my theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62sHBHq3pc
Nice. So this is effectively what is keeping skynet at bay.
Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them
91–100 of 105 posts
Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them
#92Not a Google fanboy by any means, but couldn't this be read with the opposite conclusion as well - that the average time that Google keeps marginal products alive is 4 years? Of course it's possible that everyone has some personal favourites amongst those 164, but if an idea really has legs what's to stop people from exhuming it from the Google graveyard?
> but couldn't this be read with the opposite conclusion as well - that the average time that Google keeps marginal products alive is 4 years
Averages are misleading when the distribution is bi-or-multimodal.
Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them
#93Not a Google fanboy by any means, but couldn't this be read with the opposite conclusion as well - that the average time that Google keeps marginal products alive is 4 years? Of course it's possible that everyone has some personal favourites amongst those 164, but if an idea really has legs what's to stop people from exhuming it from the Google graveyard?
> but couldn't this be read with the opposite conclusion as well - that the average time that Google keeps marginal products alive is 4 years Averages are misleading when the distribution is bi-or-multimodal.
So are you saying that it couldn't be read like that?
Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't these devices run Android? Pretty sure you can run YouTube on a 2011 Android release. That's not important to Sony, of course, but even for new hardware it seems easier to make it run Android and shovel your bloatware on it than to develop your own half-assed OS for each TV model.
Youtube's required Android version is listed as varying depending on device on Google Play, but on apkmirror.com it says that the minimum version is Android 4.4+. That was released in 2013. https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/youtube/youtube-14-...
That's for the latest version of YouTube, but I believe an old version of YouTube will still work fine with today's servers, at least for basic video watching (commenting etc. broke in the big Google plus debacle)
Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe, but some are exceptionally bad. Why did Allo exist at all for example? And the merging, demerging involved with Messages, Hangouts, and Voice have been a complete mess. There's more there than just trying some ideas, as some of the ideas actively damaged older ideas.
I made a post recently on another article saying I thought the chatter about them killing product was overblown, but the chat/video stuff is truly a cluster that's doing them no favors whatsoever. We had a separate SMS app, Google Talk, the Hangouts app, Hangouts integration with SMS, the new Messages app pushing you to de -integrate from Hangouts, and whatever the hell is happening now with Allo and Duo, Allo dying,…
or Google could have kept things simple with having just one app called Google Talk.
Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them
#96I noticed in the "recent deaths" section, YouTube for 3DS. This made me laugh, because at Netflix, supporting the 3DS was always a big pain. Regardless, Netflix still supports it to this day. In fact, as far as I know, Netflix has only ever killed support for one platform -- The PS2. And that was only because there were only about 10 people left using it. So we sent them all Rokus and told them we're discontinuing PS…
Last time I checked about a year ago. Netflix still works on my iPad 1
Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but couldn't this be read with the opposite conclusion as well - that the average time that Google keeps marginal products alive is 4 years Averages are misleading when the distribution is bi-or-multimodal.
So are you saying that it couldn't be read like that?
Think about how many Google products have lasted much longer than four year: Search, Maps, Gmail, Drive, AdWords, etc. This skews the average.
What would be more helpful is a median, or percentiles (eg 75% of Google products only last X years, 25% last Y months). I imagine that would be much more representative of Google’s fail-fast experimentations.
Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Love this a ton! How does Netflix ensure reliability for those platforms with an ever growing codebase and the evolving business? Was the platform built to be extensible from the start?
Most of the old apps can't be updated, so they are sort of frozen in time. They all hit APIs on the backend, so as long as the APIs they hit remain backwards compatible it "just works". The old apps don't get any new features that require UI changes or can't be supported on the platform if that platform is updateable. So the short answer is, everything is an API, so as long as the API stays backwards compatible it ju…
Gotcha I thought that it might have been server driven clients similar to the way Spotify does it. But that makes sense :)
Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them
#99A better metric would be rate of death, not total deaths. For example, how many products does Google have now vs 2004 Google?
Not only a better metric, but the only way to actually compute life expectancy. We need the mortality rate for each year, then we can know the expected remaining time for any particular "age".
Re: Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them
#100Not a Google fanboy by any means, but couldn't this be read with the opposite conclusion as well - that the average time that Google keeps marginal products alive is 4 years? Of course it's possible that everyone has some personal favourites amongst those 164, but if an idea really has legs what's to stop people from exhuming it from the Google graveyard?
Id be interested in seeing the median lifespan. I feel like it's possible there are long lived products bringing the average way up, although I could be wrong without diving in further.