"it was limited to India for its entire life."
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?
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?
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.
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.