Hacker News Reader

Comment by Chinjut | Hacker News Reader

As prophesied in the top comment (by user24) right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6248771

This makes me think of the launch of Google Domains[1]. One of the top comments was "What happens when Google sunsets this product?" which is a great question we should all be asking before investing resources (money or time) into a new Google product. Maybe even more so the ones that are labeled as beta. We should also be skeptical of their customer service, because as many of the comments show[2] users are wary of this too.

I made the choice to use Google Domains last week for a pet project because: 1) Google has been good at letting users get their data out of their system, and they give a long notice of impending sunsets and opportunities to migrate away. 2) Google specifically called out email, phone, and chat support for this new product.

So far I've been very happy and they addressed a few of my particular needs. But I do worry about lock-in or wasted time.

Maybe one of the questions I'd ask upset Helpout users is how much time was spent "wasted" or if any of it was useful. Perhaps Google was trying to help out everyone (make them more skeptical of Google products, learn from their mistakes, etc.) by sunsetting Helpouts! ;)

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7934146 [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7933870

> This makes me think of the launch of Google Domains[1]. One of the top comments was "What happens when Google sunsets this product?" which is a great question we should all be asking before investing resources (money or time) into a new Google product.

Nothing really special about "Google" here.

Any product from any company runs the risk of (1) the company failing, taking the product with it, or (2) the company canceling the product. The more a company is committed to mitigating (2) by maintaining products that aren't profitable, the greater risk (1) is.

I guess what I wanted to call attention to that was relevant to Google was:

1) Did users lose anything by trying Helpouts that was special? Besides time, which comes with trying anything new. 2) Google tries really hard to warn users of services shutting down. Google Reader had a bunch of notice. Wave ended up being open sourced and handed off to a different project manager. 3) Google tries hard to avoid vendor lock-in. Take a look at https://www.google.com/settings/takeout or I can use the example of Google+ photo albums that put the download or export button front and center so I can upload them to Flickr if I want.

Now don't think I'm a huge Google advocate blind to their issues. In fact, what I was trying to call out was a healthy amount of skepticism to their product launches based on previous situations and comments around Google.

Google Reader didn't allow export of all the saved blogs they had archived that were no longer live. You had to write your own scraper to get the data out of Reader.

There were copyright issues with that. Don't blame Google for following the laws.

Actually there is something special about Google for that service. It's not their core business.

Unlike other registrars who would typically be happy with being profitable & having typical growth, Google may be unsatisfied with such a result and consider shutting it down. Namecheap will keep their business open even if they have a soft quarter.

Further, a service for domain registration will struggle because it's targeted at an audience with heightened awareness of Google's tendency to put their products & services onto the chopping block. They've created a chicken & egg problem for themselves; they will shutdown their products because they don't get enough traction, and they don't get enough traction because everyone expects them to shutdown.

Eh, startups 'pivot' all the time. Fun fact: Mongo, formerly 10gen, was originally a cloud/web-hosting service. They pivoted to just publish their database, which is cool, but if you were one of the early customers it kind of leaves you high and dry.

Well, not all companies are get-big-quick-fast-and-sell-or-die Silicon Valley VC-funded "startups". Many registrars have been around for years and making decent money doing that and are likely to be around for time to come.

Iron Mountain was a mushroom farm for 20 years, until the mushroom market crashed and the owner needed another use for his abandoned iron mine. Tandy Leather took a brief detour through consumer electronics, purchasing Radio Shack and selling the Tandy computer, before eventually going back to leather.

It took a mushroom market crash to ruin Iron Mountain. Was there a crash in people seeking help with stuff between Google launching & shutting down Helpouts?

The point is that Google didn't need Helpouts, Google Wallet, Google Reader, Google Checkout, etc. They have a core business. If one of those products had been their core business, they likely would have kept going. Each of the products they shutdown is typically profitable to some degree, or could be made profitable. Google shuts them down because they've have too little traction for Google to stay interested, but if they were companies in their own right, they would likely continue.

You're right, so the informed customer is likely to avoid both Google (and other large companies where the product/service isn't the core business) as well as startups.

It's unfortunate for startups, but also a reality. For large businesses, they can mitigate this effect over time by sticking by anything that they launch and seeing it through. Microsoft did that to an extent beyond what anyone expected when it came to Zune, for example. Google has developed a reputation for doing exactly the opposite. In fact, with Google Wallet they're shutting down pretty much the most compelling payments service for digital goods that the web has seen. Why? They never promoted it properly, and as a result web developers generally don't even know it exists.

But Google domains makes a ton of sense while Helpouts make zero sense (for Google to offer).

Yup, my first reaction to Helpouts was that it was silly. Google Domains made a lot more sense to me.

If I had to guess, Helpouts was an attempt to get people to use Hangouts (the video, chat, and collaboration service) more, since it looks like a bunch of time and energy has gone into developing it. They push it for businesses[1] and for teams to video conference[2]. Helpouts was targeted for the other audience --individuals.

Also if I had to guess, Google may be nervous of other chat/video services taking market share, such as Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, etc., and sees Hangouts as Google's foundational approach and push forward.

[1] https://www.google.com/work/apps/business/products/hangouts/ [2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/chrome...

It's not just Google. The whole industry thinks it's just fine to trash user data. http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Category:Rescued_Site...

This is only my perspective, but I had never heard of it before seeing this article. I'd like to consider myself pretty "in-the-know" when it comes to this sort of stuff, so how in the world is this supposed to work when there's been nearly no awareness? This search trend is pretty telling:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Google%20Helpouts&dat...

My wife wears a Google Helpouts hoodie and I got a ton of freebies when they launched. It's not like Google wasn't trying ... but it always felt like a half-hearted, let's see if this sticks, kind of attempt ... especially on the software side of things. It didn't stick.

Aside from merchandise, what did they do to promote it? Not saying they did nothing, but I have a feeling that Google collectively (on average) underestimates the degree of promotion necessary to make a product or service successful. They're somewhat spoilt by their big hits.

Prophesied the death of a new Google product is becoming this generations equivalent of "First Post". :)

Google should focus!

Google should keep services running despite low growth or low interest!

Google should be all things to all people!

Surely an organization with as much resources and revenue as Google can have their cake and eat it too?

Just throw out the last one. Google should just not launch new stuff. Unless they're serious about it and they're going to keep it.

The problem is that a number of users that would make a dedicated startup quite happy, doesn't interest google - "low growth or low interest" is a rather high bar for google. Google Reader was huge, just not google huge.

EDIT: Why I think this, is because I'm annoyed that all the big companies want one of what all the other big companies have - music locker/streaming service, home automation platform, tv platform, freaking VR goggles. One does it, the rest have to get one too. Then it's forgotten in a couple of years. (Helpouts was part of the Hangouts push, and now that the push is over, it's forgotten.)

They could just start spinning off (into separate companies) or open sourcing the projects they decide to no longer pursue. That would alleviate a lot of the negative PR they get from doing this stuff, I think. Also is the right thing for customers who are invested in the product.

Technically, this is impossible because their build system and shared libraries [0]

Commercially, this is exactly the right thing to do! Then you can only blame customers for not buying shares of the spin-off!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899467

Someone says this about everything that Google launches. When Google does close something, they're right. It's like people who say that the stock market is going to crash.

Haha the funny feels. Too bad you can't reply to old comments; there are a few there worth replying to just to mock Google's commitment. One guy says "You cannot be sure they're going to shut this down soon", another says "Why would they kill helpouts. Helpouts is build upon hangouts and hangouts is here to stay.".

Cause Google. Cause Google.

Why start a company when no one's going to buy your product anyways?

Hilarious, this one didn't even last 18 months, it's almost like they're doing it on purpose.

Its so predictable because of how corporations work. People try to launch big visible projects, everyone high fives, a few people get promoted or a bonus, then everyone leaves to repeat the process. There is no value to support something long term at Random Bigcorp (TM).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com