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Comment by ClassyJacket | Hacker News Reader

While I'm sure this is useful to the right people, unfortunately my reaction when I see a new Google service announced is "Nobody should use this, it'll be abandoned in six months and shut down in twelve."

I hope Google realises this is a viscous cycle where people avoid signing up for their services, causing low usage, causing them to abandon it, causing lower usage, causing them to shut it down, causing people to avoid signing up for their services...

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Where does this rumor even come from? I don't see any evidence for it but there's always a HN comment about it. In fact, I've never had a Google service shutdown but a dozen smaller companies have disappeared in the meantime.

Also, this is a B2B product which is treated much more seriously than their standard consumer products.

"Google’s list of dead services; an infographic:" http://www.androidauthority.com/google-services-shut-down-23...

If that's really the full list then I'm not sure what the problem is. Google Reader was a good service and universally mourned but many of the others have evolved into newer products or have much better non-Google alternatives (it even says that in the descriptions). What in that list are you missing today?

It's not just the apps that Google explicitly retires, there are also the ones that Google just stops paying attention to and they fade into nothingness. Google Voice comes to mind.

My company recently switched to Google suite of apps (Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, etc) and soon after was given the heads up that we should expect minimal support/updates to Hangouts since Google is shifting their online chat efforts into Allo and Duo. We're now regretting that switch.

We were using StackDriver for our AWS monitoring which they bought and killed. B2B definitely isn't safe. They've earned this reputation IMO.

StackDriver is still available and can still monitor AWS: https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/quickstart-aws

Even if it no longer works for your usecase, it's not a Google originated service but another startup that was shutdown/acquired/sold which is what I was referring to.

Should we hold it against google when they acquire a startup and shut it down? Or is it preferable for them to wait for the startup to wind down the service first and then swoop in?

I don't know, I'm assuming users just care that the product or service continues to exist and get better. If an acquisition helps then great, otherwise... sure, we can blame whatever decisions led to the demise, although it's rarely as simple as "stupid big company wasted a bunch of money and made people sad".

I think it's important to distinguish between consumer services, especially beta and one via acquisition, and core parts of their cloud / big-data ecosystem. Do you worry about Azure services because Microsoft killed WMP or WM10 or FoxPro?

Stackdriver isn't dead. I use it today. You can still run it against AWS.

Stackdriver is alive and now supports AWS and GCP. Were certain features you used dropped? Which?

Eh? Stackdriver is a alive and kicking, even their PMs happily interact with customers on the google group and even SO. I've had positive interactions with them regarding some desired use-cases and workarounds until features are available. I'm much more pumped about StackDriver than CloudWatch logs although both have limitations.

Is Google actually more likely to shut down a given service than any other company?

Perhaps yes, because almost none are core businesses of Google.

This one looks like core business (analytics/data collection).

Any new product is either:

- A startup, which will likely fail

- Not the core business of the company which created it

But it's much easier to drop without endangering the company. And the question is specifically about Google.

Established services... maybe? Although the list on Wikipedia[0] doesn't make it seem as dramatic.

I know of at least one website[1] dedicated to track whether or not Google had shut down products yet. I think the thing that started this meme was when Google shut down Reader[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...

[1] https://didgoogleshutdown.com/

[2] https://www.google.com/reader/about/

Seems so, especially that most of the time we're talking about companies for which a given service is their only product.

Personally, I've learned to treat SaaS products as throwaway by default. That is, if I can benefit from it short-term, like in 3 to 6 weeks, I may sign up. But I don't expect it to exist in 3 to 6 years, so I'm not going to invest much into using it.

I don't specifically blame Google when they acquire a startup and shut down the service. We don't know the financial condition of the company before the acquisition. Would you rather Google wait for the startup to officially fold and then scoop up the assets in bankruptcy?

Their numbers definitely are adversely affected by these "acquisitions"

Companies with only one product are very likely to shut that product down when they go out of business or are acquired.

Yes. Google's model is "user has zero say." On the one side of it is forced auto-update, and on the other side is forced deprecation.

This!

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