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Lazare

So this gives people the opportunity to try Google products...

...that are even more likely to to be cancelled without warning than normal Google products?

I'm positively quivering with anticipation.

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I liked Gmail labs' stuff. And some of it got incorporated into Gmail proper (and later inbox).

I for one was grateful for the "experimental" things I got the opportunity to use, e.g. cancel after send.

The thing about Gmail labs is they are (mostly) extra features that you could use or not, and which didn't leave you worse off than if you'd never used them if you started and then they were killed off

Fully fledged products have more risk. And I've felt burned by multiple Google products in the past.

Let's say the first product announced by Area 120 turns out to be a great new chat app. Would you recommend your friends all download it and start using it? :)

Edit: Confused Google Labs and Gmail labs, my bad. Removed nonsensical comment.

>Let's say the first product announced by Area 120 turns out to be a great new chat app.

That's exactly what Google has been missing all these years: a chat app.

Are you speaking of labs being killed off in the hypothetical? As far as I can tell, it's still there...

I was thinking of Google Labs I guess, brain fart. Edited my comment. :(

I can certainly see the sentiment. I also thought maybe this is like a startup incubator where the Google employees get some 'test customers' to actually see if their science project has legs. Because who doesn't like being a test customer right?

The optics are horribly bad here, to someone on the outside, hitting that landing page, it looks like "Gee we have these fans that will do almost anything to feel like they are on the 'inside', lets have a thought shower and see how we can exploit that!"

What's next, let us be early testers of the fully immersive VR environment? You know strap us into a harness, feed VR right to our brain, and harvest our thermal energy to power data centers?

That's turning into the Google version of what one of the mods here called 'Wolfram derangement syndrome'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978871

Yes Google cancels stuff (usually not without warning). Experimental stuff? Even more likely to go nowhere, just as it says on the page. The response is, by this point, completely content-free.

Yes, this has become an HN meme/trope. The other one illustrated here is "what's up with web page design trends where I can't read the text or scroll properly?"

Why such a negative response? I do not see how it is constructive at all..

A) Look: New Vaporware! B) Yeah but it's still vaporware

Not necessarily constructive, so much as pointing out a thing.

Just curious, do you post the same response when Microsoft announces products or services?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsof...

You can also add these to the list:

  Wunderlist
  Sunset
  Games for Windows
  Silverlight
  Zune
  Kin
  XNA
  PlaysForSure
  Flight Sim
  Expression Suite
  SteadyState
  Windows RT
  Windows Phone 7
  Forefront
  Front Page
  Money

Or Apple?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_discontinued_....

Some of the Microsoft products you listed have been around and successful for a really long time. I can only imagine some people being disappointed about Flight Simulator being dropped after about 24 years, but that's a very respectable product lifespan. When you look at Silverlight, that was very strategic to Microsoft, they put a lot of weight behind it, and them abandoning it after nine years isn't for a lack of trying. With Google it's more like floating an idea, that then people might get hooked on, for them to seemingly say: nah, never mind. Google probably has the numbers to back up these decisions, but for people that were buying into it, that's pretty sour, and it either has happened quite a few times with them, or they have a major perception problem around the matter.

Yes, some of those products and services that Microsoft has shut down do go back some way, but others such as Sunset and, the soon to be shut down, Wunderlist are very recent.

The difference between web services that Google provides and almost everything in both those lists is:

1) When a web service goes away, you can't keep using the old version that's installed on your PC/hardware you own.

2) In the vast majority of cases the products were not cancelled before the introduction of a replacement. Notable exceptions might include the Newton. And yes, it would probably quite normal to mention the Newton when a similar product was launched (i.e. the original iPhone) and may people did.

Microsoft has also cancelled services so I'm not sure why you're trying to make it sound any different. I have Steam games that have no online support anymore because Microsoft cancelled yet another Steam competitor service. I've lost track of how many times they've tried to take on Steam and lost. You would think they would have learned by now.

But neither of those companies have as thoroughly destroyed a standard as Google did with RSS. Apple in particular has almost always continued with a device to fill the hole left by a product(excluding the Newton).

RSS is still alive and well so I'm not sure where you get the idea that Google destroyed it by cancelling Google Reader.

>Apple in particular has almost always continued with a device to fill the hole left by a product(excluding the Newton).

And it was replaced with a significantly higher priced device.

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