They also killed all offline music support for Fitbit https://9to5google.com/2023/01/17/fitbit-pandora-deezer-supp...
Google has already pulled six products in 2023
141–150 of 371 posts
Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
They really just need clear branding between "This is a side project, we might take it away with just a months notice" and "This is a product we will give you many years notice and a migration path if we decide to get rid of it". I think they should label everything in the former category "experimental". Put the label right in the logo so it is really obvious.
They used to do public betas. I remember Gmail being labeled beta in the early days.
Yeah, with unlimited storage for life. Acquiring userbase with empty promises is their M.O.
Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had a penny for every time I hear this.. yes they had big layoffs, but they also hired like crazy for a long time. Fuchsia is maybe 1/4 product and the rest is a long term infrastructure investment. If Google had lost interest they’d have no problem shutting it down by now, for instance stadia rose and fell in a shorter time span than all of fuchsia. I don’t know whether fuchsia will “make it”, heck a frustrated…
> If Google had lost interest they’d have no problem shutting it down by now It does feel like they’ve lost a lot of interest in Android. It’s too big for Google to just close, but I could see them selling it. If that happens, hopefully it’s to a Microsoft but chances are they will screw us all and sell it to Oracle or Xiaomi. But there are a lot of things that will die before Android or Fuschia. Here’s a list of 270…
> hopefully it’s to a Microsoft
as long as it's not Microsoft itself of course.
Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023
#144Why does Google get grilled so badly for pulling products? Don’t other companies do the exact same thing, and isn’t it their full right to abandon projects when it no longer makes sense?
Other companies kill projects when they’ve clearly failed and basically nobody is using. Google will kill things that are moderately successful and people are dependent on, but they aren’t a blockbuster success that makes a difference compared to their ad revenue. But mostly we’ve just never forgiven them for killing Google Reader. And we never will.
I have gotten over them killing Google Reader. But I will never forgive them if they decided to kill Google Keep.
Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gmail was in beta for 5 years, from 2004 until 2009 — imho it didn’t make much sense to label something as beta when it is used by ~1B people.
i think it's about expectations
Thing is... imagine they had announced "Thanks for being part of the gmail beta. We learnt a lot, but have now decided to close GMail. You have 3 days to download your emails and find a new email provider".
A lot of people would have been very pissed off, even though it said 'beta'.
Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023
#146When hear about hardware products turning into bricks after the manufacturer pulled the plug on cloud services, I wonder how long it will still be legal. Legislation should be put in place so that features not requiring a connection shall work offline. In north America, there is a lot of political pressure for some environmental issues but nothing about planned obsolescence.
> Legislation should be put in place so that features not requiring a connection shall work offline.
I'm afraid that in most cases that is just impossible, because the service is essentially all in the "cloud" by design.
Perhaps the company should be forced to sustain service for a minimum warranty period like in the EU with their 2-years minimum legislation, which has cost repercussions onto the user.
But really in most cases the problem is that it's so accepted to be sucked into subscription deals where the company can change their end of the deal at a moment's notice, and where you might just lose a lot of invested time and effort, let alone data and privacy, and essentially nothing of that can be properly compensated.
Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which product on this list do you think was "moderately successful" and had "people depend on it"?
Maybe not "moderately successful", but if I bought a router from Google and it was no longer supported / discontinued, I would probably avoid buying a Google product again.
I think that general routers, such as TP-LINK products, become obsolete faster than Google routers because they only receive one or two firmware updates with no significant feature additions during their product cycle.
Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other companies kill projects when they’ve clearly failed and basically nobody is using. Google will kill things that are moderately successful and people are dependent on, but they aren’t a blockbuster success that makes a difference compared to their ad revenue. But mostly we’ve just never forgiven them for killing Google Reader. And we never will.
Which product on this list do you think was "moderately successful" and had "people depend on it"?
Any of their chat product ? Google Reader ? Cardboard ?
The list is much much longer, I'm surprised you're having a hard time finding them.
Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
What other company has a literal graveyard of products? https://killedbygoogle.com
Amazon and Microsoft would have graveyeards just as large, if compiled via the same criteria. You know all that shit Google gets about chat apps? Microsoft has also launched and killed more than a dozen of them. Jeff Bezos used to brag about how many failed products they launched and killed. So it comes back to the question that ed_mercer had: why is there such a double standard? Why does somebody obsessively maintai…
Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because half the crap Google ships are “side projects which didn’t work out,” a list which apparently now includes its cloud. What do you mean by this? It seems GCP has around 10pc market share and growing.
Google Cloud “is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding” [1]. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
I work at Google so am perhaps biased, but that article is from 2019 and cloud is now a 20B/yr business and growing. Why does it keep coming up?