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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

#291

Post by yamtaddle »

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.

As far as I can tell, Google, culturally, just hates maintenance. Or practically anything that's not a product launch. Ask anyone who's done much development on Android—eternal bugs (I've seen people provide patches and beg to get them applied on bugs years and years old, and be ignored), half-assed implementations of all kinds of things, poor docs often with outdated info, mediocre architectural direction—and that's on a major product!

I think it's some combo of an organizational/internal-incentives failure, and a cultural thing where all these "geniuses" they hire can't be bothered to do any boring shit, to include, sometimes, properly finishing features they start developing.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#292

Post by yafbum »

kennyadam wrote: post #111
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…

Bard should have been released as an upgrade to Google Assistant imo. Imagine how much better a voice assistant would be if you could actually hold a decent back and forth conversation with it without having to know the exact phrasing needed to accomplish something. Google Assistant still feels so stunted and lifeless when I know Google can produce more realistic generated speech audio, interpret requests in plain En…

I don't think it would be an upgrade at this point yet. Bard / LLM lacks precision in ways that are pretty important when carrying out the user's wishes.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#293

Post by 999900000999 »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #246

Honestly still missing Stadia so much. Not a heavy gamer, but Stadia was awesome for game nights with friends and also the play while someone watches along feature was great. I'd always wanted to play Red Dead redemption 2 (which was on Stadia) but my PC can run it, so I bought it for my birthday, 110 gb download, had to install the epic launcher, then the rockstar launcher, then it complained about not being able to…

Xbox Game pass is the only cloud gaming service that does this right. It's 15$ a month, and you get a few hundred games to chose from. You have the option to run the games locally via a PC or Xbox as well.

Games work best locally, but if your fine with streaming then you can try tons of different games instantly.

Stadia's issue was you needed to subscribe and pay for games separately. It even shipped with a bizarre controller that didn't work with anything else. If anything Google got out competed, plus Gamepass is baked into Xbox Live so you had an existing customer base.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#294

Post by jsnell »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #217
martius wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. So on one hand Google doesn't innovate anymore and is too shy to release anything new, and on the other hand Google can't just get things out and experiment because it would let down people…

wasn't there an HN thread a couple years ago where Google announced Cloud had a couple years to make money (but without specifying what would happen if it didn't) and now here we are? I'm worried I'm forgetting exactly the dates here since I never keep track of Google Cloud, but I remember a bunch of people announcing they weren't going to use Google cloud because obviously it would be shut down in a few years? on ed…

No. That link is not Google announcing what you claim they did. It's some anonymous person - not Google - claiming they saw some confidential slides to that effect, which Google then denied.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#295

Post by muyuu »

nobody9999 wrote: post #288
muyuu wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

according to the article, they are refunding all Stadia hardware and software purchases done through their store they don't say the same about their wiretap wifi router thingy

And are they reimbursing all the developers they conned^W enticed into developing exclusive content for Stadia?

doubtful, it's Google after all

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#296

Post by Workaccount2 »

kennyadam wrote: post #111
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…

Bard should have been released as an upgrade to Google Assistant imo. Imagine how much better a voice assistant would be if you could actually hold a decent back and forth conversation with it without having to know the exact phrasing needed to accomplish something. Google Assistant still feels so stunted and lifeless when I know Google can produce more realistic generated speech audio, interpret requests in plain En…

IIRC google has purposely kept assistant stunted and lifeless. Remember how originally it was the inhuman "Okay Google" key phrase? They did explicitly to keep people from humanizing it. Also its the only assistant with no name, its just called "assistant"

It wasn't until Alexa and Siri gained traction that they let "Hey google" slip in.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#298

Post by jsnell »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #228
jsnell wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People who developed for Stadia mainly did so because Google paid them outrageous amounts of money for ports, not because users they were making a lot of money buying games.

If there were no users buying games, shutting it down would not have had any meaningful impact on the developers.

How do you think they should have done it instead? What would have changed for those developers when done your way?

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#299

Post by Workaccount2 »

belter wrote: post #179
simonswords82 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has started to monetise and Microsoft’s pockets are deep enough to cover the difference until profitability is achieved.

But it could become a new Concorde, on the way to the mythical AGI... only affordable for some, never profitable.

There are already lightweight models that are in the ballpark of GPT3.5 that run on (admittedly high end) consumer level hardware. This is with only a few months of development too.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#300

Post by hunter2_ »

pqb wrote: post #89
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…

> As [this]( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35553634 ) comment on HN pointed out, this was a good move by Google. You can feel fulfilled as an HN user. Your comment was cited (linked) in the article. Note: I am not an author of the article :)

Very peculiar to link to a comment that criticizes TFA as blogspam, though, right? Unless perhaps the comment wasn't so critical at time of linking and was later edited...
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