Consider the saga of Stadia. The tech is rock-solid. That fact did nothing to address developers not wanting to risk a platform that might not have customers, customers not wanting to subscribe to a platform that may not have long-term support, game development itself being the world's biggest game of craps, entire swathes of the world lacking enough internet bandwidth for realtime streaming, and nobody trusting Google to lean into something at an operational loss for more than a few years anymore (with the exception-proving-the-rule of Cloud).
The pricing model was probably the biggest single issue, but I believe better engineering could have made a huge difference. This is a common pattern for Google products: a technically impressive core is held back by bad engineering and business decisions at higher levels. Duo is another good example IMO.
> It was also as easy to port games too as any Linux port would be
And nobody bothers to port to Linux either. It isn't trivial in many cases. And I believe Stadia wasn't just as easy because of a Vulkan requirement along with other platform integration and certification stuff. An unhappy medium of too many platform requirements to be trivial to port to, but not enough to actually make Stadia a better experience than other platforms.
> Online play was free
Only if you bought games at full price, trusting Google to run the service forever. Clearly a risky bet, and the risk was obvious to everybody at the time, not just in hindsight.
> more than 50 games in the subscription
The selection was not compelling compared to other platforms' subscriptions. If they had had a larger catalog to draw from, that could have helped.
If they really made it the case that AAA gaming was just another type of content you might bump into in a pre-roll ad, or in one of your social media content streams, I have a hard time imagining how that would not be a massive success.
It's an incredibly rich form of content, and they would have been competitive in so many ways. Think about all the kids and teenagers out there who would love to play games and for whatever reason can't get access to gaming hardware.
If they could somehow get a free taste of AAA games on their phones, it seems like you would be able to find some way to make that profitable over time.
Instead it ended up being a worse console which nobody knew existed.
Their problems are mixed bag problems. First of their problems is lack of vision. No clear backlog/roadmap and UX vision of their products.
Second set of problems are software related problems as of technical debt, maintaining codebase of their software products and lack of understanding of how their algorithms actually work e.g ranking algorithms, recommendation algorithms etc.
You didn't actually need both the subscription and the game. Subscription is just for > 1080p streaming and other 'pro' features. You could just buy a game without any subscription.
Stadia didn't require a subscription. You could just buy games and play them. But loads of people came to the conclusion that you needed a subscription. My going hypothesis is that this was caused by the free trial of the subscription service (higher resolution, cheaper games) that everybody got when they launched. So since people couldn't access the games without getting the free trial they assumed that this meant that they couldn't access the games without a subscription.
Hypothetically, if they'd wanted to go a totally different direction, the could have courted game developers willing to create games for them that would have been offerable at a pure-subscription rate. But they chased AAA games and hit a major market issue: there was no way AAA publishers were going to under-cut their per-unit sales in other channels by offering with-subscription access to their product and trusting Google would pay them enough to make that worth their while.
But now if you purchase via iOS instead of the web it's $30 because of the Apple 30% tax. So... don't do that. They are literally pushing you to subscribe via the web, so do that.
The only thing insane is that Apple still takes a big cut of streaming/media subscriptions.
A bit insulting, TBH.
$18 to $23 is not insulting. It's still less than the price of two individual subscriptions.
Perhaps I'm grandfathered into a cheaper plan, but that's my data point.
IAM, in particular, was a huge undertaking in jamming fine-grained access rights onto existing resources where none such existed before, and it was pretty much marching orders from above: "Potential clients can't migrate off AWS because AWS has this and we don't." And it caused more than its fair share of "Why is this API suddenly throwing errors" tickets from existing users who were accustom to the pre-IAM permissions model.
ETA: Re-reading my initial statement, it was over-broad. There is room in Cloud for bottom-up engineering and product design. However, especially relative to the rest of the company (where Google is an industry leader, not entering a market already heavily dominated by an elephant), Cloud spends a lot of its time chasing "table-stakes" features to enable new customers to be on-boarded who can't subscribe to Cloud because they can't migrate their existing flow off AWS without X Y or Z analogous feature available in GCP.
I would be more concerned if your org wasn't doing this. AWS does it all the time too. The parent post is wrong to paint this as a negative. And GCP has some unquestionably industry leading products too (BigQuery, GKE, Spanner, AI/ML services)
Whatever the heck Vertex AI is compared against the Sagemaker+Ground Truth pile that AWS has. By no means is any of it groundbreaking from either company, just piling open source software and buckets behind UIs, but it seems GCP is doing catch-up there.
I'd be curious where you think we could have done better on the annealing with specifics :)
But for real… it’s prestigious because it’s hard to get into, not because Google is great at product development.
In practice Google’s product muscle has proven to be pretty weak
Installing uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock makes Youtube a much better product than simply paying for premium. If you haven't used it, SponsorBlock is a crowd sourced browser extension that identifies and skips sections of videos like "This content is brought to you by..."
I used to pay for premium and use YT Music, but after getting fed up with YTM I cancelled. I'm noticing a much MUCH better experience using UBO and SponsorBlock. Unfortunately, this setup means the creators don't get any revenue from me.
If only YouTube offered such an experience at a reasonable cost.
If there's a threat to the value proposition, it's increasingly-intrusive sponsorship messaging. But that's outside Google's ability to control.
There's no match for YouTube, as long as you are not after movies, but very broad "video" content. Nothing even close to it. 4 coffees per month so my whole family can enjoy it without ads? It's a bargain for me.
Just comparing Apple Music to YouTube Music Premium, Apple Music is $11 for individual and $17 for family.
YouTube Premium is $12 per month for individual (with an option for $10 per month if prepaying for a year) and $23 per month for family.
So you are basically paying anywhere from -$1 to $6 for no ads on YouTube compared to Apple Music.
YouTube Premium is $11.99 individual or $22.99 family (the latter recently increased from $17.99.) Where do you get $30 from?
Source?
This doesn't have to be the case. But Apple's lockdown enables Google's tyranny, so there's really no other choice. On other platforms, I can install apps like NewPipe on watch YouTube in the background without needing to download anything from Google besides the videos I want. Google is not the savior of this story by any means, but they're not afraid to play Apple's game of turning iOS users into hostages.
Every retail outlet gets a “cut” when you buy from their store.
Are you also as outraged when consumers can buy cheaper goods online than at a BestBuy?
[1] I think that there is an argument to be made that the store fee subsidizes everything that people don’t generally pay Apple for explicitly, which makes it possible for free/cheap apps to exist. I don’t personally feel like that argument reaches 30% however.
Pretty difficult to square >$250B of annual revenue with “all of your products are failures” and “can’t think of a product that people actually want”
This question seems to answer itself? Engineering skills are not product skills, and Google kinda sucks at product
(... I've heard stories. ;) )