Hacker News Reader

Comment by oramit | Hacker News Reader

What a bizarre press release that accompanies this... https://blog.google/products/search/google-finance-makes-inv...

Google Finance used to have all these features. They were already implemented and working fine in 2009! The original chart tool was much better than the current version. You could see every dividend that was issued, splits, add moving averages, etc. Then they "simplified" it by removing all the best features and are now adding them back?

Why would I bother to use this when they have so thoroughly torched their goodwill by senselessly killing off working (and good!) products?

View on HN

Yes but they were implemented in Flash.

So obviously they didn't choose to remove features, they were forced to rebuild it from scratch.

And along the way, instead of it being a standalone product (which was really only justified because of competition from Yahoo Finance etc.), it made more sense for it to be simply part of Search, and so give simpler results.

Does that make sense? I don't think they torched anyone's goodwill here. It's not senseless -- to the contrary, there was a lot of sense to what they did.

If you want a serious finance tool, Google (or Apple) stock "apps" are probably not going to be the right choice in the first place.

The Flash switch could explain a few months but they had years to do a small project which much smaller companies did for more complicated projects. This seems a lot more like the usual Google problem where everyone involved moved on and nobody had an incentive to do maintenance work.

They could've just ported features to HTML5. Not sure why you're trying to justify clearly sketchy behavior of billion dollar company, but maybe Google's recruiters scour HN, so I might be the crazy one

Assuming the project had any headcount to do so. But Google has (apparently) not invested much in Google Finance which is . . . fine? Tons of alternatives. Are we now saying it's a bad thing when Google cedes part of the web ecosystem to other companies?

I have no idea what you're getting at with the comment about Google recruiters.

Google doesn't cede anything, they just wait for a bit and then come out and destroy the market for the other tools.

They are really taking their time with the process of destroying financial website tools. But I'm sure that in fifty years or so they'll get around to destroying that market. ;)

Are you a google product manager? I ask because, wow, this response is condescending.

I know the original chart tool was in Flash... I used it and described the features it had. Why after 10 years is the new version less useful than before?

Yahoo finance stayed separate and has been better for it. It doesn't make sense for stocks to be integrated into search - I completely disagree.

I never said anything about Google Finance being the only tool I used. It was a perfect place to start and once I found an interesting security I would move over into something more serious.

Does that make sense?

Eh. Where's the condescension?

I didn't react as strongly as the person you're replying to but I get it. The "Does that make sense?" bit, along with the rest of the comment, makes it read like a schoolteacher trying to patiently explain why something is the way it is to a student who they are sure they have superior knowledge over. The last line of the comment you're replying to makes it clear that's how oramit interpreted it.

A bit more charity may have been warranted but I do see where he's coming from.

> The "Does that make sense?" bit

The first person said that Google dumbed down Google Finance "senselessly".

So, in context, I definitely took the response's "Does that make sense?" to mean "Was it a rational product decision on Google's part?" rather than "Can you understand this?".

> It doesn't make sense for stocks to be integrated into search

You not personally finding it useful is not the same as it not "making sense".

This comment gets emotional and attacks the previous comment unnecessarily.

No, it didn’t make sense to take an existing and useful site like Google Finance and dumb it down to make it a part of Search instead.

If it made sense, then there wouldn’t be a need to reverse course today.

I think it only makes sense if you look at the incentives of Google as a corporation, and disregard the opinions of the people who used and liked Google Finance.

Yesterday I saw a post on Indian investment subreddit where people were discussing how they switched to Google sheets after Google finance since it allows fetching data for stocks in spreadsheets using some function.

Anyhow it doesn't seem like Google might have ditched finance for this result. Increase in sheets usage is just a side effect.

This is what I did as well.

Could someone who knows about doing this in a large tech firm speak to the difficultly of converting standard flash --> js/html? For something as common as stock charts, it doesnt seem like a big investment, is there some complexity that comes with scale?

We have transitioned a few major silverlight based applications.

A conversion made no sense at all. What we ended up having to do (and in hindsight was absolutely the right decision), was creating a new application completely.

The best way to "transition" for Google with Flash would be to probably, similarly, just create a new application.

Google Finance wasn't a Flash app though. It was just the charts which is a much less daunting situation than what you are describing with a Silverlight conversion of a full app.

We're doing a a large silverlight app right now and the auto-conversion to blazor got us < 65% of the way there, so instead of jumping from MS's old destined-to-fail tech to their new destined-to-fail tech we're going to rewrite from scratch as a web app. I hate to do this but it's the path of least smell.

> ... is there some complexity that comes with scale?

I can't see how scaling would be an issue since the tricky/ resource intense bits happen on the client end. We're building interactive charts which are comparable to the Google Finance ones with a fairly tiny developer team.

If Google hasn't migrated functionality, it's because the Finance product hasn't met their goals and they've trimmed the team back.

If you want a serious finance tool, Google (or Apple) stock "apps" are probably not going to be the right choice in the first place.

Do you have a recommendation of any free tool?

I would give Koyfin a try - was just recently advertised on a podcast I listen to, and looks interesting.

+1 for Koyfin

+2 for Koyfin

Try TradingView

ActionScript and JavaScript are both ECMAScript, and there have been AS>JS/HTML5 converters for almost 10 years.

If it's NIH Syndrome and/or a low-status in terms of Google promotion fuel, we should just say that.

They did the same thing to Maps. 7 years ago Maps was pretty amazing and useful, these days it's barely tolerable.

It’s sooooo busy! And prioritizes displaying businesses and points of interests over street names...I really dislike it now and though I vehemently refused to use apple maps for years, this distinction made me cave.

The good old bloatification. At some point Maps was nearly perfect. However the hundreds of people behind it would be let go if they called Maps "complete" so they turned the growth inwards and started creating the bloat.

Honestly, it feels like they're just trying to monetize the shit out if it.

It went from being a navigation tool too being the "how do I get to consumption" tool.

> Yes but they were implemented in Flash. So obviously they didn't choose to remove features, they were forced to rebuild it from scratch.

Who forced them? I have always been Ok with Flash and see no real reason to abandon it (besides driving sales for more powerful hardware which can do the same Flash did on Pentium 2 and with less code).

> I have always been Ok with Flash and see no real reason to abandon it

Assuming you're okay Flash being a closed product of Adobe (which was a huge problem for the web), it was also a bountiful garden of security issues, which Adobe didn't do a great job of managing.

I personally never cared about products being closed. In fact I still use Windows 7 and XP (albeit my main OS is Arch Linux). It (Flash, but Windows 7 and XP also) works (and is way more efficient than modern alternatives, both in runtime and in development) and that's Ok.

There also are open-source implementation like Ruffle, Lightspark, Gnash etc (I never bothered to try any of them however).

Even the original Adobe Flash player is not dead - it will[1] be maintained by Harman for years to come.

Nevertheless, what I meant to say was nobody really forced or could force Google - AFAIK killing Flash was Google's and Apple's own initiative.

[1] https://services.harman.com/partners/adobe

The world of computers is "reinvent, but slightly different".

Remember the "Briefcase" sync feature of windows 95... Now compare that to Dropbox syncing... Pretty much the same thing 25 years on. Different UI, same principle.

I never did get what the Briefcase was supposed to do. It was so poorly explained that that was it's purpose. Perhaps because I didn't have any networked computers, and the utility of a Dropbox via floppy disk was so limited...

Completely off-topic rant incoming, but Microsoft has very often sucked at advertising itself. Here's a more recent example. I bought a Windows Phone way back when. It was amazing. My favourite feature of it, believe it or not, was the keyboard. I have a sneaky suspicion that they used MS Word's dictionary somehow, because it could correct typos not just when the wrong letter was typed (for instance, typing 'aentence' instead of 'sentence'), but also words typed in the wrong order ('snetence'). It was delightful. I could type as fast as I wanted, confident that auto-correct would take care of any errors. Then I moved to Android, and I could not believe how appalling the keyboard was. But it seems that no one else was talking about it, because android users just didn't know of the excellence that existed out there.

Then, at some point, Microsoft went ahead and ruined their keyboard when they went to Windows Phone 10 or 8.1 I can't remember, and I've been searching for perfection ever since. GBoard, with it's fucking emoji page is an affront to engineering.

> Then, at some point, Microsoft went ahead and ruined

When Microsoft does things like this, and it's not clearly a dumb product decision, it's often to avoid a patent that they don't want to license or fight. I've been using 'simple keyboard' on Android, because it's just a g-d keyboard, but it doesn't do good spell check either. I didn't particularly notice spell check getting worse when I left windows phone, but there was a lot of other stuff going on.

>....but Microsoft has very often sucked at advertising itself.

The MS team that did Clippy would like to have a word with you...

If I remember it correctly, the briefcase was able to synchronize by floppy.

It was an awesome piece of software, that nobody knew about.

Yes the idea was that you'd have files that you wanted to use on different computers (e.g. at work office and at home). At the end of the work day you'd sync the files to floppy, take the floppy home, and sync it to your home machine.

Remember at the time many people did not have laptops. They often didn't have home internet either. Maybe they had AOL, or maybe nothing. They also didn't have a work VPN or any way to access files on their work computer.

It was also a good 'lock in'. If your work used Windows, you needed Windows at home too to be able to use Briefcase.

They "simplified" their own maintenance by supporting fewer features.

You are 100% correct. There are those among us that overlook this as the reason for new releases and discontinuing products.

I know I've experienced a point where the decision is made to discontinue something as adding what is needed to move forward will require too much investment versus benefit.

Just curious what you do use, I don't spend a lot of time using this product but when I did I struggled to find a good alternative.

As far as simple interfaces are concerned for the average layperson yahoo finance is as good as it gets since google literally gimped their finance product in such a stupid fashion since they didnt know how to monetize it. So not only did you have a competitor pick up marketshare, but also offer a premium sub feature that does not compete with their insanely good free public api. what a stupid company

MarketWatch has some of the features but Google Finance used to have almost everything. It was the easiest way to see financial ratios, previous year finances, and basic screening. There’s a few free stock screeners out there like finviz but they’re all less intuitive than Google was.

I also hate it when apps/services move backward in terms of features. I'll still give them credit when they start to move in the correct direction again, even if they would have been better off not screwing things up in the first place.

so the update was today since september?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com