Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by joefkelley » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

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…

Oh everyone is aware of it. They have been making some changes to the promotion process to try to address it. But it's still a huge issue.

I'm not so sure about what the alternative is, though. The promotion process at other places I've worked was pretty much "does your boss like you? If so, they'll promote you." Which has a whole host of other issues. For instance you can get promoted for doing a mediocre job at maintenance work but being very friendly and likable.

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

#292

Post by purple_ducks » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

markstos wrote: post #252

I would rather Google keep trying and failing than quit trying. If you don't keep the start-up spirit to keep trying new things, then some start-up will find a way to disrupt you.

Google aren't inventing.They aren't even re-inventing.

They're just re-implementing.

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

#293

Post by jfasi » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:15 PM UTC

compiler-guy wrote: post #237

jfasi wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t share with you how much GCP is making in revenue, but I can assure you it’s enough that it won’t get dropped, ever. I’ll put my money where my mouth is: I’m now preparing to expand my own team’s operations into GCP and away from AWS because of how good their ML offerings are.

People were saying this about Google+ for years. "It's a 'bet the company' level of commitment." Yet here we are.

Maybe from the outside it seemed that way, but from the inside just about everyone except Vic Gundotra and his org, no one considered it a serious contender. Just about everyone I know knew Google+ was misguided and orthogonal to the business, meanwhile the consensus internally is that GCP is an obvious extension of the infrastructure work that is going to get done anyway.

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

#294

Post by ocdtrekkie » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:15 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #255

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…

Streaming game services, not so much. Yes. The game industry is very reluctant to use Improbable's Spatial OS, because, through a deal with Google, they force you to host your game, expensively, on Google's servers.[1] Nobody wants to spend $100 million developing an AAA title using that system, and then suddenly get an email that Google is discontinuing the product. (Spatial OS is technically interesting, and, hopef…

Didn't know SpatialOS was attached specifically to Google Cloud. This seems like a risky business move, people should've learned from the fine example of companies built exclusively on the Facebook platform by now.

https://www.hadean.com/ is presumably a direct competitor to SpatialOS then, I take it? And it's tied to Azure, I believe.

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

#295

Post by lgleason » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

The majority of Googles profit/revenue still comes from search/advertising. It has generated wads of cash for them, but if they just sat on the cash it would not make Wall Street happy so they've thrown a bunch of money at different efforts to make it look like they have more than just search and advertising to boost the stock price. Because of that there has been no incentive to see these other products to fruition, but at the same time they could afford to throw money at it as it helped to boost the stock price. Now however there is the new threat of regulation in both the US and Europe with the later also starting to impose fines. This makes me wonder if part of the motivation is to retrench with investment because of some potentially significant headwinds.

My guess is that what people have observed inside of the company is a manifestation of that.

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

#296

Post by saurik » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #166

PopePompus wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be that GCP isn't going anywhere, but when our organization was choosing a cloud service, we chose Amazon over Google specifically because of Google's flakiness. Google could drop cloud services tomorrow, and it would not be out of character.

We are in the same boat. My boss came to me last week saying he had lunch with a friend that just moved their services all to GCP and got big savings. But we just recently were impacted by the sudden, unexpected Maps 14x price increase.

Similar drastic changes happened to AppEngine, where Google let it rot for something like a year with increasing, extremely bad, latencies and then a sudden very large pricing model shift that made it much more expensive. I was an early adopter of AppEngine, and just can't imagine ever screwing around with Google cloud technology ever again.

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

#297

Post by tikkabhuna » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

zrobotics wrote: post #199

tikkabhuna wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. Gmail doesn't seem to have that much customisation. I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them. The Inbox bundles seem to be slightly renamed categories that Gmail has, but with the ability that they're always on the main page and being able to create your own. Why couldn't this be easily ported back over to Gmail and tweaked…

Oh God, the "updates" tab has eaten so many important emails. It won't trigger push notifications, and I don't always remember to check it when I open the page. I still don't understand what the category was supposed to be, but it's main purpose seemed to be to hide important (but automated) emails. I took the plunge and switched to protonmail w/ a custom domain. It's not perfect, and I'm looking at other options, bu…

Thanks for sharing. Good to see other people considering alternatives. I’ll start looking at the options.

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

#298

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#299

Post by jfasi » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #255

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…

Streaming game services, not so much. Yes. The game industry is very reluctant to use Improbable's Spatial OS, because, through a deal with Google, they force you to host your game, expensively, on Google's servers.[1] Nobody wants to spend $100 million developing an AAA title using that system, and then suddenly get an email that Google is discontinuing the product. (Spatial OS is technically interesting, and, hopef…

I'm pretty sure the hope is that this will lead to the development of a parallel track of game developers who make games that would otherwise be too difficult or expensive to make on old platforms.

It makes sense on paper: latency isn't an issue because Google's network is excellent. The browser is a widespread and powerful distribution network which gives you access to both desktop and mobile. The cost of development should be lower because you don't need to buy expensive development kits and licenses/certifications.

My personal view is that this isn't a technical problem but rather a bizdev problem, and Google's approach to solving things tends to be "throw out some tech and hope people use it," which is straight up not going to work with investment-heavy industries like games.

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

#300

Post by user5994461 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:21 PM UTC

yoodenvranx wrote: post #203

jfasi wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The metric you need to keep in mind here is revenue per employee. Keeping one product up and running necessarily means withholding engineers from another. As an extreme example, ads engineers make Google many times their salary, benefits, and ephemeral costs, and even non-revenue-generating services like Photos and Assistant indirectly drive traffic to the money makers. Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only…

> Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only a couple million users, mostly pointy-headed techie types, that doesn’t drive business to any money-making effort, And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled. But what those direct metrics do not show is the long term trust which is destroyed by such short-term…

> And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled.

Microsoft doesn't consider a product unless it can generate more than $100M a year.

It's a general mode of operation for big companies, not limited to Google.