301–310 of 371 posts
Stadia is probably the saddest one. Great technology that was never really given a chance.
Nothing sad about Stadia dying. Google is probably the last company I would want having any kind of leverage in my hobby.
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> 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…
From the beginning of the article:
> The Google unit, (...) is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
I'm sure that there are discussions about the strategy, the expected growth and revenue and what to do if these targets aren't met. It totally makes sense to reduce the rate of investments to mitigate risks if the results aren't what was expected, but this doesn't mean "shutting down" Cloud.
From the article:
> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely,
Seriously, Google could even decide to leave the Cloud business eventually, branching it off the rest of the company. But "shutting it down" wouldn't suddenly happen because a spreadsheet shows that Azure has more market shares than Google.
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i think it's about expectations
Thing is... imagine they had announced "Thanks for being part of the gmail beta. We learnt a lot, but have now decided to close GMail. You have 3 days to download your emails and find a new email provider". A lot of people would have been very pissed off, even though it said 'beta'.
A big problem is that nobody believes their designations anyway. GMail was in beta for years when it was obviously a mature product, while "Of course we're investing a ton in Stadia..." only to shut it down a couple months later.
The guy just rides on the wave of money that search brings in. Otherwise it's just failed project after failed project. Google has this stupid process where they spin up a new idea, cripple the launch, cripple support, cripple maintenance, and then kill the project for lack of success a year later leaving the few suckers who held out with faith in them high and dry.
For me personally, Allo was the final straw. I did the footwork of getting people to switch to it, had some mild success, and then google pulled the rug making me look like an idiot.
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What other company has a literal graveyard of products? https://killedbygoogle.com
This exists: https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ But if you search for "killed by Amazon", you get back news articles about people actually dying in its warehouses. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-wa...
1. Skype for Business - 18 years old. Upgrade path to Microsoft Teams
2. Windows Server Essentials - 26 years old. Unsure how relevant this is today with everything going cloud-based
3. Atom - Wasn't originally a Microsoft product and they maintained it despite there already being a better Microsoft alternative for longer than expected. Also 9 years old 4. Internet Explorer - 27 years old and a clear upgrade path was available
5. Forza Street - F2P racing game. Can't excuse this one
6. Microsoft Academic - No excuse, however the data had an open license and migrated elsewhere
7. Channel 9 - 17 years old
8. Silverlight - 16 years old and the web had evolved beyond it long ago
Microsoft has killed 13 products since 2021 and many of them had simply run their course. Comparatively, Google has killed 57 products in that same time frame. Most of them are under 10 years old, many of them under 5. Many of them had not run their course and almost all of them had no clear upgrade or migration path.
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?
> 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…
No subscription can compete with just owning the games and the hardware.
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?
I don’t think Google can innovate anymore. They did a lot of great work as a startup and when they were much smaller (<10k headcount). Now most of what they do fails.
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I keep seeing this – it's a meme at this point – and I don't get it. Answering questions truthfully from a broad set of data while citing sources seems to be ChatGPT's major weakness. It routinely "hallucinates," even with better prompting. It's much better at helping generate prose based on the prompt. I don't even buy the idea that "exponential growth" will improve things. One of the few things OpenAI is still open…
Gpt4 is much more accurate than gpt3.5, which was somewhat more accurate than gpt3, which was dramatically more accurate than gpt2. At some point you have to look at trends more than philosophical speculation.
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> 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?
Launched it as a start-up with unfair access to Google's resources. There was no way for it to work under Google's aegis.