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Stadia died because no one trusts Google

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Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#351

Post by cmrdporcupine »

vxNsr wrote: post #217
h0l0cube wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you own a whole ecosystem Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.

This is such a great point. Google has been coasting on android for years now, pixel has some cool phone features (call transcription, navigating phone trees) but those aren’t shared to the wider android market and virtually everything else comes down to, let’s make a better camera. The whole reason they created android was to prevent Microsoft from winning the mobile space. Making sure the other guy loses isn’t grea…

> just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake

I worked in Google consumer hardware and yes this is how it is. Quite a few motivated and talented people, for sure, but organizationally it just ended up being "copy Apple and/or Amazon's roadmap."

There are whole product areas at Google whose entire existence boils down to "everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#352

Post by marcinzm »

panick21_ wrote: post #256
h0l0cube wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you own a whole ecosystem Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.

With android they had to get buy in from phones makers and other powerful parties. To do this they had to give up quite a bit of power and control. They never owned the ecosystem in nearly the same way. It was always a compromise.

They've tried to make their own phones for a long time including buying Motorola in 2012. According to a friend who worked at both, Google simply didn't understand making hardware anywhere close to how Apple did.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#353

Post by discardable_dan »

vermilingua wrote: post #301
yyyk wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would make sense if Stadia was targeted at casuals (high school students probably can't afford AAA). However, the lack of subscriptions, separate purchase model, lack of discoverability (no search bar for years! from the Search company!) and porting model make it clear Stadia was very much not targeted at casuals.

AAA games are targeted at casuals.

No, phone games are targeted at casuals. AAA games are targeted at people who have some 40-60 hours of spare time over the next three weeks to spend on video games.

This is coming from someone who now has no free time for video games, and only plays indie roguelikes because AAA games are too much of a time commitment to ever finish.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#354

Post by marcinzm »

narrator wrote: post #204
stingraycharles wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for Google, I don’t think you can call what they did with search low hanging fruit. Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved. I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products. When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it make…

Larry and Sergei decided they are not interested in the business anymore. That's probably why Google has failed to innovate much lately. How great would Tesla or SpaceX be without Elon? Companies without the founders become too cautious and status quo oriented.

When was the last time Google really innovated in a useful product and when they did stop being involved? From what I can tell Google has ridden on the coattails of Search Advertising for much much longer than they were uninvolved. Even Google's more public attempts at innovation are toys rather than useful products.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#355

Post by KajMagnus »

chongli wrote: post #343
stingraycharles wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for Google, I don’t think you can call what they did with search low hanging fruit. Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved. I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products. When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it make…

Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved. It was totally low hanging fruit. Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder. Finding useful sites and filtering out spam are much more difficult now than when Google started. The signal to noise ratio on the internet has plummeted. And that is just the difficulty of building…

> implement it yourself. It’s not very difficult

But that's not where others failed. Instead, it's coming up with the idea, realizing that it's a truly good idea, that was the important thing. (Remember, Yahoo and other(s) didn't want to buy Google and the algorithm, when they had the chance.)

Maybe if you replace "totally low hanging fruit", with "It was undiscovered winner-takes-it-all markets" I'd agree.

In hindsight, everything is obvious. But initially, discovering that opportunity — looking at how many people (how few, just 2) did, it wasn't easy.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#356

Post by MaxBarraclough »

mesh wrote: post #279
brianbreslin wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought it, heavily discounted, after having sold my ps4 and wanting something to play very infrequently. The service was spotty despite having gigabit fiber and mesh wifi in my house. As an infrequent gamer, I'm likely the worst possible customer archetype for google.

That was my experience. (I tried it for a free trial). Graphics were poor and input lag was abysmal (and made a lot of types of games unplayable).

I never had much trouble with input lag or dropouts. Perhaps region-specific?

I still didn't see any value in Stadia though. The cloud-only full-price approach was the main issue (GeForce Now had them beat there), but also their investment in hardware has been pitiful, so you're effectively playing at low graphics settings. Rather than addressing that, they chased the 4K buzzword. The kind of gamers who insist on 4K aren't the kind who want to use cloud gaming services. GeForce Now understood this, Stadia didn't.

Incidentally Google were sued for supposedly misleading promotion of their 4K support: https://www.pcgamer.com/stadias-4k-gaming-claims-come-back-t...

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#357

Post by h0l0cube »

random314 wrote: post #315
bitcharmer wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google was founded by algorithm nerds, and that's now part of the DNA of the company. Not any more. These days their DNA is ads.

And ads need algorithms

I agree with both those takes.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#359

Post by h0l0cube »

vinay_ys wrote: post #286
h0l0cube wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Larry and Sergei This may be part of the problem. Google was founded by algorithm nerds, and that's now part of the DNA of the company. Apple (Tesla/Starlink/etc) was founded upon vision - what could the future look like? How do I make that happen today? - and then, somehow, to pare that back to something that's economically viable in a reasonable time frame. That said, taking existing problems and trying to better…

Google tends to take on problems that have high technical complexity, potential wide user base and extremely low marginal cost per user and monetizable via ads. And they detest manual/field operational work and don't have the institutional muscle to do fast incremental iterative product development. These are good predictors of what product of theirs will succeed vs fail. Within high technical complexity space, they…

I agree with what you're saying, and I think you've said more accurately and with more detail, what I was trying to convey.

Edit: One thing to add... Google's history of 'solving highly technical problems' has really been more around scaling infrastructure, with their notable successful products being Google search, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube - with Android being an exception that rule if you'd call that a 'product'. Maps and Google assistance have some technical aspects, but nothing really out of the grasp of a modern startup. Technical ability for SaaS companies isn't really the moat it used to be.

Re: Stadia died because no one trusts Google

#360

Post by skohan »

TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #156
KVFinn wrote: post #90

There are advantages to game streaming but Google never really did anything with them, instead they just made a worse version of a console. The marketing at the beginning was confusing. Everyone had the impression Stadia was like a Netflix for games. But it was almost the inverse, Stadia is a free gaming console but the games cost money. At the very least Google's number one pitch should have been "We're giving you a…

>Any YouTube game video could have a button for 'play instantly, one click' that loaded an already running Stadia session into a game-state with the player in a fun spot. YouTubers could have been able to hand off controls of their game session to viewers. This is very true, and it sounds really good on paper, but it seems like anything that attempts to transition content consumers to participants fail. For example,…

I actually thought this was the most interesting part of the Stadia value prop. If they could have made gaming as ubiquitous as YouTube videos I don't see how they wouldn't win.
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