If I was a large shareholder I'd be yelling to ditch Sundar everyday. The guy is a total idiot just floating by on ads dollars. Google could be so much more if they reorganized into conventional dedicated teams and stopped trying to cover their shortcomings with political virtue signalling.
Between their inability to provide support while a service is up and their consistent lack of long term vision/ investment for the services they create, it's just not worth it.
I can't imagine I'm the only one making significant financial decisions based on this sort of thought process.
In other words... they built a chat app inside their chat app.
Can’t say google workspaces is better.
I can't really understand how people can trust google domains.
You could argue bezos was a genius in this regard by religiously avoiding disclosing to wall street his true margins.
We tend to forget that modern shareholders don't care much about which companies their money is invested in, it's just a stock with some numbers in a spreadsheet making the difference between investing in Google vs. Exxon.
But it seems like Google put practically zero effort into growing Stadia into having a respectable library at all. It looks like they gave up almost immediately and the last few years have been the inevitable stagnation into the graveyard.
Thinking the solution may be that next time I upgrade my phone, I get a new SIM and run both phones at the same time for a month, transfer the google voice number to the new phone, and then do all the 2fa transfers to google voice (now AT&T) number.
(if anyone has any tips to get google voice numbers to be recognized as a cell and not a SIP I'd be delighted... that's the major functional complaint I've got with GV.)
Years ago I got tired of the mess that was Google Picasa and transferred all photos, videos, and most important docs to Amazon Drive. Now I need to find yet another service.
Or build your own NAS is you have the time and experience.
I spent about $1000 on a synology and drives and that’s given me 10 years of 10TB so it’s actually pretty cost effective too. Cheaper than Dropbox or OneDrive.
I only wish there was some community disk swap program that would be good for reliable off sites. I looked into storj but you have to share like 100mb or something to make enough to pay for 1mb.
Amazon is also known to kill products but only ones no one uses.
(I agree with you, if that's not clear: it didn't even create/define the market or take in any way significantly away from the incumbent.)
At least with Apple you know the service is gonna hang around for awhile, even if it doesn’t set the world alight.
I use it after I got bored of Netflix and other programs, because it’s ad and in-app purchase free and loads quickly on all devices. The games are obviously not the best, but then again the PS4 games I have don’t really justify the long start up time and I don’t have enough spare hours for Civilization.
[0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/28/apple-860-million-paid-...
But i don’t know anyone who intentionally uses it as a library. I assume that it’s just a nice way to redirect money to devs they like in a rare scheme to appease their game dev partners.
They're no longer in the market. Now others are also slow to enter the market, in this case video game streaming as a service, and it's good for Google? This new product market isn't a core competency for Google and only tangentially fits into their wider portfolio. This 5D chess is quite the take.
How about this instead? Google isn't a great product company. The work of making a product good isn't the same as the work of solving the engineering challenges to launch a product. Google overwhelmingly enjoys and excels at the latter, not the constant iteration and polish and listening to stakeholders of the former.
Edit:
To expand on this a little. Stadia no doubt received a lot of buyin internally from engineers because of the technical challenges. Keeping latency low, potentially hardware level challenges to running / rendering the games at scale and optimizing for costs, etc. I bet many promotions were given for the various contributions.
Now that it's launched, the not so fun work that won't get much recognition due to Google's culture, but is important:
- Iterate on the user experience
- Iterate on performance: latency, frame rates, streaming quality. Potentially add support for higher resolutions, etc..
- Fix bugs, keep it running
- Work with video game publishers, large and small, on licensing agreements. Since Stadia only has a small market share, Google has to go to them. This isn't a position Google likes to be in.
- Work with video game developers on the SDK or other technical challenges. Answer their questions. Get their buyin. Support them during development. This isn't a position Google likes to be in.
The last two points are interesting. When was the last time, outside of an acquisition (YouTube, Android both acquired), Google actually built a successful platform? This is what Stadia needed to be.
Google got lucky in the sense that they set out to build a search engine, someone said "hey why don't we do text ads," it made money, and they've been riding that ever since. They're the kind of company that drilled a few holes, found oil once, and is now drilling holes everywhere without understanding where oil comes from.
Since no one knows where oil comes from, the best way to find it is to drill everywhere (for which you’ll need lots of resources) and hope you strike. This is pretty much just Darwinian capitalism; companies in the market compete on whatever they think will give them the win (drill), and everyone who happened to be wrong dies or is bought out (no oil), and everyone who happened to be right (oil) becomes the monopoly.
Google is so huge and rich from ads it’s able to effectively implement Darwinian capitalism inside itself. This is almost the opposite of “riding the wave” - they are constantly trying new things and (smartly) canning them when it’s clear they aren’t worth the investment. By doing this, they are at least able to push the odds a bit in their favor that the next oil well is found by Google instead of startup #10327.
Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s pathetically easy to look at other services (e.g., MS or NVIDIA’s game streaming services) and say “obviously what the winner did is right and what google did is wrong, and google is therefore stupid for trying”. Think of how many apps (Vine, Cinemagram) tried to compete with FB/Insta and lost. Then TikTok came along and has beaten FB so bad that FB/insta is changing to be more like TikTok. TikTok’s market success is the lucky result of the flip of a coin whose weight no one understands. In hindsight, sure, TikTok’s win came from having done x, y, and z better than everyone else, but no one, not even FB, knew what x y and z were ahead of time (or they would have beaten TikTok to it). Google is in-house-developing Vine and Cinemagram (failures) in the hopes of hitting the next TikTok (success).
In a strange ironic twist, success in capitalism is brought by trial and error, a blind search… which just so happens to be Google’s bread and butter.
The reply was that Spotify and Netflix worked, but all music streaming services have basically the same selection these days, and movies are deemed more disposable than games as seen by the rise of people rotating subscriptions as movie video streaming fragments, so they were never perfect indicators. The one worry was that Google would buy its way in with exclusives and introductory pricing a la Epic, but Google's pride probably prevented that.
If you look at the opportunity cost of supporting a small side business va building a bigger business.. you drop the small thing. Google engineering is expensive and they have a somewhat polished brand that they don’t want to muddle with a bunch of “non winners”.
Amazon has the opposite problem. They build everything and have to find a way to scale their internal orgs to handle lots of tiny side revenue streams. I signed up for a magazine subscription through Amazon and they had a website redesign that accidentally (?) removed the management portal link for a few weeks. They do so much they can’t even stay internally consistent.
The biggest issue with that approach is that they're burning customer goodwill, and that affects their odds down the line of getting customer acceptance. Stadia is just another project in a long line of cancelled projects that leaves customers screwed over and less willing to use Google products in the future.
Your point about Amazon is pretty interesting, IMHO I think that's why in the long term Amazon will keep on beating GCP in the cloud space. Amazon having such a large set of offerings is that it makes their cloud offering particularly compelling, especially considering they seem to keep old services alive and have relatively stable interfaces. Their offerings might not be as polished as GCP's, and some of them are laughably awful, but at least I feel confident that Amazon won't change the API or deprecate/retire the service.
If the death of stadia kills the category, stadia's impact was a net positive.
And if Geforce Now goes under I retain all my games, because it’s all linked to Steam and Epic.
But I still prefer Geforce for exactly the reason you give--still having the games regardless of what happens with the streaming service.