At some point Google needs to realize that releasing products then killing them like this makes people worry about using them for other projects. Simply going on number of users / revenue per user doesn't seem to be a a great long term strategy.
That's a false dichotomy. Just because a system is profitable doesn't mean it will be moving forward or that there aren't more effective operating models out there. Long-term success of a company relies on its ability to adapt. IMO this kind of development cycle has worked up till now, but moving forward, I'd hope they're much more thoughtful and methodical about what they choose to launch and how as it is in fact hurting their brand.
And yet your post (and downvotes) still don't really answer the question: What kind of basis/proof/data is the idea that Google should change it's massively profitable strategy based on? Which metrics besides "gut feeling" or "I don't like it"?
It’s a good question, but one I could think of is something relating to success of new products. Ideally you never launch an outright flop, Apple’s had maybe 2 or 3. You can take their strategy and “be right most of the time” or you can reinforce the importance of product market fit and understanding instead of spaghetti model. There’s always an opportunity for research and understanding prior to development, and hiring people who have launched similar successful products. That doesn’t require a pivot just a bit more investment early on and the return can be tracked as a function of success of new products.
The only major flop that I can think that Apple has had in the last decade is the trash can Mac Pro and that market is so small for Apple it didn’t really affect revenue that much. I think the HomePod may be a flop.
But the difference is that the products that flopped aren’t platforms that people came to depend on.
I did say in the last decade. The iPod Hifi was discontinued September 2007. I can list many failures before then - the MacTV, the 20th anniversary Mac, the entire Performa line, the Pippin, the Mac clone program, the Apple III, eWorld, Newton, Cube, System 7 Pro, OpenDoc (and CyberDog),....
It needs to find some method of diversification and it will never do that if it kills off products that aren’t immediately profitable instead of finding a business model.
Google’s ad business can easily be disrupted by ad blockers.
Of course I've heard of it. Unfortunately, you're doing this thing where you state a bunch of at a glance, unrelated facts and leave me to fill in the details. It's the same way people talk about conspiracy theories, and it's an infuriating rhetorical tactic to deal with. So some questions:
Do you think that high speed internet is going to be so wildly profitable to cause a clear diversification in Google's profit? My understanding is that it already doesn't have great margins, and google moving in would increase competition, reducing those margins.
Do you really believe that google plans to diversify by moving into a complelety non software business like internet utilities?
If Google's ad business can be so easily disrupted, why haven't ad blockers noticably done so in the past two decades? Or if they have, why hasn't that impacted Google's profit? If your argument is that it did, but only recently (the TAC stuff), what changed recently to cause that?
Do you think that enterprise offerings like cloud aren't diversification?
Do you really believe that google plans to diversify by moving into a complelety non software business like internet utilities?
People said it was crazy for Apple to move into the music business (Slashdot: “No Wireless, Less Space than a Nomad, Lame”)and try to open a digital music store (who will buy music when they can get it for free?). That seem to have worked out pretty well.
The CEO of Palm said on rumors of the iPhone in 2006 when people thought it was crazy for Apple to get into the phone business “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.”.
Google’s ad business is being disrupted - their profit was down on ad sales. Facebook knows a lot more about people because people tell Facebook a lot more about themselves and can do better targeting. Also, since most Facebook usage is done through apps, ads are almost impossible to block. Amazon is also getting more into the ad space and they know a lot more about consumer behavior than Google. Their first party ads are also harder to block.
iOS fairly recently added native content blockers - where the most valuable consumers are and more traffic is moving to mobile.
“Do you think that enterprise offerings like cloud aren't diversification?”
It’s a distance third to AWS and Azure. GCP doesn’t have the first mover advantage of Amazon or the advantage of having the advantage of Microsoft’s entrenched base in the enterprise or its sales team.
No, by all means Google shouldn't. It's too large to be taken down by external forces, but it can (and I hope it will) inflict itself by maintaining its arrogant attitude.
Except when their rapid product cycle creates a feedback loop where users are afraid to adopt in fear of a shutdown, thereby increasing the risk of falsely determining a bad market fit.
I know I am. After they killed Health, Reader, Finance and Moderator, it became clear their new services weren't worth my time investing in. They've killed 143 services, 14 apps and 14 pieces of hardware since 2001. [1] I'm not even sure Finance is accurately reflected on this list since it just got neutered. I don't care how big a company you are, killing 10 products per year is one heck of a pace.
Same here. Some time in the past hearing of a new Google product got me excited. I'd sign up for beta, get my friends onboard etc etc, now I just think "oh something they'll shut down" and largely ignore it.
That's great, but do you have non-anectodal evidence that there's a enough people to make business sense for Google to change their strategy?
This is a startup-oriented site after all, you don't run business on a single-person's gut feeling, but on data. Do you have a firm basis on which Google should change their, currently extremely profitable, strategy?
Their history is why a lot of people at my Fortune 100 are looking to go with AWS and Azure over GCP. I'd guess they are damaging their enterprise prospects at other companies as well.
Your point is fair but I have read too many stories of people not preferring Google cloud services exactly because they think Google can't be trusted in long term. Also, I believe data is available to at least show that Google Cloud is behind both AWS and Azure in terms of clients.
For what is worth I just asked around in family barbecue if anyone knows a Google product that shutdown. No one knows.
Non tech savvy hardly know that Youtube belongs to Google even. Tech forums like this are a bubble and we must take care when generalizing our assumptions.
To be fair, AWS still has first mover advantage. And Azure has lock-in advantages because of existing enterprise relationships. From anecdotal evidence I know that that base products are largely the same, as is top tier support. If anything GCP seems to have great documentation, may be a shade cheaper and devs seem to like it.
Then everyone has their strengths. If you want to run a lot of containers or ML for example, GCP seems a save bet.
GCPs customer support is light years behind AWS’s business or enterprise support. I’ve yet to hear anyone say anything positive about any part of Google’s customer support.
Then everyone has their strengths. If you want to run a lot of containers or ML for example, GCP seems a save bet.
And that’s a minuscule part of the market.
But as far as I know, AWS has never outright abandoned a product. They may make it unavailable to new accounts.
> GCPs customer support is light years behind AWS’s business or enterprise support. I’ve yet to hear anyone say anything positive about any part of Google’s customer support.
I‘ve heard positive things. But yeah, that‘s not really something you can measure easily.
> And that‘s a minuscule part of the market.
Yes, for now. Eventually everything might be containers and serverless.
> But as far as I know, AWS has never outright abandoned a product. They may make it unavailable to new accounts.
Can‘t recall GCP ever abandoning something. Regardless, all the providers have the same deprecation policy I believe. Announce at least one year prior to deprecation.
Can‘t recall GCP ever abandoning something. Regardless, all the providers have the same deprecation policy I believe. Announce at least one year prior to deprecation.
One example I can think of is running an EC2 instance (VM) in AWS outside of VPC. That’s been deprecated for almost a decade, you can’t do it in new accounts, but AWS still supports it for old accounts.
In my experience GCP, GCP, not Google, customer support had been pretty great. We don't pay too much, in fact I'm not sure we would rate any support from AWS given our spend - or at least it's not something visible to me.
EDIT: Found AWS page about support. Was definitely harder to find than GCP's...
In practice from my work, I've seen mostly cases of AWS being chosen because of "AWS=Cloud" mentality, and Azure because "we're MS shop". TBQH, the latter is bolstered by MS doing a really great push for developer tools, integrations, etc, even if actually using Azure is at times like eating broken glass.
It’s a minimum of $100 a month or 10% on top of your bill. For that you get excellent immediate online chat or phone support. I’ve had a 100% success rate and they won’t give up no matter how esoteric your question is.
I can’t speak from personal experience with Azure.
Agreed ; but the fact that people notice the pattern and are either amused or disappointed by it, to me is telling that maybe they're doing something wrong about it.
Google isn't a startup and tends to shutdown services that are popular but on which they can't find a correct business model (e.g. Reader or Inbox) without much warning, actual replacement options, or open sourcing solutions for self hosting.
Since they're so large, that creates a discrepancy between the stability you would expect from an established company, and the "kill your babies" culture they clearly have.
Past behaviour predicts future behaviour, and so people start to notice that and lose trust, which is a problem when you start asking for significant investments from your customers (e.g. Stadia or Nest).
They need to stop slapping their name on every product launch. Look at Amazon, they have a lot of white label brands and almost none of the customers have a clue they are purchasing Amazon's own brands.
This clearly isn't the only problem Google is having. They need a top and mid level management purge, and new leadership needs to figure out why the hell they need over 200,000 employees and contractors to run a search engine and Youtube.
Google's offers a bit more than "a search engine and Youtube." They also have Android, Maps, Drive, Chrome, Photos, Cloud, and hardware (Nest, Pixel, Chromebooks).
Agreed, I think the parent comment was implying that those few services are making a disproportionate amount of the company's revenue compared to what most employees are working on
Google docs has no link to ads. I’ve never used the Google Calendar web interface. I just use it with the built in calendar app on iOS. Same with gmail. Rumors are that Youtube is barely at break even after all of these years.
As far as Android, it came out in the Oracle trial that it has made less than $40 billion in profit during its entire existence. Which isn’t nothing, but seeing that Google has close to 80% market share (not including AOSP based Android phones in China) is not really impressive.
You may be right with the apps, but Google is paying a lot Apple for providing the default search engine. It doesn't need to pay for being the default for Android (other companies pay Google for Play Sevices).
Mobile revenue is at this point bigger than desktop revenue, so Android and Chrome were really necessary projects for Google to not lose direct contact with users.
With youtube you're right, it took a lot of time to be slightly profitable, but I'm happy to pay for it monthly, as I'm learning a lot from youtube videos.
From what I can tell, OEMs didn’t have to pay for Google apps or Google Play Services but they had to place Google apps prominently and had to have Google search as the default search engine. It was also an all or nothing thing.
That changed recently because of an EU consent decree. At least in the EU. Now OEMs have to pay up to $40 per device.
Those numbers could have well come from advertising and Google Play. I couldn’t find anything about OEMs paying to license Google apps before the EU consent decree.
Most of the headcount growth is cloud atm. But even so. They hire top talent exclusively pretty much. So It‘s advantageous to retain as many as possible and let them choose projects or build new ones. It doesn‘t matter. Worst case the project doesn‘t go anywhere, at best it‘s something useful or successful. Either way, the main point is to stop them running off to other FAANG‘s. Talent is the most important thing they have and it‘s important for them to stay the top employer for new hires.
> Google isn't a startup and tends to shutdown services that are popular but on which they can't find a correct business mode
Yes this is true, If you visualize Google as an incubator, then instead of talking about service you can talk about startup, and then what is happening is just the real life of an incubator, some projects fail, some success.
People are quoting all the time "failure is good for success" but when Google is doing it, sounds like they disagree
Though Google might still have a start-up culture, general public doesn't perceive Google to be a start-up.
Now everyone, may be except techies, consider Google as an established brand which offers top quality product. General public doesn't know much about startup culture or business.
Wouldn't that have been what Project X or Google labs was for? People don't generally like to constantly be unwilling beta testers. Google is doing it wrong. They ditch popular products that could work and are popular instead of spinning them out. They buy and then kill profitable and popular products. Google hasn't really had a successful project in a while. The last major one I can think of being Google Docs. Google sometimes builds applications that compete with their own products and then kills both the stable and new product.
What people expect is that one you have a stable of popular and successful products that you will either focus or provide long term support for the products that they rely on, whether you have to move to a different model or not. Microsoft and Apple both build new products and don't have the same animus directed at them because there's and expectation of stability or planning when a product gets sunsetted. How long did XP last? Windows 7 still gets security updates even if it's a dead product. Google just kills things, even Google Fiber that people rely on, with no transition plan and messaging that basically reflects that customers or users of the product don't matter to then at all. Google has worked hard to get their bad reputation and it turned from a darling into a dangerous entity.
> Since they're so large, that creates a discrepancy between the stability you would expect from an established company, and the "kill your babies" culture they clearly have.
Curious why they don't spin some of these out, or sell to, independent businesses. Reader looks like it could have at least been profitable.
There's a lot of reasons, but at least part of the answer is technical. Most Google software is extremely dependent on a massive set of proprietary internal libraries, and it is so difficult to disentangle them that rewriting the entire thing from scratch is often easier (like they did to create Docker). I'm not sure whether it is possible to provide a contractual lease to an external company granting access to the entire Google codebase, but it certainly has enough challenges they would rather avoid it if they can.
> Curious why they don't spin some of these out, or sell to, independent businesses. Reader looks like it could have at least been profitable.
Probably because of self-competition and proprietary shared dependencies; Reader, IIRC, was killed partially because it was incompatible with the way some of it's internal infrastructure dependencies were being evolved to support other services with more promising business prospects; it couldn't practically be sold off as is (and even if the infrastructure was forked, the people maintaining it wouldn't go with it, since they were being retasked.)
And lots of Google products that are killed are killed in favor of other Google products with overlapping markets, so selling them off would mean Google would be fueling competition to the services it wanted to focus on.
In many cases, I suspect both factors apply to individual products.
Exactly; I don't think many folks deny Google has had a bit of an issue with shutting down widely used products after they stagnate, but this was none of the above. It was a beta that had "10,000+" installs according to Play Store, which I am guessing that places the active users a fair bit lower.
Products like Blog Compass are not new. Google has probably had hundreds of these smaller, more experimental products that got canned after a while, like Sidewiki (remember that?) but until relatively recently it's never been used as a sign that Google is unreliable; in hindsight most of them made sense. If I had to guess, I think the continued soreness from a few big ones like G+ and Reader have just left many jaded.
I mean I was bitten by the G+ shutdown, but honestly, looking for things to complain about is really worse than just beating a dead horse. In other words, you may as well just complain about the one that really frustrates you, since I doubt anyone here actually used Blog Compass.
Disclosure, I am a Googler, had no idea what Blog Compass was until today.
I was wondering this yesterday and maybe you can answer, what do most Google employees do during their workday (given that so many products that people used to work on have been terminated)?
Saying that people are looking for things to complain about is the exact reason that people dislike Google. The problem isn't you, it's that the entire company feels the same way as you do, that users of Google products are just looking for reasons to complain when their favorite app gets shut down. It's as if the company was created with no one who's job it is to think about users and it's bitterly apparent. Real people are really inconvenienced and impacted by switching services Google likes to kill off, whether it's this Compass product, Reader, Picasa, SketchUp, G+, Inbox, Hangouts, Nests, Blogger, or Android for Fuschia, or something else, it doesn't matter. Other companies don't treat unknowing users like beta testers. People choose to opt in, knowing it might fail, and take that risk. They don't get functions for something they physically installed into their house willfully broken for no reason. It's not just a few products. Try and fix something with Google DNS, go ahead I'll wait while you find the appropriate place to contact. I'm going to guess it's going to involve knowing someone at Google because there's no way to report that Google servers are breaking connectivity to websites. The entire company is like this now, no one cares about the users and it's blindly apparent.
Ah, so what you’re saying is, when people are complaining about products and/or features being removed, it’s because they actually used them. So in the vein of this article... did you use Blog Compass?
I never said people should just stop complaining. I said they should complain about what is actually bothering them instead of projecting it onto everything that happens. It muddies the water at best and is dishonest at worst.
At this point, using any service from Google makes no sense, really. On top of many other reasons, zero trust in the service surviving ( or just reaching ! ) a two year period at least.
This is the reason I'm sceptical of signing up for Google Stadia. People are heavily betting it would fail, and Google being Google will be quick to shutdown when it sees that.
I just upgraded my pc... In two years I probably go the online cloud gaming route...i hope there will be a cheap stadia "console". All it just needs is an ehternet port and a damn cheap arm. Power usage should be very very low.
> Which Chromecast devices are compatible with Stadia?
> For launch in November, only the Google Chromecast Ultra will be compatible with Stadia, and you will also need a Stadia Controller and access to Stadia to play with Chromecast. Access to Stadia in November is only available through the Founder's Edition or through a Stadia Buddy Pass. Stay tuned for future announcements regarding additional device compatibility.
My two cents on Stadia: people don't like platforms that challenge Steam.
Steam was the first big digital games marketplace, and people have been using it for a long time. They've amassed many games, the future playability of which depends on the continued availability of Steam to host the code.
If you threaten Steam, you threaten a lot of hardcore gamer's libraries. Any platform that tries to compete is always controversial.
That's why I think some may be rooting for failure, formed through anecdotal observation.
Steam only hosts the code incidentally. It manages your licenses. This is a big difference, and it's one publishers are free to work around if they wanted to.
Are you saying that Steam/Valve doesn't have any lock-in contracts? So, if my game is sold on Steam then I could let people 'port' it to another provider?
GOG Connect may be along the lines of what you're describing. The compatibly of games is on a temporary basis set by the publisher, but, yes, it does allow you to activate Steam purchases on GOG.
If by "port" you mean remove it from a steam accounts library and add it somewhere else on a different platform then no, I never heard about something like that. But you are free to give an extra copy to the other account, while accepting that some people will abuse this. Just like you can let people buy the game somewhere else and give them steam keys that can afaik be generated for free while missing out on some steam features like reviews being counted.
Or do you exclusivity contracts? There are certainly games that were sold on Steam and are now exclusively available on Epic's Store. Satisfactory is an example that comes to mind. Copies sold on steam are still honored there, so the contract probably doesn't allow you to force users off steam after the sale.
In general I'm quite amazed at how little abusive practices Valve has shown while having a quasi monopoly for such a long time. Stagnation is probably the one, if you want to count that. I hope they won't become worse under pressure. And I certainly have little trust in other companies trying to replace Steam to behave as well.
When it comes to DRM and content hosting, the recent closure of the Microsoft ebook store comes to mind.
If a marketplace is underutilized it risks becoming obsolete. And, unfortunately, sometimes that means loosing access to content.
There are additional considerations, of course. Steam is also a social network of sorts, so fracturing gaming communities is also of concern. But it could also just be that gamers are accustomed to Steam; they like it. And they don't like platforms that don't play well with it.
This is somewhat myopic -- there would be no incentive politically or monetarily for a publisher to a) track these licenses to the individual or b) give out new licenses to previous purchases.
> people don't like platforms that challenge Steam
It's not a matter of challenging Steam but of convenience.
Much like streaming, everyone prefers having their content on a single app/platform/whatever. Plus Steam has some other benefits like Big Picture that nobody else has.
It‘s always interesting when people like monopolies one day and call for antitrust the next.
Besides data sovereignty and user manipulation, the relationship between competition and convenience seems like the biggest issue in tech now. And there are no real solutions. It‘s obvious why tech is so consolidated. Marginal cost of growth is pretty much zero. 2 to 3 platform for a given use case might be the most „efficient“.
Chances are that quite a few of the new streaming services will disappear/consolidate soon enough.
I'm a fan of what Disney did with MoviesAnywhere-- buy a movie once and it becomes playable through all participating linked providers. So you can, for instance, buy a movie on Amazon and play it back on iTunes.
The catch being that it only applies to movie purchases by participating studios. No rentals, subscription based streaming, or TV shows.
But imagine if that's how other services worked. One can always dream.
I believe it's actually that people don't like exclusivity of platform. A game for PC should be sold on all platforms (or at least the major ones).
A tv series should be distributed on all platforms, rather than just HBO or Neflix or Hulu. Making exclusivity deals should be outlawed as anti-consumer.
Who is doing all that betting, really? I'm pretty excited about the service, honestly (and the prospect of game streaming services in general).
Given the partnerships and buyin they have developed with game publishers and studios, the infrastructure investment necessary for this kind of service, it would seem Google is actually betting pretty heavily on it.
The commentary on every new google product launch is the same tiring canards about sunlit services... at this point, most of it feels like astro-turfer generated FUD.
Stadia is an audacious attempt to demonstrate technical prowess of Google. Failure of Stadia would cast doubts on Google Cloud's efficacy. I am sure Google will put all its might behind Stadia. I, for one, is rooting for its success. That does not mean others would go out of business. It's a huge market and everyone can benefit.
Google would need to solve speed of light problems for Stadia to be successful. It's not that people are betting against Google, they are betting on their understanding of physics.
Stadia is going to be the luke warm product that OnLive was and then Google will shutter it. AT&T also tried to do this kind of service in limited markets with fiber optics to the home, servers near the last mile, and a partnership with nvidia for rapid decode/encode. Didn't stick. Why will Google be successful?
People forget that latency is actually pretty big on a console already. Many of the more casual gamers might not mind. From what I‘ve heard from the test run of AC Odyssey lag wasn‘t too bad. If anything I‘m interested to see of we‘ll see any difference in graphics quality with regards to artifacts. Also, how scalable and future proof their stack is (or how they upgrade). Especially once PS5/Scarlett come along. But most of the more casual players won‘t mind I think.
Light travels 186 miles per ms and a company like Google can put machines all over the place. The speed of light is really not an issue compared to other network overheads which can be improved.
Nvidia's current service (in beta) does really well. Google's project stream demo went really well for many people. But obviously, one's experience will be contingent upon internet providers, ultimately.
So... Stadia, along with all other current and future streaming services, are going to really suck for a lot of people.
But... they are going to be really amazing for a lot of people too.
Best-case latency should be as low or lower than the latency many play with on their consoles.
Doesn't matter who has tried it or whether it's feasible, speed of light or physics are not reasons this won't work if a company is willing to put machines every couple hundred miles.
This is the reason I don't think I'll ever sign up. Pay a monthly subscription and full price for games that'll likely vanish in a puff of efficiency? Thanks but no thanks.
Its free, if you don't mind "slumming it" with 1080p resolution. You only have to pay if you want access to free titles and 4k streaming. Honestly, its a pretty good deal when compared with a console, where you pay hundreds up front, then full price for games, then for a subscription service if you want updates and multiplayer.
Blogger and Feedburner will probably be the last Google services to shut down. Despite perennial portents of doom for them, they're used heavily on Google's own blogs and get major updates every 1-2 years.
Googlers were amongst public Google+'s most prolific users, and Google+ commenting was the way comments were handled on all of these Google blogs right up until the shut down. Internal use does not protected Google products from their fall.
They're also shutting down Google Trip replacing it with a website (google.com/travel) which is less capable (e.g. you cannot add reservations) and there isn't at the moment any mobile app replacement.
Never used Trip and don't know how it works, but https://www.kayak.com/ lets you store flight/hotel reservations and sends you notifications about them. Also has mobile apps.
I saw this at a the Google booth at trade show right around launch. There was a big panel with information and a 1/3 page take-away with the same information. I tried talking to people at the booth about it but they could only help with with AdWords and didn't know much about the other product apart that there was a flyer I could take.
Filed it away as "interesting if it actually gains momentum" and promptly forgot about it until a couple of months ago when a co-worker saw the same booth at another tradeshow and said we should look into it. Saw no further information online than what was at the booth, but made a ticket on Trello to try to contact someone.
Well, one of it's blog management tools: this one was an India-limited beta tool that connected to Blogger or WordPress, but Google also seems to have blog management tools with some overlap built in with Blogger, and with Site Kit by Google for WordPress.
122 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadWhy do you think switching to a model where Google bleeds money on unprofitable products will help anything?
But the difference is that the products that flopped aren’t platforms that people came to depend on.
Google’s ad business can easily be disrupted by ad blockers.
Do you think that high speed internet is going to be so wildly profitable to cause a clear diversification in Google's profit? My understanding is that it already doesn't have great margins, and google moving in would increase competition, reducing those margins.
Do you really believe that google plans to diversify by moving into a complelety non software business like internet utilities?
If Google's ad business can be so easily disrupted, why haven't ad blockers noticably done so in the past two decades? Or if they have, why hasn't that impacted Google's profit? If your argument is that it did, but only recently (the TAC stuff), what changed recently to cause that?
Do you think that enterprise offerings like cloud aren't diversification?
People said it was crazy for Apple to move into the music business (Slashdot: “No Wireless, Less Space than a Nomad, Lame”)and try to open a digital music store (who will buy music when they can get it for free?). That seem to have worked out pretty well.
The CEO of Palm said on rumors of the iPhone in 2006 when people thought it was crazy for Apple to get into the phone business “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.”.
Google’s ad business is being disrupted - their profit was down on ad sales. Facebook knows a lot more about people because people tell Facebook a lot more about themselves and can do better targeting. Also, since most Facebook usage is done through apps, ads are almost impossible to block. Amazon is also getting more into the ad space and they know a lot more about consumer behavior than Google. Their first party ads are also harder to block.
iOS fairly recently added native content blockers - where the most valuable consumers are and more traffic is moving to mobile.
“Do you think that enterprise offerings like cloud aren't diversification?”
It’s a distance third to AWS and Azure. GCP doesn’t have the first mover advantage of Amazon or the advantage of having the advantage of Microsoft’s entrenched base in the enterprise or its sales team.
Here - https://jamesstuber.com/second-order-effects/
> is the idea that Google should change
No, by all means Google shouldn't. It's too large to be taken down by external forces, but it can (and I hope it will) inflict itself by maintaining its arrogant attitude.
On a side note: RIM was most profitable three years after the iPhone came out. Profits are a lagging indicator.
Limited launch provided proof that it was a bad market fit and so they 'failed quickly' and shut it down. Isn't this supposed to be how it's done?
[1] https://killedbygoogle.com
That's great, but do you have non-anectodal evidence that there's a enough people to make business sense for Google to change their strategy?
This is a startup-oriented site after all, you don't run business on a single-person's gut feeling, but on data. Do you have a firm basis on which Google should change their, currently extremely profitable, strategy?
Non tech savvy hardly know that Youtube belongs to Google even. Tech forums like this are a bubble and we must take care when generalizing our assumptions.
Then everyone has their strengths. If you want to run a lot of containers or ML for example, GCP seems a save bet.
Then everyone has their strengths. If you want to run a lot of containers or ML for example, GCP seems a save bet.
And that’s a minuscule part of the market.
But as far as I know, AWS has never outright abandoned a product. They may make it unavailable to new accounts.
I‘ve heard positive things. But yeah, that‘s not really something you can measure easily.
> And that‘s a minuscule part of the market.
Yes, for now. Eventually everything might be containers and serverless.
> But as far as I know, AWS has never outright abandoned a product. They may make it unavailable to new accounts.
Can‘t recall GCP ever abandoning something. Regardless, all the providers have the same deprecation policy I believe. Announce at least one year prior to deprecation.
One example I can think of is running an EC2 instance (VM) in AWS outside of VPC. That’s been deprecated for almost a decade, you can’t do it in new accounts, but AWS still supports it for old accounts.
EDIT: Found AWS page about support. Was definitely harder to find than GCP's...
In practice from my work, I've seen mostly cases of AWS being chosen because of "AWS=Cloud" mentality, and Azure because "we're MS shop". TBQH, the latter is bolstered by MS doing a really great push for developer tools, integrations, etc, even if actually using Azure is at times like eating broken glass.
It’s a minimum of $100 a month or 10% on top of your bill. For that you get excellent immediate online chat or phone support. I’ve had a 100% success rate and they won’t give up no matter how esoteric your question is.
I can’t speak from personal experience with Azure.
Google isn't a startup and tends to shutdown services that are popular but on which they can't find a correct business model (e.g. Reader or Inbox) without much warning, actual replacement options, or open sourcing solutions for self hosting.
Since they're so large, that creates a discrepancy between the stability you would expect from an established company, and the "kill your babies" culture they clearly have.
Past behaviour predicts future behaviour, and so people start to notice that and lose trust, which is a problem when you start asking for significant investments from your customers (e.g. Stadia or Nest).
This clearly isn't the only problem Google is having. They need a top and mid level management purge, and new leadership needs to figure out why the hell they need over 200,000 employees and contractors to run a search engine and Youtube.
As far as Android, it came out in the Oracle trial that it has made less than $40 billion in profit during its entire existence. Which isn’t nothing, but seeing that Google has close to 80% market share (not including AOSP based Android phones in China) is not really impressive.
Mobile revenue is at this point bigger than desktop revenue, so Android and Chrome were really necessary projects for Google to not lose direct contact with users.
With youtube you're right, it took a lot of time to be slightly profitable, but I'm happy to pay for it monthly, as I'm learning a lot from youtube videos.
That changed recently because of an EU consent decree. At least in the EU. Now OEMs have to pay up to $40 per device.
Yes this is true, If you visualize Google as an incubator, then instead of talking about service you can talk about startup, and then what is happening is just the real life of an incubator, some projects fail, some success.
People are quoting all the time "failure is good for success" but when Google is doing it, sounds like they disagree
Now everyone, may be except techies, consider Google as an established brand which offers top quality product. General public doesn't know much about startup culture or business.
What people expect is that one you have a stable of popular and successful products that you will either focus or provide long term support for the products that they rely on, whether you have to move to a different model or not. Microsoft and Apple both build new products and don't have the same animus directed at them because there's and expectation of stability or planning when a product gets sunsetted. How long did XP last? Windows 7 still gets security updates even if it's a dead product. Google just kills things, even Google Fiber that people rely on, with no transition plan and messaging that basically reflects that customers or users of the product don't matter to then at all. Google has worked hard to get their bad reputation and it turned from a darling into a dangerous entity.
Curious why they don't spin some of these out, or sell to, independent businesses. Reader looks like it could have at least been profitable.
Probably because of self-competition and proprietary shared dependencies; Reader, IIRC, was killed partially because it was incompatible with the way some of it's internal infrastructure dependencies were being evolved to support other services with more promising business prospects; it couldn't practically be sold off as is (and even if the infrastructure was forked, the people maintaining it wouldn't go with it, since they were being retasked.)
And lots of Google products that are killed are killed in favor of other Google products with overlapping markets, so selling them off would mean Google would be fueling competition to the services it wanted to focus on.
In many cases, I suspect both factors apply to individual products.
Products like Blog Compass are not new. Google has probably had hundreds of these smaller, more experimental products that got canned after a while, like Sidewiki (remember that?) but until relatively recently it's never been used as a sign that Google is unreliable; in hindsight most of them made sense. If I had to guess, I think the continued soreness from a few big ones like G+ and Reader have just left many jaded.
I mean I was bitten by the G+ shutdown, but honestly, looking for things to complain about is really worse than just beating a dead horse. In other words, you may as well just complain about the one that really frustrates you, since I doubt anyone here actually used Blog Compass.
Disclosure, I am a Googler, had no idea what Blog Compass was until today.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Products that are doing well have more folks working on them, I assume.
- There is plenty of mobility at Google and no shortage of things to work on.
- The churn rate of products is probably lower than the perception, at least relatively speaking. I perceive Cloud as being pretty stable.
- There’s a lot of tooling that is not specific to any unit or product, like Bazel for example.
I never said people should just stop complaining. I said they should complain about what is actually bothering them instead of projecting it onto everything that happens. It muddies the water at best and is dishonest at worst.
Obligatory : https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/googles-constant-pro...
> Which Chromecast devices are compatible with Stadia?
> For launch in November, only the Google Chromecast Ultra will be compatible with Stadia, and you will also need a Stadia Controller and access to Stadia to play with Chromecast. Access to Stadia in November is only available through the Founder's Edition or through a Stadia Buddy Pass. Stay tuned for future announcements regarding additional device compatibility.
https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338946?hl=en
Steam was the first big digital games marketplace, and people have been using it for a long time. They've amassed many games, the future playability of which depends on the continued availability of Steam to host the code.
If you threaten Steam, you threaten a lot of hardcore gamer's libraries. Any platform that tries to compete is always controversial.
That's why I think some may be rooting for failure, formed through anecdotal observation.
That would surprise me, but it would be great.
Or do you exclusivity contracts? There are certainly games that were sold on Steam and are now exclusively available on Epic's Store. Satisfactory is an example that comes to mind. Copies sold on steam are still honored there, so the contract probably doesn't allow you to force users off steam after the sale.
In general I'm quite amazed at how little abusive practices Valve has shown while having a quasi monopoly for such a long time. Stagnation is probably the one, if you want to count that. I hope they won't become worse under pressure. And I certainly have little trust in other companies trying to replace Steam to behave as well.
If a marketplace is underutilized it risks becoming obsolete. And, unfortunately, sometimes that means loosing access to content.
There are additional considerations, of course. Steam is also a social network of sorts, so fracturing gaming communities is also of concern. But it could also just be that gamers are accustomed to Steam; they like it. And they don't like platforms that don't play well with it.
It's not a matter of challenging Steam but of convenience.
Much like streaming, everyone prefers having their content on a single app/platform/whatever. Plus Steam has some other benefits like Big Picture that nobody else has.
Besides data sovereignty and user manipulation, the relationship between competition and convenience seems like the biggest issue in tech now. And there are no real solutions. It‘s obvious why tech is so consolidated. Marginal cost of growth is pretty much zero. 2 to 3 platform for a given use case might be the most „efficient“.
Chances are that quite a few of the new streaming services will disappear/consolidate soon enough.
The catch being that it only applies to movie purchases by participating studios. No rentals, subscription based streaming, or TV shows.
But imagine if that's how other services worked. One can always dream.
A tv series should be distributed on all platforms, rather than just HBO or Neflix or Hulu. Making exclusivity deals should be outlawed as anti-consumer.
Given the partnerships and buyin they have developed with game publishers and studios, the infrastructure investment necessary for this kind of service, it would seem Google is actually betting pretty heavily on it.
The commentary on every new google product launch is the same tiring canards about sunlit services... at this point, most of it feels like astro-turfer generated FUD.
And Google Fiber wasn’t?
Fiber is/was more about solving legal issues than technical ones.
That was definitely technical.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Google-Fiber-Microtrenchi...
Stadia is going to be the luke warm product that OnLive was and then Google will shutter it. AT&T also tried to do this kind of service in limited markets with fiber optics to the home, servers near the last mile, and a partnership with nvidia for rapid decode/encode. Didn't stick. Why will Google be successful?
Time will tell.
So... Stadia, along with all other current and future streaming services, are going to really suck for a lot of people.
But... they are going to be really amazing for a lot of people too.
Best-case latency should be as low or lower than the latency many play with on their consoles.
They’re both what I would call mature software. A rare thing for web apps. Updating the list is major from that perspective.
There is solution and it's easy.
Filed it away as "interesting if it actually gains momentum" and promptly forgot about it until a couple of months ago when a co-worker saw the same booth at another tradeshow and said we should look into it. Saw no further information online than what was at the booth, but made a ticket on Trello to try to contact someone.
Guess I can take that ticket off now.