People with feature phones are still going to need to find info, and this move shifts the traffic onto services with less resources than Google (eg. https://twitter.com/Telefact). As additional services shut down due to increasing traffic, that traffic will move to the surviving services, until they all shut down.
Google SMS search has been shut down
21–30 of 59 posts
Re: Google SMS search has been shut down
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
This: Nope, they are more profitable than ever. Goes hand in hand with "shutting down a lot of services" since rounded to the nearest billion dollars the only business Google has is search & display advertising, generally deleting anything else accretes positively to the bottom line :-)
There's some truth to that, but their profits are growing because their annual revenues are consistently and exponentially growing, not because their costs are going down: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOG&fstype=ii... Digital advertising just happens to be a very good industry to be in right now.
The term you are looking for is efficiency which is the measure of how much of the business is dedicated to the parts that provide the revenue versus the parts that don't :-).
I left Google a couple of years after Patrick Pichette joined. Patrick is a great guy and very focused on putting as much money as possible into the bank account (great for share holders, not so great for lifestyle benefits).
But the point is that there is a target return on capital that every group is being held to and those that don't make the cut are being tossed. That helps the overall number get better (assuming those freed up resources either join more profitable projects or leave)
Re: Google SMS search has been shut down
#23[deleted]
Re: Google SMS search has been shut down
#24I posted this when it was pulled a couple days ago, to no traction :/ Google says their mission is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.' To me (and several others who have posted in that forum), this seems to be counterintuitive to that mission. Many people can't afford or don't want to pay for a smartphone or the data plan. When you try using SMS search now, google resp…
I just wanted to add that, to me, this is a more egregious shutdown than reader. While many on Hacker News (who I'm assuming are more likely to have a smartphone than the average working-class citizen) may not understand this, envision this:
You are in an unfamiliar city, attempting to follow directions someone gave you that you scribbled down. You take a wrong turn and wind up in a rough-looking neighborhood at 2 AM. Most of your friends are asleep. What do you do?
This has happened to me, and I counted myself lucky to be able to text google for directions. While this may not be an extremely common scenario, there is the possibiilty that access to google's sms search may have saved someone's life.
Re: Google SMS search has been shut down
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or services that have no future? SMS search is a dead man walking in 2013.
Not in lots of countries.
Nearly every single country is moving to smartphones. At wildly different rates and current penetration, but the vast majority of the world is going to be on smartphones in the near future. Companies who focus on the present and are obsessed with backward compatibility will inevitably find themselves behind more forward thinking companies.
Re: Google SMS search has been shut down
#26I posted this when it was pulled a couple days ago, to no traction :/ Google says their mission is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.' To me (and several others who have posted in that forum), this seems to be counterintuitive to that mission. Many people can't afford or don't want to pay for a smartphone or the data plan. When you try using SMS search now, google resp…
Sure, it isn't helpful for those without a data plan, but decisions doesn't exist in a present day vacuum. People with phones without data plans are a dying breed, and I think any reasonable person would focus their efforts on the premise that the world is moving toward smartphones.
I wouldn't exactly refer to them as a "dying breed" quite yet. I recall seeing a statistic somewhere that in many developing countries, SMS adoption rates are still going up. There's still a prominent market for SMS search, just not necessarily the one that Google wants to serve.
Re: Google SMS search has been shut down
#27I posted this when it was pulled a couple days ago, to no traction :/ Google says their mission is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.' To me (and several others who have posted in that forum), this seems to be counterintuitive to that mission. Many people can't afford or don't want to pay for a smartphone or the data plan. When you try using SMS search now, google resp…
Sure, it isn't helpful for those without a data plan, but decisions doesn't exist in a present day vacuum. People with phones without data plans are a dying breed, and I think any reasonable person would focus their efforts on the premise that the world is moving toward smartphones.
I'd like to know what you're basing this on. In the U.S. this may very well be true, though the fact still remains that lower-income people are less likely to have smartphones. But what about in developing nations?
Re: Google SMS search has been shut down
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, it isn't helpful for those without a data plan, but decisions doesn't exist in a present day vacuum. People with phones without data plans are a dying breed, and I think any reasonable person would focus their efforts on the premise that the world is moving toward smartphones.
I'd like to know what you're basing this on. In the U.S. this may very well be true, though the fact still remains that lower-income people are less likely to have smartphones. But what about in developing nations?
Plenty of stats around. The trend is fairly clear. Mobile data is the future and almost the present, even in developing countries: http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile...
Re: Google SMS search has been shut down
#29Are Google having cashflow problems? How come they're shutting down so many of their services?
>Are Google having cashflow problems? Nope, they are more profitable than ever. My friend who works at Google explained to me that a big issue is maintenance. It's a tougher problem than it sounds because if an issue comes up someone needs to understand the codebase well. When a product is no longer worth the budget of full-time employees the best course of action is to kill the product.
Makes sense. It's like the people who can't throw anything away because they "might need it" some day. Eventually they are drowning in clutter and just keeping it all organized would consume more time than they have.
Re: Google SMS search has been shut down
#30What did Google SMS Search return exactly when you sent a text?