Bets on:
1) When it will be shutdown?
2) When it will get ads?
EDIT: Does google have a paid shill force on hacker news? They are copying well from the IBM and Apple playbook
1) When it will be shutdown?
2) When it will get ads?
EDIT: Does google have a paid shill force on hacker news? They are copying well from the IBM and Apple playbook
> Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Also, how would putting ads on a developer platform be profitable? It's far more likely that they would charge money for it.
What it feels like is: An engineer at google builds something cool. Management decide it could be a product, and a bit of tooling here and there and BAM it’s released. It goes well, then it stays. It goes poorly or even just average, then it gets thrown out. And what of the users who put faith in the new product? Screw them it’s not profitable enough.
Compare to AWS, an engineer writes something cool, it gets evaluated by a project team, the business benefit and support infra is put in place, its trialed with a few users, its honed, then if it gets good KPIs then it’s generalised and released as a product. They subset very slowly and always make sure there’s a clear migration path, with humans in support to help the developers if need be.
Saying “Google and literally every other successful company continue to take this approach to unprofitable lines of business” is too reductive : nobody is contesting that a business shouldn’t cut out unprofitable actions, but the repeated, drastic culling and the “f-you we know best” attitude they take makes developers distrust google.
Google is too whimisical with both releasing and retiring products.
AWS is not a consumer-facing organization. The standards there are entirely different. Google Cloud has a much more stable offering than Google writ large. Very few of the products on gcemetery.co are cloud-related.
Before you say, "Amazon never shuts anything down, even outside of cloud." A) They do [1]. B) They have a tiny range of products compared to Google, so of course the absolute frequency of shutdowns will also be lower.
And before you say, "Well, better to have nothing than to have something and have it shut down." A) Some people [2] would disagree. B) Just don't use products in the category (consumer services) that Google tends to shut things down in.
But, please, whatever you do, don't spam every single thread where Google launches a cloud product (a category where they have a decent track record) with your gripes about Google Reader or whatever. It's not helpful and it's not relevant.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/25/9605840/amazon-shuts-dow... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson
This makes sense.
BTW: I'm on your side, I get tired about these "how long before google shuts X down" useless comments, I was just confused by your statement.
Are people honestly not creeped out when you get ads from other people's phones?