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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried putting all of their resources into that. You often see companies axe perfectly good business units just because they have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into the "cash cow" units will be better for the profit line (and it often is). We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on their own, but since the main Google products are just making much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone work on the big winners.

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> We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on their own, but since the main Google products are just making much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone work on the big winners.

Even 10 years ago they've been very explicit about this strategy internally. Management talks about it as "putting more wood behind fewer arrows".

Its somewhat self reinforcing. I didn't try Google Inbox because I was sure it would be axed in a couple years anyway. (And I was right.) The more people make that same assumption, the fewer people try anything new from Google. And the worse any new products' metrics are - which in turn makes google axe more otherwise good products.

You may not be the target audience though, the target audience are probably people that aren't yet "bough into" the google ecosystem. So they are unaware of this axing policy. Anyone logging into chromium, using gmail and google calendar and an android device is already "theirs".

What they want is to increase the share of people that are in the MS ecosystem (and presumably also OSX ecosystem, but that's mostly a status signaling thing, so the strategy there is probably different).

You will be surprised how many people are indeed aware of Google’s axing policy, if not even consciously.

The reality is that so many of them have been burnt by Google. Picasa was an extremely popular photo management platform used by many. Google Play Music was extremely popular. Google Plus was not exactly popular but touched nearly every Google user, was highly promoted, and then disappeared. And then you come to the massive list of chat and calling apps that Google has arbitrarily spun up, promoted, and then killed.

But even if we go with the idea that regular people are unaware of Google’s tendency, even subconsciously, there’s also the fact that the way most products become popular is through a smaller subset of influencers. And tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies.

My grandmother mourns Picasa and PicasaWeb to this day.

My father was so proud of having uploaded all his music to Google Play. It was the single largest source of loyalty for him to Android over iPhone. With the iPhone's missing back button being second.

And since Hangout chat used to be integrated with gmail, many a gmail user saw deprecation notices for ages now. And terribly unhelpful deprecation notices at that. They basically said something like "I'm going to stop working soon. You should do something about that."

To be fair, the music he uploaded does transfer to YouTube Music; but that doesn’t help that it’s a far inferior streaming platform.

To be fair to the customer who lacks anything like the power of one of the world's largest corporations:

he is the victim of a bait-and-switch.

> Google Play Music

This one irritates me most. GPM was mature and required...what? Minimal maintenance at this point?

But no, how about we completely rebuild a music service on top of YouTube, miss a bunch of minor simple features that every streaming service offers (you know, like save current playlist/radio as Playlist) and FORCE every user over to this far inferior service.

At least with transitions like MOG->Beats->Apple Music, it made since as the entire corporate entity changed. But Google just...literally can’t invest in anything that takes a small ounce of manpower to manage.

At this point, OP is correct. The Google “curse” is well known and few people trust their whim-products, no matter their investment/marketing budget.

This was the one digital service I was happy to pay google for and caused me a 100% ban on their consumer services going forward.

Google music hadnt changed in a few years, so of course we need to get a promotion by destroying it and replacing it with something that might grow faster but definitely wont.

Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their endless rebrands, but its not like they rewrote Lync from scratch when they renamed it to Skype for Business. Google seems to have adopted a similar marketing-driven rebrand culture ("Google Play is a confusing brand and right now consumer confidence is in the YouTube brand, we should move our media streaming holdings to the YouTube brand") but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken.

> but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken.

I think that inverts history. The YT Music implementation and brand existed long before the decision to replace GPM with it. The branding decision followed most of the reimplementation, it didn't provide an excuse for it.

Google has a strong tendency to have multiple parallel offerings in a field for a while before consolidating them (and, also, a history of botching the consolidation.)

My impression from second and third hand sources was still that YT Music implementation and brand was after GPM was asked to "code freeze" and the team directed to other projects (including some to YTM). That the products stood side-by-side for so long is only further indictment on the rewrite-the-world approach that it took them so long to reach "feature parity" enough that they felt comfortable sunsetting GPM, well after the writing had been on the wall, the development ended, and the marketing decision to change brands had been handed down.

The multiple parallel offerings thing is of course its own problem that seems to often indicate communications issues up/down the decision chains, but specifically with reference to GPM/YTM I heard it was more a symptom of a rewrite than one of those communication breakdowns. Though again, that's only from impressions I got from scuttlebutt I heard second and third hand.

Lync itself was a rebranding of Office Communicator, by the way.

Yes, that factored in as another reason it was a good analogy.

> Google Play Music

The perfect music service and discovery engine. Axed for no cause.

I don't like Spotify or Pandora, and I'm filled with seething hatred for Youtube Music. I keep trying to use it, but it's horrible and doesn't play what I want to listen to. How can you design an app that's so bad that it actively does what you don't want?

YouTube Music plays meme videos [1, 2] in my alternative music stream. And anime music I listened to ten years ago in the middle of my EDM. Seriously what the fuck, Google? I never asked to mix my YouTube viewing experience with my music tastes.

For the first time in my life, I've stopped listening to music. I want to go back to managing my own highly curated playlists, but it's too much work to set up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxp8qPEwSXM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jofNR_WkoCE

>For the first time in my life, I've stopped listening to music. I want to go back to managing my own highly curated playlists, but it's too much work to set up.

I'm sorry, I'm sympathetic to your main point but this reads to me as... silly, to put it lightly. Google made you give up on music? You could do nothing but play CDs and still have absurdly more access to music than anyone in history. Music has literally never been more abundant, discoverable, and obtainable than it is today. The technology to replay it has never sounded better for a given price, and never been more ubiquitous. Neither has the tech to create it - there is an incredible Cambrian explosion of musical styles happening right now, as more people than ever before have access to studios and are using the internet to borrow and remix each other's work in interesting ways. This is an incredible golden age for music. And you can't be bothered because Google axed a product? Can't even be bothered to do it the old way?

Force...

Yeah, I am not going to use the new thing at all. Will go the same way the last new thing did.

Repeat this a few times and users are seeking. I am.

> But no, how about we completely rebuild a music service on top of YouTube, miss a bunch of minor simple features that every streaming service offers (you know, like save current playlist/radio as Playlist) and FORCE every user over to this far inferior service.

I still can't work out how I'm supposed to listen to an mp3 on my phone now. YT Music has a "Device Only" button which I thought was simple enough, but then it just refuses to actually play anything I select.

I was surprised when my Dad, someone completely detached from the tech world, brought up Google's tendency to cancel stuff. He was a Google Music subscriber and still uses Chromecast Audio. Last year he tried buying another Audio device to discover it was discontinued, and then over the summer got notifications related to Music being cancelled. He was super disappointed!

In January he started looking into getting some IoT cameras for his house (a doorbell and something for the backyard, nothing crazy). He was looking at Nest, but the moment I mentioned Nest is owned by Google, he stopped looking at their products.

Cancelling products and services that people use and rely on leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. I used to excuse it, but in the last 5-6 years Google has done away with about 4-5 services that I used daily. It's honestly too much and I won't put the time into using their products anymore.

I honestly think that this attitude to shutting things down, plus their piss-poor customer service, is killing any chance that Google Cloud has of succeeding. I'm just not willing to invest any time into the Google ecosystem where there's a high chance that the service will be discontinued or I'll get locked out of my account.

We still use Picasa on Windows 7 & 10 and Mac OS X. It works easily on 10.13 (High Sierra) and with some annoyance on 10.14 (Mojave) (requires clicking 5 times on complaining popup when starting, then runs fine).

A good incentive not to upgrade.

> tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies.

This is huge, bigger than most acknowledge. Most people don't understand the tech and why should they?

"none of my nerd friends use it" vs "all of my nerd friends are on it" is a massive, massive signal about whether something is good or incredibly dangerous, dishonest and a foul trap. There's plenty of the latter about so we're talking about degrees of badness for most. The thinking resembles:

"I'm not super happy with any of this tech and definitely not something that my niece the computer-hacker and cousin the IT guy aren't using. I'll definitely draw a line there."

"Have you heard about signal? It's whatsapp but no facebook tracking." From a family member, friend or acquaintance who you know knows more than you about this stuff.

I think AIM is a little different... It was born out of the original AOL dial-up walled garden service where they built a bridge to the Internet where people could download standalone clients and communicate with themselves and old school AOL subscribers. I don't know the internals, but I do know that much of the original AOL backend existed at least through the early 2000s which provided the instant messenger and authentication services [0]. It wouldn't surprise me if they were shutting down all of that infrastructure which I'm sure had a non-trivial cost to operate.

I think the thing to keep in mind is that running centralized backend infrastructure (ie; store and forward, user state, directory) for an instant messaging service is not cheap and if the platform is open and allows for user supplied clients, there's almost zero direct monetization opportunity without stepping into unethical privacy breach territory. That means they're relegated to just pushing a brand, and it seems like a very expensive way to do that. Moreover, AOL transitioned in its later years into a digital journalism company, and as far as I know AOL itself as a consumer brand disappeared.

[0] Worked on a whitebox set top box browser platform (ala Android) in the early 00s specifically with AOL as a client. Amusingly, the big feature they were trying to push was onscreen chatrooms for people who were watching the same thing live, which I guess if you think about it may have led to ways to monetize chat.

Too bad they didn't open source it. I'm sure most of the costs were in the employees required to operate and maintain the system. I am skeptical the infrastructure itself was that expensive, unless they were forced to keep it running on obsolete hardware. 90's tech is generally pretty light weight...

> unless they were forced to keep it running on obsolete hardware.

If you read blog posts and the like from people involved in those projects (MSN Messenger and AIM/ICQ, specifically); the companies would take advantage of protocol updates or other scheduled downtime to failover to newer hardware. So I doubt they were ever stuck on any “obsolete hardware”.

AOL launched around 1991 if I recall. I remember watching with great interest (I think I may have been in some kind of beta program) as it was obvious (at least to me at the time) that digital communications with a graphical UI was the future. (At the time in the US, there were a few commercial information services that were textual, General Electric Network Information Exchange and CompuServe were the big ones... followed by Prodigy which basically looked like teletext or a Bloomberg terminal for the home- it was clear that something better could be done, which ended up being AOL).

The original AOL client shipped for DOS with Digital Research's GEM widget kit, it wouldn't surprise me if they used additional DR hardware and software on the backend (VAX anyone?). When I worked on the AOL project, I would see e-mails from AOL ops (from AOL screen names, no less!) about how they would take scary and unique sounding things like "access rotors" down, so I suspect that given how early the launch was, the backend was extremely bespoke simply because they were making things up as they went along in order to launch a new and unique thing.

It wouldn't surprise me one bit to learn that it ran on VAX, HP3000, AS/400 or perhaps something even older and larger. You didn't hear about horizontal scaling nearly as much back then, most scaling consisted of "buy a bigger computer."

Digital Research (DRI), the creator of DR-DOS / GEM, was not at all related to Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), the producers of VAXen and the like, despite similar names.

live and learn!

Still, I would not be surprised if early AOL implementations used a VAX! Does anyone know what that stuff ran on?

> stepping into unethical privacy breach territory

Given oath's laughable privacy policy, I'm not sure any stepping would be required.

Granted the shutdown came before the Verizon/Oath takeover, but somehow I doubt the decision came down to "we could make a lot of money off this, but it will require relaxation of privacy practices, so we'll just shut it down instead."

I see Google also axing small winners in order to have people working on big bets. Undermining and then axing Orkut and then trying to create Google+ never made sense to me. A lot of non-brazilians non-indians (that didn’t use or even knew Orkut) defended the decision at the time, but I think history showed it was a bad bet.

For sure, I think directors simply didn't understand how online communities worked. Facebook must have been the first company to fully realise this, buying both Instagram and WhatsApp but not attempting to internalize their communities under the Facebook brand. It would've been pure capital destruction if they had done that.

I'm pretty sure they're going to have to write off the whatsapp investment. At least Instagram has a viable standalone business model. They'll lose the Whatsapp userbase at the drop of a hat, and it's already hard to monetize to begin with.

As someone who doesn't understand either, how do online communities work?

You build something addictive and "social".

Now how you sell user data is the Billion dollar question.

I wouldn't romanticize Orkut. It wasn't that great and I think Facebook would've steamrolled it all the same, much as it did numerous other regional social networks around the world.

I think the causality is that it was not great because Google did not care about improving it. So it got stuck in time and then Facebook kept improving. Even a strategy of copying Facebook’s innovations (like FB does in Instagram and WhatsApp) would an improvement.

Of course we will never know, but I think that betting on Orkut would have a better chance of facing Facebook than starting from scratch with Google+

It did steamroll some, but others are very much holding onto their users. VK is still way more popular than FB in Russia, for example.

In the US, Reader had a huge social community. It wasn't just Orkut that had a large existing social community they could have leveraged instead of alienated, but the folks in charge of Google+ did not understand (presumably because they weren't RSS readers, presumably because they weren't from the communities where Orkut became popular).

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