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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how people keep bringing up Google product shutdowns as if literally half their products get discontinued. Yes, there are a couple, but that's because they have so many more products than any other company. I'm sure if you looked at it percentage wise, they're actually probably on the lower end compared to most other companies.

Obviously if you make thousands and thousands of products, then a couple will eventually have to be dropped. Can you even name me 5 big products they've ended which had a huge impact.

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I don't understand how people keep bringing up Google product shutdowns as if literally half their products get discontinued

Even if you don’t, I hope Google understands it, and then learns from it. Wanna take a guess at why Microsft kept FoxPro around for so long? One of the reasons was if MS axed it, they’d lose those developers, many forever. Not until they had a good transition story that utilized MS products could they dare discontinue it. And to this day some will still say MS bought Fox Software for the tech and killed FoxPro...despite it being kept around for over ten years.

Point being, MS did the right thing by FoxPro in my eyes, and it is still used as an example of MS discontinuing products. Google has most definitely not done right by some products, so perhaps that will help you understand why people keep bringing it up.

A company I used to work for still uses FoxPro to this day. A friend of mine at another company is still using VB6 for their core app (though they are planning a rewrite in .NET/C#.) Give Microsoft a hand - their discontinued wares still manage to work on the latest Windows releases. Sure, Google’s offerings are online, so there’s an ongoing cost associated with keeping the lights on, but if Google wants companies to trust them, it’s going to have to stop discontinuing products when they get bored with them.

> Wanna take a guess at why Microsft kept FoxPro around for so long? One of the reasons was if MS axed it, they’d lose those developers, many forever.

Still they axed Silverlight only a few years after they launched it. Lots and lots of enterprisey stuff was built with it and then all that stuff was suddenly unsupported.

>there are a couple, but that's because they have so many more products than any other company. I'm sure if you looked at it percentage wise, they're actually probably on the lower end compared to most other companies.

First cut from just checking Wikipedia. Number of google services: 117. Number of discontinued google services: 43.

So what's that.. about 40%?

If 117 is the number of currently active google services, that's 43 / (43 + 117), so about 27%.

Still a lot, though.

Ah thanks, missed that!

I'd say 0, since eyeballing the list almost none of them seem to be B2B type products.

This is by far the most pervasive comment on HN regarding Google ("Oh, they launched something, don't use it because they will retire it soon. Look what happened to Reader!"). Its also completely misleading when applied to Google Cloud Platform which has been around for almost 9 years now without deprecating any service.

Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud Platform

>I'd say 0, since eyeballing the list almost none of them seem to be B2B type products.

If moving the goalposts is allowed then fair enough, it can be any number you choose.

>This is by far the most pervasive comment on HN regarding Google ("Oh, they launched something, don't use it because they will retire it soon. Look what happened to Reader!").

Yes, hello, reality calling - Google has a PR problem, as a direct result of canceling services. This PR problem is bleeding into their commercial offerings precisely because of their reliance and cultivation of grassroots, technology-minded consumer mind share. "Man, I killed all those bees but for some reason now my honey production has dropped right off. Could there be a connection???"

Someone did not properly cost this into the decision to terminate those services, and it's now biting the organization. It should be.

He's not moving the goalposts. This thread is about a b2b product, which he claims are unlikely to be shut down. If you're trying to extrapolate about a b2b product from past experience about free software, you should justify that.

Specifically it is a dashboard creator b2b product. I bet the google shutdown rate on that is pretty good!

Sarcasm aside, by narrowing the results the goalposts are indeed shifted.

Is it a shift or a correction?

Google's cloud offerings are generally going to have more robust SLA's attached to them, that include various guarantees wrt. service deprecation, that probably compare with other vendors in the same space.

So I do think "moving goalposts" here is probably right. Comparing Reader, Buzz or Google Code to GCP offerings probably is an apples to oranges comparison. In other words, not very useful.

This comes across as a somewhat hysterical response to a fairly measured comment ("Yes, hello, reality calling").

That doesn't feel like the HN ethos. People working for any company should feel comfortable posting here, without feeling like they are the subject of a witch hunt imho.

I think your calling that response hysterical is itself a bit hysterical.

Google Maps Engine was B2B example, so your "0" is incorrect

Google Search Appliances, too.

Fair point but neither of these fall under GCP, which GDS does.

That was the point about "shifting goalposts" that was mentioned above.

You can always categorize it different and claim it’s a different story now.

But that won’t convince any customers.

And Google Site Search

Used gCSE as a primary add-on service across a few hundred sites. The twilighting of the product was a major hiccup in our business.

Through Google Apps there was once a custom URL shortener service ( Google Short Links) that I used to track and shorten hundreds of affiliate links and perform a manner of A/B testing. They sunsetted that service breaking all those links ( and considerable cashflow)

If you dig deep into Adwords or Doubleclick Knowledge base its fairly common to come across broken links, outdated information.

Was a big fan of the Picasa product as I took the time to tag and categorize a huge library of photos which has been long since pulled into Google Photos ( a superior service, but I liked the option of local management for more private photos)

I am very reliant on Google products and services and have been for about a decade. I generally expect that services will disappear, customer service will be non-existent or consist of a series of clueless email from all across the globe. Spend a half million in Adwords, Partner Agency, previously Engage partner - the staff they push on you on that side mostly seem as if they wanted different jobs and generally provide completely dense suggestions (knowledge of adwords interface but no real business acumen ) Adsense! Was once getting between $100-$400 a day in adsense results. All disappeared over night for as single event of clickfraud (likely from a competitor aiming for exactly that result). They even cancelled the last check they sent.

Generally,I've found not worth adopting a G product without an easy exit option or known replacement service.

Even the core search product has suffered but many wouldn't notice - many advanced operators were dropped or limited, regional selection in advanced options minimized, very precise searches made ineffective due to lack of use.

Just meant to say, boy cancelling Google custom search sucked and then reminded how many otherwise Ive been screwed by my reliance.

And Google Checkout

And Google ruined one of the most useful assistant features. They may have well shut it down:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/04/google-ruins-the-ass...

That's something that irks me endlessly :-(

I've stopped recommending the Home the people because of this. It may seem minor, but the shopping list -> Keep was the simplest, most useful feature that Home had, and Google managed to ruin it.

I am pretty sure the appliance is not discontinued.

It is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance

A better metric would be average lifetime of a product, otherwise comparing companies with different ages is meaningless. Of course, you have to do something to account for products that haven't yet been killed.

I specifically said products that made a big impact. Look at those 43 services on that list, and tell yourself, would you have engineers waste precious time maintaining that service which hardly get used, or would you rather have them spend said time on developing on newer better tool that have a much bigger impact?

It's not always an easy decision, but my point is that there's a balance to be hit here. There are definitely time where discontinuing products is the right choice and the time is much better spent working on something else. I'd argue that a company which NEVER discontinues anything no matter how old and unused it is is a company that won't go far.

>I don't understand how people keep bringing up Google product shutdowns as if literally half their products get discontinued.

Because it feels like half of their products DO get discontinued.

And because it doesn't matter if it's half or not. As if 20% would be a better number?

One would be foolish to fully trust any company that shut down 1-2 products they were using.

But it would take a special kind of stupid to trust new products by Google who has shut down over a dozen of their products, including widely promoted ones, from Glass and Wave to Video, Reader and so on.

Again, you say "feels" like, and I agree it's a common trope that shows up in almost every single Google thread, which is why I explicitly asked for people to name real products that are gone. I'm actually curious how many people can even remember or name, because to me, it has become more of a myth than reality.

Indeed, I see them as middle of the road. In my very anecdotal perception, by order of 'less reliable' to 'most reliable' in terms of product continuity, of the big 5 my list goes as follows:

1. Apple (Aperture, "Smart" features from OSX absent from iOS, APIs that force almost complete re-writes, generally culling of PC/corporate friendly products such as Server etc).

2. Facebook, seems like they experiment a lot (which is good) but too often fail to label things as beta. And they change 'features' way too often for my taste (I seldom use their services so far, at least on a personal level).

3. Google (Google Read for news strikes me as the biggest loss personally, my news were never the same afterwards as I never considered putting in so much time carefully selecting RSS feeds etc. if they could go away just like that; eventually I don't even read most news anymore). They have a less-than-stellar record on mobile apps, but then again that's a moving sector where it's hard to be consistent over "LTS" kind of periods.

4. Microsoft, but at this point I have to commend how much long-term support they put into most of their products, sometimes it's even too much to have to put up with legacy features that hinder modern paradigms (particularly on Windows 10, ofc).

5. Amazon, simply because I've yet to encounter a case of product/service being put out of service.

I wonder who agrees/disagrees around here.

It only takes one product you relied on heavily, to make sure you never get locked in like that again.

> Can you even name me 5 big products they've ended which had a huge impact.

- Analog Efex Pro

- Color Efex Pro

- Silver Efex Pro

- Viveza

- HDR Efex Pro

- Sharpener Pro

- Dfine

These were big products? Hasn't Photoshop advanced to the point that these plugins are no longer needed?

People also bring it up for products like this, which is related tangentially to Ads or google cloud offerings. Google is not going to shut something like this down that enhances their revenue

>Google is not going to shut something like this down that enhances their revenue

Right now this product is losing substantial amounts of money, we're talking on the order of tens of millions USD per year. If the net present cost of support exceeds the net present value of the product revenue stream Google has every right to cull it. It's their prerogative as a business.

My prerogative as a business consumer (when I am in that position) makes me wary of being reliant on the whims of a multi-billion dollar company whose primary revenues are generated from ads for my analytics needs.

It's quite possible Google Data Studio is going to be the next big thing for the company, it's just as possible it doesn't get the desired traction and ends up culled from their offerings.

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