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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

A quick list:

Angular: v1 is "dead", but is still receiving major version updates https://angular.io/guide/updating-to-version-10

Hangouts: meet.google.com

Password Checkup: integrated into Chrome, Firefox has its own thing as well.

Google Photos Print: it's just no longer a subscription service that automatically selects photos (who would want something to pick a photo book's photos for you??). https://www.google.com/photos/printing/

Shoelace: Kind of disingenuous to include Area 120 projects, which are experiments by design.

Google Chrome Apps: Sunset in favor of PWAs which don't rely on Chrome Web Store? sign me up!

Dragonfly: Was never public so I don't see this as 'killed'.

I think these different announcement types should be noted or properly filtered, maybe by noting the app that replaces the app, eg "alternative: google meet".

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The point is they create a huge amount of hassle for users by constantly killing/replacing/renaming products, and it also shows that they aren't doing any effective long-term planning. That's what makes people mad.

Angular: I agree that angular is not dead, people can still use v1 if they want to. This does not count.

Hangouts: the new version has different pricing, different features, different name, different URL, different apps... this absolutely counts (and is one of the most egregious examples)

Password checkup: the extension worked fine, but they intentionally disabled it. Any references to it on the web now have to be updated to refer to password checkup in the browser. Anyone who knows how to use the extension has to relearn how to use it in the browser. This counts.

Google Photos Print: yes the original was stupid, but it was still a product and is now gone. This counts.

Shoelace: yeah this never really launched in the first place. This doesn't count.

Google Chrome Apps: I mean really? Anything that requires rewriting parts of an app to make it work counts!

Dragonfly: this was never released, it doesn't count. But it is important that people know about this, it is an example of Google quite blatantly being evil.

> they aren't doing any effective long-term planning

They do, you just don't grok it. These applications are just toys. They are the result of the plan but not the plan itself. The plan is to just bury a ton of fiber, build a ton of computers, hire a ton of developers, and see what the heck happens. The plan is so successful that they can build and deploy these apps for almost no marginal cost, which is why they also probably feel free to just throw them away.

No - Google does not have some brilliant master plan we are unable to understand. If you're really arguing that their "plan" is to just spend money and see what sticks, then I'd say they absolutely deserve criticism for being fucking clueless idiots.

We are discussing the issue here in the very cathedral of "spend money and see what sticks". That's the whole silicon valley venture strategy. If you think of Google as a large-scale startup incubator with a very efficient private cloud in house, then you will understand the long tail of their product lineup much better.

Angular being the latest addition there.. I agree, I wouldn't really say that 1.7 development being discontinued is a "death" of Angular. Really not.

AngularJS is dead. Angular continues. As a non-user, the impression I got on the release of Angular 2 was roughly “we’re making a new product that shares some similarities with AngularJS, and we’ll continue to maintain both indefinitely, but all active development will be on this new product that we’ve decided to name ‘Angular’ just to confuse everyone”.

It was a mercy killing.

I agree with some of what you're saying but Hangouts didn't JUST get rebranded. Meet was introduced while Hangouts was still alive.

Creator here. I was just trying to gather updated information on Hangouts a couple days ago. I try to keep the list as accurate as possible. I'm probably going to move it (or even remove it), but haven't had any solid info either way come my way. Thread from Twitter talking about Hangouts:

https://twitter.com/killedbygoogle/status/131259662718668800...

The only real issue I have with ditching chrome apps in favour of PWAs it all the lost work in making web apps look and feel native. Now we have to live with a half-browser wrapper that may or may not have the forward and back buttons as fallback in order to use PWAs that the developer never expected to be "installed" to a computer.

Are PWAs comparable with Chrome apps? IIRC games like Bastion were able to use native code (maybe WASM fills the gap?)

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