Google kills two-year “Pixel Pass” subscription after just 22 months

I'm sure they're legally allowed to do it. They wouldn't be doing it otherwise.

But it's something customers are going to want to keep in mind when picking Google products or services: they have a track record of ditching you. If you're looking for long-term products you can rely on, maybe Google isn't the best choice.

I don't see how your math checks out. From the article, let's say you started the service at introduction with the Pixel 6 (22 months ago) and it cost $45 per month. Today, you would have spent a total of $990 on that phone (which was worth way less than that at launch) plus services. You now have a used phone worth $200 tops and $100 in "store credit". That seems like a crappy deal unless you value premium Google services a lot.

Agree. Probably legal in the US - strongly suspect Google would get pulled over the coals if they tried to do the same thing in Europe where consumer protections are better (Pixel Pass was not available in Europe afaik). Won't stop some cases being filed in the US anyway (but the terms were most likely worded specifically to allow such an outcome as others have pointed out). :/

For a company that fully understands their success is linked to customer trust, they sure like to push their luck…

It’s upgraded as long as you stay with the program. It’s not a reward that you get scot free that you can walk away with.

Of course, phone companies promote it that way, but the reality is you’re just paying for it over time.

Nobody was about to get a phone without committing to pay for another 2 years of pixel plus.

I just cannot rationalize getting him any gaming equipment. He could manage Stadia, juuuust barely. He frequently cannot figure out his cell phone. He is basically a ludite. My mom had to stand there and turn Stadia on on the tablet for him... I was considering Shadow but it's just too complex too.

This is all across the US, one coast to another, so these personally run apps probably wouldnt work, right?

GOOG is approaching its all-time highs today, and up well over 100% over the past five years. In a similar time frame the S&P 500 is up about 50% or so.

I hate Google's tendency to cancel products as much as anyone, but as investments go, that tendency doesn't seem to hurt it.

if that means turning into microsoft, then no thanks

There is literally no incentive for a giant corporation to put anyone competent at the helm. That's a backward understanding of the situation. CEOs don't exist to enrich corporations; corporations exist to enrich CEOs. Anyone who had the power to appoint someone competent has no motivation to do so: they can also appoint their buddies, who can continue to parasitize the effectiveness of the company for their own gain. Why would they make some rando CEO? They literally do not care about the long-term success of the company as a whole, they only care about the portion of it that they can drain of blood in the short-term. Any company with any level of "excess competence" is immediately swarmed by Business Caste parasites (via a takeover or several other means) and that excess competence is drained off into their pockets. In fact laying off support departments and canceling products and reneging on promises is one of the easiest ways to suck out value from the company into the C-layer in the short term. Who cares if the company flounders and fails? They just spread their locust wings and find a new host.

Google should change because its traditional primary revenue stream and profit center (i.e., search + ads) runs the risk of being disrupted (into the ground) by AI and chatbots. Why search of for an answer when ChatGPT can give it to you directly, without the overhead?

I tend to stick with the Thiel inspired lens. That is, Google has (had?) a monopoly on search and ads, just about everything is smoke & mirrors to hide that fact. "Look, business is hard. The market for any given product is very competitive. Look at how many business and products bombed for us..." This interpretation makes sense because Google's best & brightest has to know how these sunset episodes upset customers, undermine trust, etc. and yet they continue.

Either Google wants it this way, or they're too thick to change. It's not the latter, is it.

> If Google changes leadership to a sensible business person, I'll put serious money into the stock.

That's funny because that's usually when I sell my stocks in a company, as it usually signals (to me) that enshittification is about to begin and they'll start loosing customers quickly, at least if the company was engineering/R&D focused before.

I do wonder what it would take to get Sundar Pichai out of the CEO spot. The board must like him, but my usage and faith in Google products has never been lower.

Chucking to see what sticks is fine... it's dropping anything that isn't massively successful, even if it's profitable that I have issue with. Not every idea needs to generate billions in revenue, and with appropriate structure/substructure many of these projects can be kept. Domains is a perfect example of this.

The issue you mention though is huge though, they incentivize "new" over enhancement or better integration. Google hangouts is a perfect example of this... great all in one messaging app, Google Voice, SMS, etc. And they bork it and replace it with, what 3 different chat/voice/video apps so far? It's stupid to say the least.

Sony is the company that I feel somehow misses this the most. Possibly Microsoft. The lack of integration that Playstations and XBoxes have with anything is rather surprising. Could be as simple as volume control on the TV. Or automatically turn on the TV. Nothing fancy. But nothing exists.

> Which is why it's so annoying that I still need a Windows box for PC gaming.

Steam is not helping. Any game that only ships 32-bit x86 binaries should not be listed as having Mac support. Apple not only doesn't sell x86 Macs anymore, they don't even do security updates for Mojave. If you have an Intel Mac around, Bootcamp likely makes for a 10x better gaming experience.

I feel like Apple are really dropping the ball here. There's an amazing catalogue of classic games that could run really well under a hypothetical 32-bit x86 Rosetta. But Apple is doing Apple, and asking you to use their Game Porting Toolkit instead... Basically telling gamedevs, if you're not ready to go full Apple, don't go Apple at all.

My husband is up to his eyeballs in the Apple ecosystem. Macbooks, iMacs, Apple TV, iPhones, homepods, airpods, ... He has it all.

I feel like the idea that Apple products work seamlessly together is a bit of an exaggeration. He gets frustrated with Apply products plenty of times.

It seems a lot of people make a product but don’t use it themselves enough to tell how to make it better so it always feels like v1.

Or they do but they’re not very observant idk?

Indeed, a reason why I am still hoping they release a new airport. I’ve tried quite a few and none of them have ever been particularly great. The most recent being Ruckus and my current AP, an Omada EAP670.

FYI, GeForce Now also works fine on a plain old Chromecast with Google TV ($30), which you can connect standard Bluetooth controllers to (say, Xbox controllers or leftover Stadia controllers with the firmware upgrade). The Shield is a luxury version that does basically the same thing with more horsepower. I imagine you can use any similar device (like an old Android phone or an old laptop) for the same purposes... if it can stream Netflix, it can run Geforce Now.

The main downside of GFN is that it's a publisher opt-in, and many games aren't available on it . But for the games in its catalog, it works REALLY well -- so much so that I much prefer it to the dedicated gaming desktop I used to have, because it's so much quieter and cheaper (both in terms of an upfront hardware purchase and in electricity costs, between the GPU itself and needing to cool down the room).

There are also services like shadow.tech and AirGPU that let you run virtual Windows boxes with a GPU, cheaper than you'd get from AWS or GCP, but able to run any game you want.

I use ShadowPC. Steam, with Big Screen, makes it console enough. At least until you want to play an EA game.

> a product way ahead of its time

Ahead of it's time?

The gaming industry is the biggest entertainment sector - millenials that grew up playing video games have the highest amount of disposable income. The market exists.

The technology and networking also works. Streaming has been well established for movies and television, the past few years has put a dramatic emphasis on remote work and distributed collaboration.

Stadias' timing was fine, it's Google that dropped the ball.

Stadia was not ahead of its time. It was a latecomer to a growing field that Google dipped its feet into, but never fully committed to. I'm pointing this out not to be pedantic, but to illustrate just how thoroughly Google dropped the ball on it.

In 2010 OnLive was launched to the public, creating the first version of a public Stadia-like service. It worked the same way; you opened a browser or an app and you could play a game that you bought on it (I think back then it was a subscription model? can't remember)

Around the same time, Gaikai and Sony partnered up to create the predecessor to Playstation Now streaming.

Then Nvidia entered the game in 2012, right around the time they started adding hardware-accelerated video encoding to their GPUs, launching Nvidia Grid with some partners. By 2017, Grid evolved into GeForce Now and could play the user's entire Steam library (unlike today, back then ALL games were available, not just ones opted-into by the publisher).

Stadia didn't come around until 2019, nearly a decade after OnLive. Google being Google, they didn't want to do what Nvidia did (make existing games playable), but instead created their own architecture that was easier to launch and easier to use, but required users to re-purchase existing titles, usually without cross-saves and cross-plays. (Edit: It also required devs to spend time and money porting the game to Stadia's platform, vs a one-click opt-in for GeForce Now). So it sat in its own little bubble, away from the entire rest of the PC ecosystem (which was Steam and/or Games for Windows back then). It also had inferior graphics compared to Nvidia's cards (notably lacking raytracing, ultrawide, etc.) and Google flat-out lied about its capabilities (like Orcs Must Die 3 games being made a Stadia exclusive at launch because "only the cloud" could run it smoothly, except it came out on Steam a year later and was just fine).

They did some minimal barebones marketing targeting casuals. Fast forward a few years and they just completely abandoned it, while GeForce Now continues to grow, gaining EA, Ubi, and now Activision Blizzard games as official partners. Amazon has Luna, Microsoft has xCloud (or whatever it's called now), Playstation has PSNow (or whatever it's called now), Shadow, Boosteroid, AirGPU etc. are all alive.

Google didn't invent game streaming. They didn't perfect it. They launched a slightly more polished experience that was significantly more expensive, had terrible sales compared to Steam and its 3rd-party resellers, and and gave up on it in its adolescence. There was nothing "ahead of its time" about it, it was just another could-have-been that Google toyed with and never seriously invested into.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming#History

I guess you missed that generation where they were trying to transition the Google Wifi product into the Nest lineup, while Google Home was still in its adolescence.

That one device needed the Google Home app to set up initially, the Nest app to configure day to day, and Google Wifi for advanced legacy settings and port forwarding and such. Three apps for one device? Was a real WTF moment for me...

Router aside, some of my other devices would end up in Google Home, others in the Nest app. Eventually I got tired of the bullshit and switched to the much cheaper & simpler Wyze ecosystem and never had an issue again.

Unless he's smashing the old phone with a sledgehammer, it doesn't cease to exist.

That he's given money for the trade-in indicates it's refurbished and sold used to someone else, so the total waste is reduced, perhaps even more so than someone who buys top of the line phones, and after three years puts them in a drawer and buys a new one (because the trade in value is almost nothing and/or by then it's cracked, etc).

Was it really a service, then? Seems like a change in pricing model.

Google is stuck with gmail whether they like it or not.

Gmail is used by what, 1.8 billion people? And e-mail isn't some small take-it-or-leave-it feature. Even disregarding the mail itself, e-mail is central as a form of online ID for accounts.

If Google tried to kill Gmail there would be an uproar of incredible proportions.

Realistically, their best bet for getting rid of it would be to gradually abandon it, making it slower, less reliable, taking away features, etc over the course of a decade or two. But even then, they'd likely need to wait another ~40 years for generational effects to kick in and most people to get off of it.

All 3 carry massive non-consumer-sourced revenue streams which have been very profitable for nearing 20 years so why the uncertainty?.

Picasa and Hello were fantastic. 1000 years ahead of anything else.

Google photos? hahahaHAHAhaha..uhm... ill host my own thank you.

That’s what I thought when I laboriously migrated my library to Picasa.

I don't think calling it a "pricing structure" is really fair. It was a subscription program (Google's own words) that they stopped.

> Pixel Pass All in One Subscription Program

> Pixel Pass combines your phone and Google-powered services all in one monthly price. Upgrade every two years. Get a new Pixel after two years and continue

While it's not a software service, I think most people consider subscription programs a "service", in the classical sense.

TMobile at one point charged me $15 every time my phone pinged a tower in a foreign country. They disconnected my account after $1200 in charges and only notified me by sending snail mail to my address on a different continent asking to call them with my now-disconnected phone.

"Excellent" is not the word that comes to mind, especially given their constant security breaches. I'm on fi now and hoping Google forgets it exists so they don't cancel it.

Not sure how it is now but when we were on vacation last year they capped you at 5GB a month of international. Still way better than other carriers, but Fi doesn't cap you, it just counts as your normal plan.