Google is shutting down Neighbourly
support.google.com
support.google.com
First, put a halt to launching new products. Two, take a cold hard look at existing products and prune them in one fell swoop, rather than this distributed system where projects scale up and down independently, spread across time. It seems individuals are incentivized to launch irregardless if anyone actually cared about that product launching. It's really hard for the orchestration node to say No to projects where there are so many other projects launching that it would seem unfair.
Effectively, saying NO. Just my two cents.
It doesn't pay to be creative or engineer driven when you're a monopoly. The ones that make the big bucks are sales and marketing.
The other factor is cash reserves[1]. They can make 1000s of mistakes like this without any significant damage to their cash flow. Also assuming they are mistakes which we don't know, because we don't know their strategy.
Finally, if you think the leaders don't know about this trend and/or killedbygoogle you're kind of naive. Actually with the amount of data they have there is a pretty high chance they can easily learn everything about you way before you can learn everything about them.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/1/20749831/alphabet-google-a...
Heck, Google is so big that they're often in direct competition with their other services and products. For example, they're currently developing three different operating systems: Android, Chrome OS, and Fuschia.
See, Apple is big and I’m sure they have a plethora of internal products too. At least on the consumer front, it’s not so confusing.
Startups can launch a product off 5 engineers. Let's say, hypothetically, Google is way less efficient and can launch a product off 50 engineers. You are looking at thousands of products. If the CEO spent literally every working hour just reviewing and approving products they get roughly an hour per product per year.
This means that these decisions must be delegated and therefore there will be decisions that seem boneheaded in retrospect. Its just a fact of being a massive company.
The fact that being ahead of one’s time is often associated with misunderstood geniuses has more to do that those geniuses had severe lack of skills outside their brilliance
That's largely how execs describe it to the public, so... yea?
Neighborly, just like 99% of the stuff on Killed By Google, was free product that never left beta. It amazes me that people on HN still confuse paid products like Stadia and Fi with huge infrastructure and userbase with these small experimental Android apps...
Alphabet has 117 BILLION DOLLARS cash on hand.
Why is it worth screwing over how ever few people were using this?
Let's say a team to maintain an app like this cost 2 million dollars a year.
For 1 ten thousandth of their cash of hand, they could fund this app for 5 times longer than Homo sapiens have walked on earth. 1.1 million years.
Even if Google shuttering apps is just a meme, why is it even worth feeding the meme when you have such mind bending amounts of money and revenue?
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Of course the answer people will reply with is "they have better things to do with the resources".
That's the mentality that makes people not trust Google.
When you have such mind bending amounts of money, something can be successful by the standards of mere mortals and an embarrassment to Alphabet. No one wants to rely on a company that sees your money as a joke and will gladly pull the rug under you.
This app is a perfect example, what kind valuation do you think an app with 10 million installs for neighborhood engagement would see? We don't have DAUs, but you could literally value a listing with 10 million users in the millions.
Tot cost of a more reasonable scenario- a single employee, total cost 500K per year. For 10 years this would be 5M. Which is indeed less than 1/ten thousand cash on hand.
Maintenance cost is not flat over time. What happens when a product is easy to maintain (one engineer) but suddenly critical infrastructure gets deprecated and now the transition is going to take five engineers? Do you allocate new resources to support products that already have so few users that they only justify maintenance mode?
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-apps-is-out-o...
The point here is that very few people are using Neighbourly to make it interesting to Google.
Btw, in these days I learned that Duo is still alive. I thought it was dismissed time ago. The page on Google Play says 1B+ installs and still I don't know anybody using it. I mean, nobody ever asked me to make a call using Duo. Everybody is using WhatsApp or Skype for that on mobile. So, to get to the point, very second (or probably, fourth, fifth, etc) in the rankings but not dismissed by Google. I think they value our as strategic. Neighbourly was not. They already have Maps.
Duo is great actually, me and my family use it all the time. WhatsApp video calls are pretty bad imho, they tend to show a lot of artifacts and not be very fluent in general. Duos on the other hands looks pretty good, no matter if you're on WiFi or 4G.
The biggest benefit however is the fact, that the user interface is so incredibly simple. For apps like WhatsApp video calling is just an secundary feature, for Duos its the main focus. I never had to explain anything about Duos to my parents, but they still know how to use it with me and their friends.
However, I don't feel like Google is putting a lot of effort into bringing Duos forward, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'd shut it down as well.
(Also, the high install count is probably just because some devices come with Duos preinstalled, although I don't know when its counted as an install in the PlayStore)
It hast over 10 million installs apparently.
I'm all for abandoning projects that makes no sense to maintain. But if this happens too often, then somewhere along the decision chain people are missing the mark on what's worth building and supporting. In Google's case, they should probably put a bit more thought into it before releasing something to the public. This situation, to me, is a sign of overconfidence among Google workers about their abilities. In humbler places, they do side projects too but before they start them there's a lot of discussion about the purpose of the project beyond the code and the value it brings. When I saw the list of projects Google had killed, most of those projects looked plain boring to work on and seemed like undergraduate projects. Then again, may be it's it's own strategy to build as many stuff as you can quickly hoping some of them might take off.
From what I hear, it's the internal performance evaluation and promotion processes at work here. People are rewarded for "launching" products. Once a product launches, backs are slapped, promotions are had, and everyone moves on. There are no clawbacks if the project fails; the fact that it launched is all they care about. This is why there are so many little projects which launch, flounder and then are turned off.
This should not be true and if it is, it’s just further indication of a problem.
I said 1 ten thousandth of cash on hand for 1.1 million years to drive home how much of a paradigm breaking amount of money they have.
They could make a blank rule that every app gets 20 years of maintenance and support and support 55,000 projects for 1/10000 of their budget.
Now realistically I feel your comment is still missing the point because it’s not even about saying they should maintain these apps anymore.
It’s about the fact that your hard earned dollar is a a drop in the bucket for them. Literally.
Imagine a bucket holding a bucket of water.
Imagine 1.5 million of these buckets back to back.
$1 of your money, is one drop in all 1.5 million of these jugs for Google.
Now pardon my visualizations here but I find it helps when you’re talking about such stupid amounts of money, to help put things into perspective.
They don’t care about services unless the returns are going to be astronomical in one dimension of another.
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Every service they make like a VC backed startup on their Series A... except they go and attach literally the biggest name in modern technology to it, which lulls people into a false sense of security and also expands the reach of these projects so that them shutting down affects many more people than an early stage product shutdown should.
This is what angers so many people
But what about the other 10,000 projects Google is working on? /s
I would also suggest that the people who like such a product (neighbourly.co.nz is popular with the Boomers) are not the people who like downloading apps that could be websites.
So yeah, it didn't get as popular as Google would like, but then, how hard did they try?
Then Covid-19 hit and the data being shared on it was not great.