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Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Google cares whether its users are "passionate" or not. They've reached market saturation, so further spread of their products through word-of-mouth (via passionate users and such) isn't a goal at this time.

With regard to their Internet service products, their goal seem to be to monetize the user base effectively, while avoiding wasting funds on unnecessary developer time. To that end, many of their products seem to exist as short-term bets or "experiments", ostensibly to give users something great/interesting, but internally justified by the extra data or "research" those products will generate. See Google Voice (angle: voicemails help train Google Assistant), Inbox (angle: research on some email ideas for potential incorporation into GMail), etc.

Google's cultural fixation on decision-making based on data and statistics will bite them eventually. It may help them squeeze the market, but it won't help them care about other people.

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Agree entirely. They don't launch products with the hope of having a long term product. They launch products to experiment and learn more about ad delivery. The core ad system is the main priority. As such, falling in love with any product that isnt their ad tech means understanding the product may disappear for no decent reason.

I would take it a step further and say that they don't launch products; they launch experiments. It's a giant Mechanical Turk setup.

I am not sure if you are using the term "Mechanical Turk" correctly. Would you mind clarifying?

They're likely referring to Amazon Mechanical Turk:

https://www.mturk.com

as opposed to the chess-playing variety:

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

Becoming 'a worker' is very eye opening experience.

Got it, MTurk defintely makes more sense than the Turk :)

Which actually raises an interesting point. The word data comes from Latin dare for "to give". So, as Rob Kitchin observes, while something like MTurk can be properly described as collecting "data", Google and the vast majority of networked platforms should really be more properly described as collecting "capta", from Latin capere, or "to take".

You are absolutely correct and I completely agree; this is part of what I wanted to get at. Google also uses this two-fold "data-gathering disguised as a service" methodology in its captchas -- as your reference to "capare" reminded me. :)

It's actually interesting because Rob Kitchin has started almost exclusively using the word "capta" in his later works. I'm tempted to follow him in doing that in my personal writings. (Captcha and other forms of "data labor" [1] or even "data slavery" is also something that I've started exploring.)

[1] https://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_facpub/11/

I had no idea anyone was doing in-depth research into this kind of -- as he aptly calls it -- data labor. This would really merit its own HN submission. Thank you for showing me!

Point being we, the users, are the mechanical turks, carrying out Google's experiments.

And people happily store their 20 years of photo memories there...one day it will not be a custom inbox view or a voicemail transcript that will disappear.

You're right that passionate users can no longer effectively bring new people to Google. But passionate users can lead people away from Google.

This. Google cloud for example is the most technologically advanced. But no one in my company would touch it with a ten foot pole. Google can and will shutdown things is just ingrained - even when we pay, things will change so drastically or be not supported any more that you just can't assume anything.

But Google Cloud deprecation policies and other SLA's for generally available products.

Yeah, but the perception is that google discontinues things. Even if unfounded, perception is very important...

They had an internal search box you could setup to crawl your intranet. They have shut this down and order all companies to turn it off. SLA does not matter

Are you referring to the Google Search Appliance?

Yes, I think that is what it was called

Yea, that sure was nice while it lasted :-|

it seems so weird to me how many companies seem okay with choosing just one cloud vendor, when operating across two isn't that much extra overhead, if you limit yourself to products that two companies provide, and gets you a lot of negotiation and business continuity options.

I would argue that there's a huge overhead. At least if you make use of tools that these companies provide. And if you don't, then just go with dedicated boxes which you can get cheaper than cloud solutions.

I thought most people used wrappers. sort of like SQL in the '90s, and then you limited yourself to features that both of the providers used

I think this article[0] is very well written and clearly explains the problems with provisioning resources in multiple clouds. Yes, there are tools that allow you to do it, however you give up most of the reasons for going into the cloud.

Switching between cloud providers is much easier than going from on-prem to the cloud. So, once your systems are "cloud" ready you should be able to avoid vendor lock in naturally.

[0] https://bravenewgeek.com/multi-cloud-is-a-trap/

I'm thinking we're now at the point that there aren't enough passionate people to lead people away from Google, because Google has become just so engrained in the lives of so many people, especially through Android.

The learning curve to a Google free life is steeper than many people want to take.

Can they? As always I think this idea is overestimating the power of passionate users (usually computer geeks thinking they're influential).

They surely didn't lead any large swaths out of Microsoft and into Linux, for example...

I'm so tired of this decision making process in business: well our statistics say <5% of people want feature X so lets just kill X to streamline.

Just stop. Please. Analytics != insight. Meetings should stop being won by whoever prints off the the most tables and visualizations, because gasp sometimes that leads to the wrong decision.

I don’t get this. Features complicate products and require maintenance. By your logic, features would never get built because they’d carry a lifelong burden.

I think the idea is that the ‘long tail’ of users that such use features can still be 10s of millions for google, and preserving can act as a most preventing these power users from seeking alternatives.

And then taking other users with them.

It's the frustration of people building their workflow on those features that is talking. It's very irritating when you find yourself in the position during your hard earned vacation to (once again) have to find a new option for something that your company needs to function.

It's not linear. GCD haven't got traction (and billions of revenue) it might have now because of shutdown of some products like Reader. And that's oversimplified example actually.

People's minds are not linear, especially when they make decisions. The only market when you can do well with raw numbers only is cheapest 10%, when all competition is about price, and customers have zero loyalty whatsoever.

GCD?

A typo, Google Cloud Platform.

Thanks.

Chalk one up to exactly that. I recommend against GCP exactly because of the Reader SNAFU (among others).

Google themselves has actually built very few successful products outside of search. Half of what they build internally they kill and the other half is acquisitions, many of which they also kill.

Sometimes I even wonder about things like GSuite. When does the 2-year sunset period start?

$5/month per user is a pretty good return and it keeps those users/businesses from an expanded Microsoft footprint. I think (hope?) That G suite will be the exception.

Gmail, Chrome, Play, Maps seem pretty successful to me.

The above poster said few, not zero.

Google has killed off dozens upon dozens more officially launched projects.

the four listed are the biggest products in the world in their space. the first three would be multi billion dollar companies outside of Google.

not to mention Search itself, Docs has become a fantastic product as has Photos. of course they have killed hundreds of potentially great projects (RIP Reader) but give the company their due - they know how to build products.

Gmail would not be a multi-billion dollar company. It doesn't make money (remember they don't target ads on email content anymore). You'd have to roll in Google apps for business to get to the money making part.

Chrome definitely isn't a multi-billion dollar company. There is no revenue stream there. Firefox only exists by selling the search bar and being a non-profit.

I think that it's pretty obvious that products like chrome are not designed to make money. They are simply designed to enable control of the platform.

Context, please? OP reacted to a specific comment in this thread.

> Docs has become a fantastic product as has Photos.

Didnt the acquire companies which eventually became docs and photos?

>the first three would be multi billion dollar companies outside of Google

Gmail got popular because it's free (and had large space for a free client). If it wasn't to be outside of Google, it would make an insignificant amount of money through ads, or started to charge (in which case users would flee).

Ditto for Chrome. There are 4-5 free browsers, nobody would use a browser that's not free (a required for it to be a multi-billion dollar company). At best they'd sell their search bar default setting, like FF does, which is less than a billion IIRC.

    "the first three would be multi billion dollar companies
    outside of Google"

I think this is the problem. Google does not care about products smaller than that. They will happily shut down a product because it's too small, even though it would be a reasonably successful business on its own.

However, "reasonably successful" is not good enough for them.

Maps was significantly enhanced thorough a bought company: Keyhole.

https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2005/04/google-maps-and-key...

Intermediated by the CIA;

https://pando.com/2015/07/01/cia-foia-google-keyhole/

And Chrome was based (and later forked off) on Webkit, after Apple had already done the hard work (and KHTML laid the groundwork).

Good point.

RIP Songza. I will never forgive them for acquiring and ruining that service.

God I listened to Songza every single day for hours. I walked out the day they got acquired.

Ads everywhere, google showing things in your face. Nop!

>Google's cultural fixation on decision-making based on data and statistics will bite them eventually.

As will their attitude towards the privacy of their users. Everyone keeps the focus on Facebook while failing to realise that Google are probably worse.

I remember when they came out with Goog411 where you could could google and search for businesses and such. This was way before smartphones so it was a solid, free option for finding stuff on the go. They canned it after a while, but used all the interaction data to further their voice recognition services.

Precisely. I can be as pissed at Google as they come, ready to pick up my pitchfork, but at the end of the month when I spent $120,000 on adwords and made $280,000 in profit as a return, I will gladly tattoo Google logo on my chest.

The scary part is they will sunset gmail eventually. I know from someone inside “L team” that founders hate how much headache gmail brings for such little return. Initially started at the boom of free email providers with fancy always-updating clock of how many extra megabytes you just got in last few seconds, fastforward today there is no money to be make in providing free email.

As they failed to secure sale for a reasonable amount and on fair conditions, expect eventually they will offer to keep paid accounts and auto forward anyone else to another provider for a year or so and then sunset gmail free only leaving gmail enterprise on.

They still scan your Gmails though? I'd think the information they gather this way would still be worth something even if they don't "personalize" their own ads with it.

I thought they "wouldn't go there," hence the hullabaloo when Yahoo "went there?"

Last year they said they were going to suspend the practice of scanning the content of consumer emails

https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio...

Everyone scans emails. Google was just a high profile example and there was some backlash because they used for ads, not for "spam prevention", or "anti-virus".

More than a billion people use Gmail, and it continues to serve as the gateway for many people to the Google ecosystem. I, for one, doubt they would sunset it any time soon.

Not a chance. Gmail is the gateway to their cloud storage and office products. There is not way they will get rid of free Gmail. Maybe cut back on the free storage. But even that...

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