Hacker News Reader

Comment by beambot | Hacker News Reader

Pity. Sounds like they had a real product with a real, demonstrated business model (akin to Universal Robotics). Google needs to embrace a bit more of the "just fscking ship" attitude for its moonshots.

(The brand protectionism is really starting to hurt their ability to be scrappy.)

View on HN

This "we must protect our brand" is really weird. If you look at the sentiment here on HN, it's pretty much "Oh great, Google is in the news again. I wonder which product they're sunsetting today". Maybe Google only invoke this for their HW products and not their SW.

They've now optimized the process to the extent now that they can cancel them before they launch. Seems like an advance over things thus far. :)

They seemed to throw a lot of stuff up like buzz, reader etc. and then stop supporting it.

This is exactly my fear with Project Fi. It's very intriguing to me and I'm considering switching over to it, but what happens if Google suddenly decides it's not "core enough" and decides to shuttle it?

It takes less than a day to port your number over. As a Project Fi customer I can tell you that 1) customer support is awesome 2) It feels like a VC-backed startup, they give you generous discounts for small issues 3) There are a few small issues, for example some fuck-up with wifi calling 4) It's terrible if you travel a lot 5) Its great if you travel a lot to places with networks that are Fi-partners.

What I really love is that they do true cash-back for unused data, not rollovers, etc.

For number 4 are you referring to domestic travel? I used Fi on my Nexus 6P recently through Canada, Japan, Indonesia, and Taiwan with the service becoming available soon after landing. I was actually surprised it worked as well as it did.

Domestic, yes. It was bad for me when I was in Montana recently, but it could just be that regular mobile networks suck in those places anyway (because sparse population).

When I went home to India it worked very well, likely because it just hopped on to a good network. Coupled with really cheap roaming data, and automatically using google voice for all calls, its simply awesome.

If that happens, you can just move your number to a different telecom. Others will welcome you.

I'm a recent Fi convert, so take this with a grain of salt.

- Customer service is exactly what it should be, accessible, excellent, quick, friendly and timely. It feels a bit like stepping back in time 40 years.

- The service works very well considering it's combining the coverage of 4 different networks (3 mobile + wifi)

- call quality on the mobile providers is about what you'd expect from them, not as good as AT&T or Verizon

- call quality on wifi is great

- the additional built in services and integration into the phone are really well done: simple website to service the account, reasonable pricing, automatic voice transcription of messages

I'm pretty impressed with how consumer friendly it is.

I've been a Project Fi customer for almost a year and love it. I am slightly worried about them shuttering it at some point, but switching to another carrier is really easy and I use Google Voice anyways, so the downside of potentially having to do that isn't too bad compared to the huge upside of awesome customer service and super cheap pricing (for me). It brought my monthly bill from $80 to $30 as I mostly use WiFi.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com