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Google is shutting down Stadia
581–590 of 1001 posts
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governmen…
I was at Google 2014-2018. It appeared that Larry & Sergey didn't understand incentives, despite otherwise being very smart guys. They just didn't seem to get it. At all. There were lots of smart, motivated people but the incentive structure was completely set up to reward launching products and moving on. Some of the Stadia folks were insanely good at playing the promo game. There was talk about the need to "land" r…
I wrote a description of the actual incentives Googlers see here a couple weeks ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844740#32845704
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#583I use gmail, photos and youtube, thats it.
Pretty much anything from google that I have used in the past has shut down in a few years.
So I dont touch anything new from them at all. Pointless.
Good job google.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#584At what point does working for Google (on anything released after 2008) go from being prestigious to embarrassing?
Why are so many of you here so bitter against this company?
When they literally had to remove "don't be evil" as their company slogan, on account of how evil they are, that did it for me.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governmen…
The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any significant moves to improve this. Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly see increased monetization…
I don't know how Pichai can change Google's culture without Google having an existential crisis first like IBM in the 90s. I saw these intertwining problems in Google: 1. Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks to lax promotion policies for years. L6 used to be treated as god, but no more. Employees simply lost it when they saw people who were not necessarily effective get promoted fast. Well, maybe the process is not lax, but identifying the real gems certainly becomes disproportionally harder as the company grows. 2. Management want to expand at all cost. The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be. Yes, managers did get cautioned that it is the scope and impact that matters instead of team size, but in practice team size is a proxy measurement for scope and impact. 3. Maybe this is the real root cause: as Google becomes so large, it is simply impossible to gauge the impact and complexity of one's work reliably, resulting in all kinds of gaming and angst in all levels of employees. In the end, gauging impact becomes gauging the perception of impact.
In other words, people are culture. When a company grows large, the culture regresses to the mean.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#586While inevitable, I am impressed they are refunding all purchases, including hardware. That can't be cheap.
I think it begins to address mistrust of new Google products. Which is worth a lot to Google. If they consistently take this approach for other cancellations, it could change the the common view from: "why use this? They're just going to shut it down in a few years anyway" to: "oh neat, Google's experimenting with something new. Let me try it out. If it doesn't work out, they'll take care of me."
This is the exact reason that I don’t mind purchasing Amazon’s experiments. If it doesn’t work out, I get my money back and Amazon has more data for product dev
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, I bet if that Stadia would've done much better if it had launched with the promise of "if we do shut it down, we'll refund all your purchases"
I don't remember exactly, but I believe this was promised in some sense when I decided to get on board a year or 2 ago. At the time you got a free Chromecast + Controller when buying Cyberpunk which was also a pretty good deal to pass by.
Someone asked Stadia devs or reps on Reddit if users would have access to purchases games if the service shut down, back when Stadia was announced, and the response was not a "no" but definitely wasn't a "yes".
https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/comment/eu56...
(That said, props to them for refunding folks.)
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governmen…
In that sense Google is the Anti-Microsoft. Microsoft makes the scrappiest products but as long as they are not total failures MS is committed to them in a way that is borderline ridiculous. Google makes good products but seems to have the attention span of three year old toddler.
Stadia is 2 years and 10 months old hah
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#589this is especially bad news given the growth in games stremaing. nVidia, Amazon, sony, microsoft and even Logitech are all growing streaming products. It was Google's game to lose.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#590People: remember IBM. It used to be completely indestructible, like a given in any office…