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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

#361

Post by josefx »

nobody9999 wrote: post #271
Nathanba wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it only seems worse from Google because their product shutdowns don't seem to be tied to financials and if that isn't the case then it makes them unpredictable to us as consumers. Let's remember that Google offers a lot of their products entirely for free. Yet the reason for shutting down Stadia was: "it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected". But how does that make logical sense given that G…

>But how does that make logical sense given that Gmail is free which means it costs money to Google and yet it gets to live forever but Stadia has paying customers and it's not good enough? >[...] >Unless I'm being more than naive and we the users are quite LITERALLY sold out to advertisers. Yes. Because when you can read every email and store it for data analysis focused on "targeted" ads, you can charge your custom…

> And pausing game play to show you ads...well, that would certainly never fly.

TV has been doing popup ads for years and I am quite sure many Android games also do it. Then you have ads that could be directly embedded into the game play or the games environment itself, a port to Stadia was necessary anyway, so adding ad support could have been done as part of that.

Of course having a streaming platform filled to the brim with the unending amount of cheap ad supported android game clones this would have attracted would have hardly made any sense. No need for Stadia if the games already run natively on the only supported endpoint.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#362

Post by jacknews »

never_inline wrote: post #317
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…

Going by this logic, most of these shut-down projects should be coming from India (and possibly eastern European countries?), where the bar of DSA problems is much higher due to competition. I too dislike the pervasiveness of the narrow type of DSA problems (because it comes at the cost of other computer science topics, scales linearly with practice after some point, and selects for people who have time to practice t…

"where the bar of DSA problems is much higher due to competition."

I don't see any logic there. Companies in the rest of the world are less focused on DSA as a hiring metric, in my understanding.

Why are Google projects closed? Why are they started?

I believe Google are heavily focused on data and metrics and algorithms, and I think that is definitely a factor.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#363

Post by muyuu »

illiarian wrote: post #350
muyuu wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but there are many more almost every major brand has essentially their flagship and most do worse than the Pixel Asus, Xiaomi, Huawei, Sony, Vivo, Oppo, Motorola, OnePlus, etc etc all have high-end phones only Apple and Samsung are doing better than Google Pixel

Again, you're clumping all pixels into one category. Even if major Pixel sales seem to be coming from the relatively cheap Pixel 6a. https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/21/consumers-are-splurging-on... "While both Honor and Google’s share of the premium smartphone segment more than doubled in 2022 from 2021, they still only account for around 1% of the pie, so they are still significantly smaller players." Behind Apple, S…

last time I researched into it last year, Google Pixel was already the biggest division in hardware for Google in terms of profit (above Nest and Home) and had better-looking numbers in profitability than all the main players in hardware except Microsoft - and that included Apple for the first time

since Google killed Stadia and perhaps has no chance at the console business, it strategically looks like a terrible idea to exit the mobile hardware division, but again, with Google you never know

the image Google has created around having essentially no commitment to any business lines makes it hard for them to enter the console market with longer cycles, but doesn't hurt them as much in the mobile market as phones are replaced often anyway

PS: Pixel is just Google's newer mobile hardware brand, for me there is no real difference with Nexus in that respect - just a rebranding

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#364

Post by jzb »

porkbeer wrote: post #332
column wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know your question was rethorical but I'm counting 7 chat / messaging platforms : Hangouts (2013): A messaging platform that integrated with Google+ and Gmail, offering text, voice, and video communication. Google Messages (formerly Android Messages, 2014): An SMS, MMS, and RCS messaging application for Android devices. Google Spaces (2016): A group messaging app that allowed users to create "spaces" for sharing li…

'Only' 7, while legacy AIM still seemed to work better than any of them. You are just making the point for them.

I never realized how much I'd miss AIM, but here we are.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#365

Post by passion__desire »

loudmax wrote: post #236
papito wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am convinced at this point that the brass at Google doesn't even know about Keep. It'd be dead a long time ago.

I have the same suspicion regarding Google Podcasts. The UI is stable and it doesn't seem to try very hard to promote ads or podcasts I'm not already subscribed to. I do worry that someone in Google management will realize that this product exists and decide that it's in their personal interest to either "improve" it by rearranging the entire UI until it's unusable, or just shut it down entirely.

Have you seen "podcast" tab on the channel's page on youtube. Most likely they will kill the app.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#366

Post by nobody9999 »

josefx wrote: post #361
nobody9999 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But how does that make logical sense given that Gmail is free which means it costs money to Google and yet it gets to live forever but Stadia has paying customers and it's not good enough? >[...] >Unless I'm being more than naive and we the users are quite LITERALLY sold out to advertisers. Yes. Because when you can read every email and store it for data analysis focused on "targeted" ads, you can charge your custom…

> And pausing game play to show you ads...well, that would certainly never fly. TV has been doing popup ads for years and I am quite sure many Android games also do it. Then you have ads that could be directly embedded into the game play or the games environment itself, a port to Stadia was necessary anyway, so adding ad support could have been done as part of that. Of course having a streaming platform filled to the…

>TV has been doing popup ads for years and I am quite sure many Android games also do it. Then you have ads that could be directly embedded into the game play or the games environment itself, a port to Stadia was necessary anyway, so adding ad support could have been done as part of that.

A fair point, and one I hadn't really considered.

I was thinking along the lines of multiplayer FPS games and the like. If you stop play to show some players ads, they'll be dead/have lost by the time the ad is over. If you stop play for all players to show them ads, I'd expect really high loads on servers as they "customize" the ads by region and PII.

Alternatively (as you imply), using "product placement" ads in-game without interrupting game play, I suppose that could work, no matter how disgusting it might be.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#367

Post by ChildOfChaos »

999900000999 wrote: post #293
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 c…

This is not correct. You did not need to 'subscribe and pay for games seperately'

You could buy a game and play it on Stadia, you did not need a subscription. The subscription was to play the included games and get a few new ones each month.

The controller wasn't bizarre, it used Wifi to connect directly to the servers to reduce latency of it having to go to your device first via bluetooth then to the servers, hence why 'it didn't work with anything else', which is also not correct, it worked fine wired, you could also use an xbox controller just fine which is what I did, it wasn't something that 'shipped' with Stadia, it was an optional extra.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#368

Post by 999900000999 »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #367
999900000999 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

This is not correct. You did not need to 'subscribe and pay for games seperately' You could buy a game and play it on Stadia, you did not need a subscription. The subscription was to play the included games and get a few new ones each month. The controller wasn't bizarre, it used Wifi to connect directly to the servers to reduce latency of it having to go to your device first via bluetooth then to the servers, hence…

Ok, I'll admit to being wrong here. You did need the subscription for 4k streaming which Gamepass just doesn't offer.

I'd still argue Gamepass does this much better since for 15$ a month you get a good variety of games to play, plus the option to run them locally with whatever resolution your hardware can handle. Google tried moving into a market they couldn't compete in.

I actually got a free Stadia kit with a 4k Chromecast + Stadia controller. I might of gotten confused since you had to sign up for a pro subscription to get the free kit.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#369

Post by poopooracoocoo »

bombcar wrote: post #109
orra wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many different chat / messaging platforms has Google put out in the last ten years, for example? This is a good point. They don't iterate on products, at least that's my obvious perception. Instead, they launch competitor products, so in the end they end up pulling more products.

Microsoft has had various tools and programs that they sunset (lynk becoming Skype for business becoming teams) but they do try to make a migration path available (or, arguably, they just put window dressing on the same backends).

There's no migration path from Skype to Microsoft Teams (Personal). Microsoft hasn't picked one as far as I know.

Microsoft similarly has a bunch of duplicate services and products. They've got chat functionality spread across many apps, specifically Teams, Skype, and Xbox. Windows also has widgets in Windows 11 and widgets in Xbox Game Bar. There's also the mess that is developing apps for Windows that has just become Chromium, partially due to Microsoft's own messes.

Re: Google has already pulled six products in 2023

#370

Post by ChildOfChaos »

999900000999 wrote: post #368
ChildOfChaos wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not correct. You did not need to 'subscribe and pay for games seperately' You could buy a game and play it on Stadia, you did not need a subscription. The subscription was to play the included games and get a few new ones each month. The controller wasn't bizarre, it used Wifi to connect directly to the servers to reduce latency of it having to go to your device first via bluetooth then to the servers, hence…

Ok, I'll admit to being wrong here. You did need the subscription for 4k streaming which Gamepass just doesn't offer. I'd still argue Gamepass does this much better since for 15$ a month you get a good variety of games to play, plus the option to run them locally with whatever resolution your hardware can handle. Google tried moving into a market they couldn't compete in. I actually got a free Stadia kit with a 4k Ch…

To be fair, a lot of people thought the same as you, even when Stadia closed a lot of news articles mentioned this as being a reason. Google did a horrible job of selling the product, that was one of the main reasons why it failed.

Gamepass does seem like a decent product, particularly if you are a big gamer, it's not for me as I don't like subscriptions and I don't play games enough, but it is a decent offering.

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