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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

I wonder about the damage Google does to any potential start ups in a field.

How much buzz can you get when everyone’s first thought is “how could this be any good? Google already tried that and failed...”

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I don't know, Google has failed at all kinds of products that other companies have achieved massive success with. This includes some really ubiquitous tools like a social network (Google+) or messaging apps (too many to list). I think at this point most people assume a failed project from Google has more to do with the company than the concept itself.

But these are all things where Google was late to the game and didn't succeed in taking someone's crown. So it's an interesting question: How does Google failing at some product that isn't already a well established concept impact the consumer's sentiment towards the idea behind it.

FWIW Google had orkut long before facebook became a success and moved out of colleges. Google had gtalk long before WhatsApp was conceived.

Microsoft had MSN Messenger, there was ICQ and many others, and there was "always" IRC etc., and frankly things were great with gAIM, Pidgin and other messenger aggregators until Google Talk switched off access for third-party apps and launched Hangouts...

I remember my whole family was in gtalk and other jabber talkers. The funny thing they were usable on mobile long before android/ios phones. There were JavaME clients that could run on many common phones. I still miss T9.

GTalk was really in a position to be the #1 messenger.

Orkut was pretty much killed in the English speaking world by the Brazilian Portuguese speakers which took over any group which was created. They pushed every photography, climbing and Linux group to the point where, as a non-Portuguese speaker, the site became way more noise than signal. You could flash a group as being for a specific language, but it wasn't enforced when someone violated this. Orkut admins ignored complaints and the malfeasanant posters rebutted with something which might translated to "who's going to make me?"

So, it became a useless site because there were no teeth to the rules.

>Orkut was pretty much killed in the English speaking world by the Brazilian Portuguese speakers which took over any group which was created. They pushed every photography, climbing and Linux group to the point where, as a non-Portuguese speaker, the site became way more noise than signal.

This is the source of the HUEHUEHUE meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/huahuehuahue . There's even an academic study on the Brazilian online cultural traits that cause such problems in Orkut! https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265844216_'HUEHUEHU...

A few days ago I was researching a bug I was seeing using with xfce on chrome remote desktop. Apparently this was thoroughly solved in someone's Google+ post that everyone linked to. All I can see now is the Google+ termination notice. Thanks, Google.

Check the Internet Archive. I want to say they grabbed a copy of all the Google+ posts, but I might be wrong.

They did; I just looked up someone's post about USB-C standards the other day

Google was one party in that. The other was the person who choose to gave Google the content to post. When we choose to give content and power to a few, large, centralized organizations, that's on us.

What would you have expected them to do? Would you point to the user if Stack Overflow stopped hosting content? Or GitHub? Before places like imgur, I'd see forum postings linking to broken images hosted on personal sites--so self hosting is unfeasible. Geocities data is still around as well as Usenet postings going back to the 80s.

> Stack Overflow

... which licenses its content with CC by SA 4.0[1] and has a public API.

Other licensing models of content will vary.

[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

This is an important point. Someone else is allowed to use the StackOverflow content and likely would if StackOverflow was turned off.

I do think that is worth noting, but it is (mostly) separate from the original point. It doesn't matter if the copyright is open if the content disappears.

At least in the U.S., I don't think it's that relevant to the use-cases I've seen. IANAL, but in the 4-factor fair use test a place like Internet Archive rehosting the content to me easily clears 3 of them if the original host goes away.

These days IPFS is getting closer to being a real alternative.

Sad thing was google+ and the control it offered was nice. The tech communities on G+ were wonderful but for the average person they were just too entrenched in facebooks ever growing social iron fist.

What google considers success is not the same as what others consider a success. $10m revenue is huge for a lot of startups.

For google it's just a distraction that needs to be culled.

I seriously doubt that's everyone's first thought. I know my first thought when Google launches a product is: "this will suck and I'm not even going to bother trying it". Experience as trained me to avoid Google products and look for migrations away from things I'm stuck with that they executed well on in the distant past (email, maps, search, browser).

The criteria for failure at Google is very different from that for a startup.

For eg. Allo was considered a failure because it had 'only' 10 million DAU in first 8 months. For a startup that would be like hitting a jackpot.

More importantly, how many start ups are already in the field that go out of business because Google uses their resources to undercut or out-advertise the existing start up, only to abandon it after the competitors have all been killed?

Google "failures" can have millions of happy users... if google ejected 10m users, and you can gain say 1/10th of those, 1m, and even 10% paying $5/month that's $500k/month of gross income. Depending on your needs, a well designed system to support 1m users or so could be done under $50-100k/month, leaving $400k/month for staff and profit.

While it may not make sense at Google Scale, it can absolutely make sense for a small business spinoff.

I (and plenty of other people) love and make use of services up until the second they are killed by Apple/Google/etc. Just because a big tech firm doesn't like the product doesn't mean it isn't viable as a smaller business.

You can do that endlessly. The reaction to Stadia could well have been “how could this be any good? OnLive already tried that and failed...”.

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