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Comment by MarkMc | Hacker News Reader

> Google often seems to have the attitude "if we build it, they will come, and if they don't, the idea was never feasible in the first place".

This comment echoes Paul Graham's observation about the wrong attitude founders often have about initial growth [1]: "A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist."

[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

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It's funny though, I remember the old days before Google and they built something that was demonstrably superior for their users than what was out there at the time. They did win with a superior product.

Stadia feels like something that got designed by asking "how can we make something that's worse for our users than the other alternatives that are out there now?" and then going and building that.

Now had they come out with virtual machines better than what anyone could get at home, maybe?

Don't get me wrong though; I'm sure a lot of this is death by a thousand compromises.

As a side note: I was watching the Product Keynote from Flutter Interact '19 and when the person from the Stadia team was speaking about their app, it reminded me that despite all the negativity Stadia is getting, we should remember that there are real people building it that are enthusiastic about what they're doing and trying to make something good.

It was actually the same with Gmail as it was with Search.

Gmail was just a much better service than Hotmail or Yahoo! mail, arguably their biggest competitors at the time. They also offered a ridiculous amount more space.

I think those two successes alone led a lot of us into a place of just using Google products by default for a while.

It’s an utter shame what’s happened with the company, especially with its privacy issues.

> Stadia feels like something that got designed by asking "how can we make something that's worse for our users than the other alternatives that are out there now?" and then going and building that.

My friend has Stadia and it's actually a great product. The latency is negligible. I would be the exact target audience. I usually play 8-10 games a year. I don't really want to invest in a console or gaming PC just for that. The ~100 upfront cost is great. But Google's reputation kills it. I won't pay full price for AA titles when it can be taken away in any minutes. Till that fixed, I just stick with buying ~5 years old games from Steam that runs on my MacBook

I wouldn't say that directly applies to what Google is trying to do.

I think what Google is doing is just re-investing back into x amount of companies/ideas where even if 1-2 of those companies bounces back and becomes profitable they make up their investments + they make profit.

I think they do realise how much money there is to be made in the gaming world and such. Its just time and money against profit for them.

Throw eggs in the wall and see what sticks or not.

Personally I don't like that model and thats why I use google services less and less. Even gmail is a huge no-go for me due to their nonexistent support.

Forgot about http://paulgraham.com/ds.html. Great post and relevant as ever today.

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