This comment seems to top any HN post regarding a google product launch so reliably that perhaps there should be a bot which automatically pins it to the top.
It's not noise, it's a valid market signal. So I'll side with automatically appending one such comment in every Google thread until their behavior visibly changes.
Every expression of anyone's reaction to a brand is “valid market signal” on the level that that is true of this, but that doesn't stop most of that from being noise in an HN comment thread.
> So I'll side with automatically appending one such comment in every Google thread until their behavior visibly changes.
Such an automated comment would still be noise, but would have less of excuse of being a valid market signal than comments posted organically, even if that was an excuse (which it's not.)
If HN is interested in the success/failure of products & services, product-market fit and such, then what Google have done to themselves is a fascinating phenomenon.
In the past, many companies have had "not great" reputations for supporting products, but surely Google have taken it to level not seen before. The fact that pretty much all of their products live in the cloud rather than being software that can continue to be used beyond the support period (ala Win98) has probably contributed a lot to that. I think the way that potential customers react to that reputation is very interesting.
We're at the point now where Google have clearly acquired this reputation and it's very likely to affect the adoption of anything they try to launch. The next phase will be Google recognising that and trying to correct it somehow. I'm keen to follow along and see how that goes.
> If HN is interested in the success/failure of products & services, product-market fit and such, then what Google have done to themselves is a fascinating phenomenon.
Sure, that's a reason discussion of the phenomenon is appropriate for HN, just as discussion of AI-driven automated spamming of message boards as a marketing technique might be. (Though, even then, not an appropriate thing to derail every thread in which a Google product is the subject into.)
OTOH, that doesn't make the phenomenon itself appropriate for HN, in any place.
> It is a necessary lens to view any new Google product through, though.
No, it's not.
> There is a real risk that they will abandon anything they launch.
There is a real risk that any company will do that, either by internal choice, or by change of plan due to acquisition, or by business failures. It really isn't necessary or helpful for people who have no interest in Google products because of their view of the brand (whether for this reason or any other) to pollute every discussion thread about a Google product with this.
The products themselves are often very interesting. The next step in consideration is whether they are fit for purpose, though. Google have made a reputation for themselves for abandoning their products/services, but at the same time anyone pragmatic will realise that they won't abandon everything they launch. So if you're interested in taking up a Google product, you will then consider whether it's one of the products/services that they are likely to continue supporting or not.
I think it's highly predictable. Where in their org does it fit, how much have they invested in it, how big is the opportunity, etc.
This isn't part of GSuite and therefore isn't subject to the same SLA. I wonder if the pricing will stick like this forever or if it will eventually be bundled, since Microsoft already includes something like this in 365 (and many companies probably already pay someone else for this type of functionality, like Airtable).
I'd be a little scared of paying for something in the Google incubator, knowing how they cull stuff that isn't popular. But maybe it'll be successful and go into the bundle.
"The Google incubator" is particularly accurate here, if you look at the tags on the blog: "Area 120". This is an app developed by one of their "let these people write random stuff" groups: https://area120.google.com/
To my knowledge, nothing majorly successful or long-term supported has ever come out of Area 120.
Area 120 is definitely not a bunch of random people coming together. The projects there are fully funded and do have corporate backing. They launch separate from the rest of Google, with the positive end result being absorbed by another team into a fully supported product.
> To my knowledge, nothing majorly successful or long-term supported has ever come out of Area 120.
Instead try evaluating the success of Area 120 by the number of Google staff members who have had their "incredible journey" itch scratched and then returned to a product or infrastructure team at Google when their Area 120 project is EOL'ed. From a corporate perspective, it's worth spending some money on throw-away projects to retain staff who might otherwise quit to pursue an actual startup.
I'm surprised it isn't there from the start, but some flexibility to sell this into organizations which have other suites is probably valuable for getting a hook in. My guess would be that they'll move it into the bundle at some point, but if it fails they might be able to avoid the price of long-term maintenance.
It also makes you wonder: If this isn’t part of GSuite, then where does it belong in the Google organisation?
If Tables is just it’s own thing, not related to search, GSuite, GCP or ads then it’s already dead. At some level it must suck to know that you’ve created a culture where people don’t even care to try out your new fancy gizmo, because they expect you to abandon to quickly it’s simply not worth investing you time in. Or does Google not know that how they’re perceived?
> If this isn’t part of GSuite, then where does it belong in the Google organisation?
I suspect if it were to ever emerge from the “internal incubator” Area 120 is described as, it would become a GSuite feature.
> Or does Google not know that how they’re perceived?
I think Google knows that people in certain circles talking nothing but that view. They probably also have real stats on how their experiments are picked up and used, and I suspect they aren't at all what the people who think that the perception you refer to do instead public consciousness would predict.
> I think Google knows that people in certain circles talking nothing but that view. They probably also have real stats on how their experiments are picked up and used, and I suspect they aren't at all what the people who think that the perception you refer to do instead public consciousness would predict.
It has to depend a lot on what type of product/service it is, too. For anything consumer facing, I imagine they don't see this effect harming take-up at all. It probably doesn't affect businesses looking to take-up the more established services like GSuite, but I have a really hard time believing that tech-savvy businesses are looking at any new APIs or services within GCP without considering what their lifetime will be.
You know Google has a serious credibility problem when half or more of the comments on tech sites covering product launches are questioning when Google will decide to randomly pull the plug.
They should release the financials of the app and let companies bid to acquire the app and its userbase. Smaller companies get a shot at growing the business, users stay happy(er than they would otherwise) and google gets a shot at acquiring the original idea back should it succeed under the hands of people who give a damn.
Unfortunately, such a program would likely be sunset after a year.
More importantly, this is all released on Google's internal infrastructure. Any such work would require moving to the external infrastructure, and the cost of it likely wouldn't make sense.
The real issue is this: Why am I paying 10 dollars/user/month for this when G suite Business is 12? I could see using this for the organization, but not at that cost.
The way Google builds software makes that approach tough.
Even if you had the source code to the app (which Google isn't about to give out at any price), what you'll find is that it's an app architected to link against libraries nobody has ever seen and run atop a distributed computing fabric that's loosely related to Kubernetes but, really, nobody's ever seen, storing data to a backing store nobody's ever seen, and identifying users via an authentication model that nobody's ever seen.
Dangling references all over the place, leading to special sauce Google is even less likely to publish, because it's deeply tied into a physical hardware architecture that Google can't publish, because even if they did nobody's going to build it.
Some of Google's user-facing stuff runs on the architectures they make public, like GCP. But a lot of it runs on Google's proprietary fabric of service management and distributed storage, which is an alien planet relative to the world outside their walls. Publishing an app out of that part of the ecosystem would be like Google handing a company a koala with no eucalyptus trees. It'd be dead in days.
Most of it is just the HN echo chamber. Folks commenting that GCP my be shut down because it doesn't make as much money as Azure, totally oblivious to the fact that Google has billions invested in physical buildings and hardware being hammered on and built out around the world as we speak, just shows that folks here are out of the loop on this type of thing.
I don't think this is true. Plenty of "normal", non-HN people bring this up too (I mean, not my mom, but like regular somewhat tech-savvy people). You can point to GCP all you want, but people are just going to keep pointing to https://killedbygoogle.com/.
From what I can tell, there isn't a single person in this thread claiming GCP may be shut down. And if there is, it certainly isn't a meaningful number of people.
What you're doing is claiming people hold an easily attackable position that they don't hold, and attacking that position. It's called strawmanning.
Not in this thread, but it has happened a couple of times in the past any time Google products / GCP have been brought up, and that I've replied to saying that it is nonsense.
Aside from an easily dismissed hardware-backed GCP case, Google _does_ have a long history of useful and interesting ideas that launch, gain some users, look really useful if some effort is put into it, and get dropped instead. Even if some solid use cases are building.
I'm going to look at this idea, see what it might be able to do, and look at whether there's another alternative that would be likelier to survive.
That is the exact thread I have a comment in from ~9 months ago. Anyone thinking that Google is going to shut down 24 physical datacenter regions spread all around the world if they're not #1 in the cloud market in 3 years is insane. The cloud market is multi billion dollar business and is only going to continue growing (even moreso now in the last ~9 months thanks to COVID). It isn't a free RSS aggregator that isn't maintained anymore and thus going to be sundowned.
1. Some of the things they launch they probably shouldn't be launching because they have next to no chance of ever being a meaningful business for Google. (eg. Google Helpouts)
2. Some of the things they launch are attempts to get into a particular area and Google's interest in that area lasts longer than their interest in whatever they initially launched. Chat is probably the best example of this; Google Talk, Hangouts, heck, I don't even know what it's called now! In such cases Google should be more disciplined about supporting whatever it is they've launched. Re-brand & iterate as much as they want, but never leave customers hanging.
I think if Google followed these two rules they would be sunsetting a lot less stuff. They might still need to retire the odd product/service, but at least they wouldn't be doing it so much that customers doubt every single launch.
Their current approach hasn't been working well for their customers, but it's actually going to begin affecting their customers less and affect Google more. Who in their right mind would put any medium/long term stock into Tables, for example? Customers no longer affected. Now Google can't launch a service that the market will take seriously.
They don't care. They're revenue is from ads. If they get a bump in revenue from gleaning information off of Tables (tm) to display relevant ads to you for the year this will be active, then maybe it was worth it.
It seems like 80% of these projects are pet projects by VPs so they can launch a Google project for their career or Google can keep them from leaving for Facebook.
The otherside of that coin is feature creep. Docs/sheets so their job fine, so aside from minor updates//fixes they don't need to substantially change; given their user based substantial redesigns should be their own product and if they prove to be substantially better then they can migrate away from the old docs/sheets
I'm inclined to agree with you on Docs though, there is a bunch of stuff that Notion does (really badly IMO) that Drive/Docs just can't do, and so people use Notion instead.
For example (in case any Google PMs are reading), folding bullets, easily embedding tables, embedding sub-docs, faster navigation/caching of folders in the web browser, and perhaps most important, a sensible way to build a wiki-type knowledge base, with "front pages" on each directory (like how Github handles README.md).
I call it Promo-Driven Development. You have to launch things to get promoted at Google, but you're not going to get demoted for transferring to a better project afterward.
Just like that one engineer on your team that says yes to everything the manager does while writing the worst spaghetti code because he knows once he gets promoted/leaves for greener pastures, someone else will take care of the mess and he will be long gone by then.
When you were a SaaS startup in the 2000s no one took you seriously. Now, the big players have a better chance of responding in a timely fashion.
It's going to be harder for these types of apps to get traction in less tech-centric markets. This is especially the case if the "it's part of the suite you own" argument starts to come up more frequently.
What a useful app. Reminds me of Airtable in some ways. I enjoy a good flexible table app any day.
We're all tired of the obligatory "I wonder how long before Google deprecates this...;)" but I wonder if Google would get better adoption if they explicitly published what would be needed for them not to drop the product... 1M monthly users? 3M? ...xM? or that when a project actually reaches that point.
The only way to rebuild credibility is to do the right thing repeatedly for a long period of time.
Google saying “if we get X users we won’t cancel it” both sounds like a hostage note, and doesn’t matter because we fundamentally don’t trust Google. Without that trust, it doesn’t matter why they say, since it won’t be believed.
If they say they need X users to not cancel something, that does nothing for me, even if I trust them. I will not sign up until it already hits that point, because before then, it's practically guaranteed to be canceled. And I bet at least X users would share my opinion.
If they could just commit to maintaining Hangouts, they would go a long way to rebuilding trust. I know many school aged kids who joined Hangouts (though Google classroom IIRC) as a painless way to collaborate with classmates and friends. It's literally a gold mine for "next generation" social networking, but the fact that they are killing Hangouts means those kids are all finding their way to other feature rich platforms, like Discord.
I wonder if Google would get better adoption if they explicitly published what would be needed for them not to drop the product..
Feedly picked up 3 million new users in the two weeks following Google shutting down Reader. Based on that alone I would never trust Google not to shut down a product that seems popular and well-used.
Literally the only thing that would change my perception of Google's short-termism would be if they don't shut down any products in the next 10 years.
[Disclosure I work at Google Area 120 and would be partly responsible for this type of decision]
This is a really helpful comment and I like the nod to transparency. Thank you! Not sure we could get quite so concrete publicly (there are lots of unknowns and wouldn't want to make commitments we can't keep), but aligning goals between the business, team, and users/customers is a great idea and something we can improve on.
I’m not sure the incentive is really wrong, although it sucks for the users affected. It’s sort of like how VCs want startups to reach unicorn status or go bust trying. Google doesn’t want to waste engineers running a lifestyle business.
As a Googler, I'd just say it's a boring meme that shows little thought and just wastes time actually getting to interesting discussion here. It's almost akin to "first" from the old days of Slashdot or the race to mention generics whenever anything related to Go comes up.
Products come and products go, this is not unique to Google. Killed By Google is cited as some sort of proof, but that goes back to _2003_, and does nothing to talk about whether the product was replaced with something new that users were transitioned to.
Then you have a company like Microsoft that keeps things around in perpetuity, but sometimes to the chagrin of users who want new features added or you get incongruent UX (you can still find plenty of very old apps in Windows 10). And this is fine too, but it's not a meme and so never comes up.
I don't see any condescending language in that comment. But with my disclosure, you will be quick to say, of course I can't.
Not sure where the "elite" or "450k/year" is coming from as well in the parent comment. Perhaps give that comment another chance to see what they are actually saying?
Calling it a boring meme is condescending. It's dismissing people's concerns as a joke they made up for attention, rather than addressing and refuting their actual argument.
Linking to killedbygoogle.com where more than half of things are not actually kiled by Google is not a good argument. I agree that products getting killed by Google is a concern and a few comment accurately point out and add to discussions while most of the others just keep repeating like a meme. Very rarely the discussion feels like a discussion.
OP brought up another point about Google being a 20 year old company so you are ought to see lot of products being shut down over the time. While the reply had nothing to do with that but instead resorted to ad hominem attack.
Well, nonetheless, the amount of privilege you wield is astronomical compared to me, and it's clear that you believe you're superior to me in every way. Unfortunately, you're probably right because I can't pass a top-tier tech interview.
Even if the complete public distrust of the companies ability to be reliable is "just a meme" it's brand damaging and creates a scenario that impacts adoption of new products.
While products come and go is true, it's more a matter of scale on why this reputation exists.
I know I personally have been burned by the platform I was using going out from beneath me. That memory comes up each time I am considering between an AWS (where its never happened to me), azure, and google cloud solution.
Your dismiss response has made me even more confident Google plans to immediately abandon this (as well as other services I might be interested in, including end-user ones like Stadia), not less.
It's not a meme. It's a very real problem that prevents people from wanting to invest in Google services. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy too when people don't use these services, then they get shuttered for low usage.
Google has a huge amount of work to do to earn the trust they've burned, and responses like this damage the cause further. You've cemented firmly in my mind that staying the hell away from this and anything Google has to offer is the right choice, as they clearly don't take this problem seriously and won't even acknowledge it.
The point is, what differentiates products that come out of this project from another startup that is also struggling to stay afloat? If the answer is nothing, then why should anyone treat you any differently (because those other companies also get hit hard on that point)? Why shouldn't customers be weary about relying on your products if there isn't a commitment? You are free to call it a boring meme, but to me, these are very valid concerns. Sorry, you don't get a free pass because you're Google, and IMHO it should get scrutinized even more because its from Google for obvious reasons (poor privacy, track record of poor UI performance, s/w is often sluggish/resource hog, etc, etc)
>Then you have a company like Microsoft that keeps things around in perpetuity, but sometimes to the chagrin of users who want new features added or you get incongruent UX (you can still find plenty of very old apps in Windows 10). And this is fine too, but it's not a meme and so never comes up.
I'm not exactly the biggest fan of MS, but our company has saved tens of thousands of dollars in software costs because we could use old software designed for Win XP/7 on Win 10 w/o re-buying the software from the vendor. (Biotech s/w costs can get super crazy, esp with 21CFR validation)
No, you get a thick skin pretty quickly as a Google PM (and come to think of it as a Twitter PM too, my former job). Constructive comments are helpful and even the raw frustration I know is coming from a genuine place. Having your tools disappear sucks. I feel that too.
Could Google not commit to open sourcing projects in a maintainable way (public repos, k8s support versus just Borg, which no one has access to) and guarantee data export functionality as part of Takeout? This would significantly derisk attempting to use a fledgling Google service for end users.
Definitely not a resourcing issue, entirely an organizational culture and philosophy decision to be made.
I don't work at Google but my understanding is there are a lot of proprietary, closed-source internal APIs that make this difficult-bordering-impossible.
This is the primary reason I don’t use new Google labs tools any more. If there was an explicit “we guarantee this will be fully supported for X length of time and migration will be easy if we kill it” I would be far more likely to adopt new tools.
Also, is Area 120 the new Google Labs? I thought they killed off the whole Labs thing a couple of years ago? (The irony is not lost on me here.)
This is an experimental project obviously and has that Area120 tag but I think there should be a uniform experimental logo/icon across all of Google products for any projects which is provided as is with no upfront commitment to long term support or sustainability.
Once the distinction between products with long-term commitment and experimental products is super clear with a uniform icon/logo then there'll be less disappointment and upset future customers
Just to confirm, the Area 120 labelling is meant to do exactly that. Area 120 projects do not have long-term commitments, explicitly. But the goal is for the successful ones to graduate to be a fully supported Google product and gain those commitments at that time (we have a number of examples of that happening).
IMO it's still not clear from a single glance. Either no Google logo anywhere near experimental stuff or a super visible uniform "Beta/Experimental" logo as long as a product has no long term commitment.
I'd say they should use the same logo whether it's an area120 project, an experimental chrome extension from YT team, some research experiment, some VR experimental app, etc.
nothing will lead to better adoption, because, as others have pointed out, google has trashed its brand (at least among techies) because of structural issues like promotion-hopping and big game hunting (where, for example, a $50M business is just way beneath them).
further, we're never going to get sustainable businesses out of google because they don't have the patience relative to their search and advertising behemoths. these kinds of projects are designed to keep the more adventurous developers in the fold with golden handcuffs, to both reduce existential threats to google and as a held front in the developer wars against other tech companies. lastly, constraints spur ingenuity (business and technical), and google engineers are just too comfortable for that.
all that (and more) means that google is simply not in the business of creating new businesses, no matter the rhetoric. unless something drastic changes, there's no reason to invest in any new google development.
It seems like some folks at Google just woke up to Airtable and launched a counter MVP. I do not really expect more from Google any more. When there are tough competitors, why would people use something else which does not even look quite finished?
Google has reach (read search monopoly), so I guess that is an angle.
Google should be inspired by their more nimble competitors! Their main problem is not offering Tables as part of G Suite where it would boost their offerings in the office productivity space and deliver a more complete and coherent strategy. That is, if they are really commit to Tables and are ready to offer proper corporate support and maintenance...
Interesting that they would launch this as a totally separate product and not as a part of G Suite.
Do you think they want to create some distance between them and the rest of Google because ofd Google's reputation of shutting down products? Or maybe they want to launch a product outside the usual bureaucracy?
Right but you can be sure that many people across several teams inside of Google have thought about creating a Airtable clone. Somehow Google greenlit this as a standalone product amongst many other options...
> Somehow Google greenlit this as a standalone product amongst many other options...
Even before the “internal incubator” that this came out of, Google hasn't been known for doing a single exclusive offering in a space, so this probably wasn't centrally green lot (because otherwise “internal incubator” makes little sense), and it's release wouldn't (even if it was) exclude another Google offering in the same space. The competitive process you imagine just doesn't seem likely to even approximate the truth.
Google Maps was a 20% eons ago, wasn't it? So there is a chance that it becomes part of Google's corporate goals, e.g. making G Suite essential to businesses.
I've used G Suite exclusively for something like 7-8 years now. The core products (Docs, Sheets, Slides) are rock solid and well integrated, and I've never found myself missing a feature. The drawing tool (what is it even called? Draw? Drawings?) is a bit of a toy, but there are plenty of alternatives.
It's the reverse: GSuite products have a mandatory minimum level of support (and integrate with the Suite). Area 120 is for standalone products that have zero promise of support.
Apart from pulling the plug on products at random, why I'm sceptical is because this hasn't been introduced / used internally widely.
Think of it like a product Google created, say Cloud, but doesn't use it itself. Oh wait. It doesn't.
You know what would help, Google? Slightly incentives early adopters somewhat, with perks in the same product if you sign up early enough.
Google Apps (precursor to G Suite) effectively did that. Free plan was 100 users at first. Maybe even higher. Then it got reduced to 15 or something. Then 5. Then they removed the free plan, for new signups.
I am pretty happy to be on a 100 user plan, I know I would easily pay $15-25/month for a few containersed Google accounts with my own domain names.
But because I signed up early as a Google adopter, and I get a little discount in a way. That's cool, and made me happy to be an early adopter.
You should try to do the same for new products. Maybe for the first adopters, offer them 10 paid seats for lifetime of their account, for free.
The future revenue cost is small because early adopters are just viral advocates (you want them!); and the developer/techie market can set trends.
$10 a month! This does look really useful, and seems like a smart move: I like AirTable, but if they integrate this into gsuite then I'm way more likely to use it for random things.
Interesting to see it being paid though! The free tier seems very limited for a google product: 1000 rows, 100 tables, 50 bot actions... paid version is $10 a month. 1000 rows won't be enough for anything serious - so they must be really betting on people paying. I guess that's also why it's not integrated directly with GSuite?
Hey there! I'm the Tables PM and your comment caught my eye.
I really appreciate that feedback for us, and we're really hoping to make it as useful as possible for you and others! :) As prlambert@ mentioned in another comment, we're kinda like a startup and if things go well, the goal is graduate into larger parts of Google.
A point of clarification on the free tier: we're offering 1000 rows per table--an individual tab within a workspace--which we hope offers a lot of flexibility in mixing and matching data in a workspace to track your work together. If there's particular use cases you have that involve over a 1000 rows, we'd love to hear more about it. Thanks for taking a look at the product!
Cool. I would migrate my personal bookmarks to Table, and you how it can grow through the time, actually I have 6k records. Another real use case is tracking compliance recommendations for simple teams operating in 300 locations around the world, I would assign 200 tasks per office that staff must follow up each 6 months for 4 periods, just need to use a couple of process flow triggers in order to make it operative. To me this kind of tools like Table, Airtable, MS Lists, are way more than project management, may fit any low-no-code mvp where you just need to crud, use fast filters, identify records visually easy, automate approval mechanism and archive records when completed for future audits. IMO there are more hacker user cases where you just need to store gathered/enritched information that you want to access human friendly (even from an app) without having to build a frontend client, 100k free records would be acceptable if Google decides to go very generous with the ordinary Maker, anyways how much cost store 1000 records? This is something you can measure in money at Google?
Congrats, I hope this product comes to life and be the next must-have tool, I think they will be super cheap in the future anyways because lack of unfair advantage, it's a platform that just need to be ready to be integrable with all existing apis and that have the ability to execute lambdas. But has to be secured otherwise not recommended to be used with sensitive info, I would trust in Google since I use Gmail for my personal things.
I wouldn't surprise when Soho comes with something similar.
That's really helpful to hear, thanks for the examples. I definitely agree that there's potential for supporting use cases beyond just simple work tracking, and into more advanced workflows, and I'm hoping that we'll be able to make Tables useful for some of those use cases in the future too.
Thanks for the kind words, and I hope Tables will help people and businesses in positive ways as well! From my perspective, we just want to offer a decent option for users who want to track team work within the Google ecosystem, especially during this time with covid forcing many businesses to digitize and work remotely.
Thanks for sharing those use cases and we'll take that feedback on the limits back to the team.
Google Announces that Google Tables will be sunset and all users will have to migrate away by Sept 23, 2021.
"Google Tables was a great experiment but we're migrating to Google Tracker - a better version of Google Tables designed for power users." said Dep Re. Kated, VP of Engineering at Google.
Google Tables has no migration tool or system for users to export their data angering some users.
There's no support available for people wanting to get their data off the platform and many users are upset.
"There's no support number? I can't even pay if I wanted to!" said Alice Bob Carol, a huge fan of Google Tables that is upset it's going away.
When I tried to login it told me that "suspicious behavior was detected" and locked my account. Now I can't get access to my data and there's no one I can even contact!
(this was a parody but I'm calling it now - Google products are already dead when they're launched)
What's funny is people acting like this is a joke. It isn't. Adding this to your workflow is asking for a headache in a few years when this gets shut down. Google currently has 5 products that are shutting down between now and the end of 2021. https://killedbygoogle.com/
Seriously, we're an enterprise G-suite customer and Google really does move too fast for us. It pisses off our executives when things change/get removed. We'll be migrating to O365, despite all its flaws and uptime problems.
THIS! , considering the news that they are sunsetting chrome payment api(ish), anyways.. Google used to invent a lot of cool products during their 80/20 rule i guess, and blockbuster hits like gmail, gchat and a lot came out, but only a very few left :(
This is often claimed, but more often than not, data provided by export features, and not just Google's, are in a format which makes it useless to non-programmers.
That's going to be the common case; without knowing the end-target application, most data formats we would pick at random are useless to non-programmers.
Plaintext is too complex for programmers and likely drops semantic information that is needed to reconstruct the relations in the original data.
There's a reason plaintext is rarely used as the preferred method of semantic data exchange. What's our preferred method of representing images with plaintext? Audio files? Rich text, such as Google Docs? Spreadsheets (complete with formulae and attached macros)? Databases that contain bin-blob fields?
> And also can be re-imported into just about anything with a quick Perl script.
In your specific use case, I expect that works well. In the general case, my experience has been that plaintext can be imported into just about anything incorrectly with a quick Perl script. And when the data is MBs / GBs, the odds that such an error goes unnoticed until the data is needed and cannot be reconstituted are high.
For instance, consider email or newsgroups formats, with key-value attribute headers, with the difference of putting them at the bottom of the file.
With each "item" being a text file, you could easily fit the average person's Facebook profile into a zip file of (folder-arranged) text files with the content at the top and the extra attributes (e.g. timestamp, reply-to, etc.) below.
Even for someone very active, this would only be several hundred text files per day, so several hundred thousand per year, and several million for an entire profile. With that many, you'd probably have to split them up, but for the average person with maybe several hundred thousand, that's a manageable number of textfiles to put into a zip file.
These textfiles could be almost trivially imported into a relational database with a simple script.
At the same time, the user can also browse the contents of the zip file if the folder structure is arranged thoughtfully.
Of course, I am talking about text only, not images or videos. For these, you would have to either use metadata or have a matching text-file to go with the file.
Good. I still remember when Facebook export was some shitty useless html garbage file, that didn't even include post types, or names of other people, or sensible structure (just a soup of <br> tags), or entity IDs, and was basically useless for about anything.
These days exports are at least usable, so that you can hire a programmer to make something useful out of it, if you need.
I've already helped people make tools to create automated summaries for counting billable hours for language lessons taught over skype or messanger, which was only possible thanks to these exports finally being in some processable format, with enough metadata included.
It's not either or though. Services can export in both nice usable formats, and html garbage that is nice to look at but useless for anything else.
Given this is explicitly being launched under "Area 120", "Google's workshop for experimental products", I think it's fair to let them ship things, try things out, see what works, and close what doesn't.
If you're starting a new team today, or a hobby project, or you have very little movement cost and low risk choosing a new service, then maybe you read this page, see a thing that this solves that has frustrated you about a previous tool, and you go for it. That's why a customer might choose it.
That's winning an early customer, that's proving product/market fit, that's progress. That's why Google would do this.
The marketing material pitches it as a much bigger deal, but then would anyone sign up if it didn't? There's a minimum quality bar that many people expect before signing up, and from a known entity like Google that's likely a much higher bar.
I almost wonder if they're making problems for themselves by naming it under the Google brand? Being completely separate they'd be able to fail faster, ship something lower quality that still proved product/market fit, etc. Area 120 seems to be their attempt to create this space, but I'm undecided on how well I think it will work.
For most companies this is a bit ridiculous. The UK government runs on Google Apps. Many schools and universities use Google Apps. Many large companies are on GCP.
Unless you're a Google competitor there's likely no reason to exclude Google products.
374 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadIn terms of HN’s overt purpose, it is.
> it's a valid market signal
Every expression of anyone's reaction to a brand is “valid market signal” on the level that that is true of this, but that doesn't stop most of that from being noise in an HN comment thread.
> So I'll side with automatically appending one such comment in every Google thread until their behavior visibly changes.
Such an automated comment would still be noise, but would have less of excuse of being a valid market signal than comments posted organically, even if that was an excuse (which it's not.)
In the past, many companies have had "not great" reputations for supporting products, but surely Google have taken it to level not seen before. The fact that pretty much all of their products live in the cloud rather than being software that can continue to be used beyond the support period (ala Win98) has probably contributed a lot to that. I think the way that potential customers react to that reputation is very interesting.
We're at the point now where Google have clearly acquired this reputation and it's very likely to affect the adoption of anything they try to launch. The next phase will be Google recognising that and trying to correct it somehow. I'm keen to follow along and see how that goes.
Sure, that's a reason discussion of the phenomenon is appropriate for HN, just as discussion of AI-driven automated spamming of message boards as a marketing technique might be. (Though, even then, not an appropriate thing to derail every thread in which a Google product is the subject into.)
OTOH, that doesn't make the phenomenon itself appropriate for HN, in any place.
No, it's not.
> There is a real risk that they will abandon anything they launch.
There is a real risk that any company will do that, either by internal choice, or by change of plan due to acquisition, or by business failures. It really isn't necessary or helpful for people who have no interest in Google products because of their view of the brand (whether for this reason or any other) to pollute every discussion thread about a Google product with this.
I think it's highly predictable. Where in their org does it fit, how much have they invested in it, how big is the opportunity, etc.
I'd be a little scared of paying for something in the Google incubator, knowing how they cull stuff that isn't popular. But maybe it'll be successful and go into the bundle.
To my knowledge, nothing majorly successful or long-term supported has ever come out of Area 120.
By lived I do mean no changes to end user for the absorption into another team.
Instead try evaluating the success of Area 120 by the number of Google staff members who have had their "incredible journey" itch scratched and then returned to a product or infrastructure team at Google when their Area 120 project is EOL'ed. From a corporate perspective, it's worth spending some money on throw-away projects to retain staff who might otherwise quit to pursue an actual startup.
If Tables is just it’s own thing, not related to search, GSuite, GCP or ads then it’s already dead. At some level it must suck to know that you’ve created a culture where people don’t even care to try out your new fancy gizmo, because they expect you to abandon to quickly it’s simply not worth investing you time in. Or does Google not know that how they’re perceived?
I suspect if it were to ever emerge from the “internal incubator” Area 120 is described as, it would become a GSuite feature.
> Or does Google not know that how they’re perceived?
I think Google knows that people in certain circles talking nothing but that view. They probably also have real stats on how their experiments are picked up and used, and I suspect they aren't at all what the people who think that the perception you refer to do instead public consciousness would predict.
It has to depend a lot on what type of product/service it is, too. For anything consumer facing, I imagine they don't see this effect harming take-up at all. It probably doesn't affect businesses looking to take-up the more established services like GSuite, but I have a really hard time believing that tech-savvy businesses are looking at any new APIs or services within GCP without considering what their lifetime will be.
Unfortunately, such a program would likely be sunset after a year.
The real issue is this: Why am I paying 10 dollars/user/month for this when G suite Business is 12? I could see using this for the organization, but not at that cost.
If nobody wants to pay, you at least know that.
Even if you had the source code to the app (which Google isn't about to give out at any price), what you'll find is that it's an app architected to link against libraries nobody has ever seen and run atop a distributed computing fabric that's loosely related to Kubernetes but, really, nobody's ever seen, storing data to a backing store nobody's ever seen, and identifying users via an authentication model that nobody's ever seen.
Dangling references all over the place, leading to special sauce Google is even less likely to publish, because it's deeply tied into a physical hardware architecture that Google can't publish, because even if they did nobody's going to build it.
Some of Google's user-facing stuff runs on the architectures they make public, like GCP. But a lot of it runs on Google's proprietary fabric of service management and distributed storage, which is an alien planet relative to the world outside their walls. Publishing an app out of that part of the ecosystem would be like Google handing a company a koala with no eucalyptus trees. It'd be dead in days.
I don't think this is true. Plenty of "normal", non-HN people bring this up too (I mean, not my mom, but like regular somewhat tech-savvy people). You can point to GCP all you want, but people are just going to keep pointing to https://killedbygoogle.com/.
What you're doing is claiming people hold an easily attackable position that they don't hold, and attacking that position. It's called strawmanning.
I'm going to look at this idea, see what it might be able to do, and look at whether there's another alternative that would be likelier to survive.
“Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260
And they point blank said that Google is not investing into GCP and implied that it's on a death bed.
LOL
1. Some of the things they launch they probably shouldn't be launching because they have next to no chance of ever being a meaningful business for Google. (eg. Google Helpouts)
2. Some of the things they launch are attempts to get into a particular area and Google's interest in that area lasts longer than their interest in whatever they initially launched. Chat is probably the best example of this; Google Talk, Hangouts, heck, I don't even know what it's called now! In such cases Google should be more disciplined about supporting whatever it is they've launched. Re-brand & iterate as much as they want, but never leave customers hanging.
I think if Google followed these two rules they would be sunsetting a lot less stuff. They might still need to retire the odd product/service, but at least they wouldn't be doing it so much that customers doubt every single launch.
Their current approach hasn't been working well for their customers, but it's actually going to begin affecting their customers less and affect Google more. Who in their right mind would put any medium/long term stock into Tables, for example? Customers no longer affected. Now Google can't launch a service that the market will take seriously.
Not sure when that was released, though!
We are talking about document sizes that Word for Windows 95 could handle.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/connecting-bi...
I'm inclined to agree with you on Docs though, there is a bunch of stuff that Notion does (really badly IMO) that Drive/Docs just can't do, and so people use Notion instead.
For example (in case any Google PMs are reading), folding bullets, easily embedding tables, embedding sub-docs, faster navigation/caching of folders in the web browser, and perhaps most important, a sensible way to build a wiki-type knowledge base, with "front pages" on each directory (like how Github handles README.md).
It's going to be harder for these types of apps to get traction in less tech-centric markets. This is especially the case if the "it's part of the suite you own" argument starts to come up more frequently.
We're all tired of the obligatory "I wonder how long before Google deprecates this...;)" but I wonder if Google would get better adoption if they explicitly published what would be needed for them not to drop the product... 1M monthly users? 3M? ...xM? or that when a project actually reaches that point.
Google saying “if we get X users we won’t cancel it” both sounds like a hostage note, and doesn’t matter because we fundamentally don’t trust Google. Without that trust, it doesn’t matter why they say, since it won’t be believed.
Feedly picked up 3 million new users in the two weeks following Google shutting down Reader. Based on that alone I would never trust Google not to shut down a product that seems popular and well-used.
Literally the only thing that would change my perception of Google's short-termism would be if they don't shut down any products in the next 10 years.
This is a really helpful comment and I like the nod to transparency. Thank you! Not sure we could get quite so concrete publicly (there are lots of unknowns and wouldn't want to make commitments we can't keep), but aligning goals between the business, team, and users/customers is a great idea and something we can improve on.
I'm a stranger on the internet and even I can feel the burn.
Good luck.
Products come and products go, this is not unique to Google. Killed By Google is cited as some sort of proof, but that goes back to _2003_, and does nothing to talk about whether the product was replaced with something new that users were transitioned to.
Then you have a company like Microsoft that keeps things around in perpetuity, but sometimes to the chagrin of users who want new features added or you get incongruent UX (you can still find plenty of very old apps in Windows 10). And this is fine too, but it's not a meme and so never comes up.
Not sure where the "elite" or "450k/year" is coming from as well in the parent comment. Perhaps give that comment another chance to see what they are actually saying?
Disc: Googler.
OP brought up another point about Google being a 20 year old company so you are ought to see lot of products being shut down over the time. While the reply had nothing to do with that but instead resorted to ad hominem attack.
Unlike me, he has absurd wealth. I’m lucky if I hit $200k after 3 years tenure at Amazon.
While products come and go is true, it's more a matter of scale on why this reputation exists.
I know I personally have been burned by the platform I was using going out from beneath me. That memory comes up each time I am considering between an AWS (where its never happened to me), azure, and google cloud solution.
It's not a meme. It's a very real problem that prevents people from wanting to invest in Google services. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy too when people don't use these services, then they get shuttered for low usage.
Google has a huge amount of work to do to earn the trust they've burned, and responses like this damage the cause further. You've cemented firmly in my mind that staying the hell away from this and anything Google has to offer is the right choice, as they clearly don't take this problem seriously and won't even acknowledge it.
I really think you should reconsider.
It's also a consequence of the business models that Google has explicitly chosen, i.e. your employer has chosen to incur this reputation.
>Then you have a company like Microsoft that keeps things around in perpetuity, but sometimes to the chagrin of users who want new features added or you get incongruent UX (you can still find plenty of very old apps in Windows 10). And this is fine too, but it's not a meme and so never comes up.
I'm not exactly the biggest fan of MS, but our company has saved tens of thousands of dollars in software costs because we could use old software designed for Win XP/7 on Win 10 w/o re-buying the software from the vendor. (Biotech s/w costs can get super crazy, esp with 21CFR validation)
Definitely not a resourcing issue, entirely an organizational culture and philosophy decision to be made.
Also, is Area 120 the new Google Labs? I thought they killed off the whole Labs thing a couple of years ago? (The irony is not lost on me here.)
Once the distinction between products with long-term commitment and experimental products is super clear with a uniform icon/logo then there'll be less disappointment and upset future customers
I'd say they should use the same logo whether it's an area120 project, an experimental chrome extension from YT team, some research experiment, some VR experimental app, etc.
further, we're never going to get sustainable businesses out of google because they don't have the patience relative to their search and advertising behemoths. these kinds of projects are designed to keep the more adventurous developers in the fold with golden handcuffs, to both reduce existential threats to google and as a held front in the developer wars against other tech companies. lastly, constraints spur ingenuity (business and technical), and google engineers are just too comfortable for that.
all that (and more) means that google is simply not in the business of creating new businesses, no matter the rhetoric. unless something drastic changes, there's no reason to invest in any new google development.
Google has reach (read search monopoly), so I guess that is an angle.
Do you think they want to create some distance between them and the rest of Google because ofd Google's reputation of shutting down products? Or maybe they want to launch a product outside the usual bureaucracy?
It literally just has no backing by Google's corporate or business goals.
Even before the “internal incubator” that this came out of, Google hasn't been known for doing a single exclusive offering in a space, so this probably wasn't centrally green lot (because otherwise “internal incubator” makes little sense), and it's release wouldn't (even if it was) exclude another Google offering in the same space. The competitive process you imagine just doesn't seem likely to even approximate the truth.
thatsthejoke.gif
I laughed at that, at first, thinking it were a joke.
No, no that's a quote from https://area120.google.com/
Google Apps (precursor to G Suite) effectively did that. Free plan was 100 users at first. Maybe even higher. Then it got reduced to 15 or something. Then 5. Then they removed the free plan, for new signups.
I am pretty happy to be on a 100 user plan, I know I would easily pay $15-25/month for a few containersed Google accounts with my own domain names.
But because I signed up early as a Google adopter, and I get a little discount in a way. That's cool, and made me happy to be an early adopter.
You should try to do the same for new products. Maybe for the first adopters, offer them 10 paid seats for lifetime of their account, for free.
The future revenue cost is small because early adopters are just viral advocates (you want them!); and the developer/techie market can set trends.
Interesting to see it being paid though! The free tier seems very limited for a google product: 1000 rows, 100 tables, 50 bot actions... paid version is $10 a month. 1000 rows won't be enough for anything serious - so they must be really betting on people paying. I guess that's also why it's not integrated directly with GSuite?
I really appreciate that feedback for us, and we're really hoping to make it as useful as possible for you and others! :) As prlambert@ mentioned in another comment, we're kinda like a startup and if things go well, the goal is graduate into larger parts of Google.
A point of clarification on the free tier: we're offering 1000 rows per table--an individual tab within a workspace--which we hope offers a lot of flexibility in mixing and matching data in a workspace to track your work together. If there's particular use cases you have that involve over a 1000 rows, we'd love to hear more about it. Thanks for taking a look at the product!
tl;dr is we'd love to and we're working on it! I'm glad to hear you're interested in Tables, we'll try to get it to you as soon as we can.
Congrats, I hope this product comes to life and be the next must-have tool, I think they will be super cheap in the future anyways because lack of unfair advantage, it's a platform that just need to be ready to be integrable with all existing apis and that have the ability to execute lambdas. But has to be secured otherwise not recommended to be used with sensitive info, I would trust in Google since I use Gmail for my personal things.
I wouldn't surprise when Soho comes with something similar.
Thanks for the kind words, and I hope Tables will help people and businesses in positive ways as well! From my perspective, we just want to offer a decent option for users who want to track team work within the Google ecosystem, especially during this time with covid forcing many businesses to digitize and work remotely.
Thanks for sharing those use cases and we'll take that feedback on the limits back to the team.
Yeah I’m going to pass. This will just be deprecated in the near future.
Sept 22, 2021.
Google Announces that Google Tables will be sunset and all users will have to migrate away by Sept 23, 2021.
"Google Tables was a great experiment but we're migrating to Google Tracker - a better version of Google Tables designed for power users." said Dep Re. Kated, VP of Engineering at Google.
Google Tables has no migration tool or system for users to export their data angering some users.
There's no support available for people wanting to get their data off the platform and many users are upset.
"There's no support number? I can't even pay if I wanted to!" said Alice Bob Carol, a huge fan of Google Tables that is upset it's going away.
When I tried to login it told me that "suspicious behavior was detected" and locked my account. Now I can't get access to my data and there's no one I can even contact!
(this was a parody but I'm calling it now - Google products are already dead when they're launched)
And it's somewhat in the same space as Tables.
Weird. Last I checked, even when deprecations happen, the data is accessible via Takeout.
Even JSON is too complex for non-programmers.
Coupled with in-file tokens, it makes for an easy format to export into anything.
That's why I am using it as the base format for my forum application.
At any time, the entire forum content can be exported into plaintext, which is readable by most users on most platforms (except iOS)
And also can be re-imported into just about anything with a quick Perl script.
There's a reason plaintext is rarely used as the preferred method of semantic data exchange. What's our preferred method of representing images with plaintext? Audio files? Rich text, such as Google Docs? Spreadsheets (complete with formulae and attached macros)? Databases that contain bin-blob fields?
> And also can be re-imported into just about anything with a quick Perl script.
In your specific use case, I expect that works well. In the general case, my experience has been that plaintext can be imported into just about anything incorrectly with a quick Perl script. And when the data is MBs / GBs, the odds that such an error goes unnoticed until the data is needed and cannot be reconstituted are high.
For instance, consider email or newsgroups formats, with key-value attribute headers, with the difference of putting them at the bottom of the file.
With each "item" being a text file, you could easily fit the average person's Facebook profile into a zip file of (folder-arranged) text files with the content at the top and the extra attributes (e.g. timestamp, reply-to, etc.) below.
Even for someone very active, this would only be several hundred text files per day, so several hundred thousand per year, and several million for an entire profile. With that many, you'd probably have to split them up, but for the average person with maybe several hundred thousand, that's a manageable number of textfiles to put into a zip file.
These textfiles could be almost trivially imported into a relational database with a simple script.
At the same time, the user can also browse the contents of the zip file if the folder structure is arranged thoughtfully.
Of course, I am talking about text only, not images or videos. For these, you would have to either use metadata or have a matching text-file to go with the file.
These days exports are at least usable, so that you can hire a programmer to make something useful out of it, if you need.
I've already helped people make tools to create automated summaries for counting billable hours for language lessons taught over skype or messanger, which was only possible thanks to these exports finally being in some processable format, with enough metadata included.
It's not either or though. Services can export in both nice usable formats, and html garbage that is nice to look at but useless for anything else.
Given this is explicitly being launched under "Area 120", "Google's workshop for experimental products", I think it's fair to let them ship things, try things out, see what works, and close what doesn't.
Certainly not going to shift my team or multiple teams onto it if I can't trust it's going to be there tomorrow.
Users: Hey Google, please commit to supporting your new shiny product for the long-haul!
Stalemate. Google did this to themselves.
That's winning an early customer, that's proving product/market fit, that's progress. That's why Google would do this.
The marketing material pitches it as a much bigger deal, but then would anyone sign up if it didn't? There's a minimum quality bar that many people expect before signing up, and from a known entity like Google that's likely a much higher bar.
I almost wonder if they're making problems for themselves by naming it under the Google brand? Being completely separate they'd be able to fail faster, ship something lower quality that still proved product/market fit, etc. Area 120 seems to be their attempt to create this space, but I'm undecided on how well I think it will work.
Unless you're a Google competitor there's likely no reason to exclude Google products.
(I'm not any kind of Google fanboy. Just bored of predictable takes like this.)
Maybe that's a concept for a startup. Betting on when Google dismisses new products.
edit: mandatory link to https://killedbygoogle.com/