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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

#351

Post by edude03 »

AraceliHarker wrote: post #147
ryanbrunner wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not "moderately successful", but if I bought a router from Google and it was no longer supported / discontinued, I would probably avoid buying a Google product again.

I think that general routers, such as TP-LINK products, become obsolete faster than Google routers because they only receive one or two firmware updates with no significant feature additions during their product cycle.

Not really, because other than things like newer standards (that'd necessitate new hardware anyway) there isn't really any changes that need to made once it works.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#352

Post by rpdillon »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #347
rpdillon wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strawman. I bought a router. I never expect any router to stop working because the manufacturer flips a switch.

> I bought a router. You bought a connected router. Again, you just have the wrong expectation for online products. The fact that it was maintained for 8 years should be praised.

Nah, they never said it wouldn't work without their servers. Bait and switch.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#353

Post by fancl20 »

layer8 wrote: post #262
fancl20 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is when you are in that position it’s also easy to move to other interesting projects internally. Then the real choice is between doing boring maintenance or useful new things at same pay.

Maintenance doesn’t need to be boring, and I also don’t see how you wouldn’t add interesting new features and improvements to existing products. The basic issue, it seems, is that the higher-ups simply don’t care about the products themselves, other than for them to serve as a profit center.

Those projects have real difficulties to retain enough developers even to keep lights on. And even higher-ups want, they can’t force allocate developers (in Google’s current power structure) other than providing some incentives including promotion.

The end result is a doom loop that if the team can’t retain enough staffing, developers will be overwhelmed by the boring maintenance work, which leads to more team transfers. They do use contractors to mitigate the issue but IMO it doesn’t work in every case.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#354

Post by vitus »

ouid wrote: post #306
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…

Stadia failed because gaming is already hilariously cheap. even at the AAA "price point", you pay 60 dollars for 80 hours. No subscription can compete with just owning the games and the hardware.

The hardware is a big up-front cost. If you want a gaming PC, that can potentially set you back $1000 or more, and there's ongoing maintenance cost as you have to keep upgrading your graphics card if you want to keep playing the latest titles. Stadia Pro at $10/month was the equivalent of building a $600 PC every 5 years, plus with a bunch of free games thrown in over that time. Buying the latest console can set you back hundreds of dollars in one go, and now you also have vendor lock-in (which means you have to commit to one platform, or buy multiple consoles each generation).

The marketing was... not executed well. Most people didn't realize that you could actually just buy games on the platform and play them without paying the monthly subscription for Pro. The backbone of the business model was supposed to be driven by that 30% cut of game sales revenue that most gaming platforms / stores take.

The infrastructure was supposed to be further subsidized by selling off-peak compute as a cloud service. That never materialized.

The exclusives were lackluster compared to other platforms (Breath of the Wild? Halo Infinite? God of War Ragnarok?), and leadership shuttered the in-house game studios before they were able to release much of anything.

Beyond all that -- there were plenty of features that owning your own hardware simply could not compete with. Just to list a few:

- Not having to wait for video game downloads was an incredibly underrated feature -- being able to start playing a game within seconds meant you could play a game immediately after an impulse purchase, rather than having to wait half an hour (100GB download at 500Mbps) first.

- Family sharing meant that you could play Cyberpunk 2077 (which, by the way, launched with serious performance issues across most platforms... but played smoothly on Stadia), while the kids next to you on the couch played, I dunno, Paw Patrol, all on hardware you already owned, e.g. your laptop, or phone, or the Chromecast that came with the founder's edition (also 100% optional).

- You could seamlessly continue a game across multiple devices -- play a game at home on your TV, then continue at a friend's house on your phone.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#355

Post by wolrah »

voytec wrote: post #313
lolinder wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, 1GB was the starting point and was considered insane at the time. Then they eventually added a counter where the storage space grew all the time. They finally capped that out—maybe that's what you're thinking of?

My bad. I misremembered.

It was almost 20 years ago at this point, easy mistake to make.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#356

Post by userbinator »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #261
userbinator wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least they could just release the server-side code when they've had enough, but they don't even want to do that.

Have you ever written software in a company as large as Google? I have. It would need massive investments to make a server usable outside of the environment it was originally written for. It's just not viable.

The goal isn't necessarily "usable", but more of a "we don't want to host it anymore, do what you want with it".

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#357

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

mrguyorama wrote: post #339
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 technically impressive, but the economics relied on the addressable market actually being willing to go all-in on the service. This is what I don’t understand. Is leadership really this dumb or are we missing large pieces of context? The prevaili…

Why would management care? Ads, the entire point of google as a business, will continue making gobs of money no matter what. The point of these toy side projects is to entertain developers in between "track users more" and "Show users more ads" tickets.

To create more streams of revenue, gradually evolve the business. They can’t just be an ad company forever.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#358

Post by doubled112 »

edude03 wrote: post #351
AraceliHarker wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that general routers, such as TP-LINK products, become obsolete faster than Google routers because they only receive one or two firmware updates with no significant feature additions during their product cycle.

Not really, because other than things like newer standards (that'd necessitate new hardware anyway) there isn't really any changes that need to made once it works.

It isn't new features and standards. It is not ending up part of a botnet with no user interaction.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#359

Post by iLoveOncall »

rpdillon wrote: post #352
iLoveOncall wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bought a router. You bought a connected router. Again, you just have the wrong expectation for online products. The fact that it was maintained for 8 years should be praised.

Nah, they never said it wouldn't work without their servers. Bait and switch.

And the box of lightbulbs doesn't say it won't work if you don't pay your electricity bill.

At some point you have to have an ounce of common sense.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#360

Post by trasz3 »

GVIrish wrote: post #175
trasz3 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes. I guess this means a "reputation" doesn't influence their profits. Some companies aren't in impression-making business, or even pretending-to-be-trying-to-make-their-customers-happy business.

Reputation may not affect Google's ad based revenue, but it absolutely affects their ability to profit in lines of business outside of ads. Google might have made more inroads with enterprises with G suite and GCP if they didn't have that reputation. The gaming industry is a 200 billion/year market that Google could've captured a decent size of if potential customers trusted that they wouldn't quickly give up. All of…

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