Google shuts down its blog management tool just 10 months after launch
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Limited launch provided proof that it was a bad market fit and so they 'failed quickly' and shut it down. Isn't this supposed to be how it's done?
That's great, but do you have non-anectodal evidence that there's a enough people to make business sense for Google to change their strategy?
This is a startup-oriented site after all, you don't run business on a single-person's gut feeling, but on data. Do you have a firm basis on which Google should change their, currently extremely profitable, strategy?
Non tech savvy hardly know that Youtube belongs to Google even. Tech forums like this are a bubble and we must take care when generalizing our assumptions.
Then everyone has their strengths. If you want to run a lot of containers or ML for example, GCP seems a save bet.
Then everyone has their strengths. If you want to run a lot of containers or ML for example, GCP seems a save bet.
And that’s a minuscule part of the market.
But as far as I know, AWS has never outright abandoned a product. They may make it unavailable to new accounts.
I‘ve heard positive things. But yeah, that‘s not really something you can measure easily.
> And that‘s a minuscule part of the market.
Yes, for now. Eventually everything might be containers and serverless.
> But as far as I know, AWS has never outright abandoned a product. They may make it unavailable to new accounts.
Can‘t recall GCP ever abandoning something. Regardless, all the providers have the same deprecation policy I believe. Announce at least one year prior to deprecation.
One example I can think of is running an EC2 instance (VM) in AWS outside of VPC. That’s been deprecated for almost a decade, you can’t do it in new accounts, but AWS still supports it for old accounts.
EDIT: Found AWS page about support. Was definitely harder to find than GCP's...
In practice from my work, I've seen mostly cases of AWS being chosen because of "AWS=Cloud" mentality, and Azure because "we're MS shop". TBQH, the latter is bolstered by MS doing a really great push for developer tools, integrations, etc, even if actually using Azure is at times like eating broken glass.
It’s a minimum of $100 a month or 10% on top of your bill. For that you get excellent immediate online chat or phone support. I’ve had a 100% success rate and they won’t give up no matter how esoteric your question is.
I can’t speak from personal experience with Azure.
Google isn't a startup and tends to shutdown services that are popular but on which they can't find a correct business model (e.g. Reader or Inbox) without much warning, actual replacement options, or open sourcing solutions for self hosting.
Since they're so large, that creates a discrepancy between the stability you would expect from an established company, and the "kill your babies" culture they clearly have.
Past behaviour predicts future behaviour, and so people start to notice that and lose trust, which is a problem when you start asking for significant investments from your customers (e.g. Stadia or Nest).
This clearly isn't the only problem Google is having. They need a top and mid level management purge, and new leadership needs to figure out why the hell they need over 200,000 employees and contractors to run a search engine and Youtube.
As far as Android, it came out in the Oracle trial that it has made less than $40 billion in profit during its entire existence. Which isn’t nothing, but seeing that Google has close to 80% market share (not including AOSP based Android phones in China) is not really impressive.
Mobile revenue is at this point bigger than desktop revenue, so Android and Chrome were really necessary projects for Google to not lose direct contact with users.
With youtube you're right, it took a lot of time to be slightly profitable, but I'm happy to pay for it monthly, as I'm learning a lot from youtube videos.
That changed recently because of an EU consent decree. At least in the EU. Now OEMs have to pay up to $40 per device.
Yes this is true, If you visualize Google as an incubator, then instead of talking about service you can talk about startup, and then what is happening is just the real life of an incubator, some projects fail, some success.
People are quoting all the time "failure is good for success" but when Google is doing it, sounds like they disagree
Now everyone, may be except techies, consider Google as an established brand which offers top quality product. General public doesn't know much about startup culture or business.
What people expect is that one you have a stable of popular and successful products that you will either focus or provide long term support for the products that they rely on, whether you have to move to a different model or not. Microsoft and Apple both build new products and don't have the same animus directed at them because there's and expectation of stability or planning when a product gets sunsetted. How long did XP last? Windows 7 still gets security updates even if it's a dead product. Google just kills things, even Google Fiber that people rely on, with no transition plan and messaging that basically reflects that customers or users of the product don't matter to then at all. Google has worked hard to get their bad reputation and it turned from a darling into a dangerous entity.
Curious why they don't spin some of these out, or sell to, independent businesses. Reader looks like it could have at least been profitable.
Probably because of self-competition and proprietary shared dependencies; Reader, IIRC, was killed partially because it was incompatible with the way some of it's internal infrastructure dependencies were being evolved to support other services with more promising business prospects; it couldn't practically be sold off as is (and even if the infrastructure was forked, the people maintaining it wouldn't go with it, since they were being retasked.)
And lots of Google products that are killed are killed in favor of other Google products with overlapping markets, so selling them off would mean Google would be fueling competition to the services it wanted to focus on.
In many cases, I suspect both factors apply to individual products.
Products like Blog Compass are not new. Google has probably had hundreds of these smaller, more experimental products that got canned after a while, like Sidewiki (remember that?) but until relatively recently it's never been used as a sign that Google is unreliable; in hindsight most of them made sense. If I had to guess, I think the continued soreness from a few big ones like G+ and Reader have just left many jaded.
I mean I was bitten by the G+ shutdown, but honestly, looking for things to complain about is really worse than just beating a dead horse. In other words, you may as well just complain about the one that really frustrates you, since I doubt anyone here actually used Blog Compass.
Disclosure, I am a Googler, had no idea what Blog Compass was until today.
- Products that are doing well have more folks working on them, I assume.
- There is plenty of mobility at Google and no shortage of things to work on.
- The churn rate of products is probably lower than the perception, at least relatively speaking. I perceive Cloud as being pretty stable.
- There’s a lot of tooling that is not specific to any unit or product, like Bazel for example.
I never said people should just stop complaining. I said they should complain about what is actually bothering them instead of projecting it onto everything that happens. It muddies the water at best and is dishonest at worst.
> Which Chromecast devices are compatible with Stadia?
> For launch in November, only the Google Chromecast Ultra will be compatible with Stadia, and you will also need a Stadia Controller and access to Stadia to play with Chromecast. Access to Stadia in November is only available through the Founder's Edition or through a Stadia Buddy Pass. Stay tuned for future announcements regarding additional device compatibility.
Steam was the first big digital games marketplace, and people have been using it for a long time. They've amassed many games, the future playability of which depends on the continued availability of Steam to host the code.
If you threaten Steam, you threaten a lot of hardcore gamer's libraries. Any platform that tries to compete is always controversial.
That's why I think some may be rooting for failure, formed through anecdotal observation.
That would surprise me, but it would be great.
Or do you exclusivity contracts? There are certainly games that were sold on Steam and are now exclusively available on Epic's Store. Satisfactory is an example that comes to mind. Copies sold on steam are still honored there, so the contract probably doesn't allow you to force users off steam after the sale.
In general I'm quite amazed at how little abusive practices Valve has shown while having a quasi monopoly for such a long time. Stagnation is probably the one, if you want to count that. I hope they won't become worse under pressure. And I certainly have little trust in other companies trying to replace Steam to behave as well.
If a marketplace is underutilized it risks becoming obsolete. And, unfortunately, sometimes that means loosing access to content.
There are additional considerations, of course. Steam is also a social network of sorts, so fracturing gaming communities is also of concern. But it could also just be that gamers are accustomed to Steam; they like it. And they don't like platforms that don't play well with it.
It's not a matter of challenging Steam but of convenience.
Much like streaming, everyone prefers having their content on a single app/platform/whatever. Plus Steam has some other benefits like Big Picture that nobody else has.
Besides data sovereignty and user manipulation, the relationship between competition and convenience seems like the biggest issue in tech now. And there are no real solutions. It‘s obvious why tech is so consolidated. Marginal cost of growth is pretty much zero. 2 to 3 platform for a given use case might be the most „efficient“.
Chances are that quite a few of the new streaming services will disappear/consolidate soon enough.
The catch being that it only applies to movie purchases by participating studios. No rentals, subscription based streaming, or TV shows.
But imagine if that's how other services worked. One can always dream.
A tv series should be distributed on all platforms, rather than just HBO or Neflix or Hulu. Making exclusivity deals should be outlawed as anti-consumer.
Given the partnerships and buyin they have developed with game publishers and studios, the infrastructure investment necessary for this kind of service, it would seem Google is actually betting pretty heavily on it.
The commentary on every new google product launch is the same tiring canards about sunlit services... at this point, most of it feels like astro-turfer generated FUD.
And Google Fiber wasn’t?
Fiber is/was more about solving legal issues than technical ones.
That was definitely technical.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Google-Fiber-Microtrenchi...
Stadia is going to be the luke warm product that OnLive was and then Google will shutter it. AT&T also tried to do this kind of service in limited markets with fiber optics to the home, servers near the last mile, and a partnership with nvidia for rapid decode/encode. Didn't stick. Why will Google be successful?
Time will tell.
So... Stadia, along with all other current and future streaming services, are going to really suck for a lot of people.
But... they are going to be really amazing for a lot of people too.
Best-case latency should be as low or lower than the latency many play with on their consoles.
Filed it away as "interesting if it actually gains momentum" and promptly forgot about it until a couple of months ago when a co-worker saw the same booth at another tradeshow and said we should look into it. Saw no further information online than what was at the booth, but made a ticket on Trello to try to contact someone.
Guess I can take that ticket off now.
Obligatory : https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/googles-constant-pro...
Why do you think switching to a model where Google bleeds money on unprofitable products will help anything?
But the difference is that the products that flopped aren’t platforms that people came to depend on.
Google’s ad business can easily be disrupted by ad blockers.
Do you think that high speed internet is going to be so wildly profitable to cause a clear diversification in Google's profit? My understanding is that it already doesn't have great margins, and google moving in would increase competition, reducing those margins.
Do you really believe that google plans to diversify by moving into a complelety non software business like internet utilities?
If Google's ad business can be so easily disrupted, why haven't ad blockers noticably done so in the past two decades? Or if they have, why hasn't that impacted Google's profit? If your argument is that it did, but only recently (the TAC stuff), what changed recently to cause that?
Do you think that enterprise offerings like cloud aren't diversification?
People said it was crazy for Apple to move into the music business (Slashdot: “No Wireless, Less Space than a Nomad, Lame”)and try to open a digital music store (who will buy music when they can get it for free?). That seem to have worked out pretty well.
The CEO of Palm said on rumors of the iPhone in 2006 when people thought it was crazy for Apple to get into the phone business “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.”.
Google’s ad business is being disrupted - their profit was down on ad sales. Facebook knows a lot more about people because people tell Facebook a lot more about themselves and can do better targeting. Also, since most Facebook usage is done through apps, ads are almost impossible to block. Amazon is also getting more into the ad space and they know a lot more about consumer behavior than Google. Their first party ads are also harder to block.
iOS fairly recently added native content blockers - where the most valuable consumers are and more traffic is moving to mobile.
“Do you think that enterprise offerings like cloud aren't diversification?”
It’s a distance third to AWS and Azure. GCP doesn’t have the first mover advantage of Amazon or the advantage of having the advantage of Microsoft’s entrenched base in the enterprise or its sales team.
Here - https://jamesstuber.com/second-order-effects/
> is the idea that Google should change
No, by all means Google shouldn't. It's too large to be taken down by external forces, but it can (and I hope it will) inflict itself by maintaining its arrogant attitude.
On a side note: RIM was most profitable three years after the iPhone came out. Profits are a lagging indicator.
They’re both what I would call mature software. A rare thing for web apps. Updating the list is major from that perspective.