Comment by tmpz22 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmpz22 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think so (and I'm the type of person to never miss a good Google bashing). And here's the hot take i'll make for it: Google is not solely responsible for the bad PR they get for prematurely retiring popular services.

Often this is a conundrum of naive technologists clamoring to shove untested tools into production for... reasons? Excitement? Risk-taking adrenaline? I'm not quite sure.

Yes Google's marketing oversells (or even lies a la Google Stadia), but at the end of the day I think Google SREs/devs/evangelists expect (wrongly) some measure of common sense and restraint from users and that is just not there. For example, if you ever watched some of Kelsey Hightower's earlier kubernetes talks he practically begs users to deeply consider their use case and whether or not they should actually be using kubernetes.

Google also expects their users to SRE/devops/refactor/upgrade constantly like they're able to. Which is also insanely unrealistic.

Ultimately, while some cases are Google's fault, often the blame is shared - most of the time. The market realizes this and thus the opportunity cost is already priced in somehow.

>Often this is a conundrum of naive technologists clamoring to shove untested tools into production for... reasons? Excitement? Risk-taking adrenaline? I'm not quite sure.

My understanding is that you get promoted at Google for launching new things, not for maintaining them, so there's a perverse incentive to launch projects that become orphans almost immediately. So much so that I wouldn't even say that they retire popular services prematurely, but that because there is no institutional will nor support for these projects to survive into the future, they are simply de-launching proofs of concepts. Translation: nothing is intended to survive at Google besides search and AdWords, and everything else is subject to cancellation at any moment without warning.

I'm not sure what you're saying about sharing blame, that these products are too popular? I'm not sure that's a sufficient reason, but it would certainly explain Google's overarching product strategy through the decades.

I think it's a dichotomy where half of the thinking is bonus-oriented as you describe, and the other half is them wrongly assuming all users think/work as they do and will thoroughly evaluate before making a meaningful decision to purchase or put into production (because surely everyone has massive SRE/QA budgets and only does 10 hours of relevant work a week and the rest is for deep optimization). Thus you get the outcome of releasing beta products and then be surprised when either the product is a disappointment, or it gets yanked later due to poor/unideal adoption.

> I'm not sure what you're saying about sharing blame, that these products are too popular? I'm not sure that's a sufficient reason, but it would certainly explain Google's overarching product strategy through the decades.

I'm not sure if it's sufficient cause either, I just try to peel back the onion to understand more then just "those people are dumb profiteers with simple minds making simple mistakes". Also I think it yields some unique insight into my own work/coding/life when I identify the deeper subconscious flaws in product development.

In addition to what you said, I feel that may be Google's view of a viable project (business-wise) is different from many others, hence any real drive to continue these POCs long term.

If we look at main projects/products at Google like Chrome, Search, Gmail, Android, YouTube, Maps, Kuberenetes none of them has any serious competitors out there (except for Android perhaps). I mean, sure we technologists are more aware of alternatives and open to try new things but almost every average user I know is utterly uninterested in an alternative. There's a perception of Google as simply being the most technologically capable company on the planet for average users and that any alternative simply can't match, let alone surpass, Google's offering. Sometimes, when I think about, there's some truth to the latter part of that sentiment. Google does a good job with the projects that actually last.

So, perhaps any project that can't have a similar traction in the market probably doesn't get a whole lot of attention on a collective level.

Chrome has competitors! It has majority market share, but other browsers get usage too.

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