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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

Yet another google service that will be dropped in one of their "spring cleanings" in a few years.

The secret of Innovation is to keep on trying and failing. Not everything is always a win. Midas touch is a fable, not reality.

The problem is Google’s size.

1. Try out new business

2. Take over the market due to Google’s name/search power

3. Decide business isn’t worth it and pull out

4. No one is left, people have to start from scratch again

Which of the businesses they've dropped is this true for? Few of the examples I can think of were market leaders when they were dropped, and none of those were monopolising the market completely.

Google Reader? The diaspora that followed is often considered to be the "death" of RSS, and certainly the "death" of "Social RSS". RSS usage in general did tank after Google Reader.

Though, there's a correlation/causation question there. Google Reader shutdown to entrench Google's attempt at a walled garden social network, but Google was considered late to the "walling in your garden" party at the time, so market forces (Facebook, Twitter) what they were at the time, it's possible that even if Reader didn't shutdown, RSS probably was "doomed".

Similarly, Google Talk? For a brief period everyone was using XMPP (whether they knew it or not), to the point where even Facebook capitulated to using XMPP for real-time communications, partly to integrate with Google Talk, just in time for Google to drop most Talk support and XMPP support in the "upgrade" to Hangouts.

Again, things are washy in the correlation/causation question. If Google had pushed Talk longer, would XMPP be more of a thing today? Or was the walled garden communications network too tempting to the market that it would have gone that way anyway?

Personally, I think Google losing a lot of its "roots" in trying to use standards to best fit (RSS, XMPP), versus rolling everything internally/proprietarily was a key change in the web at the time, and I'm willing to ascribe it more to the causation side of things, but there's certainly a healthy debate to both sides.

Hmm.

This comment gave me an idea: what does Trends say for RSS?

It has two results:

- For the search term: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss

- For the "computer file format": https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

Both charts are nearly identical.

There's a noticeable blip in March 2013 when the closure was announced, but that blip sits within a concretely downward trend.

I had to dig a bit to locate the very tiny downward slope in July when Reader actually shut down; there's nothing noticeable there.

Right, but Google Talk didn't take over some large XMPP market. The dominant IMs at the time were using proprietary protocols. XMPP just fell back to where it was before they came in.

They can also take market because they likely have better tax arrangements, so running their experiments would be much cheaper than for independent start-up.

Personally I couldn't care less about whether Google innovate or succeed or whatever. I just care that when I bother to invest (time) in a service it sticks around. If it's not a companies core service/product then it's not worth the effort. Google have demonstrated this more than most. They're at the bottom of the list.

Can you name an example of a Google product that you invested time in and then was later deprecated, without saying Google Reader?

Code search

Flu trends

Latitude

Talk. Google Code. Google sites (technically still around). Google desktop (so awesome, really miss this).

For me it was Irkut

They made some filters for photoshop called Nik that were really nice...

Google Goggles was released 7 years ago and the last release was 4 years ago.

Other than Google Reader I'd include Hangouts and Picasa. And as someone else pointed out, latitude. It was broken but they could have fixed it. Odd that they have all the creepy spying capabilities but don't let you use them. Maybe they're worried that it'll let people see the creepiness for themselves.

Maybe a class action lawsuit - not for money - but for the promise of open sourcing and leaving some funding for any future projects that have customer support, but that they want to squash without adequate reason.

The secret to innovation is saying no 1000 times.

But in Goog’s case it’s not so much innovating and failing as it’s poor product design and sticktoitiveness with +, Wave, a hundred chat apps

the secret of innovation resume oriented project development.

If Google deprecates something = HN complains they deprecate everything If Google launches something = HN complains they deprecate everything I Google migrates, renames, merges, spins off, sells = HN complains they deprecate everything

Google Reader was 5 years ago... what other example is there of a successful or even well-liked product that was killed, and not simply renamed or migrated? Picasa albums made it to Google Photos, for example. Google Talk became Hangouts. Where exactly does this meme come from? What product are you mourning that you actually used? Buzz? Wave?

I see from a different branch of this thread that the other answer is "XMPP support for Hangouts," which seems like a pretty specific feature to carry all this water.

Google Wave, yes. For as much as they pushed it and acted like they were confident, they bailed really fast. Google Talk, Google Code, Google Notebook, iGoogle. Various APIs for maps etc. Big pushes that never go anywhere like Google Books. Wasn't there Google shopping at some point? Or non-discontinued things that aren't really taken seriously: Google Plus, Allo, Google Scholar, any number of rebrands of their payment service. Lots of acquisition-shutdowns or just embarrassments like Nest.

But more importantly, they just don't seem to actually have a strategy. Every few months we hear this is the future, and then that thing is never mentioned again. Or they announce a clone of some existing successful service and then don't seem to have any follow-through willpower.

All these renames/migrations/rebrands usually come with breakage of the UI/API/functionality. It's irritating to actual users and feels sloppy to everyone who pays attention.

However Google earned this reputation and however fair it is or isn't, it undoubtedly hurts new product launches. So the question is, how does Google throw off the reputation of being completely untrustworthy?

Why didn't anyone pick up the open-source drop of Wave and built an awesome service out of it?

Some did, but they're not widely known.

Kune: https://kune.ourproject.org/about/

(ex-Novell) Vibe: https://www.microfocus.com/products/vibe/features/

SwellRT: http://swellrt.org/

The cynic in me wonders whether this is just a way for Google to "mine the consciousness". They will use the findings from this to feed into another product (Search, Maps, Assistant, etc.) and drop the service in a few years.

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