Comment by evmar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evmar | Hacker News Reader

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[google engineer, not a lot of insight into product decisions]

Option one: every product Google makes it supports forever regardless of whether it succeeds or not, where "success" for Google is defined as "billions of users". (Ref all the people laughing at why G+ was still going despite not being popular. [Note: I've read the 'unpopular' thing was disputed; I don't know the actual numbers.]) In this world Google can never attempt a product unless they've verified ahead of time it will become a category-defining product (Chrome, Android, Gmail).

Option two: occasionally some products will test the waters and fail.

I think it's easy to say at the time of a product failure (or even at launch: see the people who scoffed at iPod and Dropbox) to say that it was destined to fail -- it's pretty much guaranteed to happen on HN because people love to shit on and watch other people shit on others' work, for some sad human nature reason -- but difficult to see which of those guaranteed-to-fail products will actually eventually succeed. So option one mostly means you never launch new products.

Big companies faced with this dilemma (the Ciscos or Microsofts or even Facebooks) deal with it by waiting for startups to succeed then buying the result (Whatsapp, Instagram, Github). Famously at Microsoft if you had a good idea the correct way to implement it was to leave, implement as new company, get reacquired. That may become the case at Google too.

Instead Google tries to do option two. I think you could argue about the rate of launch/fail in category two but it doesn't bother me too much. I recall a comment from the Netflix founder about how they had too many successful shows and how that is a problem, that they were playing it too safe.

I also use emacs as my editor because I know it's old enough that it's not gonna change out from under me. When I care about reliability in this way I choose accordingly. Nothing in life in permanent; I evaluate new Google products like I evaluate random startup products, which is to say they may randomly disappear in a year and I factor that in. For example Keep seems like a nice product and I sometimes use it for grocery lists but I'm not gonna put anything important in it (disclaimer: I have absolutely no insider facts about Keep, that is just my feeling about it based on the previous reasoning).

I think we have to question what "success" means here - all the complaints come from people who were satisfied customers of something with a user base that many startups would be happy to have. Is there no room for "not a world takeover but still fundamentally OK" products?

I'm not sure Google has yet figured out how or why it wants to make such products. I don't understand how apps like Trips or Reader get launched given that they seemed destined for at most mild success, but one possibility is that the people behind them at the time promised some sort of larger success to motivate their funding.

True story: I worked on a small Google product where at one point our sales team got a customer interested in a $1m contract, which was a decent amount of money for the scale of our product. But the customer wanted some adjustment in some of the wording. We couldn't get a Google lawyer to even look at the result -- it wasn't worth their time for such a small amount of money -- and I believe lost the customer as a result.

To your specific question, I think there is lots of room in the world for fundamentally OK products -- but outside of Google. I love Pinboard for example (well, I don't use it, but I'm rooting for him).

I've always preferred Option 2; this is not a criticism of all that entails. In fact, it's no different from all the other startups and side-projects that rise and fall. Google's unique problem is it's all under 1 roof and each product has the Google name on it. So the shuttering of products unfairly get more moaning and press. There's a branding problem here where long term products are in the same group as experiments and Google needs to categorize them to correct public perception.

Past approaches were putting things under Google Labs or the Eternal Beta. But it needs to exist separately from the long term survivors like Sheets, GDrive, etc.

I think Google has experimented in the past with releasing things under separate brands, but it leads to the problem where if you don't mention the host company prominently enough users feel tricked (like all the people who use Instagram without realizing it's just a reskin of Facebook), while if you do mention the host company prominently you fall back into the same trap of user expectation.

Google also has the related problem where if they release even a genuinely uninteresting app (say a grocery shopping list) they'll still have a hundred million people try it out on the first day, so when building the app you have to build for that scale before you're even able to validate the design space. (There was one experiment, I can't remember which right now, which had a small team with didn't do this and then was widely mocked for being slow with "Google can't even make its own apps scale".) Damned if you do, damned if you don't. ...but I imagine the execs wipe their tears away with wads of hundred dollar bills.

Defining success as billions of users gets tossed around a lot, but why is that the dogma? If you can make a product smaller than that and have it be profitable, then what's so bad about that? Is it really so hard to manage that apart from Google's gigantic products?

If success is going to be billions of users then yeah, probably do option 1, because nearly nothing is going to get there. Why not have a pipeline to spin these products off or have them survive with lower expectations?

Opportunity cost seems like the biggest reason. Why devote resources to a project that is merely profitable when they could be working in something that is hugely profitable instead?

Reasonable, but then why launch Inbox in the first place? The best email client possible is not going to displace Gmail on a billions of users scale.

It makes a lot more sense from a corporate gamesmanship perspective. I think the incentives of the typical Google employee (widely believed to heavily value launching new stuff) are not in sync with the company or its users.

> why launch Inbox in the first place?

Google didn't launch it, it was a startup that Google acquired for the team, and then killed of Inbox as soon as they could.

That doesn’t explain one high profile product that was killed that was universally loved - Google Reader.

But from the writeup, it doesn’t seem like this product was a failure.

I explained the Reader phenomenon here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20116287

(I loved it too.)

Let’s look at Apple Podcasts - the app and the directory. It doesn’t make Apple any money, they don’t host any of the podcasts. They just provide an index and once you subscribe to a podcast, the app polls the podcast’s creators website directly. The podcast directory also has a freely available API that is available to any other player.

It is the dominant player and directory. Do you think Apple is going to kill it? Google killed Reader with similar dominance.

I’m not saying Apple is always on the side of the angels. But in this case they have kept their podcast directory maintained since 2005.

This link does not explain Reader.

> where "success" for Google is defined as "billions of users"

Why? This how old Microsoft thought and it’s unbelievable that Google is taking their place while they have renewed to “new Microsoft”. I see tons of small stuff coming out of Microsoft these days that lives on despite tiny niche user base. When they do decide to kill product, they seem to be very sensitive, give plenty of time and figure out some migration path. The point is that a lot of dev ops can be automated in 2019. You can comfortably run small products without much overhead. Google seems to be either behind mastering this art or confused. I thought I would never see a day when I say Microsoft is doing better than Google.

> occasionally some products will test the waters and fail.

Most of the time "fail" just means "fail to become a category-defining product," whereas any other software company would be happy to pull the kind of numbers Google does for its smaller projects. If Google wants to operate like a venture capital firm, investing in many products and seeing most fail to get huge, than that's fine, but they need to consider the negative impact it has on their brand and on all future product launches.

Re:keep

Keep is now a core gsuite app, so while it could also get canned or have a total makeover, it will probably stay, atleast for enterprises, like Google+ continues to.

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