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Google has already pulled six products in 2023

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Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#181

Post by magicalhippo »

jsnell wrote: post #72
imgabe wrote: post #63

Earlier 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"?

I don't know how successful, but I loved Inbox. The current GMail is still not close, so I'm phasing out my Google mail account.

I also enjoyed Google+ despite Google's attempts to make it worse at the end. Still miss the discussions there. A few of the communities and people moved to forums or similar, but several I've lost contact with.

A good friend of mine had built his business around the Google Earth API. He made simulators for employee training as well as games.

Another good friend still relies on Picasa, as we haven't found anything that fits his image managing needs in an equally easy way. Sure it still works, but for how long who knows.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#182

Post by illiarian »

muyuu wrote: post #169
illiarian wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it though? Especially in the context of Google, and Google Products? John Gruber summarised it correctly: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/09/12/google-pixel-po... And Google's approach to Pixels reflects that: they make them greta, then they all but abandon them, then okay again, then...

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 supported their own phones for more than three years until recently).

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#183

Post by papito »

passion__desire wrote: post #144
imgabe wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

I have gotten over them killing Google Reader. But I will never forgive them if they decided to kill Google Keep.

I am convinced at this point that the brass at Google doesn't even know about Keep. It'd be dead a long time ago.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#184

Post by arafatamim »

vaasuu wrote: post #156
remirk wrote: post #29

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…

I mostly used the Street View app to capture 360° spherical panoramas, offline, on-device. Now that Google has killed the app, I can’t capture those photos! The app worked fine a month ago, why not let me use it, as it worked offline‽ No one seems to be talking about this issue. I haven’t found suitable replacement apps to capture photospheres on a (i)Phone. The suggested Street View Studio doesn’t let you capture Ph…

Try GCam. It's not officially supported by Google outside of Pixel devices, but people have tried porting it for other phones. https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#185

Post by tuukkah »

vaasuu wrote: post #156
remirk wrote: post #29

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…

I mostly used the Street View app to capture 360° spherical panoramas, offline, on-device. Now that Google has killed the app, I can’t capture those photos! The app worked fine a month ago, why not let me use it, as it worked offline‽ No one seems to be talking about this issue. I haven’t found suitable replacement apps to capture photospheres on a (i)Phone. The suggested Street View Studio doesn’t let you capture Ph…

On Android, you may be able to use e.g. Google Camera or F-Droid's Focal.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#186

Post by edude03 »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #64
cultureswitch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extremely disingenuous point you're making about OnHub. Nintendo didn't remotely remove functionalities from the Gameboy Color. Google did that with OnHub. Arguing "it's hardware" doesn't work when the features are cloud-based and the company shuts down the servers. It's bait and switch, pure and simple.

So is the expectation for every single cloud-connected item or online product that the servers remain online ad vitam aeternam so that future archeologists can still use the item when it's rediscovered and restored in 10,000 years? You just have the wrong expectation for online products.

As a software engineer I can see why you say that but as a consumer you have to ask yourself, who does a product that is designed to be reliant on the cloud benefit? Wifi routers with mesh existed before and will continue to exist after the onhub and they don’t require a cloud connection, so it seems like the cloud connection was designed to mostly benefit Google.

As a consumer, especially a tech savvy one we should continue to push tech companies to build products that last and serve the user and not just throw our hands up and say “we have the wrong expectations”

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#187

Post by jjulius »

passion__desire wrote: post #144
imgabe wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

I have gotten over them killing Google Reader. But I will never forgive them if they decided to kill Google Keep.

My wife and I both refuse to forgive them for killing Inbox. That was a wonderful product and really made a difference with email sorting.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#188

Post by surgical_fire »

zvrba wrote: post #110
illiarian wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have insanely expensive multi-year contracts with quite a few huge companies (and probably government agencies, too). You don't just shut GCP down.

You don't just shut it down, but discontinue further sales instead so that existing contracts die gracefully.

Yes, Google is known for discontinuing things gracefully.

I almost want GCP to fail just for the popcorn factor.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#190

Post by Paul-Craft »

creshal wrote: post #49
Paul-Craft wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? Yeah, about like this: https://killedbygoogle.com/ I don't really care if Google is unable, unwilling, or uninterested in supporting anything that isn't G-Suite, search, or ads. Their track record is more than enough for me to dismiss using Google Cloud Platform, or even saving anything of any importance to Google Drive…

Even G-Suite isn't really getting that much support, it's on life support at best. There's so many missing features and bugs and just painfully unergonomic workflows that have been ignored for 10+ years at this point; the long overdue and minimal UI facelift recently didn't really solve any pain points.

Nothing you've said here has prevented the last 4 companies I've worked for from using it, though. One of those companies is a very large, public company. It seems like people are still buying it.
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