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Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

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351–360 of 427 posts

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

#351
This is true. Google cannot be relied upon.

The axing of Google Talk & Reader is still fresh.

Even the other day, a friend mentioned that instead of waiting for Gmail to be killed, its better to move email to your own domain.

Even I moved off keep. I am confident that it is going to be axed soon.

The thing that bugs me the most of why Google doesn't just opensource the code. Open-sourcing Google reader was the decent thing to do. Like netscape open-sourcing its code to Mozilla before it sank. I still treasure the Netscape CD I got with from my ISP in the late 1990s.

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

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm dying to know more information about Google Music. I'm one of the people who uploaded their entire library up there, and while it vaguely exists as a backup of a 20XX version on a hard drive somewhere, losing access to it would be pretty crippling to my every-day listening. I'm absolutely not interested in a Spotify-like subscription to a revolving library that I don't control; Google no longer letting me listen…

I'm working on a self-hosted alternative to google music. The server part stable and the mobile apps are being actively worked on. Check it out here: https://mstream.io/

Thanks, I'll look into it!

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

#353
post #10

Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for people with long-standing accounts is untenable. The kitchen-sink approach of gmail has created a website/app that wants to meet every need and honestly meets none. In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly rolled up and ideal notifyin…

[deleted]

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I know a lot of "non-techies" that switched to using iPhones just for iMessage because Google's messaging ecosystem is confusing and seems to change every 12 months. I also know a lot of non-techies that use Google Play Music to upload and manage their own music libraries. It's rumored that Play Music is going to be killed in the next few months as Google pushes YouTube music subscriptions instead. The pr…

I'm dying to know more information about Google Music. I'm one of the people who uploaded their entire library up there, and while it vaguely exists as a backup of a 20XX version on a hard drive somewhere, losing access to it would be pretty crippling to my every-day listening. I'm absolutely not interested in a Spotify-like subscription to a revolving library that I don't control; Google no longer letting me listen…

It's very expensive but check out Roon.

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically identical to youtube. Forget putting AAA games on it, imagine a massively improved version of the flash games that were popular a decade ago.

Forget putting AAA games on it, imagine a massively improved version of the flash games that were popular a decade ago. I wouldn't be so confident about AAA games being a barrier. I guess AAA games emphasizing "realism" might always have a high-end PC niche, since the genre could always ramp up graphics to the point of un-streamability. I could also totally imagine, let's say, Nintendo, going whole-hog into streaming…

I guess I was thinking more in terms of what's going to happen when you can literally play a game with the click of a button in a browser like you could in flash. My thought is there will be massive amounts of games flooding the market in much the same ways there are on mobile devices and the price will trend towards zero with microtransactions in the same fashion.

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

#356
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…

Note that whilst GMail, YouTube and Search might not be going anywhere they also are not being improved or developed upon. Just being kept running which is the same symptom

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

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much money do you think AWS loses still supporting old deprecated services like running EC2 instances outside of a VPC and SimpleDB? I’m not aware of a single feature on AWS that has ever been abandoned.

I don't know of any service that was dropped on either of AWS or GCP. Features are dropped though, they can't be ordered from new accounts then they disappear eventually. I don't think that you can order older instances, or run instances outside of a VPC, not sure if non-HVM AMI are still supported. AWS has a strategy of leaving offerings to rot and making a new thing that you have to migrate to yourself. For example…

You can't run EC2 instances outside of a VPC if you have a new account. If you have a very old account you still can and every now and then they announce a new feature that works with them.

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

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads Do you see ads in Gmail? I don't anymore and it feels it has been like since a very long time. (and my AdBlock os turned off on Gmail)

I've started seeing ads disguised as emails (similar to promotional reddit "posts") in the "new" Gmail app I've switched to after being forced off Inbox. I think the ads only show up on free accounts. I have another Google account through my employer (for work email) and I don't see ads there.

My Gmail is free, too...

On GSuite (non-free version of Gmail) I don't see the ads either and it is supposed to be like that (after all, it's paid)

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

#359
post #334
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…

If so, why is YT (sampled randomly from your list) buggy as hell? Is it possible no-one at G noticed that (sampling randomly again) for example playlist shuffle does not work? How come this is not fixed?

Following OPs argument (I have no idea either way)

Someone got promoted for introducing playlist shuffle

Nobody gets promoted for fixing it

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

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hadean looks interesting. But there's no documentation available, just hype. Their demo was big, but very simple - it's a FPS in space. They demoed Hadean on Azure, but it's not clear that it's tied to Azure.

The problem is basically distributed cache coherence. You have many small data objects shared between a large number of machines. Often, one needs access to an object on another machine. How do you do that efficiently.

Spatial OS seems to work kind of like a multiprocessor cache.[1] Two machines can have read-only copies of an object. If one copy is changed, the other has to be updated. Performance is better if you don't have to do that too much. They use the fact that they're representing a 3D world to advantage. If something is geographically nearby, they try to keep it on the same machine. To load balance, they will cut up overloaded regions into smaller regions and apply more machines to them, or combine underutilized regions to free up compute resources. This is a rough understanding from reading the documents.

No idea how Hadean does it. The site doesn't say much. It's one of those "onboarding funnel" sites - no info for you until the marketing people have all your info.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_coherence#Coherence_mech...

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