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Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them

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101–105 of 105 posts

Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them

#101

Meanwhile on AWS I was using SimpleDB until recently on a small project - I make AWS NO money - but they seem to still support SimpleDB even though it is not actually marketed? It's 12 years old and can't be generating a lot of new signups because it doesn't actually show up anywhere I don't think. Does anyone know how AWS handles depreciating items on AWS. I've yet to be bitten despite beng a long time user (S3 stil…

As I've understood it, AWS keeps things alive as long as someone is using it. Once they want to get rid of it, they take it off the catalog of items you can provision, and start encouraging users to move to it's successor, and once it's abandoned fully they get rid of it. That's how they've always done old ec2 instance types, for example.

Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them

#102
post #15

I noticed in the "recent deaths" section, YouTube for 3DS. This made me laugh, because at Netflix, supporting the 3DS was always a big pain. Regardless, Netflix still supports it to this day. In fact, as far as I know, Netflix has only ever killed support for one platform -- The PS2. And that was only because there were only about 10 people left using it. So we sent them all Rokus and told them we're discontinuing PS…

The counter example would be Google Maps. They really care about this product. I think they even support Palm OS.

They care about it because

a) it’s basically Google Search just with a visual representation

and

b) the closest the West has to a ‘Super App’ (book hotels/restaurants/movie tickets etc straight from Maps)

Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them

#104
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you saying that it couldn't be read like that?

Think about how many Google products have lasted much longer than four year: Search, Maps, Gmail, Drive, AdWords, etc. This skews the average. What would be more helpful is a median, or percentiles (eg 75% of Google products only last X years, 25% last Y months). I imagine that would be much more representative of Google’s fail-fast experimentations.

FTA: The average lifespan of a discontinued Google product is 4 years and 1 month.

"Living" products aren't skewing anything

Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them

#105
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix is the last app that works on my Sony Google TV from 2011. The YouTube app shut off after like 2015, but 8 years later Netflix is still trucking.

Ahhh my 40" google TV was too big to haul across the country the most recent time I moved. Ended up in a dumpster. Really too bad.... That was a nice TV. Good picture quality. On the bright side I bought a new TV and found, to my surprise, digital antenna works much much better now. I have two TVs, the flat screen from ~2010 gets 3 channels, the new one gets 30. They're connected to the same source.

> Ended up in a dumpster

Bummer. Put it on the side of the road and someone would have LOVED to take it.

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