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Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#131

Post by zaarn »

maxxxxx wrote: post #73
holdenc wrote: post #7

Hopefully Google will see this and better understand why Microsoft is beating them in cloud services. When I moved about a TB of S3 data into their cloud storage (as a cross-vendor backup) one of their product evangelists called me just to say hello. I was floored. But I mentioned that their constant shut downs are making me wary of a larger Google Cloud commitment.

“one of their product evangelists called me just to say hello. ” They are good at that but if you need actual support they are much less eager to talk to you.

Well, that's still better than Google, which is stopping short of launching short range missiles are everyone daring to call customer support in terms of support friendliness.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#132

Post by ocdtrekkie »

FreakyT wrote: post #85
radarsat1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them. Isn't this because it's a categorization they do using global information, like spam filtering? If so they would only be able to support the specific categories they are trained for across all users, so they couldn't support custom categories.

Inbox’s custom categories were created using simple filter rules. You can technically do that in GMail also, but only for folders, which are independent of the social/promotions/etc tabs. It seems to me that the ability to create custom tabs via filters would not be a particularly unreasonable feature.

Ideally, you should move more towards folders rather than these custom tabs anyways: The custom tabs don't work with other email clients, which just see one big inbox.

When I was on Gmail, third party client use led me to replace the tabs with custom rules to sort my social notifications, for instance, into proper standards-compliant actual folders.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#133

Post by jfasi »

noneeeed wrote: post #105
jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

Is this basically why things like Inbox, and the endless attempts at messaging, all come out as seperate products rather than enhancements to existing products, because that way you get to say you launched something new?

To be perfectly honest I don’t know the answer to the chat app case in particular. That’s possible, and if one were to investigate and find each app was made by a team rolling up into a different director then I’d say that’s what happened. However it’s entirely possible that it was caused by an overly complex market segmentation strategy.

WhatsApp had the advantage of growing slowly and segmenting their users with time to experiment and tweak things. The Google chat apps came out at once, and it’s possible there were so many because they tried to come up with a working segmentation for all addressable users from day one instead of growing organically and grabbing each segment one at a time.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#134

Post by ocdtrekkie »

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #59
criley2 wrote: post #10

Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for people with long-standing accounts is untenable. The kitchen-sink approach of gmail has created a website/app that wants to meet every need and honestly meets none. In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly rolled up and ideal notifyin…

To my mind, Gmail has always been broken because it utterly fails at being able to delete messages when acting as an IMAP backend. On iOS, this problem has generally been solved, but on the Mac, it remains a clusterfuck. I have no hope it will ever be fixed. While my primary account is still there, I moved my personal domain address to Fastmail.

I actually discovered recently Gmail has a setting for configuring this behavior over IMAP. But yes, countless times I discovered emails I had deleted on my Windows Phone just got archived silently. I wish their default was to behave like IMAP is supposed to, but my guess is they wanted to err on the side of not deleting data.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#135

Post by Griever »

duality wrote: post #118
Goronmon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's combination of: * The person who pushed for the Inbox project got the promotion/raise they desired and move onto other new projects for further advancement. * Inbox was too good at quickly managing email, and Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads than getting this done efficiently. Call me cynical but that's where I'm at with Google at this point.

"Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads [...]". What ads?

Gmail now contains ads within each of the "category" tabs. Ad blockers seem to mostly block them, so that's most likely why you haven't seen anything.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#136

Post by Guillaume86 »

duality wrote: post #118
Goronmon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's combination of: * The person who pushed for the Inbox project got the promotion/raise they desired and move onto other new projects for further advancement. * Inbox was too good at quickly managing email, and Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads than getting this done efficiently. Call me cynical but that's where I'm at with Google at this point.

"Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads [...]". What ads?

Gmail app on Android has ads in the mailbox.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#137

Post by ocdtrekkie »

slantyyz wrote: post #121
FabHK wrote: post #77

My list of degooglifying actions (mostly from my older post [1]) * switch default search engine to DuckDuckGo (one can still use the !s bang when one wants to see what Google has) * use tracking blockers (uBlock origin, BlockBear on iOS) * use anonymous/private/porn mode browsing most of the time (except for sites I actually want to be logged in permanently) * use Zoho as a replacement for shared Google docs * use Yo…

>> * switch default search engine to DuckDuckGo (one can still use the !s bang when one wants to see what Google has) I switched to Bing Search last year to earn Microsoft rewards, and I was surprised to find that I only need to go to Google for supplementary searches less than 10% of the time. I thought switching to Bing was going to be much worse.

I was on Bing for rewards for a time, but became uncomfortable with their decision to allow ad targeting based on LinkedIn profiles with no option to opt out. DDG user now.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#139

Post by jamesgeck0 »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #100
throw_away wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately. I would love if they followed this strategy. Instead, you have products like reader and inbox with many passionate users, which demonstrate some wall stickiness, and they're killed rather than monetized. Monetize me. I recognize that the things I like cost money. Figure out how to make money off me! I would…

Google reader is the one that kills me. Not only do they not monetize it / promote it, but it's Google subsidized free existence killed the market for alternatives. Then Google+ and their failed social efforts killed Reader and RSS feeds have now disappeared from the landscape leaving us with only proprietary options.

> it's Google subsidized free existence killed the market for alternatives

Did it? IIRC, there were at least six decent alternatives available when Reader closed. More if you count desktop and mobile applications.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#140

Post by steven2012 »

TheTruth1234 wrote: post #112
jfasi wrote: post #61

Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…

Thanks, but to you and any other GOOGLE EMPLOYEES Are you not internally aware of this? Do you just carry on regardless? What happens when you voice this issue internally? As an ex-Google fan boy, the title of this article has been true for years and it's what poisoned me (and no doubt many others) against you. So you must be aware of it. What's your take? I'm super curious as to why you gave up tech (brand) leadersh…

Google as a company is worth almost $1T. It's hard to argue that's the wrong approach when they are so ridiculously successful.
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