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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

I complain about Google having too many competing/overlapping products, so I can't really complain when they close/merge them.

The best time to shutdown Allo was before it launched, the second best time is now.

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From an Xoogler's perspective, the launches are all about the promos. Eg, just think about all those engineers who would not have gotten a promotion because then they would not have had a product launch in their promo packet.

The technical term for this is “circle jerk”.

Very interesting - other large orgs also accept waste in the name of talent development, but I'm not sure I've seen it at this scale.

Do scientific advances in papers also count as product launches, or do you have to put a thing in the world?

Previously, they made a hard push to make sure that their science was "applied" science, but that's softened a bit in their pitches lately [0].

The current iteration has a 4-axis evaluation metric [1], where the value of a given project is measured by the area of the polygon.

So, you can make theoretical advances that don't go into products, but it's better for you if they do.

[0]: Disclaimer: I've been recruited by Google's research arm, but haven't worked there.

[1]: https://ai.google/research/philosophy/

But there should be some VP which will be accountable for spent budget on dead product..

Ah - but if you're the one with VPs reporting to you, you best not foster an environment where taking risks (even like this) is punished, if due diligence seems like it was carried out.

And you have to be very conservative with what you consider a violation of that threshold.

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