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Comment by fardo | Hacker News Reader

I think part of the disdain is people’s recognition of Google’s inability to make and maintain new products.

Separate from recent poor generations, I’d be reluctant to use any Google AI, as if for some reason I’d liked it, the odds are too high it’ll get shut down or replaced by some worse internal competitor.

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Yes. I love many of Google's products, but there is always the fear that if you add them to your workflow, they could be removed tomorrow for no good reason.

Disclaimer: I'm still salty about Google Reader, Domains and Play Music.

The loss of play music to Youtube music was such a massive, significant downgrade. If I didn't get grandfathered in with my plan from the old Youtube Red days (it includes YT premium alongside YT music) I would have dropped the whole thing by now.

With YT music, you still can't add a song to the same playlist more than once. It's like they unnecessarily chose sets rather than lists.

This stuff should be easy.

It's the CurrentYear™, and we still don't have play counts (like personal ones, not the youtube global count). Play Music had it, even my iPod shuffle from 2006 had it, but YT Music for some reason don't.

Adobe have the same problem - it then becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, as people won't adopt the new software because they can't risk losing years of their work or their skills becoming irrelevant.

The only way both can stop this is by sticking to a product, for better or for worse, and then actually innovate, not sit still once they've wrangled competitors.

The pattern from a business perspective is so repetitive as to be tiring: Get involved with anything that threatens their core revenue source, suffocate or buy out competitors, then barely push the needle forward ensuring that disruption never comes from within.

I believe that if Google weren't so against self-disruption that much of the latest AI innovation would be entirely theirs to own.

This is said a lot here but Hacker News readers really should know how overblown that meme is. Most new products fail to find a market fit, whether at a FAANG or at a startup. The only difference is that the startup dies and therefore doesn't have any public memory of its product failure following it around and the FAANG doesn't because it has one or more cash cows to sustain itself.

I don't have the impression that other FAANG companies launch (and then kill) same amount of products. I'm no fan of Apple (don't own any device from them), but still recognize that when they launch a product, it likely won't get abandoned in a year. That instills confidence and people are more likely to invest their money and time into it.

While tech enthusiasts are a minority, they often drive the adoption of new products and technologies.

I agree it's overblown and become a meme, but there is certainly some truth to it.

When Stadia was announced, I was one to push back about the silly "they'll just shut it down" stuff by pointing out that there's a big different between a massively invested product like Stadia and an RSS feed reader or a Could Print service. Then they showed me that investment $ wasn't a reassurance either...

I don't think they'll shut down Gemini, in fact I'd be utterly shocked if they did, so I do think it's memey and silly to avoid Gemini because "they might shut it down," but I would certainly not bet my company on it (by building on top of their APIs).

You aren't making a compelling argument for the future of Gemini.

Indeed, as I said I'd be shocked if they killed it, but I wouldn't bet my livelihood on it, so I would suggest everyone else do the same. I'll use it as a toy, but I'm not going to allow myself to become dependent on it.

There is a website dedicated to listing how many times Google has done this. It’s a long list.

The biggest insult really is these Google products often do have a reasonably large and dedicated following, it just doesn’t seem to be enough to move the needle compared to a monster ad business.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Currently at 293.

It's really not overblown. Google's own culture rewards creating new things and does not reward iterative improvement.

I don't know, because these various startups don't pretend to have a cohesive vision/platform/ecosystem with each other, but that's exactly what Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc do.

I can't think of any apps or services that Apple has launched in the past decade and has since killed, whereas without even trying I can rattle off at least ten such projects by Google.

I don't think the general population holds that view about Google.

I don't know - just anecdotally, the majority of non-tech 30-somethings I know certainly say this. There was a period where Google both loudly announced things that wouldn't last (Google Glass) or killed enough niche products in quick succession (Wave!) that the impression stuck.

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