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.
Everyone else: do NOT use Google as your registrar. Just don't.
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.
Google: good search results mean the user clicks on an ad this time but the results look plausible enough they’ll come back for their next search.
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.
But I don’t believe that either. Hardware design and manufacturing cycles are long and we’re just now starting to see transformer-optimized HW. Accuracy per dollar and per joule will improve by at least an order of magnitude, maybe two.
But then we can move on to percent of human tasks LLMs are suitable replacements for, or the ethics of increasing automation.
[1]https://www.wired.com/story/cerebras-chip-cluster-neural-net...
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?
Then the real choice is between doing boring maintenance or useful new things at same pay.
The basic issue, it seems, is that the higher-ups simply don’t care about the products themselves, other than for them to serve as a profit center.
The end result is a doom loop that if the team can’t retain enough staffing, developers will be overwhelmed by the boring maintenance work, which leads to more team transfers. They do use contractors to mitigate the issue but IMO it doesn’t work in every case.
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.