201–210 of 371 posts
and this is why I wont use Google products. You can't trust them not to pull the plug.
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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…
Why are you and ed_mercer so intent on defending Google here? I mean I HATE Microsoft and I have to admit they do a much better job of handling product shutdowns than Google. Microsoft tells you the dog is going to "Aunt Joy Ann's farm" and gives you a puppy. Google blasts the dog right in front of you and leaves you to bury the poor thing.
Which of the "products" on _this list_ was shut down badly, in comparison to what MS would do? Not products on some other list, but this list that's at the top of the front page.
Code Jam was not a product. Stadia refunded all purchases. Street View is still accessible from the Maps app, this is just removing some ancient standalone app that nobody had heard of. Currents and the wifi routers had long deprecation cycles. I bet nobody here knows anything about the wearable computing stuff or how it was shut down.
If these are all products that were reasonable to shut down, and were shut down reasonably well, then what's newsworthy about this?
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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?
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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?
The dedicated Streetview app was finally killed because streetview is already integrated in regular google maps. To me, that seems like a good reason to discontinue the dedicated app. I don't get the reasoning behind this article. Half of this list is side projects which didn't work out, which is understandable to a certain degree. The article feels like blogspam riding on the hypetrain of people disliking when googl…
> Half of this list is side projects which didn't work out, which is understandable to a certain degree What happens to the people who bet on them? Do they even have a point of contact if e.g. an integration breaks? That’s the point. They’re half-baked products being put out and pulled with no care in the world. That’s the brand. Which means when a Stadia comes out, a product that could have worked if people trusted…
So on one hand Google doesn't innovate anymore and is too shy to release anything new, and on the other hand Google can't just get things out and experiment because it would let down people who bet on these experiments.
There is probably an in-between.
> a list which apparently now includes its cloud.
Two years ago Google Cloud was 37k employees[1], which is about 20% of the company. Even if the 12k layoffs were on Cloud that would still be 10-12% of the company.
Calling it a side project and comparing it to a "smart tag embedded in clothing" or even Stadia is just FUD.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-26/google-fa...
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Yeah, with unlimited storage for life. Acquiring userbase with empty promises is their M.O.
Wasn't it originally 1 GB? Then they doubled it on April fools one year and started increasing it from there.
Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN. It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes. Anyone wanna bet on if/when Bard gets axed?
Do you think anyone beside who are vocal (HN/tech crowd esp) care about this 'killed by google' and refrain from using their main source of revenue such as Search, Gmail, Android, Youtube, Map, Photos? Zilch. GCP/Gsuite's money pouring clients are enterprise customers (not HN crowd), who for the large majority won't bother much about that either. So they clearly know their act doesn't actually make a dent in their re…
It starts with a loss of cultural cachet among the people who influence spending. It looks like hip startups with rows of desks with Apple machines where Windows was the default for a decade or two before.
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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'.
Them shutting it down in 2005 or 2006 would have been annoying or disappointing like the shutdown of Google Wave but understandable.
It's all about brand expectations. Google is synonymous with unreliability because they don't have another brand to shoulder that association. It used to be "Beta" but no longer.
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you can never put it past Google to just kill anything up to Google Search, but the Pixel is a success and it doesn't make sense to compare a high-end line of products on a per-unit basis to cheapo phones like TLCs for instance the most profitable watch companies in the world are Timex, Rolex and Omega, and they have a combined market share of a fraction of a percent and on a per-unit basis they don't sell, combined,…
> but the Pixel is a success and it doesn't make sense to compare a high-end line of products on a per-unit basis to cheapo phones Compare it to high end products then, and you'd still come up short. There's also the reason why I pointed out "in the context of Google, and Google products": it's a tiny product made at great effort and expense that Google clearly doesn't know what to do about (they haven't even support…
companies don't get to #3 or #4 in some of the most lucrative sectors in the world and then just decide to close shop because they're not #1 or #2
there are a bunch of profitable companies that ONLY make money in Pixel's sector, are recognised brands and they are already behind the Pixel in market share
it's essentially like being Rolex in the watch business (number 1 or 2 in profit depending on market) and just closing shop because Casio sells 1000x+ more watches