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Comment by amoorthy | Hacker News Reader

Sigh. Remember when Google Finance was great with easily the best charting software and easy lookup of key stats for a company? Then they decided a couple years ago to destroy it for no reason. I wish I knew why they made this horrible decision.

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Google seems to get tired of its own products very easily, and just kills them, even if they are popular.

Or makes them worse by "developing" them

Eg: Google Chrome on Android

I really wish there was incentive to have products be "done". It seems that so many products get to a great state and then get made worse over time because we need continuous growth (Evernote immediately comes to mind. Others seem to feel similar about 1Password) or in the case of Google, get shut down.

Yes indeed. I get Evernote but not 1Password. The issue with Evernote for me was it kept getting slower and they lost me when they changed pricing, I felt they had lost their way and it was really easy to change note apps. I prefer simpler note apps today, even Google docs or Word. 1Password is good, the windows app could be better and browser integration is a pain but it’s solid.

> I really wish there was incentive to have products be "done".

Easy, just use version numbers which asymptotically approach an irrational number, like Knuth's TeX (currently at version 3.14159...ish)

But seriously, the incentive to be "done" is when a lot of other software relies on your API or file format. This is why mozillans throw such a tantrum whenever anybody tries to use their rendering engine as part of some other piece of software. Getting to "done" isn't fun.

I think the first charting software was written by one talented javascript guy. I think he moved on and the next person did not want to touch the code. Which is the story of many Google services.

That's funny because the Google Finance charting software was famously Flash.

Yes, it really was quite perplexing. I imagine the "reason" was to make it more mobile-friendly or mobile-first or perhaps just to standardize their properties more. However, as you noted, it really degraded the product. I went from a daily user to an almost never user.

"mobile-friendly or mobile-first" seems to be a trend in quite a few companies, in the last few years. The main problem is, the completely ignore the desktop design, viewing it as an either-or proposition, for some, unknowable reason. While it's understandable that much traffic is mobile, during office hours, especially during work from home (which will probably - at least partially - be a continued trend moving forward), quite a bit of traffic will be from a desktop/laptop. Simply ignoring this market share seems to be a fools errand.

Ah but its not tech unless you're ignoring all but the most dominant market force

It probably wasn't a path to internal promotions any more :-)

Give it a year or 2, it'll be rebooted with a messaging feature

Nah,they’ll try to make it tiktok for stocks.

I mean, Yahoo finance has one and nobody gives them any shit about their abysmal policing.

I thought the reason was that it was written in Flash, and then browsers decided to stop supporting Flash.

Easily the best stock charting software. And they nuked it because _______?

One thing I do remember about Google Finance was that it required Flash for the longest time. That made me never use it.

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