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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not even sure that Google has shut down more products than an equivalently sized company.

AWS has shut down I believe only one service in its entire existence (SDB). And only when they had a viable alternative (DynamoDB) and helped their biggest users make the move.

I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down without an alternative. They've certainly cancelled hardware programs, but that doesn't break your existing hardware. And they give plenty of warning for iOs phase outs. They pissed some people off by dropping support for old apps, but only after most of the big ones had been converted.

And Microsoft is the king of long term support. How long did they keep supporting DOS in Windows? Or 32 bit programs. Or Windows 2000!

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Amazon shutdown Drive (their dropbox competitor), there are plenty of consumer services Amazon has shutdown. Google's problem has been their tendency to shutdown perfectly good services because they aren't successful as ads. Reader is the posterboy for this; a service probably used happily by millions (or tens of millions) that had the plug pulled.

The fear with Stadia wasn't that Google may just shut it down, it's that it could have been very successful, with millions of happy users, and Google still would have shut it down. That's what separates Google from other companies.

jedberg said "AWS has shut down I believe only one service in its entire existence (SDB)" - emphasis on AWS, not Amazon as a whole. Big difference when you're talking about developer services, as opposed to end-user services.

Now, it's a perfectly valid point that Stadia is a consumer service, like Drive - but in a thread where there are discussions about developer services (GCP, for instance), making the distinction is important.

>(GCP, for instance), making the distinction is important.

The distinction is meaningless in that case because GCP hasn't sunset any services either.

GCP did shut down IoT Core. Only one I know of, though.

Google has shutdown many developer-facing services, no?

> it could have been very successful, with millions of happy users, and Google still would have shut it down

Weeps in Google Play Music and Hangouts.

> Reader is the posterboy for this; a service probably used happily by millions (or tens of millions) that had the plug pulled.

I feel like there's a whole generation of people who are now in senior decision-making roles who are still bitter about Reader. Killing that product, specifically, is likely costing billions per year in GCP revenue.

Bias up front: I work at Google but this is just my personal opinion.

> AWS has shut down I believe only one service in its entire existence (SDB).

Sure, but that's comparing a different branch of the company. Stadia is a consumer product, not a paid developer product. On the consumer side, Amazon has discontinued plenty of things (as every large corporation has):

According to this article[1], Amazon has canceled Haven, Amazon Spark, Amazon Restaurants, Amazon Storywriter, Amazon popup stores, Dash buttons, Amazon Tap, Instant Pickup, Amazon Tickets, Whole Foods 365, Amazon Fresh's Local Market Seller, Quidsi, Endless.com, MyHabit.com, Amazon Webstore, Amazon Destinations, Amazon Local, Amazon Wallet, Amazon Local, Fire Phone, Amazon WebPay, Amazon Askville, Amazon PayPhrase, and Amazon Auction.

Relevant to this thread, Amazon Games is technically still around, but they canceled Nova, Intensity, Breakaway, Crucible, and the Lord of the Rings MMO. Many top executives have left.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-products-services-fai...

> I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down without an alternative.

I can think of an esoteric one that no one misses: Ping (their music-based social media network)

There were a decent number of features in Apple's iTools / MobileMe package which were discontinued with no replacement. One big one that comes to mind was iWeb (static web hosting).

Also their "Print a photo book" from Photos (at the time it was call iPhoto I think?). You could design a photo album and they would send you a really nice bound copy. They discontinued it but had 3rd-party plugins that filled the gap for a while before even those died (I think).

Ironically enough, Google Photos still has this capability.

> I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down without an alternative. They've certainly cancelled hardware programs, but that doesn't break your existing hardware. And they give plenty of warning for iOs phase outs. They pissed some people off by dropping support for old apps, but only after most of the big ones had been converted.

Not sure if it counts, but dropping 32-bit support on macOS may be counted.

Microsoft shutdown stores, resulting in loss of purchases for customers. I lost a few ebooks when they shut down their ebook store, their Zune Marketplace and Play For Sure was a confusing fiasco with the final result of authorizing purchases for one final resting place before the DRM servers were killed.

So they don't exactly have a spotless record.

Windows phone was the biggest shutdown of all time. Off the top of my head, there's also Edge and Silverlight.

Edge and Silverlight both had replacements. Windows phone was shut down because almost no one cared.

The difference is Google shuts down services people actually like and use simply because they aren't profitable enough

10% of Europeans cared, but it wasn't enough.

And windows phone still got updates for over 2 years even after the shutdown, despite the fact it had been semi dead for years before then.

In terms of market share, Windows phone was a few percent, but that's still millions of phones.

Silverlight may have a replacement, but that doesn't help the devs who sunk their time developing with it. Same for people writing extensions for and debugging compatibility with Edge.

So is your argument that people liked and cared about Stadia? Because right now it feels like a really odd double standard. Go read through that canonical "Killed by Google" list. How many of those products were more popular than Windows phone / had users be more invested in it / etc? Be honest, it's a handful. Most of them you hadn't even heard of.

It feels like you have a double standard at play here, and are giving both Microsoft and Amazon a free pass on their abattoirs of dead products by various excuses, and totally ignoring that those same excuses would apply to Google's.

What's the replacement for Silverlight? Or do you mean it had replacement in a sense that nothing stops devs from going back to JS?

Steve Jobs's Apple liked to deprecate the whole API underpinning their OS from version to version. That and "upgrade" products with increasingly inferior versions (Final Cut, iTunes, XServe).

And then there's any era of Apple and their habit of removing consumer choice and forcing customers more into their closed ecosystem.

> Steve Jobs's Apple liked to deprecate the whole API underpinning their OS from version to version.

Can you provide some examples? The years of supports for things like Carbon are hard to reconcile with that claim.

Did they ever actually shut down SimpleDB? Last I checked, it was still online, although maybe they stop most accounts from creating new tables now.

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