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Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

arstechnica.com

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

#81

Post by javagram »

apexalpha wrote: post #70
o10449366 wrote: post #63

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…

Does anyone even use Google's messaging apps? I've literally not seen one being used once in the past 4 or 5 years. It's been Whatsapp for as long as I can remember.

Your country and social group determine this.

Hangouts and Gchat before it certainly have been used by a lot of people. In my experience, it has gotten less popular since the Gchat days but I’ve never chatted to anyone on WhatsApp...

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

#83

Post by theandrewbailey »

nerdjon wrote: post #14
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #2

Well in that case losing Google Reader was all worth it.

I am still upset about that. That single service being shut down is what started me to distance myself from all google services except search when possible (including making the decision to actually pay for services when necessary)

You don't want to use anything Google except search? That was about the easiest one to step away from (using duckduckgo now).

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

#84

Post by o10449366 »

apexalpha wrote: post #70
o10449366 wrote: post #63

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…

Does anyone even use Google's messaging apps? I've literally not seen one being used once in the past 4 or 5 years. It's been Whatsapp for as long as I can remember.

Non-technical people on Android definitely do because they either come preinstalled on the phone or they're heavily promoted/advertised. Even in my relatively small city I saw huge billboards and posters advertising Allo and Duo when they were released.

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

#85

Post by FreakyT »

radarsat1 wrote: post #49
tikkabhuna wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. Gmail doesn't seem to have that much customisation. I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them. The Inbox bundles seem to be slightly renamed categories that Gmail has, but with the ability that they're always on the main page and being able to create your own. Why couldn't this be easily ported back over to Gmail and tweaked…

> I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them. Isn't this because it's a categorization they do using global information, like spam filtering? If so they would only be able to support the specific categories they are trained for across all users, so they couldn't support custom categories.

Inbox’s custom categories were created using simple filter rules. You can technically do that in GMail also, but only for folders, which are independent of the social/promotions/etc tabs. It seems to me that the ability to create custom tabs via filters would not be a particularly unreasonable feature.

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

#86

Post by mrbonner »

jfasi wrote: 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…

It is general true for any big organization. In my own firm, I could see the rush into machine learning direction as a door way to a promotion. Any engineer or PM who works on a ML related project and is able to ship it would have a higher chance of getting promoted. I could also say the same for the usage of AWS products. In the end, I often see projects resembling the messy mashup of AWS products to form a unnecessary complex ML solution to a mosquito problem. It’s a waste yes, but sure will make it looks challenging and boost people to promotions.

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

izzydata wrote: post #66
vitaminCPP wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inbox was a dream come true for the zero-inbox mentality. Sadly, I've yet to found a replacement for this tool.

I agree, but you can archive emails in gmail and it does the same thing as setting an email to done in inbox. You can still search for them in the search box or browse the all mail category.

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by TeMPOraL »

malvosenior wrote: post #75
meddlepal wrote: post #35

Google's two (maybe three) core Google-branded products to non-tech people are Search, Gmail and maybe Chrome. I don't think non-techies could even tell you what some of the other products are or did. I would also wager most people outside of tech don't realize YouTube is owned by Google. Tech people pay a lot of attention to this stuff, but casual user's don't notice or don't care.

You forgot probably their only actually good product: maps

Good at being a pathfinding and point-by-point navigation tool, not as an actual map. Their completely broken treatment of street and POI labels makes the product very annoying when trying to preplan a journey, get yourself oriented in a place you don't know, or evaluate alternative routes.

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

#89

Post by fixermark »

Jorge1o1 wrote: post #71
fixermark wrote: post #42

I was going to make a comment about how Google's approach to service deprecation contrasts with Microsoft's, but then I spot-checked my assumptions and realized that MS has discontinued over 50% of the Office ecosystem of apps over the years. So I think I need to instead ask a question: Is Google's deprecation strategy actually unusual for a company with a wide ecosystem of offerings?

Disagree about the MS point a bit. Yes, nominally, MS has killed some programs in the Office Suite, but the core products of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook are still there. Even the weird, obscure products like Publisher and Access are still around. So maybe they killed Clippy, but that guy

Google has killed some of its offerings, but the core products of search, ads, drive, and mail are still there.

(... Inbox being only a UI on top of the mailbox and not the mailbox itself, not unlike Microsoft Schedule+ went away but the underlying Outlook functionality remained).

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

#90

Post by javagram »

ergothus wrote: post #45
gnur wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I am aware, Google hasn't shut anything down that you actually pay for. So fear mongering about GCP is just begin irrational.

Right, they just let it wither. If you have a google apps domain, you run months to years behind getting new features compared to their free offerings. Then there's Google glass...when was the last update for that? Paid has not meant any kind 9f safety net from Google's mercurial attitudes.

I have a personal google apps domain and don’t mind this.

Being on a slow, stable update release track means I have the better version of the product IMO. I don’t need the latest flashy updates pushed immediately to my gmail as long as the battle-tested version gets there eventually.

Also, it’s ultimately an enterprise product and rapid changes aren’t appropriate for that space anyway.

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