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.
A lot of people would have been very pissed off, even though it said 'beta'.
Them shutting it down in 2005 or 2006 would have been annoying or disappointing like the shutdown of Google Wave but understandable.
It's all about brand expectations. Google is synonymous with unreliability because they don't have another brand to shoulder that association. It used to be "Beta" but no longer.
A big problem is that nobody believes their designations anyway. GMail was in beta for years when it was obviously a mature product, while "Of course we're investing a ton in Stadia..." only to shut it down a couple months later.
Sure, go ahead. But the market will take notice if you do that.
If they had removed the beta label sooner, they might have attracted businesses to GSuite sooner?
It’s a fine line to walk: you want to iterate quickly on one hand but some users need stability on the other.
I recall a time where they were raising the limit constantly and even advertised that fact, that for most users your available space was going to increase faster than you could use it, but there was always a limit somewhere.
And of course gmail was in beta for many years.
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.
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)
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.
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...
I think Google is more creative on the business side with GCP and is doing well in the market in a lot of ways. AWS does the circa 1985 “Hi, we’re IBM, fuck you” thing.
Azure doesn’t get the grief GCP does because MS service growth is driven by really complicated deals. Few of the types of people who post here understand it.
The kind crafted by competent sales teams in it for the long haul. Not the rotating cast of characters at Google.
“It would be a shame if those O365 E5 went up 30%. How about you buy 50% of your spend on these credits that fell off the truck, and we can forget about that?”
It doesn't help that it allows others to push opinion pieces in media that build up memes against its products (I honestly believe it's non-trivial part of what killed Google+ - at some point someone believed at Google about it being "ghost town" and started making it more FB-like and pushing "new people to observe" at you, making it less and less usable).
The infamous "will kill your account on basis of unaccountable algorithm and you can't do anything about it" is another big issue when trying to get clients on GCP. I honestly find GCP to be the best cloud I can use when not going full hog on things like AWS-specific services, yet there's always the fear that Google will just kill the account, possibly shuttering the business.
I get that feeling sometimes about my Gmail account.
If I do get deleted by the algorithm, then I feel the only way I will get support is by posting it on hackernews.
Keep doing that long enough, and still be behind AWS by 4x, and you’ll get your plug pulled.
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.
It became a meme a long time ago.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Laughs/cries in Picasa
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.