Why does Google get grilled so badly for pulling products? Don’t other companies do the exact same thing, and isn’t it their full right to abandon projects when it no longer makes sense?
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.
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.
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>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.
A fair point, and one I hadn't really considered.
I was thinking along the lines of multiplayer FPS games and the like. If you stop play to show some players ads, they'll be dead/have lost by the time the ad is over. If you stop play for all players to show them ads, I'd expect really high loads on servers as they "customize" the ads by region and PII.
Alternatively (as you imply), using "product placement" ads in-game without interrupting game play, I suppose that could work, no matter how disgusting it might be.
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.
But mostly we’ve just never forgiven them for killing Google Reader. And we never will.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which of the "products" on _this list_ was shut down badly, in comparison to what MS would do? Not products on some other list, but this list that's at the top of the front page.
Code Jam was not a product. Stadia refunded all purchases. Street View is still accessible from the Maps app, this is just removing some ancient standalone app that nobody had heard of. Currents and the wifi routers had long deprecation cycles. I bet nobody here knows anything about the wearable computing stuff or how it was shut down.
If these are all products that were reasonable to shut down, and were shut down reasonably well, then what's newsworthy about this?
Nobody who developed for Stadia thinks this. And this is far from a HN view—it regularly comes up at conferences for financial types.
If there were no users buying games, shutting it down would not have had any meaningful impact on the developers.
How do you think they should have done it instead? What would have changed for those developers when done your way?
Launched it as a start-up with unfair access to Google's resources. There was no way for it to work under Google's aegis.
Obviously it was not a well launched product, but that's what you get when you hire Phil Harrison.
I'm broadly criticizing Google's ability to launch and maintain products. Launching fucked products falls under this umbrella. The point is betting on Google with your own resources is a bad idea.
My apologies, I should have realized you were not actually replying to that point in any way and just making another generic "Google cancel everything lol" argument.
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.