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.
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.
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.
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...
What do you mean by this? It seems GCP has around 10pc market share and growing.
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!
Laughs/cries in Picasa
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.
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 :)
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.
It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes.
Anyone wanna bet on if/when Bard gets axed?
Yes, but we're not the people making the product decisions.
Stadia's shutdown was inevitable in part because we had already established this distrust, and also because leadership handled every aspect of it incredibly poorly. It was technically impressive, but the economics relied on the addressable market actually being willing to go all-in on the service.
Sure, you can blame part of it on the promo culture encouraging people to move to new and shiny projects, and part of it on the fact that we release a lot more experimental stuff than you see at more established companies, but there's also plenty of cases where there was exactly one person who understood the codebase and was keeping the product running, and said person is no longer at the company for one reason or another.
In my opinion, Bard should never have been released in its current state, but, that's leadership for you.
This is what I don’t understand. Is leadership really this dumb or are we missing large pieces of context?
The prevailing sentiment is google is flakey. Don’t rely on their stuff.
Now removing redundant services is one thing. But from the outside it looks like they don’t care about regaining confidence. And they don’t care about creating new stable products that I want.
Did they really think Stadia would be an instant success with their shit reputation in a market that has been already carved up by the incumbents? A naïve observer would say it would take years and a ton of money.
Google Assistant still feels so stunted and lifeless when I know Google can produce more realistic generated speech audio, interpret requests in plain English and respond in a helpful manner.
No subscription can compete with just owning the games and the hardware.
Yeah, about like this: https://killedbygoogle.com/
I don't really care if Google is unable, unwilling, or uninterested in supporting anything that isn't G-Suite, search, or ads. Their track record is more than enough for me to dismiss using Google Cloud Platform, or even saving anything of any importance to Google Drive. I'm occasionally involved some of those types of vendor decisions, and I imagine others in similar positions feel the same way, so I can't imagine this is all theoretical fake losses they've suffered from this MO. I don't know how you'd even begin to measure the amount of revenue opportunities lost in this way, but I will say this: I'm really glad I'm not a part of Google's marketing department.
I think the 'problem' is that reputation damage doesn't really impact Google's revenue. They get the overwhelming majority of their money from publishing adverts, with a significant amount on their own properties (search and YouTube). It really doesn't matter if a bunch of gamers decide Stadia screwed them over, or if some devs decide to avoid GCP because they killed Reader. Google still makes a staggering amount of money no matter what.
The only way Google killing products will ever impact the company is either if people have an alternative to Google Search (very unlikely) or if people stop wanting to work for Google because they see it as a dead end working on things that only last a few years (also unlikely because $$$ talks).
Google will continue to launch, run, and then kill products forever. I suspect that if you're at Google and you're not working on ads or something that displays ads then you're being paid to build something frivolous that won't go anywhere mainly so you don't go and work at a different company that could impact one of Google's cash cows. I'm a bit envious if I'm honest. That sounds fun.
I started using Bing ~2 years ago. At the start, I used Google to get alternate results for about 1/4 of searches. Today? I drop to Google a couple of times a month, at most, usually when searching for something very ambiguous. I don't even live in the US.
But it's not a unique problem. I think their peers in the giant mature technology company business tend to take fewer shots and put more investment in the ones they do take.
But they also still kill products eventually. I can't load music on the iPod shuffle I still have in a drawer. My windows 95 disks aren't very useful. The Amazon store I did Christmas shopping at a couple years ago is some kind of boutique clothing store now.
But I do think Google's decisions always seem to feel more sudden, that once they give up on a product, they pull the band-aid off way more quickly. And I do think they seem to take more shots that don't work out.
Everything I've heard (mostly on HN) about working there is that there are simply too many perverse incentives to abandon products. People get promoted for creating exciting new products and then leave those products behind at their new position.
Up-and-comers are also incentivized to do the same thing. There seems to be no appetite whatsoever for hiring "steady hand on the tiller" type people. The whole company DNA is built around hiring elite graduates fresh out of school.
It's the classic "too many chefs in the kitchen" problem.
The promo system has changed in the last year. So to some extent this info is outdated.
And while obviously culture and incentives play a role I think the statement that this is the major reason for Google killing products is largely false.
New grads aren't making any big decisions about products.
And Google has many steady seniors because of the high tenure rate. In fact the one of the major complaints is that it is too steady , too bureaucratic and too slow.
Surely the people on Hackrnews understand that no one outside of tech enthusiasts even knows about this, right? I have to imagine so... they're smart people and surely sometimes interact with regular people in real life?!
But on a more serious note: none of these projects have ever had any traction. That's why they're killed!
Try asking anyone who's not in tech but does play videogames what Stadia is. You'll soon find out why it's axed.
It starts with a loss of cultural cachet among the people who influence spending. It looks like hip startups with rows of desks with Apple machines where Windows was the default for a decade or two before.
I don’t think Google can innovate anymore. They did a lot of great work as a startup and when they were much smaller (<10k headcount). Now most of what they do fails.
Yeah, outside of tech enthusiasts, the majority of people don’t care.
Street view was an app for marketing. In 2010 it looked really cool and helped their image.
None of these projects/products looked financially feasible. And a code jam? Jesus Christ, my public library hosts code meetups.
This blog post is boring and weird. It comes off as a weak attempt to find more reasons to hate Google.
I guess this means a "reputation" doesn't influence their profits. Some companies aren't in impression-making business, or even pretending-to-be-trying-to-make-their-customers-happy business.
Google might have made more inroads with enterprises with G suite and GCP if they didn't have that reputation. The gaming industry is a 200 billion/year market that Google could've captured a decent size of if potential customers trusted that they wouldn't quickly give up. All of that represents billions of dollars in lost opportunities.
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.
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.
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.
But mostly we’ve just never forgiven them for killing Google Reader. And we never will.
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.
Not saying Microsoft is perfect, but in my personal experience they've been a lot better in these key metrics.
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...
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?
Stadia Onhub Glass
I bought a Pixel 6, I don't think I'll buy another Pixel again.
The official pixel case got destroyed due to wear in not even a year (my own 3D printed case in TPU now lasted longer than google one). The official pixel case also caught some dust and scratched the glass of the back.
The pixel without a case is so slippery it slip alone on any surface not perfectly flat.
otherwise you can be pwned by a phone call
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/03/multiple-inte...
phones from mid 2022 seem like abandonware already
And Google's approach to Pixels reflects that: they make them greta, then they all but abandon them, then okay again, then...
Any company engaging in mass market IoT sales should be compelled, for the sake of consumer confidence and protection, of an "exit plan" to allow fully localized control of these devices -- independent of an upstream server or system.
In their defense, Stadia consisted of a ChromeCast and a controller which are both still useful.
they don't say the same about their wiretap wifi router thingy
While I don't know this founder, his excellent writeup summarizes my understanding of the culture w/r/t innovation: https://medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cf...
It seems like an interesting concept, since hands-free control of your phone via speech is often too awkward to use in public imho.
Maybe it'll come back when the hardware is able to shrink even more, making it less conspicuous.
Not a heavy gamer, but Stadia was awesome for game nights with friends and also the play while someone watches along feature was great.
I'd always wanted to play Red Dead redemption 2 (which was on Stadia) but my PC can run it, so I bought it for my birthday, 110 gb download, had to install the epic launcher, then the rockstar launcher, then it complained about not being able to verify the files, then it locked me out of my account due to some linking issue between the two, then it just kept refusing to start saying it was already running and then many, many hours later, I was able to sit down and play it for an hour and a half which is all i wanted, which wasn't really worth it in the end.
Why is the user experience and entry into gaming so rough/awful?
Edit: If I were you I would try out GeForce Now[0], you can connect your Steam account and play your game with a decent experience. I don't believe they have Red Dead Redemption 2, but next time you want to play just 30min-1h, it could be a good option.
Games work best locally, but if your fine with streaming then you can try tons of different games instantly.
Stadia's issue was you needed to subscribe and pay for games separately. It even shipped with a bizarre controller that didn't work with anything else. If anything Google got out competed, plus Gamepass is baked into Xbox Live so you had an existing customer base.
You could buy a game and play it on Stadia, you did not need a subscription. The subscription was to play the included games and get a few new ones each month.
The controller wasn't bizarre, it used Wifi to connect directly to the servers to reduce latency of it having to go to your device first via bluetooth then to the servers, hence why 'it didn't work with anything else', which is also not correct, it worked fine wired, you could also use an xbox controller just fine which is what I did, it wasn't something that 'shipped' with Stadia, it was an optional extra.
Rockstar games are also made with a focus towards consoles first so there are often bugs on the PC port that can ruin your experience, like the notorious GTA loading issues that were fixed by one guy[0].
Google Code Jam was not a product, and it was an event that was a net loss in terms of revenue, which is hard to justify maintaining when you are cutting thousands of jobs.
Google Street View is part of Google Maps, the post even says so.
Google OnHub is a one time hardware product. Nobody is blaming Nintendo for killing the Gameboy Color when it stopped producing it.
I don't see how any of the 6 things mentioned here have been unjustifiably "killed".
Arguing "it's hardware" doesn't work when the features are cloud-based and the company shuts down the servers. It's bait and switch, pure and simple.
You just have the wrong expectation for online products.
> Then in January 2023, the company rendered the product almost completely useless by disabling most of its features.
I think GameBoy Color still works today?
Also, the list is missing Nest Secure.
Did your Gameboy Color stop working when Nintendo decided to stop producing it?
8 years of support for their router doesn't seem bad at all.
[1] https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/11257354?hl=en
I have neither asked for, nor received, a single feature from what I bought, I just want it to continue working. With prior products, they were "free" so it was kind of acceptable that they were discontinued, but now I have a real tangible thing, that Google has just decided to shut off and that's that.
I will never buy something without open standards again. My expectation is that at some point in the life of these cameras they would support RTSP but they never did, and I now see more than ever that that was a feature, not a bug. I will never make that mistake again.
- All Google Code Competitions, which had gone on for 19 years
- Jacquard, there IOT clothing attempt, around for 9 years
- Stadia, shorter but their cloud gaming attempt around for 3 years
Google killing Jacquard and Stadia seems run of the mill but the first one! When I was in college I remember people talking about google code jam and I wasn't even into coding then. That seems like a big retreat and I must have missed HN discussing it because, just wow.
Fuchsia is maybe 1/4 product and the rest is a long term infrastructure investment. If Google had lost interest they’d have no problem shutting it down by now, for instance stadia rose and fell in a shorter time span than all of fuchsia.
I don’t know whether fuchsia will “make it”, heck a frustrated enough SvP can probably kill it if they really wanted to. However, fuchsia never lived in the same world as the rest of Google, or even the platform & ecosystems org (Android & ChromeOS), not really.
Nobody ever expected a new OS and kernel to be a mainstream success in single digit years. It’s an insane project to take on, and ironically that insanity keeps a lot of the short term opportunists away, specifically the kind that leaves a crater after them when they leave..
It does feel like they’ve lost a lot of interest in Android. It’s too big for Google to just close, but I could see them selling it. If that happens, hopefully it’s to a Microsoft but chances are they will screw us all and sell it to Oracle or Xiaomi.
But there are a lot of things that will die before Android or Fuschia. Here’s a list of 270 Google projects (past and present)[1]. I learned about Google Sunroof through this list (rooftop solar calculator) and it’s pretty neat.
Legislation should be put in place so that features not requiring a connection shall work offline.
In north America, there is a lot of political pressure for some environmental issues but nothing about planned obsolescence.
I'm afraid that in most cases that is just impossible, because the service is essentially all in the "cloud" by design.
Perhaps the company should be forced to sustain service for a minimum warranty period like in the EU with their 2-years minimum legislation, which has cost repercussions onto the user.
But really in most cases the problem is that it's so accepted to be sucked into subscription deals where the company can change their end of the deal at a moment's notice, and where you might just lose a lot of invested time and effort, let alone data and privacy, and essentially nothing of that can be properly compensated.
I too dislike the pervasiveness of the narrow type of DSA problems (because it comes at the cost of other computer science topics, scales linearly with practice after some point, and selects for people who have time to practice them). But DSA puzzles aren't what you should be blaming for closing down stadia.
I don't see any logic there. Companies in the rest of the world are less focused on DSA as a hiring metric, in my understanding.
Why are Google projects closed? Why are they started?
I believe Google are heavily focused on data and metrics and algorithms, and I think that is definitely a factor.
I wouldn't blame eng interviewing practices on this particular issue.
Well, guess not. It just cements an already shaky reputation. Don't depend on anything Google personally or in business if you have a choice. They still don't care though, they seem immune to market forces and things like "customers".
Goes to show that Google has been a free-for-all for too long. Who allowed these things to be built (waste of resources) and launched (bad for brand and marketing as they won't be able to succeed anyway) is beyond me. What's going on at Google nowadays?!
Apple abandoned AirPort access points 5 years ago in 2018, and still got security updates a year later. Dammit!
What seems more likely is that they shut down an increasing number of individual sub-products, in the way that they are shuttering IoT Core [2]. If they do, then I'm not convinced that will be a bad thing -- a slimmed down, profitable, platform with a well-supported set of core services feels like a safe long-term partner.
[1] https://www.ciodive.com/news/Google-Cloud-Profitability-Alph...
"This person said the group’s leaders didn’t explicitly state what would happen to the cloud division if it didn’t reach a top two position by 2023. A commonly held view inside the group was that Google wouldn’t continue investing money if it failed to it meet its goal, the person said. "
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
The guy just rides on the wave of money that search brings in. Otherwise it's just failed project after failed project. Google has this stupid process where they spin up a new idea, cripple the launch, cripple support, cripple maintenance, and then kill the project for lack of success a year later leaving the few suckers who held out with faith in them high and dry.
For me personally, Allo was the final straw. I did the footwork of getting people to switch to it, had some mild success, and then google pulled the rug making me look like an idiot.
I came across a Goole project.
I didn't even look at it twice.
Google is probably the last company I would want having any kind of leverage in my hobby.
Google shutting down something noone has ever heard of
Is it just me or has Google search gotten worse?
