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Comment by a1371 | Hacker News Reader

The cards are definitely stacked against this when it's at Google. Because of:

1. Google's solid track record of killing things because they didn't grow quickly, after a half hearted effort. Stadia being the latest example.

2. Google being pretty bad at cracking the corporate communication space. Teams and Zoom ate its lunch.

3. Google not having a strategy behind communication tools in general. Meet, Hangouts, Chat, Duo, Alo, ... already it's weird where this fits.

4. Google being bad at supporting new hardware gadgets. My Daydream VR came out 2 years before my Pixel, somehow these two things don't support each other.

I wish they at least would sell their divisions instead of kill/hamper such moonshot products. This looks like the next Google Glass.

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It's a super fun thing to be the first person to comment about #1 on literally everything Google does, but it's silly and wrong to think that's a valid criticism.

For every product Google kills, it's launched dozens of wildly successful products you've been taking for granted for over a decade in some cases: Gmail, search, Drive, Photos, Chromecast, Chrome, Books, Flights, Scholar, AdSense, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Keep, Translate, Maps...

Google can and does support dozens of good products, and pretending otherwise is getting tiresome. If your best criticism is, "I dunno if Google will support this long term" that, to me, means you couldn't come up with anything better to say, which means it's a pretty damn cool product.

thank you. it's the definition of a middlebrow dismissal

> For every product Google kills, it's launched dozens of wildly successful products you've been taking for granted for over a decade in some cases: Gmail, search, Drive, Photos, Chromecast, Chrome, Books, Flights, Scholar, AdSense, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Keep, Translate, Maps...

More like for every 10 products they kill they maybe let one live... Have you not seen killed by google ?

> Google can and does support dozens of good products, and pretending otherwise is getting tiresome. If your best criticism is, "I dunno if Google will support this long term" that, to me, means you couldn't come up with anything better to say, which means it's a pretty damn cool product.

It's pretty fucking important to know that if you're going to splurge a bunch of money to put it in your offices. You're just being ignorant at that point.

> It's pretty fucking important to know that if you're going to splurge a bunch of money to put it in your offices. You're just being ignorant at that point.

Companies don’t kill things that have support contracts and enterprise agreements.

Look at GSuite. What’s been killed?

Fuck even apple won’t kill the orphaned MacBook Pro with touchbar for support contract reasons.

Back when I used gsuite at work they broke the old chat program. A few years later they obfuscated the hell out of the "accept/comment on calendar invite" flow.

Also, they are in the process of discontining the free tier.

Most damningly for me, they screwed up and eventually killed grand central (voip, call forwarding, voicemail) post acquisition.

> Have you not seen killed by google ?

Yes, we've all seen it. Honestly can we just discuss the tech for once instead of making the same comment 30 times on every Google thread?

This sort of video streaming is reminiscent of the "tele-human" teleconferencing in Silicon Valley [1]. Hopefully it works better. It would be timed well as so many companies are looking at working from home right now. Though as with anything with "Project" in the name, I wouldn't expect any actual product for at least five years, and probably more.

Salesforce makes sense as a partner. They have multiple global offices and could stress test things beyond internal dogfooding.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU

I’m not sure tech for tech’s sake is a good value proposition. If they were to kill this off in the year what impact did it have on the world?

Likely very little. But wouldn't that be true of any technology? That doesn't seem like a good metric for determining how much potential impact a technology actually has.

I do agree about technology for technology's sake, but even in cases where the application is wrong, technologies are often repurposed. Viagra was created to treat heart disease.

For the tech to succeed they need to sell to enterprises, scale manufacturing, and be making the right bet on the future of work

In my opinion google has the wrong instincts on all 3.

This is not really a tool for hybrid work (it’s too expensive to deploy in homes) it’s a tool for communicating between offices.

Google is betting on everyone being back in the office at some point.

Let's have a look the release dates of your list of surviving products, shall we?

Gmail: 2004; Search: 1998; Drive: 2012; Photos: 2015; Chromecast: 2013; Chrome: 2008; Books: 2004; Flights: 2011; Scholar: 2004; AdSense: 2003; Calendar: 2006; Docs: 2006; Sheets: 2006; Keep: 2013; Translate: 2006; Maps: 2005

What do those all have in common? The most recent one is 7 years ago, and the others are older still. What else happened 7 years ago? Sundar became CEO. Google has not released a single successful product since he started -- telling, isn't it?

> Have you not seen killed by google ?

How could one not see it, when it's spammed multiple times in any Google product announcement thread on HN? But the thing is, that site doesn't actually tell you much for two reasons.

First, the list is just crap. Here's an exercise: pick 10 random items from that list. Had you ever heard of that product, do you think it had any users? Is "killed by google"'s categorization of something having been discontinued actually legit? Was the thing they're claiming as a product even one in the first place?

Second, it doesn't actually tell us whether this level of discontinued things is actually uncommon. Do the same exercise with the same inclusion criteria on the peer companies like Amazon and Microsoft, and I bet the lists will be comparable.

> it's silly and wrong to think that's a valid criticism

Knocks it out of consideration for me. Deploying these things zaps energy. I trust a start-up with that investment more than Google. Sure, with an SLA, I’d have assurances. But for the “let’s throw a couple in some offices and home offices and see if it works” threshold, it seems like a time waste.

Meet is pretty dang solid, and is pretty much exclusively used for “work” or anything related to a calendar invite. The rest of their video chat seems to be reserved for P2P/personal communications.

> Meet is pretty dang solid

It’s being whooped by Teams and Zoom, latecomers, in no small part because Google can’t help but rename it every six months.

I believe enterprises choose those either because:

(A) they've already bought into Office 365, so Teams being free to them makes it a no-brainer

or (B) Zoom was the first big name during Covid, so companies that bought into it don't consider changing due to the friction that would cause.

Pretty much every company I've interacted with over interviews and meetings who does use Google Workspace ends up using Meet as well, for the same reason enterprises using O365 as their user directory choose Teams (reason A above).

Sure. Nobody disputes Google’s tech chops. It’s the business side that’s been perennially problematic. That applies to Starlight as much as it does to Meet.

Zoom’s stock is down 86% from ATH. They’re hardly thriving.

> Google being pretty bad at cracking the corporate communication space. Teams and Zoom ate it's lunch.

That really perplexes me. They had multiple both video and text chats. Their video chat was one of better ones even way before Zoom.

All they need to do is stop making tech demos and make one app doing it. But they just make one sorta kinda decent one, throw it away, and make another one to replace it.

I apologize if this comes off as aggressive, but all four of your points are totally wrong and I am sick of seeing these ideas parroted all over HN.

1. Google does not have a solid track record of killing things. IF you actually go through the list of all the "products" Google has "killed", you find that 95% of them are just consolidated into other areas of the Google product stack. Stadia was a herculean undertaking that involved a capital deployment that, at the time, was unprecedented in the gaming space. Stadia wasn't killed because it didn't grow quickly, it was killed because it didn't grow at all and was losing money, not to mention failing to acquire market share. Would you prefer the product be destroyed to put it on indefinite life support like Amazon has done with Twitch?

2. Google is an absolute giant in corporate communications via G-Suite. Just because their video chat didn't win out doesn't mean they have no competency in the space.

3. Google now does have a strategy for comms tools. Workplace text chat is part of the Gmail end of G-Suite, all video chat is under Meet. This would slip right into their new Meet ecosystem. Unfortunately many of the people who parrot your talking points also were the ones criticizing google for attempting to reign in their comms ecosystem because it was "killing" products, when in reality they were just being re-bundled

4. Google delivers legendary levels of hardware support for their Pixel devices, the absolute best in the Android ecosystem. Not to mention they run the single most compatible smart home ecosystem and have supported Chromecast for a decade.

Can you even name a division that Google could just spinoff in your world? Stadia couldn't sustain itself without the Google Cloud backing it. Really tired of all the HNers essentially making up this narrative about Google when it rally doesn't exist.

> 1. Google does not have a solid track record of killing things…95% of them are just consolidated into other areas

Public opinion still stands, they now garner a reputation of “won’t support for long, might kill” on new products they launch. You can’t even trust their owns comma - a month out of Stadia being axed they were talking about how they were going to continue supporting it.

> Google is an absolute giant in corporate communications via G-Suite.

Email and stuff, sure. Video conferencing, less so.

> Google delivers legendary levels of hardware support for their Pixel devices, the absolute best in the Android ecosystem

Is this a joke? Their hardware support is lacking, and the fact that it’s the “best of the Android ecosystem” says a lot about the quality of that sector. Basically every time this topic comes up on the pixel and Android subreddits, users who have those phones bemoan googles lacking and inconsistent support.

1. Stadia wasn't even first to market. Multiple startups have a better product.

2. G-Suite did well because it was free and had a good collaboration model. It has stagnated, and things like search and folder navigation are hilariously bad. Quip has innovated much more in this space in recent years.

3. If they rolled old chat into new chat, it put my buddy list somewhere, and didn't just delete it without prompting, right? Google voice still exists with the old feature set? Can I have my auto deleted vanity number back? Presumably Meet is always e2e encrypted, like zoom, and its predecessor from Google, right? No? No to all these questions? Wow. Maybe they don't provide feature continuity after all.

4. I am typing this on a pixel 6 pro. Meh.

The following divisions would be better off as spinoffs, IMO:

Stadia (small companies lapped it), Waymo (small companies lapped it), their MVNO, android (then it could stop being a privacy tire fire), chrome (the Mozilla model works, and this would let Microsoft and Brave upstream more easily), g-suite+gmail (no tie in to search or ads), search, double click, AdWords, YouTube.

What startups had better products than Stadia?

No company of any size has lapped Waymo. Waymo is the industry leader by a long shot.

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