Google has already pulled six products in 2023
toolhub.tech
toolhub.tech
I don't get the reasoning behind this article. Half of this list is side projects which didn't work out, which is understandable to a certain degree. The article feels like blogspam riding on the hypetrain of people disliking when google discontinues products like Stadia.
What happens to the people who bet on them? Do they even have a point of contact if e.g. an integration breaks? That’s the point. They’re half-baked products being put out and pulled with no care in the world. That’s the brand.
Which means when a Stadia comes out, a product that could have worked if people trusted it, nobody budges. Because half the crap Google ships are “side projects which didn’t work out,” a list which apparently now includes its cloud.
I think they should label everything in the former category "experimental". Put the label right in the logo so it is really obvious.
And of course gmail was in beta for many years.
Is that even the standard procedure at google though? There are plenty of projects where they’ve unceremoniously pulled the plug with little notice, stadia is a glaring example (though to googles credit, they did provide some refunds)
Lying to consumers is the safer (short term) bet.
(sadly, to get official distribution, you need to be part of the "worldwide deployment" of Google products, and it's often a lie that actually menas "we deployed in many large countries except yours")
Maybe it’s important that they act like a grown up company and have some focus instead of throwing random shit up against the wall like apes in a zoo on a crack.
That's a bit of a bummer, but probably fine. Just one of those things about working at a grown up company rather than a scrappy upstart.
You'd be hard pressed to pick a 'worst', between Google Glass, Google Plus, Google Wave and so on the list is long and getting longer all the time. It would be a lot smarter if they launched these separately so that they do not impact the trust relationship people have with their main brand. I don't know any other company besides Yahoo that has managed this in such a terrible way.
But in just about every way, it is the same or worse than their previous offerings (the older "Talk" and the later "Hangouts"). They ditched the option to do SMS fallback in the same app instead of improving on integration. Can't just hit the little camera icon in a group chat to instantly start a group video call anymore. Individual and group chats are in separate tabs. Photo and video handling are worse (but at least not downgraded as badly as MMS between Android and iOS).
Honestly I only use it because it sucks to message with iOS users if you can't use iMessage and I/some of my friends don't use Facebook products like FB or Whatsapp.
It became a meme a long time ago.
I think that's the whole point though. A lot of the products, if they can even be called that, listed in this article are not even possible to "bet on". I mean, Code Jam?? I think it sucks they shut it down, but annual events and conferences come and go, it's not like people had a right to expect it would go on indefinitely.
I only think about half the items in this list are even possible to invest much time on as an outsider, either a customer or a partner: Stadia (obviously a ton has already been written about that), OnHub (classic "I bought an IoT device that isn't much better than a paperweight after they stopped support), and Google Currents (though that one is marginal - I don't know anyone who used it, also I don't know how seamless the transition to Spaces was).
I think the biggest issue with Google products is that nobody trusts them because they won't stand by any roadmaps. If they had clear, discrete classes of products that they actually stood behind (e.g. "these we'll only guarantee to support for the next 18 months" vs. "these are mature products we stand by"), I think folks would be more OK going into things with eyes wide open. But Google has time and again bullshitted ("Of course we're investing in Stadia..."), or even had things been in beta for years and years when they were obviously mature products, like GMail. And since it's clear Google only really cares about ad revenue, when shit hits the fan and they need to "streamline", like now, anything that doesn't directly support ads like Search, Android, GMail, Chrome, etc. feels like an afterthought.
So on one hand Google doesn't innovate anymore and is too shy to release anything new, and on the other hand Google can't just get things out and experiment because it would let down people who bet on these experiments.
There is probably an in-between.
> a list which apparently now includes its cloud.
Two years ago Google Cloud was 37k employees[1], which is about 20% of the company. Even if the 12k layoffs were on Cloud that would still be 10-12% of the company.
Calling it a side project and comparing it to a "smart tag embedded in clothing" or even Stadia is just FUD.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-26/google-fa...
From everything I've read here, the problem is that only innovation is rewarded with promotions. Once a product is released, the people in charge get promoted, and move on to another new project, leaving everything to die.
There are many ways to be promoted and launching something new is definitely not the easiest way.
I understand that it's common to see people leave a team or product once they shipped a promo project, but products don't just die because one or two senior people leave a team.
on edit: someone else down thread has a link to it https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
From the beginning of the article:
> The Google unit, (...) is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
I'm sure that there are discussions about the strategy, the expected growth and revenue and what to do if these targets aren't met. It totally makes sense to reduce the rate of investments to mitigate risks if the results aren't what was expected, but this doesn't mean "shutting down" Cloud.
From the article:
> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely,
Seriously, Google could even decide to leave the Cloud business eventually, branching it off the rest of the company. But "shutting it down" wouldn't suddenly happen because a spreadsheet shows that Azure has more market shares than Google.
What do you mean by this? It seems GCP has around 10pc market share and growing.
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
These are all projects that google wanted developers to engage with their ecosystem. Routinely inviting devs over to work with you, then kicking them out in the cold, will obviously have consequences.
I remember participating in CodeJam 2003 twenty years ago, and it was such a positive experience that Google was the first company I applied to out of college.
Right now I'm working on a project using a gcp API, and now I'm considering finding an alternative because arbitrarily doing the same work twice is never the most efficient way.
Now that Google has killed the app, I can’t capture those photos! The app worked fine a month ago, why not let me use it, as it worked offline‽
No one seems to be talking about this issue.
I haven’t found suitable replacement apps to capture photospheres on a (i)Phone. The suggested Street View Studio doesn’t let you capture Photo Spheres!
Laughs/cries in Picasa
This is kind of your answer right? It’s not the issue to others that it is to you. If Google sunsetted Search, for example, I think people would talk about that issue.
I think it’s probably 90% blogspam and reinforces that anyone sane should very carefully evaluate whether they rely on anything google releases.
Personally, I’ve looked at google phones and networking and home stuff and won’t touch it with a ten foot pole because I don’t want to switch out my router because google decides to kill it.
I agree on the side projects or conferences being shut down and thought the same thing of “why is this even a stand alone app, wouldn’t people just use maps?”
You can feel fulfilled as an HN user. Your comment was cited (linked) in the article.
Note: I am not an author of the article :)
You can export and import KML in Maps, but it's in a separate custom map interface under Saved->Maps. It's not integrated with the main interface like in Earth as far as I can tell. If there's a way to load them like overlays in Earth, that would be useful.
Perhaps the poster is the author of article, and possibly the user gondaloof (they are both green accounts).
Or maybe the author of the article is just paying attention to HN.
Stadia and CodeJam are more than enough.
Perhaps there wouldn't be "blogspam" like this if Google didn't regularly provided content by shutting down things that people actually loved.
I think I know (resource allocation), but I'd love to be certain.
It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes.
Anyone wanna bet on if/when Bard gets axed?
Yes, but we're not the people making the product decisions.
Stadia's shutdown was inevitable in part because we had already established this distrust, and also because leadership handled every aspect of it incredibly poorly. It was technically impressive, but the economics relied on the addressable market actually being willing to go all-in on the service.
Sure, you can blame part of it on the promo culture encouraging people to move to new and shiny projects, and part of it on the fact that we release a lot more experimental stuff than you see at more established companies, but there's also plenty of cases where there was exactly one person who understood the codebase and was keeping the product running, and said person is no longer at the company for one reason or another.
In my opinion, Bard should never have been released in its current state, but, that's leadership for you.
This is what I don’t understand. Is leadership really this dumb or are we missing large pieces of context?
The prevailing sentiment is google is flakey. Don’t rely on their stuff.
Now removing redundant services is one thing. But from the outside it looks like they don’t care about regaining confidence. And they don’t care about creating new stable products that I want.
Did they really think Stadia would be an instant success with their shit reputation in a market that has been already carved up by the incumbents? A naïve observer would say it would take years and a ton of money.
Google Assistant still feels so stunted and lifeless when I know Google can produce more realistic generated speech audio, interpret requests in plain English and respond in a helpful manner.
It wasn't until Alexa and Siri gained traction that they let "Hey google" slip in.
No subscription can compete with just owning the games and the hardware.
The marketing was... not executed well. Most people didn't realize that you could actually just buy games on the platform and play them without paying the monthly subscription for Pro. The backbone of the business model was supposed to be driven by that 30% cut of game sales revenue that most gaming platforms / stores take.
The infrastructure was supposed to be further subsidized by selling off-peak compute as a cloud service. That never materialized.
The exclusives were lackluster compared to other platforms (Breath of the Wild? Halo Infinite? God of War Ragnarok?), and leadership shuttered the in-house game studios before they were able to release much of anything.
Beyond all that -- there were plenty of features that owning your own hardware simply could not compete with. Just to list a few:
- Not having to wait for video game downloads was an incredibly underrated feature -- being able to start playing a game within seconds meant you could play a game immediately after an impulse purchase, rather than having to wait half an hour (100GB download at 500Mbps) first.
- Family sharing meant that you could play Cyberpunk 2077 (which, by the way, launched with serious performance issues across most platforms... but played smoothly on Stadia), while the kids next to you on the couch played, I dunno, Paw Patrol, all on hardware you already owned, e.g. your laptop, or phone, or the Chromecast that came with the founder's edition (also 100% optional).
- You could seamlessly continue a game across multiple devices -- play a game at home on your TV, then continue at a friend's house on your phone.
Yeah, about like this: https://killedbygoogle.com/
I don't really care if Google is unable, unwilling, or uninterested in supporting anything that isn't G-Suite, search, or ads. Their track record is more than enough for me to dismiss using Google Cloud Platform, or even saving anything of any importance to Google Drive. I'm occasionally involved some of those types of vendor decisions, and I imagine others in similar positions feel the same way, so I can't imagine this is all theoretical fake losses they've suffered from this MO. I don't know how you'd even begin to measure the amount of revenue opportunities lost in this way, but I will say this: I'm really glad I'm not a part of Google's marketing department.
I think it's some combo of an organizational/internal-incentives failure, and a cultural thing where all these "geniuses" they hire can't be bothered to do any boring shit, to include, sometimes, properly finishing features they start developing.
No idea how it somehow kinda works and when it’ll finally explode in my face.
I think the 'problem' is that reputation damage doesn't really impact Google's revenue. They get the overwhelming majority of their money from publishing adverts, with a significant amount on their own properties (search and YouTube). It really doesn't matter if a bunch of gamers decide Stadia screwed them over, or if some devs decide to avoid GCP because they killed Reader. Google still makes a staggering amount of money no matter what.
The only way Google killing products will ever impact the company is either if people have an alternative to Google Search (very unlikely) or if people stop wanting to work for Google because they see it as a dead end working on things that only last a few years (also unlikely because $$$ talks).
Google will continue to launch, run, and then kill products forever. I suspect that if you're at Google and you're not working on ads or something that displays ads then you're being paid to build something frivolous that won't go anywhere mainly so you don't go and work at a different company that could impact one of Google's cash cows. I'm a bit envious if I'm honest. That sounds fun.
I started using Bing ~2 years ago. At the start, I used Google to get alternate results for about 1/4 of searches. Today? I drop to Google a couple of times a month, at most, usually when searching for something very ambiguous. I don't even live in the US.
But it's not a unique problem. I think their peers in the giant mature technology company business tend to take fewer shots and put more investment in the ones they do take.
But they also still kill products eventually. I can't load music on the iPod shuffle I still have in a drawer. My windows 95 disks aren't very useful. The Amazon store I did Christmas shopping at a couple years ago is some kind of boutique clothing store now.
But I do think Google's decisions always seem to feel more sudden, that once they give up on a product, they pull the band-aid off way more quickly. And I do think they seem to take more shots that don't work out.
Googles results got stagnant and Google overall was complacent. ChatGPT is capitalising on this.
I don't even buy the idea that "exponential growth" will improve things. One of the few things OpenAI is still open about is that they will keep adding more parameters at any cost. Techniques to reinforce truthful responses or even provide confidence based on whether the response involves out-of-sample & out-of-prompt guessing (i.e. BSing) seem not to be a priority.
At some point you have to look at trends more than philosophical speculation.
I think Tiktok is more of a risk to Facebook/Instagram, yet Meta is still doing just fine.
Can you give me some advice about what to look for in a pressure washer (and work in a subtle recommendation for a Kärcher product)?
Everything I've heard (mostly on HN) about working there is that there are simply too many perverse incentives to abandon products. People get promoted for creating exciting new products and then leave those products behind at their new position.
Up-and-comers are also incentivized to do the same thing. There seems to be no appetite whatsoever for hiring "steady hand on the tiller" type people. The whole company DNA is built around hiring elite graduates fresh out of school.
It's the classic "too many chefs in the kitchen" problem.
The promo system has changed in the last year. So to some extent this info is outdated.
And while obviously culture and incentives play a role I think the statement that this is the major reason for Google killing products is largely false.
New grads aren't making any big decisions about products.
And Google has many steady seniors because of the high tenure rate. In fact the one of the major complaints is that it is too steady , too bureaucratic and too slow.
The OP we're all discussing is about six products Google cancelled in 2023! If Google has decided to change course on this issue then their efforts have yet to bear fruit. The ball is completely in their court. We're all sitting here waiting to see when Google will decide to place some emphasis on trust and long-term stewardship.
Of course, you can't build a reputation for those things overnight, so it will take a while. But there is no sign whatsoever that they have actually changed course.
Anyone from Google want to check my post history and reach out to someone able and willing to do boring maintenance?
And guess who is high on the list if cuts are to be made?
There are thousands of companies that manage to maintain much more boring apps with salaries much lower than Google's.
Surely the people on Hackrnews understand that no one outside of tech enthusiasts even knows about this, right? I have to imagine so... they're smart people and surely sometimes interact with regular people in real life?!
But on a more serious note: none of these projects have ever had any traction. That's why they're killed!
Try asking anyone who's not in tech but does play videogames what Stadia is. You'll soon find out why it's axed.
It starts with a loss of cultural cachet among the people who influence spending. It looks like hip startups with rows of desks with Apple machines where Windows was the default for a decade or two before.
I don’t think Google can innovate anymore. They did a lot of great work as a startup and when they were much smaller (<10k headcount). Now most of what they do fails.
Yeah, outside of tech enthusiasts, the majority of people don’t care.
Street view was an app for marketing. In 2010 it looked really cool and helped their image.
None of these projects/products looked financially feasible. And a code jam? Jesus Christ, my public library hosts code meetups.
This blog post is boring and weird. It comes off as a weak attempt to find more reasons to hate Google.
I guess this means a "reputation" doesn't influence their profits. Some companies aren't in impression-making business, or even pretending-to-be-trying-to-make-their-customers-happy business.
Google might have made more inroads with enterprises with G suite and GCP if they didn't have that reputation. The gaming industry is a 200 billion/year market that Google could've captured a decent size of if potential customers trusted that they wouldn't quickly give up. All of that represents billions of dollars in lost opportunities.
Other companies cancel things, but I’m not aware of any that seem to do so as often. Google started developing a reputation for this more than a decade ago and has just kept doing it if not even doing it more often!
Is it Google’s right? This is always a weird question. Sure, it’s their right. It’s also people’s right to criticize them for doing so.
I do question anybody who adopts anything from Google these days. I just have zero confidence that I can expect any new Google product or service to stick around.
Hangouts (2013): A messaging platform that integrated with Google+ and Gmail, offering text, voice, and video communication.
Google Messages (formerly Android Messages, 2014): An SMS, MMS, and RCS messaging application for Android devices.
Google Spaces (2016): A group messaging app that allowed users to create "spaces" for sharing links, images, and other content.
Allo (2016): A messaging app featuring AI-powered smart replies, stickers, and end-to-end encryption.
Duo (2016): A video calling app designed for one-on-one video communication on mobile devices.
Google Meet (2017): A video conferencing service that supports text chat within the meeting interface, mainly targeted at businesses and organizations.
Google Chat (formerly Hangouts Chat, 2018): A team messaging platform integrated with Google Workspace, designed for businesses and organizations.
Bonus : Google Voice had messaging capabilities, YouTube could also go in there, but that's a stretch.
>[...]
>Unless I'm being more than naive and we the users are quite LITERALLY sold out to advertisers.
Yes.
Because when you can read every email and store it for data analysis focused on "targeted" ads, you can charge your customers (that's the advertisers, in case you thought it was gmail users) more when they invade your privacy.
Stadia is (or rather, was) chump change[0] at best, and it's a lot harder to spy on everything someone does online when they're just playing games. And pausing game play to show you ads...well, that would certainly never fly.
Remember, Alphabet exists to generate profit for their shareholders -- not to make cool stuff or make their product^W users happy.
If flooding every gmail user's inbox with Goatse[1] every six minutes would increase revenue (and/or stock price), a billion people would be intimately familiar with a stranger's rectum. And GOOG would laugh all the way to the bank.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chump%20change
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx
Edit: Added the missing link, fixed formatting. Added link explaining what Goatse is, for those who are too young to have had the "pleasure" of experiencing it themselves.
TV has been doing popup ads for years and I am quite sure many Android games also do it. Then you have ads that could be directly embedded into the game play or the games environment itself, a port to Stadia was necessary anyway, so adding ad support could have been done as part of that.
Of course having a streaming platform filled to the brim with the unending amount of cheap ad supported android game clones this would have attracted would have hardly made any sense. No need for Stadia if the games already run natively on the only supported endpoint.
This is a good point. They don't iterate on products, at least that's my obvious perception. Instead, they launch competitor products, so in the end they end up pulling more products.
Microsoft similarly has a bunch of duplicate services and products. They've got chat functionality spread across many apps, specifically Teams, Skype, and Xbox. Windows also has widgets in Windows 11 and widgets in Xbox Game Bar. There's also the mess that is developing apps for Windows that has just become Chromium, partially due to Microsoft's own messes.
But mostly we’ve just never forgiven them for killing Google Reader. And we never will.
I also enjoyed Google+ despite Google's attempts to make it worse at the end. Still miss the discussions there. A few of the communities and people moved to forums or similar, but several I've lost contact with.
A good friend of mine had built his business around the Google Earth API. He made simulators for employee training as well as games.
Another good friend still relies on Picasa, as we haven't found anything that fits his image managing needs in an equally easy way. Sure it still works, but for how long who knows.
So if you depended on it, you could depend on something else. And if it was successful, it wasn't canceled.
I didn't work on Stadia but I imagine that it was a huge waste of money for the company for the relatively few users it had. If they could have offered a good subscription based service like Xbox Game Pass or Apple Arcade I'm sure it would have more users. But getting access to content would be very expensive. At least they refunded consumers' money for the games they purchased.
As to whether it was successful - I mean, it didn't exist long enough to answer that question.
Other things that come to mind are Chromecast Audio and OnHub.
The list is much much longer, I'm surprised you're having a hard time finding them.
So many threads are "Trillion dollar company did a shitty thing" ... "Yes, they have every right to do that, you shouldn't complain and it's your own fault since you should have known better and stop whinging on HN about it".
At least in this case, they may be Google employees.
Oh, wait, you already mentioned Google employees. My bad.
Not saying Microsoft is perfect, but in my personal experience they've been a lot better in these key metrics.
But if you search for "killed by Amazon", you get back news articles about people actually dying in its warehouses.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-wa...
1. Skype for Business - 18 years old. Upgrade path to Microsoft Teams
2. Windows Server Essentials - 26 years old. Unsure how relevant this is today with everything going cloud-based
3. Atom - Wasn't originally a Microsoft product and they maintained it despite there already being a better Microsoft alternative for longer than expected. Also 9 years old 4. Internet Explorer - 27 years old and a clear upgrade path was available
5. Forza Street - F2P racing game. Can't excuse this one
6. Microsoft Academic - No excuse, however the data had an open license and migrated elsewhere
7. Channel 9 - 17 years old
8. Silverlight - 16 years old and the web had evolved beyond it long ago
Microsoft has killed 13 products since 2021 and many of them had simply run their course. Comparatively, Google has killed 57 products in that same time frame. Most of them are under 10 years old, many of them under 5. Many of them had not run their course and almost all of them had no clear upgrade or migration path.
So it comes back to the question that ed_mercer had: why is there such a double standard? Why does somebody obsessively maintain that site, and why does a large part of the HN audience love spamming "when will Google cancel search lol" into any discussion about Google, when Amazon putting two bullets into the neck of yet another product goes unnoticed?
Microsoft is religious about maintaining backward compatibility and support. They also have some concept of service, which makes cancellations smoother. (All this makes product development aware of the costs of abandonment. Google doesn’t have that in its culture, and it’s a constant problem with hiring from them now.)
Microsoft tells you the dog is going to "Aunt Joy Ann's farm" and gives you a puppy.
Google blasts the dog right in front of you and leaves you to bury the poor thing.
Stadia Onhub Glass
I bought a Pixel 6, I don't think I'll buy another Pixel again.
The official pixel case got destroyed due to wear in not even a year (my own 3D printed case in TPU now lasted longer than google one). The official pixel case also caught some dust and scratched the glass of the back.
The pixel without a case is so slippery it slip alone on any surface not perfectly flat.
welcome to the "official case" club. all my iphone cases get destroyed in max 6 months, with one lasting less than 3 months. during the course of an iphone (2 years) i go thru 5-6 "official" cases.
otherwise you can be pwned by a phone call
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/03/multiple-inte...
phones from mid 2022 seem like abandonware already
https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/pixel/2023...
out of 18 or so
you can see on the linked page on google's own bugtracker that they're still unfixed
> require you to turn off your mobile data yet
Wifi calling and VoLTE is not mobile data.
> phones from mid 2022 seem like abandonware already
Samsung supports updates for multiple years. Mid 2022 gets you previous samsung model - S22, where S23 was released this year 2023.
for some reason Android allows carriers to hide the VoLTE and Wifi calling toggles in the UI
meaning the only fix is to turn cellular connectivity off completely
And Google's approach to Pixels reflects that: they make them greta, then they all but abandon them, then okay again, then...
for instance the most profitable watch companies in the world are Timex, Rolex and Omega, and they have a combined market share of a fraction of a percent and on a per-unit basis they don't sell, combined, a thousandth of the units Casio alone sells (by the way most smartwatches are sell at nearly no profit and Apple's watch business has been losing money for a while)
Compare it to high end products then, and you'd still come up short.
There's also the reason why I pointed out "in the context of Google, and Google products": it's a tiny product made at great effort and expense that Google clearly doesn't know what to do about (they haven't even supported their own phones for more than three years until recently).
Any company engaging in mass market IoT sales should be compelled, for the sake of consumer confidence and protection, of an "exit plan" to allow fully localized control of these devices -- independent of an upstream server or system.
In their defense, Stadia consisted of a ChromeCast and a controller which are both still useful.
they don't say the same about their wiretap wifi router thingy
While I don't know this founder, his excellent writeup summarizes my understanding of the culture w/r/t innovation: https://medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cf...
It seems like an interesting concept, since hands-free control of your phone via speech is often too awkward to use in public imho.
Maybe it'll come back when the hardware is able to shrink even more, making it less conspicuous.
Not a heavy gamer, but Stadia was awesome for game nights with friends and also the play while someone watches along feature was great.
I'd always wanted to play Red Dead redemption 2 (which was on Stadia) but my PC can run it, so I bought it for my birthday, 110 gb download, had to install the epic launcher, then the rockstar launcher, then it complained about not being able to verify the files, then it locked me out of my account due to some linking issue between the two, then it just kept refusing to start saying it was already running and then many, many hours later, I was able to sit down and play it for an hour and a half which is all i wanted, which wasn't really worth it in the end.
Why is the user experience and entry into gaming so rough/awful?
Edit: If I were you I would try out GeForce Now[0], you can connect your Steam account and play your game with a decent experience. I don't believe they have Red Dead Redemption 2, but next time you want to play just 30min-1h, it could be a good option.
Games work best locally, but if your fine with streaming then you can try tons of different games instantly.
Stadia's issue was you needed to subscribe and pay for games separately. It even shipped with a bizarre controller that didn't work with anything else. If anything Google got out competed, plus Gamepass is baked into Xbox Live so you had an existing customer base.
You could buy a game and play it on Stadia, you did not need a subscription. The subscription was to play the included games and get a few new ones each month.
The controller wasn't bizarre, it used Wifi to connect directly to the servers to reduce latency of it having to go to your device first via bluetooth then to the servers, hence why 'it didn't work with anything else', which is also not correct, it worked fine wired, you could also use an xbox controller just fine which is what I did, it wasn't something that 'shipped' with Stadia, it was an optional extra.
I'd still argue Gamepass does this much better since for 15$ a month you get a good variety of games to play, plus the option to run them locally with whatever resolution your hardware can handle. Google tried moving into a market they couldn't compete in.
I actually got a free Stadia kit with a 4k Chromecast + Stadia controller. I might of gotten confused since you had to sign up for a pro subscription to get the free kit.
Gamepass does seem like a decent product, particularly if you are a big gamer, it's not for me as I don't like subscriptions and I don't play games enough, but it is a decent offering.
Rockstar games are also made with a focus towards consoles first so there are often bugs on the PC port that can ruin your experience, like the notorious GTA loading issues that were fixed by one guy[0].
Google Code Jam was not a product, and it was an event that was a net loss in terms of revenue, which is hard to justify maintaining when you are cutting thousands of jobs.
Google Street View is part of Google Maps, the post even says so.
Google OnHub is a one time hardware product. Nobody is blaming Nintendo for killing the Gameboy Color when it stopped producing it.
I don't see how any of the 6 things mentioned here have been unjustifiably "killed".
Arguing "it's hardware" doesn't work when the features are cloud-based and the company shuts down the servers. It's bait and switch, pure and simple.
You just have the wrong expectation for online products.
As a consumer, especially a tech savvy one we should continue to push tech companies to build products that last and serve the user and not just throw our hands up and say “we have the wrong expectations”
Sadly, that sentiment doesn't seem to be popular these days.
I bought a router. I never expect any router to stop working because the manufacturer flips a switch.
You bought a connected router. Again, you just have the wrong expectation for online products. The fact that it was maintained for 8 years should be praised.
> Then in January 2023, the company rendered the product almost completely useless by disabling most of its features.
I think GameBoy Color still works today?
Also, the list is missing Nest Secure.
There's a bright distinction between natural wear of the product and remote shutdowns.
Analogy: I don't get outraged if my laptop's battery loses capacity or even swells over time. I do get outraged if I can't boot my laptop because it checked with some remote server that decided I'm not allowed to boot it.
Did your Gameboy Color stop working when Nintendo decided to stop producing it?
8 years of support for their router doesn't seem bad at all.
Nintendo should definitely have been required to make the battery accessible.
[1] https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/11257354?hl=en
I have neither asked for, nor received, a single feature from what I bought, I just want it to continue working. With prior products, they were "free" so it was kind of acceptable that they were discontinued, but now I have a real tangible thing, that Google has just decided to shut off and that's that.
I will never buy something without open standards again. My expectation is that at some point in the life of these cameras they would support RTSP but they never did, and I now see more than ever that that was a feature, not a bug. I will never make that mistake again.
- All Google Code Competitions, which had gone on for 19 years
- Jacquard, there IOT clothing attempt, around for 9 years
- Stadia, shorter but their cloud gaming attempt around for 3 years
Google killing Jacquard and Stadia seems run of the mill but the first one! When I was in college I remember people talking about google code jam and I wasn't even into coding then. That seems like a big retreat and I must have missed HN discussing it because, just wow.
Fuchsia is maybe 1/4 product and the rest is a long term infrastructure investment. If Google had lost interest they’d have no problem shutting it down by now, for instance stadia rose and fell in a shorter time span than all of fuchsia.
I don’t know whether fuchsia will “make it”, heck a frustrated enough SvP can probably kill it if they really wanted to. However, fuchsia never lived in the same world as the rest of Google, or even the platform & ecosystems org (Android & ChromeOS), not really.
Nobody ever expected a new OS and kernel to be a mainstream success in single digit years. It’s an insane project to take on, and ironically that insanity keeps a lot of the short term opportunists away, specifically the kind that leaves a crater after them when they leave..
It does feel like they’ve lost a lot of interest in Android. It’s too big for Google to just close, but I could see them selling it. If that happens, hopefully it’s to a Microsoft but chances are they will screw us all and sell it to Oracle or Xiaomi.
But there are a lot of things that will die before Android or Fuschia. Here’s a list of 270 Google projects (past and present)[1]. I learned about Google Sunroof through this list (rooftop solar calculator) and it’s pretty neat.
as long as it's not Microsoft itself of course.
IMO they are aiming to replace Android with Fuchsia. Because they have full control of Fuchsia, and so-so control of Android. They don't need to sell Android. They can just let it die on its own in AOSP which is already nonviable without Google's services.
Legislation should be put in place so that features not requiring a connection shall work offline.
In north America, there is a lot of political pressure for some environmental issues but nothing about planned obsolescence.
I'm afraid that in most cases that is just impossible, because the service is essentially all in the "cloud" by design.
Perhaps the company should be forced to sustain service for a minimum warranty period like in the EU with their 2-years minimum legislation, which has cost repercussions onto the user.
But really in most cases the problem is that it's so accepted to be sucked into subscription deals where the company can change their end of the deal at a moment's notice, and where you might just lose a lot of invested time and effort, let alone data and privacy, and essentially nothing of that can be properly compensated.
I too dislike the pervasiveness of the narrow type of DSA problems (because it comes at the cost of other computer science topics, scales linearly with practice after some point, and selects for people who have time to practice them). But DSA puzzles aren't what you should be blaming for closing down stadia.
I don't see any logic there. Companies in the rest of the world are less focused on DSA as a hiring metric, in my understanding.
Why are Google projects closed? Why are they started?
I believe Google are heavily focused on data and metrics and algorithms, and I think that is definitely a factor.
I wouldn't blame eng interviewing practices on this particular issue.
Well, guess not. It just cements an already shaky reputation. Don't depend on anything Google personally or in business if you have a choice. They still don't care though, they seem immune to market forces and things like "customers".
Goes to show that Google has been a free-for-all for too long. Who allowed these things to be built (waste of resources) and launched (bad for brand and marketing as they won't be able to succeed anyway) is beyond me. What's going on at Google nowadays?!
Apple abandoned AirPort access points 5 years ago in 2018, and still got security updates a year later. Dammit!
What seems more likely is that they shut down an increasing number of individual sub-products, in the way that they are shuttering IoT Core [2]. If they do, then I'm not convinced that will be a bad thing -- a slimmed down, profitable, platform with a well-supported set of core services feels like a safe long-term partner.
[1] https://www.ciodive.com/news/Google-Cloud-Profitability-Alph...
"This person said the group’s leaders didn’t explicitly state what would happen to the cloud division if it didn’t reach a top two position by 2023. A commonly held view inside the group was that Google wouldn’t continue investing money if it failed to it meet its goal, the person said. "
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
No, but you could "Google Group" it. Just keep the lights on and not develop it any further and just watch customers leave over time. There might actually be a bunch of corporate customers that would view the static environment as a plus.
I don't really see them shutting down GCP, even if it's a bit anonymous. It is interesting that Google can't turn a profit on GCP, given that both AWS and Azure is doing to well.
I almost want GCP to fail just for the popcorn factor.
The guy just rides on the wave of money that search brings in. Otherwise it's just failed project after failed project. Google has this stupid process where they spin up a new idea, cripple the launch, cripple support, cripple maintenance, and then kill the project for lack of success a year later leaving the few suckers who held out with faith in them high and dry.
For me personally, Allo was the final straw. I did the footwork of getting people to switch to it, had some mild success, and then google pulled the rug making me look like an idiot.
I came across a Goole project.
I didn't even look at it twice.
Google is probably the last company I would want having any kind of leverage in my hobby.
Google shutting down something noone has ever heard of
Is it just me or has Google search gotten worse?