

Even an idle computer consumes power. How could it be literally zero? As it could have been shut off otherwise.

You can't shut it off because your core business product needs to run 50ms from now.

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even an idle computer consumes power. How could it be literally zero? As it could have been shut off otherwise.

You can't shut it off because your core business product needs to run 50ms from now.

The core business product that must share a CPU with a third party and can’t be moved? Is there any real world example of that?

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't shut it off because your core business product needs to run 50ms from now.

The core business product that must share a CPU with a third party and can’t be moved? Is there any real world example of that?

Nobody mentioned a "can't be moved" constraint.

Lots of businesses have multiple services/virtual servers running on a single host. Also VPS, shared hosting, seedboxes. Google/Amazon are experts at it.

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