Use https://killedbygoogle.com/ ! It's open source, and writes savage tweets. It also answers a question I usually have to ask about shut down Google products: What was it in the first place?
IIRC, it was an acquihire situation. The founder sold their company to Google, presumably as a condition of accepting a role as the head of Google Cloud. She's no longer at Google, so it makes some sense that they're not running her service at a loss.
"Greene joined Google in 2015 when the search giant bought her startup, Bebop, for $380 million."
$380mm sounds like a pretty great signing bonus.
Edit: I shouldn't have spoke so soon re: the signing bonus joke. Looks like she ended up donating her $150mm share: "Greene intends to donate $148.62 million of those proceeds 'to a donor advised fund.'"
Are going to? They already are. I will no longer consider a Google product for work purposes. Even for big stuff they are committed to like their cloud offering there is no confidence that individual features within it they you rely on won't get killed off.
Once I started doing just a little advanced stuff in Microsoft Word I realized how poor Google Doc is. You can't define your own style for crying out loud, you have to redefine an existing one.
Go is probably pretty safe, but even internally at Google Flutter is still sort of flying under the radar and nobody knows (or cares) about it too much. But if leadership decides to take a look at what the heck is going on in that corner of the organization... that would be a hard one to explain.
Go I'd consider, even if Google ditch it, the language still exists and is sufficiently entrenched to continue on. I wouldn't go near Flutter at all. Exactly the sort of thing that Google will lose interest in and stop backing leaving you with a product built on an un-supported platform.
Every time there's a post about a Google service being shut down, there are the usual remarks. I'm not saying they aren't deserved, but I'm curious if there's an alternate perspective here? Perhaps sunsetting these services ultimately leads to a more trim and lean Google, and better profit margins? Put another way, is it just the HN circle that is so put off by this?
The two positions don't seem to be in any conflict: I'm sure it is good for Google to shut these services down. I'm sure it does result in a leaner and more profitable company. The end result is still that Google cannot be trusted to keep any service running that isn't extremely profitable, and people who come to depend on these less-profitable services still end up orphaned.
It's good short term anyway. Whether it bites them in the end is basically a question of whether they make their brand untrustworthy. They seem to be doing so.
Google has largely failed to diversify. In contrast with Amazon, or Microsoft they only have two closely coupled revenue lines ( search and ads ). Overall this makes them vulnerable to a shift in the marketplace such as increased demand for privacy.
> only have two closely coupled revenue lines ( search and ads )
There is (practically) no "search" revenue that is not "ads" revenue. Ads is close to 90% of all Google's revenue. The remainder is not broken down in the earnings report, although I suspect it's largely their cloud computing business. Thus, Google's two revenue lines are really ads and cloud, with the latter much smaller than the former, and probably with a lower margin too.
They're apparently not interested in offering an ad service that just shows ads related to the topic of the site/article (or that have identified the types/topics of sites/articles they wish the ad to appear on), the way that e.g. magazine ads would be "targeted".
I can much more likely rely on a 10 person startup who're turning over, say 50mil and clearing a few mil a year of profit after all expenses. That's a stable reliable business.
At Google, that's defined as "failure" and designed straight to the Google Graveyard.
Even a 1 person startup making a few hundred thou per year is a better bet for me - I'd sooner have Pinboard as a critical dependancy for my business than any shiny new Google toy like, say, Flutter...
Two great examples are the goo.gl URL shortener and the custom site search widget. These two services actively break parts of the internet when they stop working.
Well one thing is that here there's a full 12 months of sunsetting going on, compared to a lot of "we're killing the product and you have a month to export your data"
A year is a pretty long time!
I am curious about usage numbers on some of these though.... like if these products were actually really successful I don't think Google would actually kill them.
If you're an end user, the only relevant perspective is noticing that the company is unreliable. That they're maximizing their own interests is something you can take for granted, but it's of little comfort or interest.
Right, because when Johnny B. Small business owner realises the google service he relies on for <Insert almost any task you can imagine> is cancelled, he's not thinking "oh great now i have to find/learn/migrate data using a new service", he's thinking "Oh well at least google's bottom line will look a little better".
I wonder if Google has unintentionally created a self-reinforcing feedback loop where potential customers don’t trust the products will be supported for more than 24 months which leads to limited adoption which in turn leads to the products being canceled before 24 months. Pair that with other HN comments that have described a situation where it’s easier to get promoted from launching a product vs maintaining an existing product. I understand the startup-like culture where they are looking for huge successes but I think they abandon these products before they’ve had enough time or exposure.
Doubt it. This never made much sense as a Google offering. Very strong players in this category offering more complete solutions. Not obvious what Google brings here.
We didn’t sign up because we’d just launched another system, but I really really liked it in the demo. We’ve ended up building homegrown GSuite + Google Script + Zapier automation tooling to approximate some of the workflows, because GSuite is such a natural place to do so many of the recruiting and interviewing tasks. I’m genuinely surprised to see this go away.
After the Hangouts/Allo/Duo debacle, I've done exactly this. I'll never put time into a new Google product again. My projects don't use G Suites or Cloud, either.
So, I don't use G Suite. I just have the free consumer Hangouts (without Gmail; deleted that a long time ago .. which after the G+ shutdown, means I can no longer search contact .. weird).
So for regular old consumer Hangouts (formerly part of G+) is that going away too? What happens to the phone number I have attached to it. .. I feel like I should port that way from Google sooner rather than later.
Same here, for me the cracking point was a combination of horror stories about peoples autobanned from the whole google ecosystem (including a whole life of gmail, company infra on google cloud, everything!) and the constant discontinuation of products
Agreed. Not only might your investment into a platform be lost, but there is a tail risk somewhere out there that if you hack something together and they decide they don't like it, it might actually hurt you. I'm not convinced that this would be more likely using an obscure service, but my intuition is that would be - since any bad press for them is instantly not worth it.
G Suite and Google Cloud are very different. GSuite is the enterprise version of the consumer apps which have billions of users so it's not going anywhere. Google Cloud has potential to meet or exceed adtech revenue and has some very big commercial customers.
It's these smaller apps that suffer because $400/month isn't enough to make a difference at Google scale. They do have a mandate to keep innovating but it's a strange cycle where the company produces some great software and then abandons it due to lack of success, because it's already too successful.
> G Suite and Google Cloud are very different. GSuite is the enterprise version of the consumer apps which have billions of users so it's not going anywhere.
It integrate into G-Suite but Hire is a separate application with its own subscription. I think it's clear that the G-Suite core services (email, calendar, productivity) are not going to be shutdown.
But since I started to use GCP 2012 a number of services has been left to die by abandonement.
Most of the times you get a clear migration path to a new service, but sometimes you dont such as when they kill the devserver for appengine standard in go 1.12 without giving a proper migration strategy. Everyone I know dread when they decide to deprecate go 1.11 support.
Yeah, killing inbox moved me away from google for mail entirely, and after that the dominos started falling. The only google product I use regularly at this point is YouTube, which I pay for to avoid ads.
IMO, YouTube is their only killer product at this point. Runner up might be Maps, which I occasionally use for Street View, but I've been able to get away with MapQuest most of the time for directions. Otherwise, I've completely replaced everything in the Google ecosystem and have been very happy. Sure, Google's got all the algorithms, but that's not something I want in the first place.
If it's not ad sales or search - I don't trust Google enough to base long term projects on it. _Maybe_ add gmail to that, perhaps. Possibly Suite (since at least they charge for it). For me at least, Google Cloud is still not quite emerged from "interesting, but not sure it'll be around long term yet" status. I'll use it as part of a multicloud architecture, or for prototypes/short-term projects. But I haven't yet been able to convince myself to recommend jumping both feet into a GoogleCloud-specific project architecture - in the same way I happily recommend/design/deploy AWS-specific projects all the time.
Google Cloud as a whole is also safe. It's the individual given products you have to worry about disappearing. It's already a very large business. Even in third place it's going to be at least a $15-$20 billion business over time. They're not shutting that down.
To be fair though, it's validly arguable that at least some of the people and content they're demonetising and banning are the very far end of the trashfire bellcurve, and that YouTube is nett better without them.
This argument doesn't hold weight for me. Google demonetizes because advertisers don't want their ads on that content - and that is true no matter what platform.
To some extent, yes. But see this comment -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20818621 There are plenty of examples like this. Google's problem is not that it is cracking down on bad actors. The problem is, it does not have a human interface. So once you are part of type-1 error set, you have very little way out. Once there is sufficient number of such people, who have critical mass for a competing service.
And honestly, I am really glad that google products are dying. I switched to DDG 6 months ago, Firefox 1.5 years ago and I dont miss either of the products. Hopefully big tech monopolies will start crumbling one way or the other.
I was watching a YouTube channel that that reviews mics and audio gear last night and they had had videos de monetised because of reviews of "shotgun mics"
Holy fuck! So their shutdown/demonetizing is being done by robots? They are automating the process of taking away peoples' way of earning a living? That is awful.
Inbox was just a different skin/front end for gmail though, they aren't really comparable. I was annoyed about Inbox coming and going too, but that was a totally different thing than if gmail itself were to go away.
These days I learn of most "new" Google products from the shutdown notice posted here on Hacker News.
Also if there is a Google product that does something I need then I will almost always pick a worse alternative because I don't want to deal with the hassle of moving when Google eventually shuts down their thing.
It takes most startups years to really perfect an idea. But that’s not really the problem here, they bought it as a proven idea and said it was successful and being used. it seems they just don’t see it as a business that boosts their bottom line enough when they could be using the same talent elsewhere in the firm. Opportunity costs etc.
Maybe they don’t like being #5 best product in the category or something.
The constant churn of companies getting acquired by Google continually justifies the anger on HN after a Google acquisition of their favourite products IMO, there’s a high probability they’ll shut it down even when Google claims they want to continue the business and even if it’s successful by a lot of other business’s standards.
So, they're just shovelling the money into a furnace? Or perhaps you just mean that Google buying the company a member of the board founded isn't arms-length enough to justify the term, and this falls into some form of theft or bribery?
This is quite strange behavior for a company with colossal cash coffers. They could keep up a project like that alive for years, just to keep loyal users content.
The fact that they are not doing things like that, repeatedly, is a bad sign for me. Well, at least they seem to keep search, maps, and gmail around for some time, because these obviously generate money for their main line of business, advertising.
And this is way Clayton Christensen's theory if disruption (innovator's dilemma etc) for so famous. The grit needed to resist this type of behavior is massive in big companies.
Check out https://hirehive.com, I'm the CTO and we have a great set of features. Our pricing is based on the number of open roles and prices start at $49 per month for 3 open roles.
Not sure what the HN rules are for self-promotion but my team and I recently launched an ATS/CRM called TalentAdmin. We're currently more geared towards smaller businesses but slowly growing into larger customers. We're not a perfect fit for everyone but we're very strong in structured interviews / scorecards, support, and at a price competitive with Google Hire.
I remember clicking on that a while back on thinking there weren't that many products listed there. They must have filled in a lot of killed-off-projects because now I'm struck by what a large number of projects are in the graveyard.
While this is splendid news of another fallen Google product, I'm afraid this time it is different. Google has a similar alternative to outgrow and to completely replace Hire which is called Byteboard [0].
That only appears to cover engineering hiring, whereas Google Hire was a general ATS. Byteboard definitely isn't a replacement yet, and it isn't clear that it aspires to be one.
Does google actually have a worse track record on shutdowns than the average startup? Random 10 person companies shut down all the time, but we seem to pay extra attention when it's a 10 person team inside Google.
When I get involved with a random 10 person company, I know what I'm getting into.
Using the google brand provides(provided) a sense of respectability and deeper pockets/longer term vision.
Some users, I believe rightfully so, feel betrayed by google's lackadaisical approach to starting and shutting down projects. Especially when comparing the effort to market vs create a great product. Like google +, it was shoved down people's throats, only to be tossed.
I know how to evaluate a startup's potential failure. Who's funding them? How much money do they have? How popular are they? How solid's the product? What are the founders like? Heck, for a lot of small startups, you can just ask to talk to the CEO if it's what it will take to close the deal. And I have a good idea of the conditions under which they'll throw in the towel.
But Google product success seems to depend entirely on internal politics, which are completely opaque to me. As traek explains, this product only exists at Google because Google wanted to hire the company's CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815572
And it stopped existing because she left Google. How could I possibly predict that? Better just to stay away, I figure, unless it's an obvious money-maker or has high strategic value.
Also - if I build a business around a 10 person startup, and they run into trouble or get acquired - there's at least some chance I could negotiate to buy/lease/rent the piece of IP and platform I'm relying on, or to reasonable expect to replicate the important bits of APIs I'm using by starting my own 10 person team.
> And it stopped existing because she left Google. How could I possibly predict that?
It's pretty easy really, and you don't have to predict Google executive tenures: if the founder of a service you are considering using sells the company to Google and runs a completely different product division afterwards, even if that service doesn't immediately sunset and lives on as a vanity project, it will die of neglect. The founder focuses on the job they were hired for, and the competition will not remain in stasis like the service inevitably does.
Ah, so the solution is to understand the internal culture of every company you do business with?
Our definition of 'easy really' might be very different. In fact, whenever someone talks about complex topics and starts off with 'easy really' I cringe. There's a certain perspective people have to have to use such language, and that perspective is very far from my general understanding that 'reality is complex'.
> Ah, so the solution is to understand the internal culture of every company you do business with?
I'm comfortable treating this as a universal constant. Any company that buys a startup and immediately promotes their CEO to a different department never cared about the startup they just bought.
I think that's a good heuristic if the product is a startup and if the executive moves on and if I can see that. But I'll note that even that's not perfect. YouTube was an acquisition where all of the founders moved on to other things, and 9 years later it's still doing fine.
Google internally is like a mini VC ecosystem. Google leaders calculate the opportunity cost of headcount instead of the actual cost, so if a project isn't worth at least a million per man-year it gets shut down in favor of other projects which might fuel the system in the future.
Yes, but when a VC creates a product, he doesn't name it:
VC's Product Name
Why? Because then his name is behind it. Instead, he invests.
Google could choose to create products that aren't google branded as an experiment. Then they can win/fail on their own merit.
But google doesn't choose to do that. They use their branding and marketing machine. They know they are using their brand to create trust. Then they betray it.
Seems pretty clear to me and it even seems odd the naivete some people here display, it's almost as if they had an interest in seeing google as a force of good, when they clearly removed their 'do no evil'.
There is a choice being made, and the choice has a reason. They have every right to do as they please with their brand, we have every right to find it sneaky, dishonest and something that makes us less likely to get burned again (jumping on board other google projects)
For better or worse, brands exist. I love my Nike shoes because they are super comfortable and last a long time. I might be able to get cheaper sneakers that are just as good. But I'm loyal to the brand because they consistently produce great products. If that stopped being the case, I'd stop paying the Nike brand premium. Can Nike experiment? Sure, hopefully not under the Nike brand (in fact, that does happen, many companies in many industries own more than one brand and keep the flagship brand separate from more experimental brands on a PR basis)
No 10-person company's product story is as unfocused and insane as Google's. They abandon products right after building them, they change names of products confusingly and frequently, and they always have 2+ products that mostly overlap.
There's this sense that we're constantly being baited and switched. No small company could afford to give its users whiplash as often as Google does.
The difference between Google and a 10 person company is that at Google if a neighboring product is more successful then it will cannibalize the lesser products staff, while a 10 person company will be there as long as it is profitable.
This makes sense, Hire was born out of Bebop (founded by Diane Greene, former VMware founder/CEO).
Google acquihired Bebop to get Diane Greene as head of Google Cloud (which is why this product was lumped under their cloud division), but she left Google earlier this year. No reason for Google to keep it running now.
So I guess we now passed the aqui-hire (acquire a company you're not interested in to get the people you want) and arrived at the prod-hire: Build a product you're not interested in to acquire a company you're not interested in to get the people you want.
2. Fully automated products and processes for a wide spectrum of users who need to adopt to Google and not the other way around
To sell big Enterprise contracts, Google needs to listen to these customers specific needs and promise solutions. I don't think Google has this capability in its DNA. This must be very frustrating from someone like Diana Green that is used to operate a company in a different way. Could be the reason that she left her role.
There is no reason this needs to be a SAAS product, and at this point we should know better than to trusting any SAAS product offered by Google.
I wish they would take the approach of making it trivial for me to host an open source version myself on Google Cloud rather than just throwing away the work: it would let them keep making money and mean that I could actually have enough faith to use their products.
Lord no. My thinking was "I wonder what high-priority project required the talent that was working on Hire that they had to reorg the teams to it and kill the product."
I don't think Google has ever had any layoffs. (The use of contractors allows many companies to downsize without actual layoffs, but I don't think even that strategy has really been the case during Google's history so far, which has been growth heavy and cash rich for the most part.)
This is surprising considering how many companies I've seen use Hire in my current job search. Was it not profitable? I wonder what the backlash is going to be for all the companies that spent time integrating it into their hiring workflows.
I'd love this, a private server that ran apps (running on my box at home or maybe on an AWS instance) I can access via a web browser: no more senseless version upgrades with all the UI changes to boot, dropped file formats, license key nightmares, and of course ended products.
Some people have never stopped thinking that way. Some of us have questioned every single "we'll just use google <blah>" decision/discussion every time it's come up.
Yep. Though some of the cloud glue-like things sure do seem appealing.
So my current thinking is build it on VM but glue it together with cloud...ideally with something that is available in multiple clouds. e.g. GCP and Azure both have pub/sub and both have cloud functions
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadSomeone already has a PR to add Hire: https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/pull/567
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hire
https://www.bizjournals.com/bizwomen/news/latest-news/2018/1...
"Greene joined Google in 2015 when the search giant bought her startup, Bebop, for $380 million."
$380mm sounds like a pretty great signing bonus.
Edit: I shouldn't have spoke so soon re: the signing bonus joke. Looks like she ended up donating her $150mm share: "Greene intends to donate $148.62 million of those proceeds 'to a donor advised fund.'"
They marketed Hire by Google hard. Glad we didn't sign up and waste integration effort on this.
“Flutter’s ability for real time UI iteration is a game changer in the way we polish and refine designs” - @MatiasDuarte https://twitter.com/FlutterDev/status/994658401132019712
It is very unprofessional to try to get companies to change their processes to depend in a product that you are closing.
I wont touch Google products with a 10ft pole for my company any time soon. It is a liability.
There is (practically) no "search" revenue that is not "ads" revenue. Ads is close to 90% of all Google's revenue. The remainder is not broken down in the earnings report, although I suspect it's largely their cloud computing business. Thus, Google's two revenue lines are really ads and cloud, with the latter much smaller than the former, and probably with a lower margin too.
They're apparently not interested in offering an ad service that just shows ads related to the topic of the site/article (or that have identified the types/topics of sites/articles they wish the ad to appear on), the way that e.g. magazine ads would be "targeted".
I can much more likely rely on a 10 person startup who're turning over, say 50mil and clearing a few mil a year of profit after all expenses. That's a stable reliable business.
At Google, that's defined as "failure" and designed straight to the Google Graveyard.
Even a 1 person startup making a few hundred thou per year is a better bet for me - I'd sooner have Pinboard as a critical dependancy for my business than any shiny new Google toy like, say, Flutter...
A year is a pretty long time!
I am curious about usage numbers on some of these though.... like if these products were actually really successful I don't think Google would actually kill them.
I can't be the only one.
I'm not holding my breath.
I'm super confused by their blog post:
https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-hangou...
So for regular old consumer Hangouts (formerly part of G+) is that going away too? What happens to the phone number I have attached to it. .. I feel like I should port that way from Google sooner rather than later.
It's these smaller apps that suffer because $400/month isn't enough to make a difference at Google scale. They do have a mandate to keep innovating but it's a strange cycle where the company produces some great software and then abandons it due to lack of success, because it's already too successful.
Hire was a G Suite app.
But since I started to use GCP 2012 a number of services has been left to die by abandonement.
Most of the times you get a clear migration path to a new service, but sometimes you dont such as when they kill the devserver for appengine standard in go 1.12 without giving a proper migration strategy. Everyone I know dread when they decide to deprecate go 1.11 support.
If it's not ad sales or search - I don't trust Google enough to base long term projects on it. _Maybe_ add gmail to that, perhaps. Possibly Suite (since at least they charge for it). For me at least, Google Cloud is still not quite emerged from "interesting, but not sure it'll be around long term yet" status. I'll use it as part of a multicloud architecture, or for prototypes/short-term projects. But I haven't yet been able to convince myself to recommend jumping both feet into a GoogleCloud-specific project architecture - in the same way I happily recommend/design/deploy AWS-specific projects all the time.
Google Cloud as a whole is also safe. It's the individual given products you have to worry about disappearing. It's already a very large business. Even in third place it's going to be at least a $15-$20 billion business over time. They're not shutting that down.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cloud-arr-earnings-8-...
And honestly, I am really glad that google products are dying. I switched to DDG 6 months ago, Firefox 1.5 years ago and I dont miss either of the products. Hopefully big tech monopolies will start crumbling one way or the other.
Also if there is a Google product that does something I need then I will almost always pick a worse alternative because I don't want to deal with the hassle of moving when Google eventually shuts down their thing.
Maybe they don’t like being #5 best product in the category or something.
The constant churn of companies getting acquired by Google continually justifies the anger on HN after a Google acquisition of their favourite products IMO, there’s a high probability they’ll shut it down even when Google claims they want to continue the business and even if it’s successful by a lot of other business’s standards.
$380 million they paid is no acquihire.
So, they're just shovelling the money into a furnace? Or perhaps you just mean that Google buying the company a member of the board founded isn't arms-length enough to justify the term, and this falls into some form of theft or bribery?
The fact that they are not doing things like that, repeatedly, is a bad sign for me. Well, at least they seem to keep search, maps, and gmail around for some time, because these obviously generate money for their main line of business, advertising.
I don't know how many companies were using it, which probably explains why it is being sunsetted. And they're giving it a year before turning it off.
Edit: disclaimer, I’m founder and CEO there.
[0] https://byteboard.dev/
Exactly the same. Google often shuts down a service in favor of alternatives it already have, like Hangouts=>Duo and Inbox=>GMail.
https://area120.google.com/
Using the google brand provides(provided) a sense of respectability and deeper pockets/longer term vision.
Some users, I believe rightfully so, feel betrayed by google's lackadaisical approach to starting and shutting down projects. Especially when comparing the effort to market vs create a great product. Like google +, it was shoved down people's throats, only to be tossed.
I know how to evaluate a startup's potential failure. Who's funding them? How much money do they have? How popular are they? How solid's the product? What are the founders like? Heck, for a lot of small startups, you can just ask to talk to the CEO if it's what it will take to close the deal. And I have a good idea of the conditions under which they'll throw in the towel.
But Google product success seems to depend entirely on internal politics, which are completely opaque to me. As traek explains, this product only exists at Google because Google wanted to hire the company's CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815572
And it stopped existing because she left Google. How could I possibly predict that? Better just to stay away, I figure, unless it's an obvious money-maker or has high strategic value.
I cannot ever expect to "negotiate with Google".
It's pretty easy really, and you don't have to predict Google executive tenures: if the founder of a service you are considering using sells the company to Google and runs a completely different product division afterwards, even if that service doesn't immediately sunset and lives on as a vanity project, it will die of neglect. The founder focuses on the job they were hired for, and the competition will not remain in stasis like the service inevitably does.
Our definition of 'easy really' might be very different. In fact, whenever someone talks about complex topics and starts off with 'easy really' I cringe. There's a certain perspective people have to have to use such language, and that perspective is very far from my general understanding that 'reality is complex'.
I'm comfortable treating this as a universal constant. Any company that buys a startup and immediately promotes their CEO to a different department never cared about the startup they just bought.
VC's Product Name
Why? Because then his name is behind it. Instead, he invests.
Google could choose to create products that aren't google branded as an experiment. Then they can win/fail on their own merit.
But google doesn't choose to do that. They use their branding and marketing machine. They know they are using their brand to create trust. Then they betray it.
Seems pretty clear to me and it even seems odd the naivete some people here display, it's almost as if they had an interest in seeing google as a force of good, when they clearly removed their 'do no evil'.
There is a choice being made, and the choice has a reason. They have every right to do as they please with their brand, we have every right to find it sneaky, dishonest and something that makes us less likely to get burned again (jumping on board other google projects)
For better or worse, brands exist. I love my Nike shoes because they are super comfortable and last a long time. I might be able to get cheaper sneakers that are just as good. But I'm loyal to the brand because they consistently produce great products. If that stopped being the case, I'd stop paying the Nike brand premium. Can Nike experiment? Sure, hopefully not under the Nike brand (in fact, that does happen, many companies in many industries own more than one brand and keep the flagship brand separate from more experimental brands on a PR basis)
There's this sense that we're constantly being baited and switched. No small company could afford to give its users whiplash as often as Google does.
https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com
Google acquihired Bebop to get Diane Greene as head of Google Cloud (which is why this product was lumped under their cloud division), but she left Google earlier this year. No reason for Google to keep it running now.
The general struggle for Google is the difficulty in choosing a strategy for serving both
1. Enterprise customers with custom / manual / labor intensive needs
2. Fully automated products and processes for a wide spectrum of users who need to adopt to Google and not the other way around
To sell big Enterprise contracts, Google needs to listen to these customers specific needs and promise solutions. I don't think Google has this capability in its DNA. This must be very frustrating from someone like Diana Green that is used to operate a company in a different way. Could be the reason that she left her role.
I wish they would take the approach of making it trivial for me to host an open source version myself on Google Cloud rather than just throwing away the work: it would let them keep making money and mean that I could actually have enough faith to use their products.
I don't think Google has ever had any layoffs. (The use of contractors allows many companies to downsize without actual layoffs, but I don't think even that strategy has really been the case during Google's history so far, which has been growth heavy and cash rich for the most part.)
Proprietary stuff is starting to become flakey not in the uptime sense but pure lifespan. Almost like planned obsolescence became a thing with gear
It comes with it's own set of challenges, but I've found with the advent of docker it's quit easy to test running your own xyz server.
So my current thinking is build it on VM but glue it together with cloud...ideally with something that is available in multiple clouds. e.g. GCP and Azure both have pub/sub and both have cloud functions
The corporate equivalent of "spending more time with his family."