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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

#321

Post by soylentcola »

barry-cotter wrote: post #157
jacquesm wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google really messed up their roll outs of new products so often that it is almost a meme. You'd be hard pressed to pick a 'worst', between Google Glass, Google Plus, Google Wave and so on the list is long and getting longer all the time. It would be a lot smarter if they launched these separately so that they do not impact the trust relationship people have with their main brand. I don't know any other company besid…

Clear worst has got to be whatever they rolled out that was worse than GChat. Just astonishing to go from best in class to unusable in one go.

Ironically, it's now actually called "Google Chat". I still use it with plenty of people since it allows me to chat via browser, iOS, or Android without any device/brand restrictions.

But in just about every way, it is the same or worse than their previous offerings (the older "Talk" and the later "Hangouts"). They ditched the option to do SMS fallback in the same app instead of improving on integration. Can't just hit the little camera icon in a group chat to instantly start a group video call anymore. Individual and group chats are in separate tabs. Photo and video handling are worse (but at least not downgraded as badly as MMS between Android and iOS).

Honestly I only use it because it sucks to message with iOS users if you can't use iMessage and I/some of my friends don't use Facebook products like FB or Whatsapp.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#322

Post by chongli »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #249
chongli wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never worked at Google so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Everything I've heard (mostly on HN) about working there is that there are simply too many perverse incentives to abandon products. People get promoted for creating exciting new products and then leave those products behind at their new position. Up-and-comers are also incentivized to do the same thing. There seems to be no appetite whatsoever for h…

This comes up literally every google thread. At this point it feels like a meme which originated on HN at some point. People keep repeating because it sounds plausible. The promo system has changed in the last year. So to some extent this info is outdated. And while obviously culture and incentives play a role I think the statement that this is the major reason for Google killing products is largely false. New grads…

So to some extent this info is outdated

The OP we're all discussing is about six products Google cancelled in 2023! If Google has decided to change course on this issue then their efforts have yet to bear fruit. The ball is completely in their court. We're all sitting here waiting to see when Google will decide to place some emphasis on trust and long-term stewardship.

Of course, you can't build a reputation for those things overnight, so it will take a while. But there is no sign whatsoever that they have actually changed course.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#323

Post by brookst »

baryphonic wrote: post #308
brookst wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GPT4 is also much more expensive to use, even at the probably-running-at-a-loss pricing. Accuracy per dollar and/or joule doesn't seem to be increasing too much.

Sure, if we’re changing the complaint from “accuracy won’t get better” to “efficiency won’t get better.”

But I don’t believe that either. Hardware design and manufacturing cycles are long and we’re just now starting to see transformer-optimized HW. Accuracy per dollar and per joule will improve by at least an order of magnitude, maybe two.

But then we can move on to percent of human tasks LLMs are suitable replacements for, or the ethics of increasing automation.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#324

Post by ulfw »

None of those "products" (really just features. What is the point of a Streets View "app"?) made any sense to begin with.

Goes to show that Google has been a free-for-all for too long. Who allowed these things to be built (waste of resources) and launched (bad for brand and marketing as they won't be able to succeed anyway) is beyond me. What's going on at Google nowadays?!

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#325

Post by aleksiy123 »

chongli wrote: post #322
aleksiy123 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes up literally every google thread. At this point it feels like a meme which originated on HN at some point. People keep repeating because it sounds plausible. The promo system has changed in the last year. So to some extent this info is outdated. And while obviously culture and incentives play a role I think the statement that this is the major reason for Google killing products is largely false. New grads…

So to some extent this info is outdated The OP we're all discussing is about six products Google cancelled in 2023! If Google has decided to change course on this issue then their efforts have yet to bear fruit. The ball is completely in their court. We're all sitting here waiting to see when Google will decide to place some emphasis on trust and long-term stewardship. Of course, you can't build a reputation for thos…

My point is that the promo process being the root cause of this comes up often but doesn't really have any evidence to back it up except a long chain of repetitions.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#326

Post by pleb_nz »

onion2k wrote: post #23
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?

It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes. I think the 'problem' is that reputation damage doesn't really impact Google's revenue. They get the overwhelming majority of their money from publishing adverts, with a significant amount on their own properties (search and YouTube). It really doesn't matter if a bunch of gamers decide Stadia screwe…

Google search hasn't been best option for a few years now

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#327

Post by TheCoelacanth »

ghaff wrote: post #31
chongli wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never worked at Google so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Everything I've heard (mostly on HN) about working there is that there are simply too many perverse incentives to abandon products. People get promoted for creating exciting new products and then leave those products behind at their new position. Up-and-comers are also incentivized to do the same thing. There seems to be no appetite whatsoever for h…

Put in concrete terms, do you want to be one of the two engineers exiled to maintaining Reader because you pissed someone off to keep the geeks off Google’s back?

Plenty of people would take a steady non-exciting maintenance job, especially if it paid remotely close to what Google pays. Many would even prefer it to a more exciting job.

There are thousands of companies that manage to maintain much more boring apps with salaries much lower than Google's.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#328

Post by randgoog »

jacknews wrote: post #312

I was going to comment on another post, about the validity of CS style leetcode puzzles in interviews, and that Goole seems to have been at the forefront of this trend: Not only do they not necessarily predict competence at solving real-world problems, they possibly select for people who treat complex real-world problems as a CS exercise, and just look at the result for Google - numerous projects that try to solve th…

You're implying that engineers have a say in product decisions. They often don't. A lot of what we are told to build comes from upper management unfortunately.

I wouldn't blame eng interviewing practices on this particular issue.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#329

Post by randgoog »

jsnell wrote: post #72
imgabe wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other companies kill projects when they’ve clearly failed and basically nobody is using. Google will kill things that are moderately successful and people are dependent on, but they aren’t a blockbuster success that makes a difference compared to their ad revenue. But mostly we’ve just never forgiven them for killing Google Reader. And we never will.

Which product on this list do you think was "moderately successful" and had "people depend on it"?

I've seen multiple things be deprecated while at Google and I can say that the things I saw killed from the inside (because it was a product I worked on) in the past 5 years were either not being used by many users anymore or had an alternative that had similar features instead.

So if you depended on it, you could depend on something else. And if it was successful, it wasn't canceled.

I didn't work on Stadia but I imagine that it was a huge waste of money for the company for the relatively few users it had. If they could have offered a good subscription based service like Xbox Game Pass or Apple Arcade I'm sure it would have more users. But getting access to content would be very expensive. At least they refunded consumers' money for the games they purchased.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#330

Post by baryphonic »

brookst wrote: post #323
baryphonic wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT4 is also much more expensive to use, even at the probably-running-at-a-loss pricing. Accuracy per dollar and/or joule doesn't seem to be increasing too much.

Sure, if we’re changing the complaint from “accuracy won’t get better” to “efficiency won’t get better.” But I don’t believe that either. Hardware design and manufacturing cycles are long and we’re just now starting to see transformer-optimized HW. Accuracy per dollar and per joule will improve by at least an order of magnitude, maybe two. But then we can move on to percent of human tasks LLMs are suitable replacemen…

I was critiquing accuracy of ChatGPT, which has a certain cost. "Just use GPT4, 5, ..." was the solution proposed in response, but that ain't free. In fact, it's one to two orders of magnitude more expensive.[0] I'm also pessimistic on custom hardware being that much of a help. I read about Cerberus's giant wafer chip in 2019[1] and even saw it at a conference in early 2020 pre-pandemic, and I have yet to see that make orders of magnitude worth of improvement. The attention mechanism simply requires huge amounts of multiply-adds, especially at GPT-scale. That costs energy and cash no matter how much custom hardware you throw at it.

[0]https://openai.com/pricing

[1]https://www.wired.com/story/cerebras-chip-cluster-neural-net...

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