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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

#221

Post by falcolas »

fancl20 wrote: post #105
jiggawatts wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd do it for $300K! Anyone from Google want to check my post history and reach out to someone able and willing to do boring maintenance?

Part of the problem is when you are in that position it’s also easy to move to other interesting projects internally. Then the real choice is between doing boring maintenance or useful new things at same pay.

Not everyone wants to chase the new shiny. There are many folks out there who enjoy the challenge of working in a legacy database. Blue sky folks see a rats nest of wires, maintenance engineers see cable porn in potentia.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#223

Post by [deleted] »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #167
vitus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yes, but we're not the people making the product decisions. Stadia's shutdown was inevitable in part because we had already established this distrust, and also because leadership handled every aspect of it incredibly poorly. It was technicall…

> Stadia's shutdown was inevitable in part because we had already established this distrust, and also because leadership handled every aspect of it incredibly poorly. It was technically impressive, but the economics relied on the addressable market actually being willing to go all-in on the service. This is what I don’t understand. Is leadership really this dumb or are we missing large pieces of context? The prevaili…

[deleted]

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#224

Post by prepend »

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…

Stadia is a big deal. And OnHub must really suck if you have it as your router.

I think it’s probably 90% blogspam and reinforces that anyone sane should very carefully evaluate whether they rely on anything google releases.

Personally, I’ve looked at google phones and networking and home stuff and won’t touch it with a ten foot pole because I don’t want to switch out my router because google decides to kill it.

I agree on the side projects or conferences being shut down and thought the same thing of “why is this even a stand alone app, wouldn’t people just use maps?”

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#225

Post by prepend »

londons_explore wrote: post #100
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

They really just need clear branding between "This is a side project, we might take it away with just a months notice" and "This is a product we will give you many years notice and a migration path if we decide to get rid of it". I think they should label everything in the former category "experimental". Put the label right in the logo so it is really obvious.

They used to have “google labs” but stopped it (haha) with some stupid explanation that it wasn’t needed any more because everything is a lab, or something like that.

And of course gmail was in beta for many years.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#226

Post by falcolas »

Ensorceled wrote: post #152
eviks wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it person's full right to write blog posts listing said abandoned projects? Why do people get criticized for such simple observations re. the behavior of some giant company?

Carrying water for billionaires and trillion dollar companies is a common thing on HN. So many threads are "Trillion dollar company did a shitty thing" ... "Yes, they have every right to do that, you shouldn't complain and it's your own fault since you should have known better and stop whinging on HN about it". At least in this case, they may be Google employees.

Or, uncharitably, people being paid to minimize negative press and stymying discussions.

Oh, wait, you already mentioned Google employees. My bad.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#227

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Spooky23 wrote: post #195
tweenagedream wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There’s a bias here for AWS because they were the early adopter product and have traction with startups. I think Google is more creative on the business side with GCP and is doing well in the market in a lot of ways. AWS does the circa 1985 “Hi, we’re IBM, fuck you” thing. Azure doesn’t get the grief GCP does because MS service growth is driven by really complicated deals. Few of the types of people who post here und…

> Azure doesn’t get the grief GCP does because MS service growth is driven by really complicated deals

The kind crafted by competent sales teams in it for the long haul. Not the rotating cast of characters at Google.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#228

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jsnell wrote: post #202
Ensorceled wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My claim is just that they're not actually exceptional in how many products they cancel or how they cancel them. If the HN community realized that, then we'd get fewer low-quality submissions like this, and fewer low-quality comments in any Google article. That'd make HN a better place. 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…

> and were shut down reasonably well

Nobody who developed for Stadia thinks this. And this is far from a HN view—it regularly comes up at conferences for financial types.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#230

Post by graboidhunter »

bigyikes wrote: post #6

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?

These services aren't that important, but the theme is. It's precisely why my company will not use Google's cloud platform.
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