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Comment by throw_away | Hacker News Reader

> you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately.

I would love if they followed this strategy. Instead, you have products like reader and inbox with many passionate users, which demonstrate some wall stickiness, and they're killed rather than monetized.

Monetize me. I recognize that the things I like cost money. Figure out how to make money off me! I would have accepted ads in reader or inbox. Hell, I would have paid dollars to make those ads go away even.

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The metric you need to keep in mind here is revenue per employee. Keeping one product up and running necessarily means withholding engineers from another. As an extreme example, ads engineers make Google many times their salary, benefits, and ephemeral costs, and even non-revenue-generating services like Photos and Assistant indirectly drive traffic to the money makers.

Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only a couple million users, mostly pointy-headed techie types, that doesn’t drive business to any money-making effort, with no alignment with any stategic effort, that could be reimplemented by a particularly talented and hardworking high school senior, staffed by about a dozen engineers. That product will be the first on the chopping block, if only to encourage those engineering resources to find more profitable employment.

This comment makes it sound as if you don't think generating massive amounts of goodwill among your most passionate customer base "drives business." Google Reader was the loss leader that drove me deeply into Google's whole suite of applications and made me a paying customer of theirs.

I feel this is a sort of corporate Dutch Disease. Highly profitable sectors drive out investment in the rest.

I get this, but then why even launch if there's no vision at all beyond cancel it in a couple years since they're not willing to even try to drive new revenue with these? No profits, burnt goodwill—cynically, I wonder, is it just make-work to keep restless engineers happy and out of the arms of potential upstarts and competitors?

Cool cool, if that's what you must do. Google can go on making piles of cash with their money engines and on the side, going through an elaborate game of charades as if they were making real products so they can figure out who gets get a promotion for best pretending to create anything of actual value.

But, I'm going to ignore all Google product launches and treat them as the mistimed april fools jokes they are.

For people (like me) who hadn't heard of Dutch Disease:

"In economics, the Dutch disease is the apparent causal relationship between the increase in the economic development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture)."

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

> Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only a couple million users, mostly pointy-headed techie types, that doesn’t drive business to any money-making effort,

And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled.

But what those direct metrics do not show is the long term trust which is destroyed by such short-term behavior.

Google has proved again and again that they are not a reliable company and because of this I will never ever spend any money on any of their products (apart from a cheap android phone every 3 years).

Why should I pay for Google Drive? Why should I pay for Youtube Red (or whatever its called nowadays)? Why should I buy a Chromebook? If I start rely on them they will be canceled after a year.

They might have saved a few million dollar by axing Google Reader but they lost _me_ as a customer forever.

> And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled.

Microsoft doesn't consider a product unless it can generate more than $100M a year.

It's a general mode of operation for big companies, not limited to Google.

How much money do you think AWS loses still supporting old deprecated services like running EC2 instances outside of a VPC and SimpleDB?

I’m not aware of a single feature on AWS that has ever been abandoned.

I don't know of any service that was dropped on either of AWS or GCP. Features are dropped though, they can't be ordered from new accounts then they disappear eventually.

I don't think that you can order older instances, or run instances outside of a VPC, not sure if non-HVM AMI are still supported.

AWS has a strategy of leaving offerings to rot and making a new thing that you have to migrate to yourself. For example, the 3 different types of reserved instances or ELB vs ALB. It has its pros and cons. Google has less products that are more capable and feature complete.

They are both rather new and creating new products instead of removing products, it will take one more decade to see how they handle depreciation of core products, when any actually gets retired.

You can't run EC2 instances outside of a VPC if you have a new account. If you have a very old account you still can and every now and then they announce a new feature that works with them.

I don't think they lose any money at all. They pass the entirety of those costs onto customers.

That's why, for example, newer EC2 instance types cost less than older ones: whenever they decide to cut their margins to increase volume, they essentially do it across-the-board first, and then they back up and increase the costs for the legacy instances to reflect their increasing support burden. (It just happens to look like the legacy instances hovering at a static pricing while the modern instances get cheaper.)

Also keep in mind that when you're selling B2B SaaS, legacy services are mostly kept around because there are big enterprise accounts that pay to keep them around. If there are only three customers left on non-VPC deployments, but one of those customers is IBM, you're not going to pull the plug.

I don't think they lose any money at all. They pass the entirety of those costs onto customers.

If that’s the case, that’s a business model I’m all for. Charge people enough money to make your product sustainable instead of just trying to gain a lot of users and hope you will figure it out later. Of course even then you have to have enough scale to cover the fix costs and offer it a price to make it affordable, but don’t start off thinking the answer to everything is advertising.

Uh, but Microsoft is more conservative in both launching and canceling products. If MSFT said "Access can now do all the things that spreadsheets were used for so we're dropping Excel" the streets would be aflame with the protests of millions.

I also think this is a place where MSFT's application first (not app) development strategy shines. There are still folks out there running Excel98 and you can feel free to try and pry it out of their cold uncaring hands, they will fight you for it.

Don't launch and offer BS you're not going to support!

Yet, for some reason Microsoft keeps updating calculator and notepad in Windows.

Really? I'm on windows 10 and I couldn't tell you what they've changed in notepad - did they fix legacy mac EOL support (i.e. `\r`)?

Yes, they did fix the line-endings for both Mac and Unix files.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563704/microsoft-window...

Oh, well that's nice and helpful. Good for them!

It probably adds almost no value to the product they're selling (nobody is buying windows for notepad, and anyone with serious notepadding to do gets a real editor) but it's a nice thing to do.

How much direct revenue does WSL generate? Or VSCode?

> staffed by about a dozen engineers

That's part of the problem. You should be able to leave Reader unstaffed for as long as it isn't strategic (it's not as if borg has trouble keeping the tasks up), but in practice it will randomly fail because somebody in infra went for promo, so every project faces a choice: staff this indefinitely or kill it now.

I disagree.

Google killing Reader was very shortsighted because they’ve hurt the open web in an effort to promote Google+. And it was all an effort to promote Google+, nothing more.

Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained. Don’t tell me that Google couldn’t spare an intern for the occasional fix.

And I don’t have any numbers however I’m willing to bet that Reader was, as a social network, far more popular and active than Google+ ever was.

Also such metrics don’t count the brand damage. I will never forgive Google for killing Reader and as a result I have rejected again and again Google’s products. Even at work I just convinced everyone that we must not depend on Google’s Firebase because we can’t trust Google.

> Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained.

Google products like Reader tend to use internal APIs for storage, authentication, request routing, deployment, logging, builds/tests, etc. It can be a lot of work just to keep up with those internal changes.

It was actually worse than that - Google+ used Reader as a backend. A lot of the stream-merging and ingestion features of Google+ were built on top of the Reader codebase. That meant that when Google+ product needs changed and they needed to alter the backend, they couldn't really do so without branching & disentangling or shutting down the external-facing Reader product. The latter was a much easier course for a time-constrained engineering organization, particularly since Reader as a project had been de-staffed and the engineers (that didn't leave the company) transferred to the Google+ org.

FANG interns aren't coffee-runners; you can't give them work you wouldn't give to a real junior engineer. First: doing so undermines your efforts to recruit the intern. Second: doing so undermines your efforts to evaluate the intern. Third: doing so wastes a valuable eng resource you could deploy on something worth launching!

The real problem for Reader was that it wasn't worth any engineering effort (because it only had a couple of million daily active users).

If I were an intern at Google and it was my job to maintain Reader I would be ecstatic. Hell, I'd happily do it now as a senior engineer. Why would I rather do a bunch of bullshit on a product nobody cares about when I can work on something I know people deeply love? Can you think of something that would have a larger impact than maintaining Reader?

This mentality is entirely the reason why large corporations can never do anything apart from their core business, and why they always spend billions acquiring startups (which usually fail to integrate into their business). They just fundamentally are incapable of creating anything new, and when they somehow do it the incentives are so misaligned they shut it down and the only thing they get for their efforts is making the public rightfully hate them.

I used Google Reader and Google Notebook. Since they discontinued both, I avoid committing to any new Google products - I don't want to rely on a company I consider unreliable. I even stopped using Firebase after they were acquired by Google. I wonder if they have any metric for that - can they measure how much business they lose because of the trust damage?

What if they tried the novel concept of charging users for stuff? How many people liked Reader enough to pay for it if they had started charging?

Google reader is the one that kills me. Not only do they not monetize it / promote it, but it's Google subsidized free existence killed the market for alternatives. Then Google+ and their failed social efforts killed Reader and RSS feeds have now disappeared from the landscape leaving us with only proprietary options.

> it's Google subsidized free existence killed the market for alternatives

Did it? IIRC, there were at least six decent alternatives available when Reader closed. More if you count desktop and mobile applications.

I tested a few that appeared from the ashes. Ended up not liking most of them but eventually found bazqux and pay them money.

I switched to Feedly the day they announced the shutdown because it could import from Reader, looked like Reader, and used a lot of the same shortcuts. Is bazqux better?

Haven't used Feedly, but I was a hardcore Google Reader user, and I _love_ BazQux Reader. It does exactly what I need - shows RSS, has APIs that allow mobile apps to hook in, is fast, and it _just works_. Totally worth the $20/yr, and I'm amazed more folks don't talk about it.

I found the way Feedly handles scrolling to be aggravating to the point where I couldn't use it.

The Old Reader is great, but it doesn't have a mobile app. For a while, I ended up having accounts with both The Old Reader and Feedly, so I could use The Old Reader on desktop and GReader (a Feedly client) on mobile.

The Old Reader is compatible with a number of 3rd party clients, including GReader.

Ah thanks. It's been a while since I've used RSS, though... I eventually gave up after a while.

Google is in a unique position there: I often will avoid adding a new small service that I might like because I don't want to add another small payment I have to manage. With Google, I'm already paying them for storage and Youtube. I wouldn't think nearly as hard about adding a new Google service as I do others.

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