These shutdowns are a calculated cover for the day the DOJ shows up and slaps them with a monopoly tag for their dominant (and money printing) products.
"Monopoly? Us? Look how many times we've failed. Any dominant marketshare we have could easily disappear. Look how many times we've failed..."
Put another way, certainly Google is aware of the perception impact of these shutdowns. And yet, like clockwork, they persist. It's either intentional, or they're devoid of data about perceptions of the brand. It can't be the latter, can it?
Yes, google plans projects, spins them up spending millions or billions in dev costs over multiple years, then executes the final phase of the plan and kills them. All so their hypothetical attorneys can make a hypothetical point in a hypothetical court case.
As for the hypothetical court case. Again, there's history for that as well.
What's your explanation then? The mighty Google with some of the best and brightest minds in the world...is consistently incompetent? That it goes into markets outside its core competence, dumps a ton of resources, and then again and again surrenders prematurely?
Really?
Seems that your theory sounds more ridiculous than mine (which btw is inpired by Thiel and Zero to One).
My explanation is that they want to make money on these projects and immediately cancel them when they fail to meet some lofty goals. Not that these projects are from-inception used as pawns in some abstract legal posturing.
I agree with you. That is what is happening. Where we part ways is why. The fact that it happens over, over, and over again, then for a company of that status, that's strategy. It's intentional. Else, we're suggesting that Google cannot learn from previous mistakes. That simply doesn't hold water.
Stadia was not good because of physics. Like GeforceNow, it is laggy and artifacty. It’s not a real business because they don’t actually have a significant target audience. It doesn’t matter who runs it. I’ve been saying this for years and predicting this exact scenario but not because of trust. People trust Google enough to be swayed but this product sucked.
Yeah, the article is simply wrong, in my opinion. People don’t factor in whether or not Google will support it in n years when deciding to use one or their services. Nobody used the product because it sucked.
As a GFN user for the past 14 months I disagree. It's more than acceptable performance even when playing competitive multiplayer games like League of Legends and Planetside 2.
I do agree however that Stadia sucked as a product. Nobody was going to buy into their ecosystem if they can't opt to download the games onto their own PCs like Steam. Too much lock-in without that aspect, and without any guarantees that they were going to refund customers if Stadia ever sunk it just made it DOA
But that's not the perception GeforceNow has. If I ask around what people think it would be then most of the gamers I know wouldn't even consider it unless they had no other option.
Games are already fiddly when it comes to latency. Adding another fiddling layer inbetween just sounds more painful.
I’ve played PS Now enough to know that the latency is perfectly fine and the artifact count isn’t bad. I’m very happy with those services and they can be done well.
It's all where you live, and your home network. I had about 15 to 20ms latency to nearest POP, and Stadia honestly played just as well as a PS5 or such.
Moved to a different city, and latency wasn't near as good because of ISP routing, mainly. Still playable, but definite pretiming everything. I think latency there was 50ish ms.
Not sure why you're down voted but this is what I thought as well. What I mainly heard was that thus was aimed at casual gamers. But this felt like an over-engineered solution for casual gamers to make enough money from them while too underpowered to appeal to the hard-core gamers (PC,console gamers).
I can't speak for Google but I've played Geforce Now since December 2020. It was an absolute saver when gpu prices shot up and I could not play some recent games anymore. I do have Bell Gigabit fibre in a small town in Canada so I'm lucky with fast internet but I absolutely love the service. Even Microsoft Xbox pass premium cloud or whatever they call it now did not work properly (and their support for paid product is no existent - they send you to reddit or something), but geforce now just worked and worked well.
Now, different people have different preferences and I imagine if I were a pro online multiplayer guy with 240hz monitor and 10 million dpi mouse twitch shooting against pros, it would not serve as well. But I've played fps games like cyberpunk happily as a single player. They basically have my money guaranteed for foreseeable future.
Stadia wasn't laggy or artifacty at all. That is just because you either haven't used the service or you have poor internet.
I played many games on Stadia for a year with zero issues. I perferred over playing the games on my PC as it was just a lot easier / faster, to open chrome and be straight into the game.
I think it is just opportunism. The cool thing these days seems hating on Google, even if you have a really poor reason. It is just confirmation bias for those that have tried to convince themselves that Google is a failure despite their profits literally showing they are not failing as a business.
They can be incompetent and still successful. Look at Android. Its competition is an absolute joke, but Android still can't get dominant market share in the US even though it is cheaper than free to use in products. That's just bad management.
A business built around extracting a non-renewable resource can make record profits while still being doomed in the long-term. In this case, the resource Google may be unsustainably harvesting is consumer goodwill and partner trust.
I don't think so. Firefox has been on a mission for some time to try to market itself as the safe browser despite Chromium being open source and have roughly the same telemetry enabled by default in both. Shutting down a consumer service like Stadia isn't all bad.. in all honesty I think it is the most disappointing to people who used it on a regular basis and not some person to come by and give their two cents about how they feel Google wronged them for something unrelated.
People liked Stadia and that is why this is hard on some people but the are not going to jump on the Google hate train over every dramatic event that is often just hyperbole. They'll remember Google for creating something awesome and ahead of it's time, and Google may actually revamp that to scale to personal gaming that runs on local hardware instead.
I believe a lot of game services streaming services just aren't that profitable. The hardware required to stream games to consumers in HD or 4k is expensive. Heck, just a few months ago I was looking at graphics cards and the lower end were still priced around $600 for a modern consumer graphics card. Then having a bunch of servers and ways to dedicate those to users using some form of graphics sharing and doing to with very little latency cost a fortune and probably didn't produce the revenue because of that.
I'd people are leaving Google or this then they can certainly try make an appealing argument about how Stadia damaged them but that Netflix, Hulu, etc don't ever pivot their plans and pricings
It’s the final day of the free tier of Google Apps they promised they would never take away from me. I run a web search where the engine ignores my excluded terms[1]. Sad. But the I log into Gmail. Another redesign, thank goodness! Too bad I can’t XMPP message my friends to tell them about it.
I definitely didn't have to pretend to pay them when I elected this option, you just affirmed you were using the account for personal use and everything stayed the same basically.
Are you talking about the free lifetime Google Apps for Your Domain? They did announce that they were canceling it, but they reversed course and you can still keep it by pressing this button: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120
I actually closed my account when they first announced the cancellation, which made things more difficult and I had to contact support to get it back (I was successful). But if you haven't done that, I believe all you need to do is press that button.
It only works if you originally had the lifetime free apps for your domain, and you haven't transitioned to another offering already. If you did, then you have to contact support to transition back.
Strictly speaking, aren't the results for "49ers -football -nfl" correct if using literal term exclusion? None of those pages have the term football or nfl. But I see what you mean in principle, Google seems all-to-eager to use fancy NLP and knowledge graph to rewrite queries, so it would be fair if they exposed a way to exclude categories as well.
After starting to ignore the "not" operator, I can't wait until Google decides it no longer has to listen to the double quote "exact phrase" operator so I can finally ditch it for good.
I have some business stuff hosted on GCP. I'm actually starting to worry about that, I think it would be weird if GCP was discontinued but I don't know anymore?
Make a business failover plan now, I already migrated everything off google, its just not worth losing your company over googles inability to be business friendly.
Also a backup/failover plan to migrate to any vendor can also mean you can migrate to save money or outage. Or they ban your account by mistake, which on google seems to happen way to often, if you link it to your developer account, or your personal account.
I used to hear about their hard deadline more often. Will be curious to see if they follow through, and how many months they give small tenants to migrate off.
They have no hope of meeting the 2023 deadline. They are at 10% market share, growing 1% YoY and half of number 2 (azure).
They all play tricks. Google does flat rate ELAs, so customer retention and recurring spend is something to look for information on. Microsoft does alot of SaaS bundling and uses the EAs to drive revenue. (Buy an azure gift card vs. true up of whatever)
At some point it becomes like a “no true Scotsman” argument. They’re all big, and all use their niche to drive spend. IMO HN commentators comparing GCP to Stadia are missing the boat. Likewise, MS will figure out how to monetize the bazillion O365 users with Azure.
I wonder how good of a proxy this is for actual use. I trust Google's numbers (unless Azure users are all using Bing), so I read this was AWS is by far the leader, with GCP possibly being second.
I believe “Azure” includes simply hosting some ppl’s legacy systems in dedicated servers (a State Farm no longer has to have sysadmins or hardware on its balance sheet) and even “on prem azure” which is…you still have your own computers!
Huh. When I cared about these numbers a couple of years ago it looked like Alibaba and Oracle(!) we’re ahead but I guess that 2Bn they G poured into their cloud biz got them…something. Wow, 10% of the market.
I wonder if anyone other than AWS is making money in this space. It reminds me of the phone space with one or two winners and everyone else bleeding out.
I used to work in an small org running on GCP, and the most infuriating thing was they would very often deprecate services in favor of new ones. Almost every year we had to spend a few months migrating to a V2 of a service. That's months of resources being spent on work that the company didn't really need to do.
This was a couple of years ago, I don't know if they are better at it now. But a quick search shows this looks like it is still a thing.
This is kind of an anti chicken/egg situation! What happened first, the chicken got run over so no more eggs, or the egg got smashed so no more chicken?
To clarify the analogy: Nobody trusts Google not to cancel a new thing, so they don't invest any money or effort in the new thing, so it gets cancelled.
I'm hearing it a lot less after the recent tech backlash, but a few years ago it was fashionable to say things like "take risks" and "embrace failure". But the cautionary tale that most companies are going to take from this is to take fewer risks and to avoid failure at all costs, which I think is a bad outcome.
Google shouldn't stop cancelling products that fail to get traction, they just need to learn to fail gracefully without leaving customers and developers who've built on top of their platforms in the lurch.
the problem isn't that Google cancels risky projects, it's that they will make 3 different chat apps, cancel all 3, and make 3 more. any remotely sensible company would when making a new messenging app throw their eggs in one basket to take advantage of network effects rather than intentionally fracturing the market with multiple products.
Companies grow old and fearful. They stop taking risks and treat failure as a "bad" thing to be avoided. In so doing, they become blind to new frontiers.
That, in turn, finally opens the door for a new wave of hungry startups who are willing to take risks and embrace failure. They come in, disrupt the old guard, and spend 10-20 years becoming giant corporations in their own right. In time, the cycle repeats again.
It's been a very long time (20+ years!) that some of these companies have been going. If they're just starting to become fearful and risk-avoidant, then perhaps the next wave of interesting startups is finally < 10 years away.
(For what it's worth, the current bear market also has me thinking it'll be a good time to start a startup in the next 5-10 years. If I were still young and spry, I'd be champing at the bit to save up a few bucks, stockpile some ramen, and go for it.)
Er, but we know exactly which came first here? Google started killing products before it had a reputation for killing products. It's a cycle now, but we were actually there to witness the beginning.
The thing that I find odd about Google is that it feels like they drink their own coolaid. Reports I've seen suggest that nearly no one knew this was coming. Teams who have been working on ports for months were blind-sided. Employees generally did not know.
It just seems like a very poor way to run a business. It feels sloppy and needlessly messy. Especially when providing soft landings is so possible for a company with the absurd revenue that Google gets. It feels like a double warning: Google will withdraw suddenly, whenever they like, and they won't use one iota of their largess to help you deal with the consequences of their actions.
Obviously this isn't the same thing, but yes - this seems right. But, I remember my first time going to Google's campus in 2010 and connecting to their guest wifi network. 1Gbps! Insanely cool! Pulled up gmail and google docs and it worked PERFECTLY! My first thought was "...oh this is why their webapps suck - they have no idea how it's being used in the real world where latency is above 10ms"
For a specific example of latency incompetency that immediately came to mind while reading this: Chrome.
Chrome will not run properly on first execution, as in ran for the first time after a cold start of the computer, when executed off a HDD. Why? Because the HDD takes too long to read off data. Chrome expects SSD latency and fuck your computer if it's not residing on one.
When executed off a HDD, I've found Chrome only runs properly from second execution onwards after the underlying operating system has cached most of the stuff Chrome wants in RAM in anticipation of subsequent executions.
I want to say this is optimization for ever more powerful hardware, but I'm inclined to say it's also sheer incompetency that Chrome literally can't fallback gracefully if it doesn't get data as quickly as it wants.
Unanticipated race condition perhaps? A process takes 2 minutes instead of 5 seconds, and then a later part of the startup fails because it has no way to handle the totally unexpected lack of data
For starters Chrome will not wait for extensions to load/initialize. Its possible in case of HDD there might be more things that simply time out/chrome disables because it doesnt want to wait.
Made some offhanded comment about Chrome perf on Twitter earlier this year and a Google friend replied something like "Well, pretty much the whole Chrome team just got upgraded to local test machines with at least 32gb of RAM. Godspeed everyone."
Makes you wonder what would happen if companies occasionally did the exact opposite to their engineers.
"Oh, you know that 32 GB machine you've got? We're replacing it with this new 16 GB one. If the test suite is too slow on your new machine, I guess you'll just have to make the tests faster."
What would happen is those engineers would rightly be concerned that their leadership had lost their marbles, and would quickly find new jobs elsewhere. These kinds of “fun” thought experiments don’t pan out in the real world.
You having fun/ being able to develop fast isn't your customer's problem/ the problem's of people actually using the things you build. Windows Vista devs with 8GB of DDR2 when real world customers had 512mb of DDR learned this lesson hard.
EDIT: Also - client side native software and web dev are insanely different. Web/ serverside people seem to disregard this. Constantly.
> You having fun/ being able to develop fast isn't your customer's problem/ the problem's of people actually using the things you build.
I cannot parse this sentence. What does vista having its minimum requirements poorly defined have to do with being forced to develop on underpowered hardware?
If my boss says “we are giving you a worse machine because we think that will make you write better code” I am out of there. There are plenty of ways to emulate weaker hardware and do performance testing and to make it a development priority that don’t involve intentionally hamstringing your engineers.
Do you actually have something to add to the discussion? Or you just want to take potshots at me?
You’re all over the place. Please explain why you think using underpowered hardware is the only legitimate way to write software that works on that hardware.
Yes, I started this discussion thread you're responding to. No, there isn't really a way to do native development without experiencing what your customers do. Build locally on the high powered one, run on your lower spec'd machine. This isn't a potshot. This is me being annoyed that 15 years later, people keep making the same mistakes of not testing on "real world" hardware. Your VM isn't a real user representation. Stop thinking so.
You can write your code on a nice fast machine. A dev machine should be as fast as possible. Those devs with their big fast machines should be required to run and test on much lower spec machines though.
Testing only in a VM on a beefy dev box leads to terribly performing software on customer machines. There's a multitude of performance problems that only come up when a system starts paging to disk, a machine has a HDD, or a CPU gets maxed out. These issues will be completely occulted on a dev machine with tons of RAM, 16 cores, and an NVMe disk.
Far too many developers have the beefy dev box with no requirements to test on more prosaic configurations. Even limiting a VM's CPU and memory isn't a good environment for performance testing because it's still faster than actual low end hardware.
And it can't be cost issue, the crappiest machines are some cheap laptops from any big box retailer. Okay, that fact itself might make getting them harder, but still. Just buy a once a year a low few hundred euro laptop and add to pile. Rotate in 5-10 years or as they fail.
>I cannot parse this sentence. What does vista having its minimum requirements poorly defined have to do with being forced to develop on underpowered hardware?
Basically: An end-user has computer with 4GB of DDR3. Devs for <software> wrote for and tested on a machine with 64GB of DDR5. <Software> ends up running like shit on end-user's computer.
It isn't the end-user's problem that the software runs like shit, because the devs programmed to an unrealistic common denominator. The end-user is going to find <software> that doesn't run like shit on his computer, and the devs only have themselves to blame for losing a customer because they were so out of tune with reality.
It's a matter of tact. They could say, "Here are your 32GB RAM machines. Your old one? You get to keep it too. Make sure Chrome works perfectly on your old machine."
This is what CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) systems were designed for. If certain tests exceed the performance budget of a low-resource environment in CI/CD, the engineer responsible will be required to fix it before a release can ship.
I was just whining how when Chrome-based browsers first open up on my 5400rpm hdd, I paste in the URL and press Enter, then it loads the default home page and wipes out what I pasted... "you're goin' nowhere!"
That's far from being only a Chrome problem. That extremely irritating behavior is going to be with us until OS developers see the light and we get hard/soft realtime GUIs.
Opening Google maps, the text entry is editable far, far before when it should be. As soon as the page loads, I can start typing. Then the JavaScript starts running, and helpfully selects the text entry, placing the cursor at the beginning of the text field. Then some cached suggestion loads, inserting some suggested search for the area being viewed.
The end result is that anything I type gets jumbled or overwritten multiple times before the page settles down and can actually be used.
This is the general curse of async UI these days, and it's everywhere from the web to native desktop apps to the OS itself.
Obviously, it can be done right, but it seems that most devs who are so eager to jump on the async bandwagon have no idea that they have to make that effort now.
Okay, something I can speak too! (Though I left in 2009 but it's close enough)
I was a SRE on Gmail, and I can assure you that the experience for devs was not great intentionally. We had a pool of dedicated machines that ran various versions specifically used for development. I made sure those where always on our worst clusters (slowest CPUs and disks) so the dev experience was always the worst case scenario for performance. :-)
Would love to hear more about that! I feel like there was a very specific period between 2010 and 2012 when web app stuff just sucked but Google Docs etc was great fun ~2006-2009
The announcement seems sudden but actually it's with about three months notice. It does seem a little short, but how much would it help to drag it out further? How much time do you want to spend on a project that's shutting down?
There were games preparing to launch on November 1st.
Those should never have been approved, if the thing was shutting down. In those cases, it's normal to stop making approvals for new games, for anything expected to finish within six months of your termination date. You don't necessarily need to make an announcement yet, but you shouldn't have anyone expecting a launch when the service is dead or dying.
Big companies are quite paranoid about leaking shutdowns even internally, because they don't want the press to know, customers to start asking questions, team members leaving, etc etc.
I once casually speculated to a director that product X felt like it was going to get the axe. He was visibly freaked out and responded with a fervent Shakespearean lady-doth-protest-too-much denial, complete with demanding to know where I'd heard this from. Inevitably, it turns out that X's days were already numbered, but he already knew and I didn't.
That's true... But when you act as a publisher, then you're required to take the risk of leaking something's final days.
When you approve something for launch, and then kill the product before it can either launch or launch effectively, then you become liable for the investment in the launched failure. Google can absolutely be sued by those that just had a failed launch. They misrepresented themselves. This risk, tends to be higher for the company, than allowing people to guess that the product is about to die, because game products tend to be rather large investments.
I honestly don't know. But every developer I've seen talking about publishing on Stadia, also talked about working with the team, so there were definite considerations that they needed to take into account.
There's stories like this [0] which suggests that the performance for Stadia was different than other platforms you might deploy for. The threading behaviour is a little bit different than just a VM, which is to be expected, but can come out surprising. So there's probably Stadia-specific patching for different games.
> Reports I've seen suggest that nearly no one knew this was coming
When you're making a decision like this, you have to go full steam ahead until you decide to stop. Because not going full steam ahead compromises you in the event that you choose not to cancel.
It's like a negotiation. If you're thinking of completely folding to your counterparty, the last thing you ever want to do is tell them that they have you on the ropes.
And like in any game of minds, it goes into a guessing game: ”Are they thinking of X? They would never admit, but perhaps this and that can be interpreted as signal for X.”
This is fine for some situations, like games, and can even be fun.
It is not ”fun” if you are a paying customer and and X is ”Suddenly kill the service I’m using.”
The only remedy to this is trust. (Which a simple short term zero sum game theoretic analysis does not account for.)
You have to pretty naive to not realize that Google could flip directions any day. Look what happened to Nest? They went from being apart of Google, getting kicked out, and back to being apart of Google in a short time frame. Or the pixel that went from being a flagship phone to being a mid tier phone and then back to a flagship phone in a 3 year period. There’s more examples like Google fiber which stopped expanding in 2016 to adding a bunch of new cities this year. Leadership flips positions all the time.
They don’t have a real vision for the company. All they know how to do is search and ads.
It’s intentional, it’s a way to brag. They don’t need to at all. There’s a reason why nobody at other companies does that - people at other companies are normal and don’t think they’re gods gift to the world.
It's required by company policy. Otherwise the comments could be seen as astroturfing. The policy is so strict that it specifically says you need to put a disclosure in every individual tweet, a disclosure in your Twitter bio isn't sufficient. I think that part of the rule is broken frequently though.
Interesting. Is it limited to Twitter? I can see the company fearing a backlash in social medias where you're operating under your own name (and thus can be traced back to Google) but what about anonymous and semi-anonymous forums like HN?
I re-read it, and it actually doesn't explicitly mention Twitter. It does mention how you can disclose using hashtags, which is why I misremembered it as talking about Twitter, because Twitter and hashtags are so linked in my mind.
It looks like it applies to basically any online post/comment, regardless of if it's anonymous.
Yes, but what I am talking about is the professional side. Sibling comments are talking about the Nov 1st launch games who were in the dark. Obviously Google can make it right - but that doesn't seem like what they are going to do.
I don't really know if there's a better way to do it. If you're going to shut down and refund everyone's purchases, you need to disable purchases at the exact moment you make the announcement, otherwise people will buy things for semi-free knowing they'll get refunded in the future. If you tell game devs before the general public, it's going to leak out. If it leaks out you either need to lie and say it's not shutting down, or announce that it is shutting down, in which case the game devs didn't really get much advance notice.
If staff were told early it would be at the top of HN and Blind 10 minutes later. Same for if developers were told to wind down porting. In both cases, customers would be upset about being able to spend money on a service without being told it's circling the drain. There's no clean way of doing it without telling everyone at once and in that case, immediately shutting the store and giving a deadline in the future is the option that gives the most advance warning.
I also guess there are legal complications about telling employees early. Google employees are Google investors.
Which made me trust it even less. How is it a sustainable business model for them to run the hardware and platform for the next 10 years without recurring revenue.
For large corporations and companies, it is entirely reasonable to have a couple businesses run red ink which are propped up by other businesses running surplus black ink.
For a non-Google example: Costco and their roasted whole chickens they sell for $5 USD each. There is no fucking way Costco makes a profit, let alone break even, on those, but they do it and run the red ink anyway because the customers that come to buy them will also grab other stuff on the way out, generating black ink to offset and surpass the red ink.
Streaming Netflix is relatively simple - each customer just needs to read a stored stream. I think they even put dedicated servers at edges like ISPs, so it's not even on the public internet!
Streaming a game requires an actual real GPU being (I guess) exclusively used by that customer while they're playing. Not feasible to put those in edge locations.
They could run multiple games per GPU depending on the resolution and how demanding the games are, but yes, it's definitely more expensive than just serving a stream.
Not sure about on the edge, but the problem of gpu allocation isn't a dealbreaker. All the other steaming companies do it and have yet to go bankrupt. Heck, OnLive was doing it ten years ago on much worse hardware and internet.
Personally, I got an offer of a free Stadia controller from Google, took them up on it. It also included an offer for several games free. I searched through the list of games and, honestly, couldn't tell one from the other. They all seemed to be basically the same thing, some sort of FP adventure. My Stadia controller never ended up showing up, but the games were so uninteresting that I never pursued it. My BIL ordered a free one the same time I did, he ended up getting his. He played it for a few weeks then offered to send it to me because he wasn't that into it either. He's a HUGE game fan.
So, I think Stadia died for reasons other than trust of Google.
If you streamed Stadia to your web browser, sure, you could use an Xbox controller. The real feature of the Stadia controller was that it connected directly to the Stadia servers to minimize latency (and load on your computer), instead of connecting to your computer using USB or Bluetooth and having your browser relay inputs. You’d initially set the controller up using your phone and Bluetooth to bootstrap a Wi-Fi connection, and from then on it would talk to the servers over Wi-Fi and TCP/IP.
As far as I understand it, Amazon Luna’s official controller does the same thing.
AFAIK that means that all of those Stadia controllers are ewaste now unless Google releases a firmware update that allows them to be paired as Bluetooth.
You can use them as a wired controller with the existing firmware (although I agree it would be ideal if Google released an update adding bluetooth functionality as well).
That doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. You reduce latency by removing Wi-Fi entirely. The latency between the controller and a machine sending to Google is comparatively minor. And that machine can have a wired network.
You are completely wrong, you don't need fiber and you don't need to be next to a datacenter. I leave in London but I am using it when I am traveling even to countries that officially stadia is not supported. I know people on unsupported regions that can play just fine through VPN! Stadia is a tech marvel with great user experience, just Google execs never cared to spend enough money to make it a commercial success
I tried to use Stadia, as a long-time paid user with a gsuite account I use for my personal account, they wouldn't let me as an "enterprise user". I spit on their future grave then, and I spit on it now - it was destined to die. Steam actually embraces linux with Proton to make windows games work. As a full-time linux user for ~20 years, bless Valve's soul.
Linux is what killed stadia. They have to get developers onboard to port their games. Getting big games ported cost them millions upon millions. If they embraced windows, they would have a huge library just like Geforce now. Linux killed stadia imo.
Sounds about right. Pretty much every single gamer (across multiple circles of friends, most outside of tech) I knew joked about this. Most also commented on why would they need it when they already have a PC/console and performance (though Nvidia and PS Now users were quick to speak up on the quality). In general. I'm not saying this was the only reason, but this was one of the reasons every dismissed it.
Even the gaming press was pretty harsh on this in general.
Yeah; but I can’t be bothered to log into my xbox. It invariably takes me over 45 minutes of reading forum posts and poking around obscure microsoft sites.
It would probably be better if I plugged it in more often, but it pisses me off so much I usually stick it back in a box once it accepts my password.
Games require a lot of upfront investment. Games are not like music where top hits are routinely created in a day or two. Nobody is making a game on the off-chance that they will collect enough pennies from plays on a streaming service. Anybody making a game, be it indie or AAA, is investing years and $$$, and they need that big payday on release.
Even Netflix mostly funds their own content. A “Netflix for games” would involve Google funding exclusive games to be made for their platform.
you're just saying that they couldn't have done a subscription gaming service because the business model doesn't work.
Well, the current situation is that stadia is defunct, because their business model doesn't work!
I'm saying that i reckon an alternative business model such as a subscription service for games would've worked, but require much more up front investments. Epic games have managed to attract a large dev following using incentives like grants (in exchange for exclusivity). Google's pockets is much deeper than Epic; obviously, google isn't really ready to invest in the stadia platform or make it succeed commercially - it's likely no more than a technology demonstration, something that someone at google intended to further their careers (like all things cancelled at google).
The branding of google services is highly tarnished by now. If you are a business, you will not purchase any google services, short of the monopoly on advertising.
>Google funding exclusive games to be made for their platform.
Stadia had their own first party games that they canceled rather early - Feb 2021, year and two/three months after launch. The writing was on the wall. Stadia was a failure through and through, and they knew it.
I preorder things all the time and have never been disappointed. Granted I specifically avoided some preorders (Cyberpunk comes to mind) because it was obvious it was gonna be a shot show at launch
> Customers don't trust developers, see "never pre-order anything."
I've been buying games on Steam since 2006. The "never pre-order anything" take is overblown, IMO. Or rather, it is the default when you don't have a specific list of brands you trust to deliver (i.e. it's the attitude that a new gamer should start with) - but such list does accumulate over the years.
So, no. Trust does matter, and Google lacks trust specifically on the matter of not abandoning things.
I feel like some of these perspectives are very tech industry focused rather than gamer focused.
As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense. You had to buy games at real $40-$60 prices but you could only play them through this limited service. I don't think anyone wants that.
Compare that to paying the same price for a regular PC game which you can play via streaming using a streaming service, but also play locally, and know that you can take that game with you through multiple hardware decides and streaming services.
With Stadia, if I move somewhere with bad internet, there is no way to recover the value of my games I purchased. There is no other gaming system like that. All other systems either have an offline possibility or are pure streaming where you aren't making a game purchase investment, like Xbox Gamepass or Luna.
It just doesn't make sense except to a really small niche and is not competitive to the average gamer.
But that's really focused on long term commitments.
First they had an almost year-long waiting list. Now you have to pay a hefty commissioning fee.
For me that makes no sense as a cloud setup. The benefit of cloud is paying when you need it (like when I travel and didn't bring my PC) and not when I don't need it.
Stadia did offer that but because you had to pay for the games it also wasn't worthwhile.
I use plutosphere now for VR when I'm traveling and that's great and not too expensive. Still a bit buggy and slow to boot the machines though.
I think you misunderstand Shadow. It’s just a cloud PC. Any games you buy are unrelated to Shadow. You can stop paying whenever you want, and the games are still yours. You just reinstall them when you start up you Shadow subscription again. This is what I do. If you buy a physical gaming PC at any point, you just install your games into it, rather than Shadow.
And, there hasn’t been a waitlist for some time now. At least in California. I was up and running within 30 minutes of starting my subscription, and can cancel any time.
And, regardless of the exact implementation, the Shadow approach is infinitely more desirable to me than the complete lock in, and limited selection, of Stadia.
I know what Shadow PC is. But they now have an 'activation fee' that costs 1 month of use - $30 (currently waived but it will be imposed soon). That means if you just want to use it for 1 month (e.g. during a holiday) you will have to pay for 2 months. It applies every time you reactivate a paused account too!
And yes I know you use your own games.. But it's not suited for casual use for me. I use plutosphere instead. That's only intended for VR but that's all I use anyway :) Plutosphere is also a "PC in the cloud" but you pay $2 per hour and a $10 monthly fee if you want persistent storage. No sign-up fees though. But its pricing is pretty ideal for holidays, whereas Shadow PC is now completely unviable for that with the activation fee.
The trade off is that the hundreds of games that I previously bought can be played, there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores, and any games I buy in the future won’t be lost to the collapse of a single service, since I can just reinstall them on any other PC (cloud or not). Personally, that’s worth the minor inconvenience of an update screen. And, this is an implementation detail. Shadow could easily provide scheduled updates for Windows,
and Steam/whatever popular store games.
> manually logging in
You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.
You do have to boot with a different device, first for VR with their Quest app (implementation detail of the Beta) or Virtual Desktop (required).
> You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.
You have to login to each and every store (Steam, Epic, Ubi, etc.) you want to play games with.
> there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores
As of now. Some games' ToS already state you can't play them remotely, and technically Shadow would be in violation of that. It's enough for EA or whatever to threaten to sue them and they might implement restrictions.
I agree that the flexibility and continued ownership of the games is a massive bonus.
A 300-400 dollar console isn’t that much of a barrier compared to a 60 AAA video game. This market of people willing to pay premium prices for enthusiast products but is unwilling to pay for the hardware to run them I don’t think exists.
When I buy a console I usually wait until it’s had some price drops and then there’s really only a few games I want to play. And because I waited so long these too are at a steep discount. These days, that means there’s so much content with DLCs and the base game that it could take me over a year to finish a AAA title.
If I could just play the game and not worry about the hardware, I’d be tempted as long as the service was reliable. Had Stadia become a real business, I’d have jumped on in 5 years or something.
Now that I think about it, Stadia launched into an extremely favourable market where both GPUs and next-gen consoles were unobtainium and 'price drops' are a thing of legend, but they still couldn't make it work. Any other time without that advantage and they'd have failed even harder.
They barely tried though. Did they expect to rival Xbox, Play Station and Nintendo in 2 years with their shitty reputation and without a AAA exclusive game? Were they even prepared to invest in the platform at all?
> Were they even prepared to invest in the platform at all?
They probably spent millions on getting the whole Ubisoft and EA catalogues on Stadia. There was also Red Dead Redemption 2 quite early on, Football Manager 2020, Destiny 2, some Doom, Hitman, Cyberpunk. Not to mention hundreds of indie games. Saying Google didn't invest enough is showing lack of knowledge about the platform.
Thet didn't need an exclusive, that money would have been better spent on convincing more studios to port, marketing. And reassuring potential users with a promise for a refund.
A 300-400 dollar console that's out of stock is a barrier. I still can't go to Amazon and easily buy a PS5, and until recently couldn't have easily bought a high-end GPU, but I could have gone to Stadia and bought any of the (admittedly lacking) selection of games and played immediately, without even waiting to download anything, and on any of several devices I own.
I'm surprised at how many people are discounting what Stadia offered. My reasons for not investing in it are pretty much just data caps and lack of trust in Google.
Any gamer actually looking for a console would have found one through a discord bot in a decent amount of time. No one was about to abandon console gaming because they had to wait a month. Something to also keep in mind is people have friends on these consoles and accounts with achievements they care about.
Alternatively, that same gamer could have just bought the game they want on Stadia and not have any of that hassle to deal with.
Also, I've owned every Playstation since PS2, and I've never played an online multiplayer game on one (with the exception of Journey, which does so silently), nor do I give the slightest damn about achievements.
My point is not that I don't care, or that nobody cares about achievements, it's that not everybody cares about achievements. My point is that Stadia and its equivalents have a place in the market for at least some people.
This mindset is pretty outdated, the most popular games now are all free-to-play. I suggest checking out Fortnite (although I personally don’t suggest actually playing it), CoD Warzone, or Overwatch 2. For pre-teens (or almost anyone else for that matter) wanting to try out the free games their friends are playing, a $300+ console is a huge barrier. That’s why they play on their phones.
I think so: People who played video games as kids, don't really have much time for them now, and don't really want to go through the effort of even figuring out which console to get and setting it up, but occasionally get curious about a particular game. Maybe they don't even have an obvious place in the house for a console, if they only have wall-mounted smart TVs with nothing hooked up to them, or maybe they don't want to give their own young kids console games yet, which is hard to do with a PlayStation in the living room.
It's probably possible to turn some of these people into regular gamers with a service like Stadia. But a lot of them won't buy many games, and those that do might bite the bullet and go out and buy a console, so probably not the best audience for a product?
Modern consoles take way longer to setup than they used to. Playing a game on PS5 requires installing it, plus usually patches. I think you're giving consoles too much credit for ease of use.
Yeah, "once", as in the first time, as in the "setup" process.
If you meant "setup" as in literally just playing a game you've already setup, then sure, that can be fairly quick, but still not as quick as Stadia was.
I bought it, heavily discounted, after having sold my ps4 and wanting something to play very infrequently. The service was spotty despite having gigabit fiber and mesh wifi in my house. As an infrequent gamer, I'm likely the worst possible customer archetype for google.
I never had much trouble with input lag or dropouts. Perhaps region-specific?
I still didn't see any value in Stadia though. The cloud-only full-price approach was the main issue (GeForce Now had them beat there), but also their investment in hardware has been pitiful, so you're effectively playing at low graphics settings. Rather than addressing that, they chased the 4K buzzword. The kind of gamers who insist on 4K aren't the kind who want to use cloud gaming services. GeForce Now understood this, Stadia didn't.
I have college friends on the east coast who all said it worked great for them. The they all commented that it was better on ethernet. The mesh Wi-Fi kits that everyone loves now add noticeable latency.
I'm sick that you can't buy ("license") something on one platform and then immediately use it on another.
I understand that the platform costs and taxes are meant to recoup development and upkeep (to a certain extent), but it still pisses me off as a consumer.
If I buy ("license") a game or movie on Google, I should be able to watch it on Netflix or play it on Steam.
Yeah, thats a HUGE downside to Apple, because they locked you into their AppStore you now suddenly have no rights to use the app on anything outside of an Apple device. That is very anti consumer and detrimental to everyone involved... except Apple.
There is no requirement to use the App Store on a Mac.
And yet those programs do not magically work on Windows or Linux because that's not how computers work. Developers have to specifically target and build their programs for the devices they wish to support.
And many apps (in particular SaaS ones) allow you to buy one license and use their program on whatever device they support. App Store doesn't stop you.
No, but I'm sure you're aware that publishers/developers can make versions that run on each platform and license them in more consumer-friendly ways. I've bought non-SaaS desktop apps that come with license codes for each platform. If not included, there's often a discount for buying licenses for multiple platforms. And this doesn't require me to create an account for phone-home license validation. That type of license bundling is not so easy* and definitely less common with walled gardens.
* - I am taking developers at their word on this. I haven't sold anything on the Mac App Store.
That's an extremely rose/favorable look towards Apple which is doing everything in it's power to put itself into the relationship between a developer and a customer (to charge 30% and limit, limit, lock, block). Thats very evil.
If you buy a movie on Google (or YouTube), you can watch it on Apple and Amazon and etc. It's called Movies Anywhere and it's existed for a long time. Were you not aware?
Also applies to the physical versions of movies, there's a code inside the box. Maybe 3/4 of my blu-ray library is in MoviesAnywhere. But I will say I tend to stick to the popular stuff.
How does this apply to Steam? They sell multi-platform games with a single licence which you can use on Linux/Mac/Windows.
I don't really see the value in transferring my Steam games to GOG for example. So I don't really see what the criticism is here.
Game store and some multiplayer integration is not that limiting. It's preferrable to every single game building their own awful mini-stores/platforms (like EAs and Ubisofts. Even Battle.net's can be annoying and naggy).
If a game exists on PC and a console like the PS5 then ideally your license would let you play on both. It's the same product, just sold on a different store.
I would guess there's not enough people that want to play the same game on both console and PC to warrant pouring effort. Most people play a game only on one platform.
I always wondered about the world where you buy a licence directly from a developer or publisher, and then paid for a content service to download the game from, such as Steam.
I was also wondering if the licence could be some form of asymmetric key which could be used to "unlock" the game, but that might be a solution looking for a problem.
I don't think this would ever work in reality, because it limits the ability of the delivery service to double dip.
If you own Alan Wake on Steam from when it was first released, you aren't playing the same game, now, guaranteed. Much of the music is gone due to the license time expiring. granted that's on the publisher and game studio, but Steam should have at least let you keep a copy from the valid licensing period.
old builds being inaccessible is a big problem that i wish more people were aware of. Developers are able to make retroactive changes to their games and customers are left with no recourse. Although it's rare, I have seen developers abuse this to remove content from games. There's also a more common problem of developers accidentally releasing bad patches that negatively impact performance for some customers.
Old builds are often accessible on Steam via the "Betas" tab in game settings. E.g. for Audiosurf, this is how you get a version from before they had to kill YouTube integration.
It actually got the music added back about a year ago, but from what I understand that's from a joint licensing deal for the Remaster. So maybe the original and remaster will lose the music again in 5 years?
It's a bit weird because other games haven't had those issues. It's common for racing games to get delisted because of expired licenses, but if you purchased it that licensed content is yours to download forever. Every 2 years or so a Forza game has to get pulled and goes on sale for $1 for the final week.
Edit: Doing some further digging it looks like it's because they kept selling Alan Wake after the music rights expired, so they had to push an update or delist the game. That's pretty crappy.
Steam isn't perfect though. Years ago, there was a patch to a game to remove songs, presumably as a consequence of a licence issue. Obviously the disc-based console versions didn't face the same downgrade.
That is a good point. Short of buying and holding the physical media Steam is the best thing for gamers IMO. Even physical media have problems. Eventually it won't run or work on Windows, yet steam games will often get updates to work and get bug fixes. AAA titles work a little differently these days and tend to be massive and are honestly not even done when released these days.
I’d be curious as to the elevator pitch presented to Google execs and why they bought into it. Wasn’t anyone thinking about the issues you brought up? Seems like fundamental issues. To think they spent millions and millions on this service only to close it down in short order. Typical Google but what other company does this repeatedly with 4-year precision.
I think some of Google's strategy is identifying new markets and potential rivals, and then throwing their resources at them until they dominate the market or buy/crush the competition. Building a sustainably profitable product is ancillary to that and not much of a factor initially.
I suspect this was exactly it; Google saw a potential for something like this, wanted in on it, and when the whole market didn't pan out, abandoned it.
Microsoft did something similar with the Xbox (people forget that it was basically done because they were afraid that consoles would become general purpose computers and destroy the Windows monopoly) but they also actually made a business with it and made it profitable in its own right.
In his book "The Road Ahead", which was full of bad predictions by the way, Bill Gates wrote something about the competition between computers and TVs and about set-top boxes. The original Xbox makes sense in that context. It was a bottom-up project initially, but its approval probably had something to do with Bill Gates' set-top box ideas. Microsoft Bob was another related development (cf. the Xbox dashboard, computing appliance).
Go back to the 90s or maybe early 2000s, and there was definitely this widespread vision of a media hub connected to the TV in the living room as the primary home entertainment device (or even more broadly home control). People weren't necessarily in broad agreement about the nature of such a device but it was certainly a more centralized view of the world than what ultimately has ended up playing out.
True. Many people primarily interact with entertainment, news, etc. through a single connected device. It's just much more individualized and on the go interactions than it was envisioned in the guise of a home theater/living room hub.
I see it as a foray into the cloud gaming market and a way to stifle competition. Once Google throws its weight into the game, it might be harder for smaller companies to keep up or even secure enough funding to compete.
It's not always going to work out, but I do think Google's actions helped stifle competition in that market. Google could have successfully stopped another company from blowing up in that market and becoming a real competitor to worry about in other markets down the line.
It certainly made publishers put pressure on nvidia to block their games from its "stream your own steam library" service, because it gave them the idea they could get service exclusivity bonuses and full retail price for the privilege, something I doubt they'll roll back just because that model has failed for now
IMO, Google died the day they announced they weren’t going to work on anything with less than a billion dollar revenue potential.
It sounds like a financially smart thing to do but it cuts your legs out because nobody is doing research anymore, and you select for people with half a billion potential and an eagerness to lie.
Even high end Windows laptops have a small market share. Same for 4K displays.
Fast internet isn't a given either. It's slow in some areas, and slower in most hotels. I've had sub-10mbps, 1500ms ping internet quite often, especially while travelling.
That's without counting cultural assumptions SV companies make, especially when their staff is lacking in cultural diversity.
You’ve just got to look back through history and you’ll see the same thing play out, and controversially it’s not actually the worst play in the long run.
1) pick a high risk / high reward opportunity
2) invest heavily in the fundamental tech behind it and see if it works out
3) when it doesn’t work out, shut it down, take the tech you built and use it for something.
So for example, let’s look at dart.
There was never any way it was going to work, really…
but, at the time, maaaaybe, it could have worked. …and google would have owned the web stack entirely.
…but, they’ve put it to work in flutter now and that’s going ok.
The point I’m making is that if you look at this from the perspective of investment in fundamental technology (Ie. Steaming video say) what’s better?
A) develop it with no specific use case
B) work really hard on a very difficult use case that might end up failing
If you can afford it, the latter is maybe not the worst way of doing it.
You end up with battle tested technology and no users to bother you for the made-in-a-rush service you made to go with it.
You could easily argue that more successfully outcomes could come from less risky investments… but do you want 50 kind of bleh services in your portfolio?
I don’t think google does. They want a few unicorns.
You don’t get unicorns by playing it safe.
So… I’m not saying it’s the right strategy, or even a good one, but from that perspective you can see why you’d try.
Bet: we’ll see something fancy using the streaming tech roll out eventually, probably linked to a more successful existing product, it will be unremarkable and well liked by most people.
The counterpoint is that their strategy is burning trust in their brand. New products depend on early adopters to mature and grow. But I’ve been burned by Google’s product ADHD so many times now that I refuse to be an early adopter of any of their products. If gmail came out today, I’d assume it would be shut down in a few years and I wouldn’t touch it. The only Google products I’d use today are Android, Chrome, Search, Gmail and sometimes firebase or Meet. I think Google meet is the only thing in that list less than 10 years old. (And even then it’s just rebranded Hangouts).
Every time Google shuts down a product, they hurt their reputation. They’re pissing in the pool that future Google products need to survive. At this point I don’t know if Google can make successful new products because nobody trusts their follow through.
Yes, completely agree, same here. I don't touch Google products any more, and it's mostly because I don't trust they will remain available.
I only use the products that are very unlikely to go away quickly. Search, Gmail and Android. I'd like to get off Gmail for other reasons, but it's a pain. And I mostly use DuckDuckGo for search these days.
> I'd like to get off Gmail for other reasons, but it's a pain.
I used to think that, but I was actually surprised how easy it was to get off GMail. I gave Fastmail my credit card number, clicked a few buttons in their UI to get my mail transferred over, moved my MX records, and I was done. I ended up migrating contacts, too, but that was just a couple more clicks in Fastmail's UI, as they have an OAuth flow that interacts directly with Google's APIs.
I still haven't migrated my calendar, and a few other email-adjacent things, but it's fine; it can all operate this way until I'm ready.
Edit: right after posting, realized you might be using an @gmail.com address, so yeah, migrating off GMail in that case is much harder than if you have a custom domain.
I've always used a custom domain not with google, but the reason I would find it hard to get off gmail is the list of sites that only offer a 'login with gmail' with the only alternative being 'login with facebook'. And the list is getting consistently bigger, with many developers getting in on the trend of "passwords are too risky, just let Google handle it". If there is ever a day Google turns off sso for free Gmail users it will be a big one.
I can think of only three or four times in the last 5 years I've encountered sites that only offer third party SSO, and all of them I decided as not being worth my time. It's about as many as have decided that magic links are a sign in option they want. Sites are thankfully hesitant to play around too much with sign up options that might exclude some users
Wow, really? I have only once run into a website that does not accept signup with simple email/password (crates.io, of all things, which requires a GitHub login). Not saying they don't exist, and it sucks that you've run into them and needed them, but I'm really surprised.
Beyond that, especially given that I assume (hope?) such sites are rare, a simple workaround would be to have a GMail account just for such signups, and set it up to forward to your main mail account hosted elsewhere. I think that's a pretty small price to pay if you really do want to get off GMail.
In my case, I still have my GSuite (or Google Workspaces or whatever they hell they're calling it now) account (really the only difference is now my MX records point somewhere else), so if I did have any sites left where I hadn't switched from Google auth to email/password auth, it would still work.
Okay, Drive/Docs/Photos qualifies I think. (But also fuck 'em for ruining Picasa :D) Google Workspaces has to be a money printer.
Go doesn't make them money directly. Similarly k8s is great, but doesn't make them money. (At best it's the classic commoditize your complement strategy. Though I have no idea where Go comes from. Well, I guess if you hire enough language developers you're bound to eventually get a new language, even if it's a bit meh, so they at least matched React in that.)
My feeling was Go was a project that came out of the idea of making a language to reflect the ethos of their C++ style guide from years ago. The focus on reducing complexity felt like a way to make it easy for them to hire/onboard grads etc.
It’s a product I’ve shied away from because Google.
Angular (and angularjs before it) are typical Google engineering. (Too much rxjs solutioning in search of a problem to solve. Compare it to svelte using an observable interface to get 80% of the benefit with the rest of the absolute insanity that junior devs bounce off and make angular a dreaded framework compared to react, vue, svelte)
What jumps out from that thread you linked is the casualness of the gamers. So not only did Google find a tiny market, but that market wasn't terribly motivated.
Neither Pokemon nor Animal Crossing strike me as casual. I think of Candy Crush and all the games like that. Not games with a story that start off with a tutorial.
I disagree with this use of metric completely. I game a lot, and I own multiple devices on your list above yet subscribe to 0 of the subreddits. People subscribe to the subreddits of _games_. You didn't even count /r/nintendo instead. If anything, I think the fact that these subreddits have so many people is actually a point against what you're arguing about the size of the casual market. I do agree with you on the larger point though, stadia had no product/market fit
Agreed. Feeling of not owning games, being locked into a service, and dependent forever on connectivity, seemed a very bad idea and a bad deal.
Xbox game pass doesn't work for me but I understand it's value proposition will work others - I pay a smaller fee and in return I get cloud or local, for a large variety of games. Geforce now you still had to buy games, but you got to keep them regardless of gfn, and you still had local or cloud options. Different systems but both understandable. I never understood stadia value - it seemed worst of all worlds and full of restrictions.
> As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense.
Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success. They made their billions on low hanging fruit, by throwing a lot of resources at problems with very high demand for a solution that weren't yet tackled well (e.g. query the internet, keep in touch with friends). So it's no wonder that in this day in age they are incapable of understanding product market fit, innovating, or competing in a market with competent players and a lower barrier to entry.
At least for Google, I don’t think you can call what they did with search low hanging fruit. Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved.
I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products.
When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it makes it much easier to do; you can also see this in case of Google Maps. You can just push your products inside the ecosystem, and be almost guaranteed success.
Stadia drifted away from that ecosystem (as does Google Cloud for that matter), and as such is much more difficult to pull off. Combine that with Google’s reputation for killing things, and the writing was on the wall from the start.
I think the point is that Google nailed search so well -- and the $ chased eyes -- that they never really had to learn to build products that aren't constructed in the face of early, overwhelming demand. All the hard work of listening to customers, listening to prospects, teaching them that they should want the thing you built or are going to build, accepting feedback, etc.
Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.
This is such a great point. Google has been coasting on android for years now, pixel has some cool phone features (call transcription, navigating phone trees) but those aren’t shared to the wider android market and virtually everything else comes down to, let’s make a better camera. The whole reason they created android was to prevent Microsoft from winning the mobile space.
Making sure the other guy loses isn’t great motivation to do anything. Especially once the “other guy” has lost. Google isn’t especially excited by OS, because their bread and butter is all in the cloud they just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake. It’s always looked at through the lens of how it will help advertisers and since the zeitgeist for the last few years has been about privacy as it relates to personal devices, they can’t really “innovate” much without hurting their core business.
This is also such a great point. I've never considered Google's lazy attitude toward Android through the lens of why Android became a priority in the first place. That really does explain a lot.
And the rest of it: "Ok, we killed Microsoft here, now what?" "Eh... whatever."
> just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake
I worked in Google consumer hardware and yes this is how it is. Quite a few motivated and talented people, for sure, but organizationally it just ended up being "copy Apple and/or Amazon's roadmap."
There are whole product areas at Google whose entire existence boils down to "everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"
With android they had to get buy in from phones makers and other powerful parties. To do this they had to give up quite a bit of power and control. They never owned the ecosystem in nearly the same way. It was always a compromise.
I think that was true years ago, but less so now. Google has clawed back a lot of the power and control they initially gave away in order to gain partners. Things like moving functionality into Google Play Services give them the ability to do things without making an agreement with partners, and tightening requirements for passing conformance testing means they get to dictate even more as to what being an "Android device" means.
Their Pixel line hasn't dominated the market by any means, but has also done well enough that they can at least claim to some extent that they don't "need" the other manufacturers. Of course they do, but they can use "whatever, we'll just make $COOL_THING a Pixel exclusive and leave you behind" a threat with teeth. They actually do sometimes make features Pixel exclusive (sometimes just for a limited time), and that seems to be working out ok for them.
Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning, but I'd wager these days they've also clawed back most of that control. If Apple tells their customers, "we wanted to give you this cool new feature, but Verizon wouldn't let us", that will not go well for Verizon.
So I do agree that there's some compromise, and Google (and Apple) don't get to do literally anything they want, they are in a much better position to control their ecosystems and dictate terms than they were back when they started.
> Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning
What concessions would those have been? The way I recall it, Apple in the early iPhone years would always favor retaining control over the phone experience over carrier reach, so they were available on very few carriers initially (especially compared to Android), but would not make concessions to them. Eventually, iPhones became a must-have item for carriers, so they all signed on under Apple's terms — and nowadays, unlocked phones are mostly the norm anyway.
They've tried to make their own phones for a long time including buying Motorola in 2012. According to a friend who worked at both, Google simply didn't understand making hardware anywhere close to how Apple did.
While certainly Apple has innovated on things, you can't name anything which was not a gradual improvement but, as you say, a device that didn't exist yet.
The first phone with a capacitive touch screen was the LG Prada. Of course, resistive touch screen phones existed for a long, long time before that.
Sony Ericsson Liveview, MOTOACTV, the Pebble watch, even the Samsung Galaxy Gear predates the Apple Watch.
As always, downvotes are welcome but where I am wrong?
There were a lot of naysayers at the time around doing away with a physical keyboard led by all the Blackberry speed thumb typists. The criticisms weren't even wrong per se but they ultimately didn't win out against the tradeoffs--which were certainly aided by the maligned but very necessary aggressive autocorrect.
The first iPhone kind of sucked compared to the blackberrys of the day. They didn't even have copy and paste. It took a few iterations before the potential was unlocked.
I had a Treo and didn't switch to an iPhone until the 3GS. A lot of people remember the iPhone (and iPod) as these overnight successes--and they really weren't although they sold well enough. It was around the third or fourth generation that both really hit their stride. (As I recall iTunes didn't even run on Windows at first and Macs were systems used mostly by media professionals.)
Jobs initially wanted people to build web apps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vq993Td6ys&t=37s and the app store only became available for the second generation iPhone (which was called the iPhone 3G). The next year, the 3GS added HSDPA support which made online browsing pretty smooth. Combined with apps, it was finally ready for massive success.
The innovation and genuine new thing on the iPhone and the entire key to its success was the screen.
But you’re just seeing the screen 1 dimensionally yes capacitive screens existed but when I say the “iPhone screen” is why it was a success I mean the technology (capacitive) + the interaction design (momentum scroll and pinch to zoom) + heavy optimization (jerky scrolling was unacceptable, every interaction had to move exactly with the finger, even browser redrawing was decoupled from the scroll to enable this).
All these parts together in unison and to a high level of polish is what made that product magical and a success.
On the other hand the LG Prada devs and designers just had jerky scrolling and no one on the team said “this isn’t good enough”
I don’t think you’re wrong, yes all the individual technologies in the iPhone already existed, but there’s a bigger picture. The fact is the iPhone revolutionised hand held mobile computing, so given that fact it’s up to us to figure out how they did it and why it worked.
The reason Apple’s success at product development is so hard is that it involves orchestrating many, many different technologies together to create a powerful set of capabilities accessed through a consistent seamless user experience. That’s not a simple thing to even describe or discuss, let alone understand. It’s why they take years to develop products, and are almost never first in a new category, such as smart watches as you say.
Having a capacitive touch screen wasn’t the iPhone’s innovation, touch screens date back to the 1940’s, it was the browser, UI, and business model that was innovative.
That said, the LG Prada beat the iPhone to market by a month but the iPhone was in development for longer. What’s really interesting is the LG Prada II included a physical keyboard showing they where backing away from the design rather than doubling down.
What was innovative about the browser that wasn't already available on Sony Ericsson phones with Opera Mini since 2005? The UI was a little different and polished but also not that new. I still don't get the hype. I had the original iPhone, found out it doesn't support apps and promptly went back to my Sony Ericsson.
Opera Mini at iPhone’s release couldn’t zoom in and out or show websites in a horizontal or vertical view etc. It also didn’t directly render websites requiring a server to provide a more limited version which caused a range of compatibility and latency issues etc.
Opera Mini was well optimized for cellphones of the time and bandwidth limited cellphone plans, but Apple’s deal with AT&T to allow unlimited bandwidth flipped a lot of those design decisions on their head. IMO what really separated the iPhone’s browser was a larger screen + better UI + better rendering + unlimited bandwidth meant it could just be used to casually browse the web.
The sever didn’t provide the full sized images on large pictures, so you couldn’t zoom in the phone simply didn’t have that information.
The iPhone was released June 29, 2007 but announced in January. “On 7 November 2007, Opera Mini 4 was released. According to Johan Schön, technical lead of Opera Mini development, the entire code was rewritten.[28] Opera Mini 4 includes the ability to view web pages similarly to a desktop based browser by introducing Overview and Zoom functions, and a landscape view setting. In Overview mode, the user can scroll a zoomed-out version of certain web pages.[29] Using a built-in pointer, the user can zoom into a portion of the page to provide a clearer view”
Back in those days extremely smooth scrolling and pinch-to-zoom was something that turned mobile web browsing from annoying hurdle to a fairly pleasant experience.
Mobile hardware wasn't capable of delivering such smoothness. Apple's innovation was to prioritize UI rendering over everything else. When you're zooming, rendering stops and browser only deals with zooming. Regardless of current CPU capabilities and load, scrolling and zooming is always smooth. And turns out people care about those way more than parallel rendering.
That's some underappreciated outside of the box thinking.
There’s a reason why the LG Prada is remembered by precisely no-one other than people on message boards who say ‘well aktchully the iPhone wasn’t the first touch screen phone’.
> Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has.
I’m confused by your comment. Android pioneered a good 80% of the modern smartphone UX. Apple makes nice phones but they are pretty much always late mover.
What did Android pioneer? Android started life as a Blackberry clone, iOS appeared inspired by Newton, PalmOS, and ideas from FingerWorks and others. Android of course pivoted to copy the iPhone after it was announced. A lot of good ideas that later showed up in both were in Palm's WebOS first. Hard to see 80%.
You have it backwards. Except for the very first iphone, largely Apple steals from UX, technologies, and form from the Android ecosystem. Apple is great at polishing ideas, but not so great at launching new ones entirely. They do have a few, but not many. Most of their "advances" can be traced back to non-Apple ecosystems. Apple has a closed ecosystem that they control completely, which I why I (and many Android users) hate. They stand on the shoulders of open systems like Android and watch for innovation that has merit, pluck it out, polish, and deliver it as their own, then gain the bulk of the reward. I see them as largely parasitic. Hell, they even claim reliability claims for OS X while standing on the back of unix.
Larry and Sergei decided they are not interested in the business anymore. That's probably why Google has failed to innovate much lately. How great would Tesla or SpaceX be without Elon? Companies without the founders become too cautious and status quo oriented.
It’s pretty interesting actually you can see exactly where Elon is focusing based on what’s going on at each company. The fact that Tesla has failed to output a new car or really innovate much lately, and spacex appears to be stuck in a morass of engine troubles for their latest big rockets, tells you how much he’s taken his eye off the ball.
> The fact that Tesla has failed to output a new car or really innovate much lately
They literally turned into a battery company with their own batteries, their own chemistry and their own end to end manufacturing process. They are making state of the art batteries when only 5 years ago this company had never even made single high volume car.
You can like or dislike FSD but it is innovative.
In terms of manufacturing, things like Gigapress is now getting copied all over the car industry.
Innovation is not just new products.
And in capital intensive business, scale itself requires innovation.
And they are doing this while having 30% growth every year with exploding profits at the same time. After 10 years when people were screaming about how EV wouldn't ever be profitable.
> spacex appears to be stuck in a morass of engine troubles for their latest big rockets
What? SpaceX is currently reaching an incredibly high operational cadence. That requires innovation.
SpaceX is launching Starlink sats with laser communication and deploying it large scale. They are producing incredibly advanced antenna technology as consumer electronics.
The Raptor engine is the most advanced rocket engine in human history and they are on their second major iteration building them as fast as very few rocket engine in history have ever been produced. They are regularly doing full duration test of these engines. Currently its not really the engines that is holding them back.
Claiming that being a little bit late on building the by far the most advanced rocket system in human history is taking his eye of the ball is pretty absurd.
The Gigapress is an Italian innovation though, and the Italians built it because they understood that it could be incredibly useful, not because there was a custom order.
Tesla were early adopters by making use of them, but not innovators.
> Tesla were early adopters by making use of them, but not innovators.
There are two versions of the Gigapress history going around. In one version the idea came to the Idra CEO in a dream, while in the other version Elon gave multiple die casting manufacturers a call and got a hard no from everyone, expect for Idra who gave him a ‘maybe’.
Whichever it it is not that important in my view. What is undisputed is that Tesla put their money where their mouth is and took a real money bet on this new unproven technology early on. That is as much innovation as actually coming up with the machine and idea yourself.
Edit: to add to my point about innovation, from what I understand, no car company has ever used die casted parts in structural components due to concerns about internal stresses resulting from the die cast process. Normally this requires expensive post treatments but Tesla developed a custom alloy that makes this post treatment unnecessary. I am a bit light on details; someone with a metallurgy or structural engineering background pls chime in.
As I understand it Idra already had the idea for large presses and understood their potential. The demands Tesla had may still have been difficult to realize. Consequently the stories are in some sense reconcilable.
Structural die-casting has been a trend in the automotive industry, having started before the Gigapress. One article on this, from 2018, is https://www.spotlightmetal.com/opportunities-for-die-casting... and in that you see an analysis of the economic benefits, even though it's an article for public consumption.
The article itself, back in 2018, mentions cars already using structural die-casting and basically forecasts structural die-casting becoming a more typical manufacturing method.
Tesla specifically came to them and asked them to developed a machine to their specifications, financed and developed the product and they are getting virtually all the machines the company can produce.
Also its a part of company from China operating in Italy.
These machines are also continuously improved in prosecution at Tesla and that knowlage is flowing back to the company. The machines deployed in Texas are already an improvement over those in California. There is a lot around the core machine that needs to be improved as well.
It's an Italian company that was very recently bought by a Chinese company.
My understanding is that they saw the usefulness of these machines quite early and were developing them in this direction and that they had already produced 4000 tonne presses of this general type. Now it's at 6000 and 8000 tonnes.
Customers are needed to make use of good ideas-- you can't take them otherwise, but the innovation is the work the Italians did.
Yeah that company had no other costumers that were considering 6000+ machines. Tesla put down the money and the internal engineering to prove out that using huge casting as a structural member for the car was viable and then worked with a supplier to design the exact machines they needed.
Machines that like still wouldn't exist today had Tesla not done the necessary investment.
There is the machine and then the application of the machine to an actual production process.
Tesla may also be unique in having a strong need for machines of this kind, which in a way, attempt to avoid assembling of complex metal parts. If the other manufacturers have that down, then their need for very large components of this kind is lower.
It's like Germany and its heavy presses, during WWII. Lack of manpower, or in this case, something else that is wrong, leads to an player going for the most complete realization of that is easier and has major advantages.
No its not. You are misinformed or you are buying into some twitter non-sense.
Yes, Tesla is buying batteries from Panasonic. They are also buying batteries from LQ and CATL. Nobody questions that.
In addition to that Tesla has its totally own production process and chemistries. These are not shared with LG, CATL or Panasonic. Its own fully owned battery factory and research facility in California. They are currently building a battery plan in Austin and in Berlin, these are fully owned and operated Tesla plants.
These plants have their own manufacturing processes developed in-house. They even built the machines them selves. A lot of this is done in Germany in a former well known German supplier that Tesla bought outright like 5 years ago. They also bought a company in Canada that makes the battery filling machines and pumps in Canada.
If you still think we are in 2014 and Tesla is just being supplied by Panasonic, you have not been paying attention.
This may be part of the problem. Google was founded by algorithm nerds, and that's now part of the DNA of the company. Apple (Tesla/Starlink/etc) was founded upon vision - what could the future look like? How do I make that happen today? - and then, somehow, to pare that back to something that's economically viable in a reasonable time frame.
That said, taking existing problems and trying to better apply algorithms to make a better product is still a thing in AI space though - and even here plenty of start ups are taking the lead.
Google tends to take on problems that have high technical complexity, potential wide user base and extremely low marginal cost per user and monetizable via ads. And they detest manual/field operational work and don't have the institutional muscle to do fast incremental iterative product development. These are good predictors of what product of theirs will succeed vs fail.
Within high technical complexity space, they differ in significant ways with Apple or Tesla – they don't have organizational mechanisms to do deep vertically integrated problem solutioning. Even when they have academically much superior AI tech, their ability to productize those capabilities is slow and less effective due to how cross-organization collaboration works.
On the business side, they don't have a business team really. There's no MBAs scheming new pricing or bundling models nor are there people wanting to chase/beat market competitors. So, whenever they do SKU based pricing or subscription based pricing, they tend to get it less right than, say, Microsoft.
I agree with what you're saying, and I think you've said more accurately and with more detail, what I was trying to convey.
Edit: One thing to add... Google's history of 'solving highly technical problems' has really been more around scaling infrastructure, with their notable successful products being Google search, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube - with Android being an exception that rule if you'd call that a 'product'. Maps and Google assistance have some technical aspects, but nothing really out of the grasp of a modern startup. Technical ability for SaaS companies isn't really the moat it used to be.
When was the last time Google really innovated in a useful product and when they did stop being involved? From what I can tell Google has ridden on the coattails of Search Advertising for much much longer than they were uninvolved. Even Google's more public attempts at innovation are toys rather than useful products.
Google always figures out how to scale products to millions and millions of users e.g. Search, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Android. But I agree with you, they are not really innovating. I would say they are scaling software in order to make it useful for mass use.
That's basically how most successful large companies function. Acquire, optimize and scale. The specific areas they optimize and scale on differs by company.
But Google is so huge that they are only satisfied if they serve hundreds of millions or billions of users. For example if you have SaaS company you would be very happy to serve hundreds or thousands of customers but if your business model is advertising like Google's is then you indeed need millions and billions of users. Your motives and incentives change when you grow big and sometimes an average customer suffers. In this case people who loved Stadia in particular are left for dead because Stadia's growth didn't satisfy Google's apetite.
Search was full of low-hanging fruit. TF-IDF was well-known. PageRank less so but when the nascent internet has so much signal-to-noise it’s often hard to go wrong. Execution was key—- especially compute efficiency—- but a lot of those are nerdy problems detached from real people. Which is wear Google does well.
Stadia was a rich technical problem with an application area that’s accessible to Googlers. Even if Googlers don’t video game, real life is a game to them. But Stadia failed because it lacked the artistic passion behind Nintendo and the best gaming studios.
If Google set themselves up like McKinsey—- i.e. turn their engineering workforce into a contracting service—- then Google might be able to contribute to a real product. But Googlers just don’t care about people. They care about puzzles and systematicity.
Google is known for launching and then soon killing its projects, and game platforms are built on long term trust and momentum. That's why Stadia never got the momentum it needed.
>Search was full of low-hanging fruit. TF-IDF was well-known. PageRank less so but when the nascent internet has so much signal-to-noise it’s often hard to go wrong.
PageRank actually originates from Economics[0] where Input–output model tells you that you need to care about balancing inputs and outputs in order to have an efficient economy. Speaking of internet search engines and ranking websites inputs would be links(backlinks) and outputs would be ranked web documents.
Their solution was anything but, and it was truly innovative (at the time) and their success was well deserved.
It was totally low hanging fruit. Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder. Finding useful sites and filtering out spam are much more difficult now than when Google started. The signal to noise ratio on the internet has plummeted.
And that is just the difficulty of building an application. Actually gaining marketshare in search is a whole other problem to solve and also very difficult. Even if you manage to build a superior search engine you’ll have an uphill battle convincing people to use it.
This is what it means to have all the low hanging fruit cleaned out. Google built their application at a time when most people weren’t even on the internet and spam was barely getting started as a social problem. Sure, what they had was remarkable and innovative, but only because everything else at the time was so bad. But now? Different story.
You can actually read Page & Brin’s original paper online [1] and implement it yourself. It’s not very difficult. In fact, it was an assignment question in my 3rd year numerical methods class. Unfortunately if you just point the basic algorithm at a crawl (which you can download for free here [2]) you’re going to get useless results. The spammers are optimized to fool this algorithm (Pagerank) so you need to find a way to filter out the spam. And that is a very very deep rabbit hole!
Power iteration of Google matrix is the concept to look up. They reduced the PageRank problem to a well known linear algebra problem with a lot of efficient libraries.
But that's not where others failed. Instead, it's coming up with the idea, realizing that it's a truly good idea, that was the important thing. (Remember, Yahoo and other(s) didn't want to buy Google and the algorithm, when they had the chance.)
Maybe if you replace "totally low hanging fruit", with "It was undiscovered winner-takes-it-all markets" I'd agree.
In hindsight, everything is obvious.
But initially, discovering that opportunity — looking at how many people (how few, just 2) did, it wasn't easy.
> Remember, Yahoo and other(s) didn't want to buy Google
The big guys at that time were blinded by their own success, Google wanted users to do their search and leave the site which was completely opposite to what the Yahoo's of that day wanted to do, they wanted users to hang out on their portal.
And now Google is the one blinded by their own success, who doesn't want you to leave their portal, with tactics like embedded search results and AMP. But where are the people who will come and dethrone them? Probably purchased wholesale by Google or Facebook, sequestered safely away collecting a paycheck and inventing no threats.
> Maybe if you replace "totally low hanging fruit", with "It was undiscovered winner-takes-it-all markets" I'd agree.
I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make. I think what's being proposed is that the more undiscovered markets get discovered, the fewer undiscovered markets are left, and the more difficult they are to discover. Pagerank was a good idea that worked.
I'm thinking that whenever an undiscovered market gets discovered, this unlocks new undiscovered markets.
And back at the time, before Google Search, many many related markets didn't, couldn't, yet exist. And, back then, I'd think PageRank could count as one of the few and difficult thing to discover.
I think "low hanging fruit" makes it sound too easy :- )
I think "low hanging fruit" makes it sound too easy :- )
Then you missed the point. It doesn't matter whether PageRank was something trivial any grad student could come up with or if it was on the level of Einstein's General Relativity in difficulty. The point is that it was one basic idea.
Today if you want to dethrone Google you need to overcome the enormous amount of engineering that has gone into Google Search and Maps. You can't do that by just "discovering" something as a grad student. It's going to take thousands (or millions) of engineering hours to achieve.
That is what it means for the low-hanging fruit to be gone. It's like the difference between discovering electricity, as we all know took quite a while but was achieved by a small number of scientists and inventors over a period of a couple centuries, and trying to compete against the modern-day electrical distribution network on your own, which is essentially impossible without some kind of Star Trek alien galactic empire level technology.
It was totally low hanging fruit. Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder. Finding useful sites and filtering out spam are much more difficult now than when Google started. The signal to noise ratio on the internet has plummeted.
This is what everyone thought in 1999. Search engines were a solved problem in a crowded market where there could be little room for new contender
And whatever limitations we had in search were just inherent in how it all worked and we just had to deal with it.
The existence and popularity of Dogpile was an admission that search engines were not solved yet. We just used all of them all at once understanding they were each imperfect.
Google didn’t solve really search, it solved an at the time fairly new and related problem of low quality websites. Arguing about the inadequacy of early search engine in that context is like arguing that email clients in 1985 should have included spam filters.
Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder.
I’ve often heard the saying how “everything easy has already been invented” and that it’s so much harder today to invent new things.
I think it’s a fallacy. Things were just as hard in the past.
I owned an ISP in 1998 and there were plenty of search engines at the time. Google invented something unique and innovative and they were rewarded tremendously for it. There were literally hundreds of other companies trying to do the same thing but Google was better. If it was low hanging fruit then Hotbot or any of the other major players could’ve done it.
In 1998 there were plenty of search engines and their use was distributed more evenly. The internet was still fairly new and most people weren't online yet. It certainly wasn't an integral part of most people's life. Google came along and improved on the existing search engines and in doing so wiped out a lot of that competition, becoming what they are today.
A new search engine now has to compete with global network effects, orders of magnitudes more data, Android, and a complex web of interconnected functionality.
Even only looking at the advantage that Google Maps brings to the table totally blows past any barriers present in 1998. Sure, you could build a much better search engine but who's going to use it when it can't give them directions?
Then consider that if you look like you'll end up making some headway, you're likely to just get bought and killed off/integrated.
A new search engine now has to compete with global network effects, orders of magnitudes more data, Android, and a complex web of interconnected functionality.
Are you a pessimist in life? You’re focusing on only the negative aspects of starting a search engine today.
24 years after Google was formed we have orders of magnitude cheaper processing, orders of magnitude better AI, the ability to start small with cloud computing and work your way up from there. We have 24 years of search engine research to a large extent publicly available.
I really think all this “things would’ve been so much easier back then” are simply excuses as to why someone can’t do something today.
Hey Richard, great to hear you guys are doing well! A search engine with more personal control over rests is certainly attractive.
My intention wasn't to dismiss the possibility of popular new search engines. Only to highlight that the environment is substantially more complex/challenging than in 1997.
>Google invented something unique and innovative and they were rewarded tremendously for it. There were literally hundreds of other companies trying to do the same thing but Google was better. If it was low hanging fruit then Hotbot or any of the other major players could’ve done it.
I actually think that their entrepreneur spirit and business attitude made them successful. Other guys thought of their search engines as of technical experiments and hobbies, they weren't serious about it. In another words Google cared more for innovating their search engine, making money and then reinvesting it back in R&D and staying ahead of everybody. The same story was with Microsoft and Digital Research; Bill Gates simply cared more business wise and was more fanatical in making money than Gary Kildall.
All outsized successes look like low-hanging fruit with the benefit of hindsight. If you cherry-pick the biggest business success in any 20 year span throughout the industrial/information ages, I’m sure you will find the initial path to success is always gone by the end of that span. That implies it those successes are always low-hanging fruit. If Google strikes you as moreso, I would suggest that’s only because of the novelty and eventual dominance of the web to everyday life which was not a forgone conclusion.
>Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder. Finding useful sites and filtering out spam are much more difficult now than when Google started.
I'm not a programmer but I can write down on a piece of paper an algorithm which is more efficient than Google's in filtering out "spam" websites. I'm from southeast Europe and for my local market there are numerous ecommerce phishing websites that are popping up on a first page of search results. Some even ranked first. I reported them to Google but 6 months after nothing changed.
> problems with very high demand for a solution that weren't yet tackled well
Emphasis added. It took putting the right money and the right minds towards doing it well. There aren't a lot of SaaS ideas that scale to close to 100% of world population that don't yet have an incumbent. Tiktok was lucky that Twitter dumped Vine. Zoom was lucky that Skype, Hangouts, Facetime dropped the ball by trying to keep their users in walled gardens, and not really solving the teleconference problem well.
IMO Google was the first search engine to execute successfully, and that launched them to the stars. Building something that does the job on the label is one thing - building a good product is another.
So they are big because they were there early. But being there early didn't guarantee you'd get big.
There were no real search engine back then. Those sites were just curated list of websites. Google was the first one to crawl the whole web and made it possible to find them.
Uhh, no, Altavista was the dominant player before Google and it had plenty of competition. Google's key innovations were leveraging PageRank to extract signal from what other webpages were saying, instead of relying on naive keyword search etc, and then figuring out a way to monetize search with targeted keyword ads when Yahoo and co were stuck with banner impressions.
Yep, Altavista was the one to use before Google. I'm not sure the search results were that much better to be honest when they launched, although they were good.
Call me shallow, but I liked the simple, distraction free landing page and the "feeling lucky" button.
What on good earth are you talking about ? Google results upon launch were miles ahead of anything else at the time. I personally Googled once and never went back.
At the time many technical users were using programs that could search multiple diffrent engines to desperately try and improve the results. On home connections these programs also needed to notify you when the results were done.
Google results were miles ahead of everything found accross all the engines whilst being nearly as fast as you could type.
Google was better if you were searching for something popular, because it showed highly linked-to pages for that query. AltaVisa was perfectly good if you were searching for something specific that would only have a few pages mentioning it. It was great for function names, error messages, names of professors, etc. So different people had different experiences.
Agree with the sibling: the first time I used Google, it felt like magic. I ended up not even caring about what I was searching for; I just started throwing queries at it and marveling at how great the results were.
Altavista was certainly better than what came before, but you had to get your query just right in order to find what you wanted. And if you couldn't find the right words for the query, you were sunk. With Google, you could get ok-ish results with a sub-standard query, and the ok-ish results would often help you figure out a better query.
I remember using dogpile [1] (which was a search engine aggregator) - the results from google were consistently better than altavista, so over time I gravitated directly to google for results. These days I'm on Kagi...
I do not know about the rest of you, but me - I was hanging pretty low indeed. All what was needed for me to switch from Altavista was a start page without any advertising and small non-intrusive text ads on search results. They were even relevant often.
I don't think people at Google have a problem innovating or understanding product/market fit. Rather, they have 100,000 employees (think about that for a second, how long it would take to count that many people), and not everyone's project is a good idea. That doesn't mean people don't try hard, it just means that there isn't necessarily a business just because they want there to be.
I think the problem is simply that it's too disorganized with that many people. I used to work on Google Fiber, and something that our customers complained about was that they couldn't upload files to Google Drive at 1Gbps. That wasn't our fault, we were happy to route data at that speed, and we had the peering capacity with Google to support it. (Different ASNs!) The reality was, we identified performance problems with Google Drive, and they simply didn't care. They had other stuff to worry about; only one city in the US had 1Gbps Internet at the time, but they still didn't have 100% of the docs/file sharing market (hi Dropbox), so they were like "it's not a priority" and worked on something that would actually make them money instead. I get it, but it never felt good. That's what's sad about companies with such a large scope; supporting your own company's initiative is rarely the right business.
The reason I like small companies is because if there was jrockway Fiber and jrockway Drive, obviously they would work perfectly together. I would simply not sleep a few nights to make it happen. But at big companies, that's not a thing, and it really confuses people that imagine the brand name means something. (I have similar complaints about calling shitty Android tablets "Chromebooks", when they didn't run Chrome OS. The Chrome OS team was a level above Android in terms of technical excellence, so it just felt bad to have some bug-ridden third-party tablet ruin the brand name like that. But, money. I'm sure people bought them, hated them, and still use Chrome instead of Firefox. But it always makes me a little sad.)
I think Apple shows that it’s not really an inevitable problem with scale - they largely make products that stick around and are well integrated with each other while being huge in scale and scope.
IMO from the outside the problem with Google seems to be a lack of saying ‘no’ to people - they start so many different offerings without enough/any cohesion, bring stuff to market quite fast, then seemingly strip resources away as soon as they have gone live if the product isn’t instantly an overnight success.
Are you sure? I used to manage a department with over 100 Apple devices. Too many issues with sync on iCloud, iCal, keynote(etc). Sure works fine for 1-4 users (family). Even in hn people use fastmail, google maps in iPhone. There are so few suggestion to people move to apple email offering. People with Apple devices primarily use Google products.
Apple will lock you out of email with no recourse just like Google, hence no suggestion to move to apple email offering. The point is to use your own domain, and use a business that cares about serving email.
I didn't claim they made perfect products - but they do make products that tend to stick around and work well with each other.
I don't use iCloud with Keynote myself, but those sort of sync issues always happen in multiuser apps that also allow offline editing (e.g. I get the same conflicts in O365 with Powerpoint because they are inevitable if you are allowing offline editing).
Larry Page said he is worried because of Google was and is doing too many things. But they simply have to do it because their cash pile is so big that it can't just hang out in bank for decades.
Google Fiber was a good way to spend the cash, but it seemed like it wasn't 10x-y enough. Drag a cable to someone's house; 1 house gets Internet. Not the sort of business silicon valley likes, despite the extreme profitability potential.
> Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success.
This is accurate. What makes a company good a defending market leadership makes them terrible at innovation - and you see this with both Google and Meta as they churn though building 100 million dollar products only to discontinue them because they aren't worth billions yet.
Facebook wasn't early. Social networks had been going on for decades before them, and even the code around them is freely available these days. They had a harvard.edu gimmick and it paid off.
Facebook was advertising.
100% agree with your opinion, the business model didn’t make any sense. Also as platform it wasn’t that grate either: lags, graphics quality and many more issues (not it’s not my internet). I’m glad they tried but suits failed the project.
I imagine, as with all Google products, it wasn't a suitable data point for them and didn't feed in some way to their ADs cash cow. Google nukes things that don't feed their ADs beast.
That would make sense if Stadia was targeted at casuals (high school students probably can't afford AAA).
However, the lack of subscriptions, separate purchase model, lack of discoverability (no search bar for years! from the Search company!) and porting model make it clear Stadia was very much not targeted at casuals.
No, phone games are targeted at casuals. AAA games are targeted at people who have some 40-60 hours of spare time over the next three weeks to spend on video games.
This is coming from someone who now has no free time for video games, and only plays indie roguelikes because AAA games are too much of a time commitment to ever finish.
Casual is a nebulous term, but perhaps "widely accessible" is easier to evaluate. We can measure accessibility by games sold.
By sales, the highest-selling games are [1] Minecraft (now AAA), Grand Theft Auto V (AAA), EA Tetris, PUBG (before becoming freemium), Mario games, Pokémon, Terraria, and Red Dead Redemption 2.
So by sales, the vast majority of top-selling games are AAA. For what it's worth, I think similarly to you about preferring indie games to AAA games due to lack of time. But for most gamers and people in general, I don't think people even calculate the 40-60 hours per week. Most players probably just spend a lot of free time and weekend days gaming, and then the hours add up.
You do have a point that a large number of players play free-to-play games (e.g. League of Legends and many phone games), but there's a fair argument that AAA games are also targeted at "casual players," by evidence of their wide popularity in terms of massive sales numbers.
> AAA games are too much of a time commitment to ever finish
AAA game industry agrees with you, releasing mega titles like Halo w/o a story to finish, just online "service game" that will always be there for you (until they shut the service off).
And if you're willing to take upscaled resolutions like Stadia offers then you can typically go below the minimum specs (which are themselves far below recommended). Direct X versions are more likely to be a blocker than simply not being able to maintain a framerate.
And yet it mostly launched with games that I could play on my 5-year old $200 GPU that I probably couldn't even sell for scrap at this point. People really overestimate how much of a GPU you need to play a lot of these games. Sure, if you have a 4k monitor and you want to play at 144hz then sure, but at that point you've spent $2000 on the monitor, so what's $500 on the CPU.
I mean you are right, but on top of that I would not have trusted google to keep that service going. Generally I guess it is very unwise to trust any streaming service to keep going indefinitely, because there will always come a point where some old game is more work to support than it is worth.
If we gave some gamer the funds to run the gaming equivalent of archive.org I might have more trust in the service. Earning money and archiving cultural goods for future generations are not easily compatible goals.
I get what you're saying but I don't think it's about gamer focus so much as just gaming in general.
I wrote this on another article comment but I don't think it's just about Google not understanding gamers, but gaming in general.
- People who play games are fickle and distrustful (and rightfully so, cause gaming in general has a sordid history of screwing the player-base repeatedly). Google didn't understand this and seem to have understood it as "built it and they will come", ignoring the handful of failed consoles that claimed to revolutionize gaming
- People who play games are fiercely fanatic towards specific games/platforms (that the console wars still continue is very strange to me; preference sure, but the outright militant approach towards different platforms is just silly). Google didn't understand this and thought it would be enough to just put platform out there and everyone would switch over
- Developers understand the resource allocation for making a game pretty well, and they constantly are missing deadlines and/or releasing half-baked games. Google didn't understand this and just released a platform that was costly to port to and might as well have been another console
- The games that were the showcase of Stadia were not games you want to just pick up and play on the go, they're something you sit down and put a few hours into. Google didn't understand this and apparently just thought "well, AAA game X is popular, let's get that on our platform"
- Google already _has_ a platform for gaming called Android, and they didn't seem to understand what makes it work and what doesn't, or how to use that as a base for their idea, and instead tried to make a whole new platform
- Stadia was a new gaming platform no matter how you slice it, but Google seemed to have the idea that Stadia was just something everyone would love and convert to immediately no matter how complex it was to put games on it. Developers even as late as 2022 still had trouble porting games to Stadia and if it's hard to port, naturally they're not going to develop something specifically for it
The list can go on, but really Google just didn't understand what they were trying to do. The tech was pretty neat, but they didn't understand that what they were offering simply wasn't the way people wanted to play games or develop games for.
Combine this with the fact that _everyone_ (devs and players alike) knew that it had a limited window to be successful before Google shut it down due to lack of $$$, and not having a strong showing from day 1 was not even a nail in the coffin, it was shoveling dirt atop the platform the moment it arrived.
Google was never poised to disrupt gaming in my opinion -- what they were poised to do was to provide the datacenter and audience for developers to create their own vision of what Stadia should have been, but Google tried to make a video game platform, and instead made another entry in the "Failed Video Game console/platforms" lists that will be content for Youtube in the future.
> - People who play games are fiercely fanatic towards specific games/platforms (that the console wars still continue is very strange to me; preference sure, but the outright militant approach towards different platforms is just silly).
Well people who just care which console has MOAR FPS deserve what they get.
But as long as console exclusives still exist, there is an argument for a platform preference.
> As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense. You had to buy games at real $40-$60 prices but you could only play them through this limited service. I don't think anyone wants that.
That’s where the market is moving towards however. A lot of the game you "purchased" on the other platforms refuse to work if you can’t connect to their weird anti-piracy scheme.
I agree with the article. Stadia was an interesting offer. The revolving free games coming with the pro subscription was a good deal and the idea of being able to keep playing games at their rendering best without having to fuss and constantly upgrade a PC - by far the worst platform to game for occasional players like me - sounded great.
Stadia issue was for most it wasn’t offering what it claimed to offer. Games didn’t look that good on the free tier for exemple and as pointed no one trusts Google so I didn’t want to invest more than the strict minimum. Apparently I have played Cyberpunk for free so that’s nice.
I'm not sure that's exactly the right read in a way that is important here. Sure, if you buy a game on Steam or EGS, you're still kinda just "renting" it since if they go away, you can't play the game because of DRM. That said, I have a lot more faith that Valve will be able to keep offering Steam, since it's so lightweight, relative to the clear amount of cost inherent in running Stadia.
It's a lot harder to build a walled garden from scratch as a late-comer, and even harder when you're building it in a swamp where people are less confident about moving in.
The "average" gamer/consumer doesn't want to fuss with any special gamer hardware or upgrading PCs. They may not even know what a GPU is. And they probably accept that there are lots of things that they can't do with bad internet most of which they care about a lot more than games.
The idea of Stadia made a lot of sense to me when I first heard of it. I guess the implementation wasn't very good though.
They tend to be playable offline, but yes. The average player has zero interest in having a gaming PC.
Of course, the average consumer has also never heard of Stadia. I've barely heard of it and I was at the Google Cloud event where they either launched it or gave it a lot of air time.
how stadia stood our for me was that i did not have to pay a subscription to play my game anywhere. once i bought the game i could take it anywhere and play it for free. with nvidia it was ~10$/month after purchasing the game
Honestly you’re right there’s gaming specific reasons for the failure, but that itself is symptomatic of Google’s entry and exit of many markets: never really bothering to figure out what the market actually wanted and just hoping that high quality engineering will solve that.
Admittedly this approach has worked once, and extremely successfully: Android. But Google tend to believe that being from Google will make a product more attractive when the exact opposite is true. (For many reasons, including the simple lack of trust that Google will still be in a market in five years time.)
"I feel like some of these perspectives are very tech industry focused rather than gamer focused."
They are - Google is still the most trusted brand in any studies you can find (and if you find one where it's not, it's probably #2)
It is going down rather than climbing right now, but that's also not that uncommon - Apple/etc is also seeing the same thing.
Now, among tech, and maybe even gamers, i would bet this is less true, and that is highly problematic to the degree it needs to sell to tech/people who listen to tech.
But the latter also often consistently overestimates how much influence it has (IE tech people often believe that the whisper effect they have makes a difference, and that is only true in certain cases over a long period of time).
In most cases, social influencers in completely unrelated fields can generate more tech product sales than happy/angry tech people :)
Put another way - the simplistic notion that Stadia, or anything from Google, failed simply due to lack of tech trust is silly. While it's a fun headline that plays to their audience, things are rarely that simple
You are taking about general trust into brand. That's not what the trust means in this context.
We are talking about trust for Google to launch a new product or service. It's not worth to users nor businesses to direct any money or effort into anything new Google makes because it's not for long.
Google simply can't be trusted to do that. Partial list of products estalishing this trend: Meebo, Buzz, Orkut, Google+, Notebook, SideWiki, Google Schemer, Google Spaces, Google Checkout, Google Directory, Google Sync, Google Hangouts, iGoogle, Google Knol, Google Lively, Google Moderator, .... Complete list is over 200 items long.
Exactly this. Would I trust a new google offering by putting a bunch of my money, time, dependences into it? Hell no. The history is too strong that this offering will likely only be around for a short time and then be unceremoniously shut down and leave you hanging. Ironically, the fact they they keep doing this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Actually, I'm not. I understand you disagree, but your view simply isn't backed up by data. You are exactly the kind of person I mentioned who feels a certain way, and believes that means the data backs up their feeling, but it doesn't.
Rather then assert your feelings as truth, please show any meaningful data that says the general public doesn't trust Google to launch products. It should not be hard to find if you're right.
As an aside, I was responsible for Google moderator for the majority of its life. It was never launched except as a "use this if you like it" type thing (we considered it but chose not to make a formal product offering).
The launch blog post (which only appeared on the app engine blog) makes this super clear: "Several of our colleagues and visitors to Google have asked if we could make it available externally for any kind of talk, presentation and/or event. Conveniently, Google App Engine launched in April and made it easy for us to do this! As a result, we're pleased to release this tool, now called Google Moderator, on Google App Engine."
We were asked by some folks to let them use it, and it was easy enough, do we did it. We kept it around for folks for 7 years. Just about everyone using it had moved on.
The turndown notice was a generic one I approved because we got asked to have some random public facing answer in case anyone cared. IE so that Michael Arrington didn't just make stuff up out of thin air to support whatever his narrative of the week was. We were spending our time helping the small number of users, so I didn't care about the accuracy of the notice. It is correct that we didn't productize it due to usage and other reasons. It still remains used internally.
I know that data doesn't fit your narrative either, so I suspect you'll discard it or argue rather than change your view.
This is actually why your view doesn't match the data - you are focused on conforming the data to your view instead of your view to the data. Citing moderator in the same list as actual products shows that.
> You had to buy games at real $40-$60 prices but you could only play them through this limited service.
sigh As a gamer and actual Stadia user this is not a complete or fair depiction. Like almost every other cloud/gaming service including Xbox etc. Stadia had a "Pro" subscription model which have you access to dozens (hundreds?) of games.
Furthermore "you could only play them through this limited service" is exactly the same model as every other gaming service!
Definitely not all. GFN is by far the most reliable and "native feeling" of these, but not just giving you a generic Windows install with some persistence is what makes it not worth it for me.
I guess it's not trivial to get such "floating" windows licenses and prevent people from mining with a mouse jiggler?
Though I did subscribe to the 3080 tier for a month when my gaming machine was out of comission.
> Furthermore "you could only play them through this limited service" is exactly the same model as every other gaming service!
In theory, yes. In practise, if Steam shuts down tomorrow, I still have all my games on my hard disk and cracking Steam's DRM is pretty easy, and quite possibly completely legal in the circumstance.
Streaming RTS games is virtually indistinguishable from playing locally, except for lack of fan noise and constant need of needing to patch. There are tons of games that stream well, just not twitchy games.
Agree completely that streaming single-player games is not an issue. The issue is that many of the most popular games in the world are FPS or real time twitchy games where latency is a huge issue. The #1 and #2 games in the world by peak player times are PubG and Crossfire. League of Legends, Fortnite, Rocket League, Overwatch, are all hugely popular games with hundreds of millions if not billions of players. There may be a niche for streaming games to those who enjoy single-player games, but that wasn't what Stadia was trying to be. They were trying to become the goto gaming platform for all games. Unless and until they figure out some sort of FTL communication, that is never going to be feasible as a universal platform.
I think there needs to be a distinction between stadia the monthly service that lets you play new games each month and stadia the platform that allows you to buy and play games from any device. The platform is amazing and I wish Google would find a way to keep it around. The service is a different thing and like you said, doesn't make a lot of sense. Too few games and someone who wants to play games all the time anyway probably has. Setup they like already and lots of games for it to boot.
I bought RDR2 for stadia in 2020 and played it everywhere - my phone, laptop, desktop. I played through the whole game and never once had any technical issues. That ability is what gives cloud gaming a real value beyond PC gaming or console gaming. You tell someone without a high spec gaming PC and no PS5 that they can play a new AAA game without buying anything new, then I think lots of people will love that. The article mentions you can't use your own controller, which is flat wrong. I used a Microsoft Xbox controller for both computer and android when I played. For someone who only plays games for 10-20 hours a month or so, it's great to not have to worry about buying new equipment.
However, after the introductory free month of the service I gave it up. Only a few games, and the ones I liked were so short and simple that I was done with them after a week or so. GeForce now has the right idea here - the cloud gaming IS the service and it connects to your existing games on steam and origin.
I mean that's part of it, but Google really worked to kill it too. Like they spun up a whole game studio, hired people to work on games for two years, then cancelled the whole studio. That's not just negligence or trust issues, they took years of work from developers working on games for the platform and threw it in the trash.
I would hate it if I worked on something for n years and then it just gets binned.
I imagine that if you work on such stuff at Google, you probably need the attitude that you're only there to earn money. If you get too involved, it would suck big time if it got thrown out.
So I would think that devs not getting too involved with what they work on, will probably reflect in product quality.
I can't believe people even discuss this. Input Lag gaming will never pick up. It is supposed to be the opposite. Remove lag further instead of adding them for strange services like this.
There are advantages to game streaming but Google never really did anything with them, instead they just made a worse version of a console.
The marketing at the beginning was confusing. Everyone had the impression Stadia was like a Netflix for games. But it was almost the inverse, Stadia is a free gaming console but the games cost money. At the very least Google's number one pitch should have been "We're giving you a gaming console for free. You could buy a PS5 for $500 or you could play on Stadia for $0!" (In practice the free tier of Stadia didn't have the greatest quality but many people didn't even know Stadia had a free tier...)
Game streaming could have opened up new possibilities. Any YouTube game video could have a button for 'play instantly, one click' that loaded an already running Stadia session into a game-state with the player in a fun spot. YouTubers could have been able to hand off controls of their game session to viewers. "Okay GodGamer420 spamming in chat, if you think this boss is so easy, now you have control. Show us how it's done."
Even the lowest hanging fruit. The biggest advantage of game streaming is that it works on any device but Stadia didn't even work on most Android phones at launch, and for many months after.
>Any YouTube game video could have a button for 'play instantly, one click' that loaded an already running Stadia session into a game-state with the player in a fun spot. YouTubers could have been able to hand off controls of their game session to viewers.
This is very true, and it sounds really good on paper, but it seems like anything that attempts to transition content consumers to participants fail.
For example, Mixer had incredible low-latency technology and game integration, yet failed because (at least, I think) a lot of it was banking on that consumers would want to take control.
For me, at least, this would never be the case. If I'm watching my favorite Twitch streamer, I don't really want to play, I want to watch them play and see their reactions. If I wanted to play the game they're playing, I would do so (in fact, I just bought Railbound because I saw the Twitch streamer Atrioc playing it)
I think the line a lot of people have are small tokens of support (bits, donations, subscriptions), because many people don't want to be that involved.
Also there is the whole scaling issue. What if you have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of viewers who want to take control? That just seems unworkable. Actual stream interaction has to be build from ground up and even then it usually takes away from the game when not in place.
I actually thought this was the most interesting part of the Stadia value prop. If they could have made gaming as ubiquitous as YouTube videos I don't see how they wouldn't win.
> Any YouTube game video could have a button for 'play instantly, one click' that loaded an already running Stadia session into a game-state with the player in a fun spot.
I think the tech that this feature requires would be a huge thing for computing in general. Easy, lightweight state-saves for any program. Quick hibernation for any game. Imagine how much easier the Windows update problem would be if users knew they could open everything as it was before in a few seconds.
Even Google search is going downhill. Most searches contain a lot of sponsored crap at the top. And it's often returning worse results than duckduckgo.
I was actually searching some terms on Google about a week ago and straight up had crypto scams and "Click Allow To Prove You Are Not A Robot" on the front page. Past the first 3 results Google Search has become insanely shit.
As Google Stadia's target user, in my opinion a stronger reason Stadia died is because GeForce Now was a competing and better product.
GeForce Now allowed me to play the games I already own with a more powerful machine than I could buy myself, for just $10/month. Artifacts were noticeable but not enough for me to care. If I bought my own gaming PC later, I would be able to continue playing the game there. GeForce Now offered "Hey, you're playing Cyberpunk at 720p@25fps? Wanna play at 1080p@60fps for $10? And you can leave any time" And I said heck yes.
Stadia would have denied me the ability to continue playing on my own machine while charging me even more money. There are a bunch of stories of people with saved games trapped in Stadia. Google made no attempt to be better than the competition. It's like they're unaware of anything other than themselves.
It is yes arguably a better service in most ways and better integrated with both game studios, a TV console, and all the benefits of Xbox live community. Nut Nvidia's is arguably a closer direct competition to Stadia.
Being a purely PC game (slash arcade) platform. As much as Xbox is trying to evolve and games being cross-console/PC is getting far more common the Xbox cloud platform is still largely just an extension of Xbox games.
For ex: with Divinity and Pathfiner: WOTR they all had to release "Enhanced Editions" to support Xbox and it takes many years after the PC release to get a lot of PC games. It's not one-to-one.
That said I see Xbox Cloud completely dominating this space. Their library, pricing, and service quality is A+
It would depend on the games you play. For example Stadia got games like Assassin's Creed and Cyberpunk 2077 that Xbox Game Pass still doesn't. Their streaming service is still limited to Game Pass games only.
> Their streaming service is still limited to Game Pass games only.
Earlier this year Microsoft announced[1] that they are going to be allowing cloud enabled games that you own to be played without them needing to be Gamepass games.
They do care what the competition is doing, but the company is such a large and slow machine that it takes them many years to change course even slightly. that means when they see their competition doing something new and innovative, it takes many years to even get to the same point.
Yeah. It’s like how one of the growing YouTube monetisation avenues is basically kept in a strait jacket. YouTube Membership or more specifically channel memberships, are a one way street, it all has to start with Google, YouTube is the video platform, the the point where I would pay a the damn extortion money, App Store style, to be able to sync a user that signed up off YouTube to a membership platform like Memberful or Patreon, over so their YouTube account has appropriate permissions… it’s a one way street though, they have a discord integration, and that’s basic the only useful feature that goes outside the weirdly hidden YouTube channel member extras pages that I continue to find people who join a channel to support it but don’t actually discover the extras! That’s how badly managed this is.
+1. Why would I use stradia when I can stream a full windows machine with my whole game collection, do machine learning and use blender on shadow.tech?
Before Cyberpunk 2077's poor launch, I was looking into game streaming to play it and Geforce Now was the obvious choice. There really was no competition due to the lack of lock in. When users potentially have multiple thousands of dollars already invested in their game library over a period of >10 years, you better support playing with that library, especially when the competition already does.
I find it interesting that a service not having lock-in is actually a reason for people to adopt and stay with it. In an industry where lock-ins are common, these lock-ins also effectively become lock-outs.
It is said the biggest motivator for people is fear and lock-in results in fear. It's powerful anti-marketing.
Consumers almost universally hate artificial industry lock-in though. I think it's pretty telling that the platforms that have endured either belong to a major publisher that can lock their catalogue behind the store, or are financed by another revenue stream.
Epic in particular basically forced their way in by using Fortnite/Unreal money to fund a combination of price dumping and exclusivity agreements.
Yeah; companies like paperspace offer an even better product. It’s just a windows VM with a video card. You have to install steam or cad software or whatever yourself.
GeforceNow looks cheap compared to a gaming PC, but it's quite expensive when compared to a console. Especially an XBOX Series S. Not having to pay a monthly fee was a benefit of Stadia imo.
Tech people talk about the tech they killed, but that isn't related to game developers' incentives - especially considering nearly all the tech they killed was free and they don't have a history of rolling on actual customers.
The actual problem for game developers was that the architecture was home-grown (Vulkan-only), with little tooling, annoying licensure requirements, and not enough profit incentive to dedicate the effort. Companies have no (financial) problem releasing for GOG, which has fewer users than Stadia, because you barely have to take any effort to do so, but porting to Stadia took the effort of porting to Xbox. This both counted as a direct incentive not to port to Stadia, as well as the writing on the wall for how well-managed this product would be.
My premise at the outset was that if Google isn't committed enough to invest in a AAA launch exclusive for it's gaming platform, then I won't be committing to anything either.
To add: Trust (lack of it) played a big role also, in the sense that to capitalize with Stadia, one needed to produce a quite different port of their game.
I can imagine that making the decision to invest your developers' time on a new port and that being a product that its known track record is "https://killedbygoogle.com/."
But also google, as other sibling comments have pointed out also, did not integrate at all with their other products, did not offer more than some free games, had no offline offering -- I would pay 110% the price for physical + online access to the game for life.
They could have actually been a serious Steam competitor, they have the money to do so. Instead of supporting linux gaming, they went with their own approach. They did not offer a console, or hardware, besides the initial giveaway. Minute point, but doesn't help, when competition in the space gives weekly games, deep discounts and has a great API and track record.
Everyone knew they would fail, and they did, despite their resources, which tells us a lot. I think it is high time and paramount to retrospect and learn.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] thread"Monopoly? Us? Look how many times we've failed. Any dominant marketshare we have could easily disappear. Look how many times we've failed..."
Put another way, certainly Google is aware of the perception impact of these shutdowns. And yet, like clockwork, they persist. It's either intentional, or they're devoid of data about perceptions of the brand. It can't be the latter, can it?
Really???
As for the hypothetical court case. Again, there's history for that as well.
What's your explanation then? The mighty Google with some of the best and brightest minds in the world...is consistently incompetent? That it goes into markets outside its core competence, dumps a ton of resources, and then again and again surrenders prematurely?
Really?
Seems that your theory sounds more ridiculous than mine (which btw is inpired by Thiel and Zero to One).
Again, see Thiel for more details.
I do agree however that Stadia sucked as a product. Nobody was going to buy into their ecosystem if they can't opt to download the games onto their own PCs like Steam. Too much lock-in without that aspect, and without any guarantees that they were going to refund customers if Stadia ever sunk it just made it DOA
Games are already fiddly when it comes to latency. Adding another fiddling layer inbetween just sounds more painful.
Moved to a different city, and latency wasn't near as good because of ISP routing, mainly. Still playable, but definite pretiming everything. I think latency there was 50ish ms.
Now, different people have different preferences and I imagine if I were a pro online multiplayer guy with 240hz monitor and 10 million dpi mouse twitch shooting against pros, it would not serve as well. But I've played fps games like cyberpunk happily as a single player. They basically have my money guaranteed for foreseeable future.
Stadia wasn't laggy or artifacty at all. That is just because you either haven't used the service or you have poor internet.
I played many games on Stadia for a year with zero issues. I perferred over playing the games on my PC as it was just a lot easier / faster, to open chrome and be straight into the game.
Still grieving for Google Reader.
I haven't checked recently but they usually make the (N-1)th version free.
Thanks for the recommendation to!
I upgrade regularly as this is one of the old fashioned developers who doesn't play subscription games.
Fantastical and 1Password? Looking at you.
People liked Stadia and that is why this is hard on some people but the are not going to jump on the Google hate train over every dramatic event that is often just hyperbole. They'll remember Google for creating something awesome and ahead of it's time, and Google may actually revamp that to scale to personal gaming that runs on local hardware instead.
I believe a lot of game services streaming services just aren't that profitable. The hardware required to stream games to consumers in HD or 4k is expensive. Heck, just a few months ago I was looking at graphics cards and the lower end were still priced around $600 for a modern consumer graphics card. Then having a bunch of servers and ways to dedicate those to users using some form of graphics sharing and doing to with very little latency cost a fortune and probably didn't produce the revenue because of that.
I'd people are leaving Google or this then they can certainly try make an appealing argument about how Stadia damaged them but that Netflix, Hulu, etc don't ever pivot their plans and pricings
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=49ers+-football+-nfl
https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl=en
I just clicked your link and it says "you already have the no cost option". So we'll see what happens next month.
I actually closed my account when they first announced the cancellation, which made things more difficult and I had to contact support to get it back (I was successful). But if you haven't done that, I believe all you need to do is press that button.
Fails to exclude results without the text, and ignores known results with it.
I suppose they just expect us to eat the dogfood we are served
Also a backup/failover plan to migrate to any vendor can also mean you can migrate to save money or outage. Or they ban your account by mistake, which on google seems to happen way to often, if you link it to your developer account, or your personal account.
And if you find something that you’re absolutely dependent on; either try to mitigate that or accept it and be aware.
If you don't think Google would support GCP long term, it wouldn't make sense to put one (and just one?) service on GCP.
They have no hope of meeting the 2023 deadline. They are at 10% market share, growing 1% YoY and half of number 2 (azure).
Doesn’t look good.
[1] https://www.capacitymedia.com/article/2afswwuvis94wy12r320w/..., https://www.ciodive.com/news/aws-microsoft-google-cloud-mark...
"Azure" includes Office 365 so MSFT can pretend Azure is 3x bigger than it is: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.techtarget.com/searchcloudc...
At some point it becomes like a “no true Scotsman” argument. They’re all big, and all use their niche to drive spend. IMO HN commentators comparing GCP to Stadia are missing the boat. Likewise, MS will figure out how to monetize the bazillion O365 users with Azure.
I wonder how good of a proxy this is for actual use. I trust Google's numbers (unless Azure users are all using Bing), so I read this was AWS is by far the leader, with GCP possibly being second.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
I wonder if anyone other than AWS is making money in this space. It reminds me of the phone space with one or two winners and everyone else bleeding out.
Surprised alibaba isn’t bigger TBH.
This was a couple of years ago, I don't know if they are better at it now. But a quick search shows this looks like it is still a thing.
To clarify the analogy: Nobody trusts Google not to cancel a new thing, so they don't invest any money or effort in the new thing, so it gets cancelled.
Google shouldn't stop cancelling products that fail to get traction, they just need to learn to fail gracefully without leaving customers and developers who've built on top of their platforms in the lurch.
Too much risk and too little risk are both bad. Take risks, but only risks which you can actually afford.
It's like how both too little and too much dihydrogen monoxide is bad for you.
Companies grow old and fearful. They stop taking risks and treat failure as a "bad" thing to be avoided. In so doing, they become blind to new frontiers.
That, in turn, finally opens the door for a new wave of hungry startups who are willing to take risks and embrace failure. They come in, disrupt the old guard, and spend 10-20 years becoming giant corporations in their own right. In time, the cycle repeats again.
It's been a very long time (20+ years!) that some of these companies have been going. If they're just starting to become fearful and risk-avoidant, then perhaps the next wave of interesting startups is finally < 10 years away.
(For what it's worth, the current bear market also has me thinking it'll be a good time to start a startup in the next 5-10 years. If I were still young and spry, I'd be champing at the bit to save up a few bucks, stockpile some ramen, and go for it.)
However, if you look at their history, they cancel many many products.
Looking at wikipedia, I see 200 discontinued products (or scheduled like stadia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Schedu...
It just seems like a very poor way to run a business. It feels sloppy and needlessly messy. Especially when providing soft landings is so possible for a company with the absurd revenue that Google gets. It feels like a double warning: Google will withdraw suddenly, whenever they like, and they won't use one iota of their largess to help you deal with the consequences of their actions.
Chrome will not run properly on first execution, as in ran for the first time after a cold start of the computer, when executed off a HDD. Why? Because the HDD takes too long to read off data. Chrome expects SSD latency and fuck your computer if it's not residing on one.
When executed off a HDD, I've found Chrome only runs properly from second execution onwards after the underlying operating system has cached most of the stuff Chrome wants in RAM in anticipation of subsequent executions.
I want to say this is optimization for ever more powerful hardware, but I'm inclined to say it's also sheer incompetency that Chrome literally can't fallback gracefully if it doesn't get data as quickly as it wants.
"Oh, you know that 32 GB machine you've got? We're replacing it with this new 16 GB one. If the test suite is too slow on your new machine, I guess you'll just have to make the tests faster."
EDIT: Also - client side native software and web dev are insanely different. Web/ serverside people seem to disregard this. Constantly.
I cannot parse this sentence. What does vista having its minimum requirements poorly defined have to do with being forced to develop on underpowered hardware?
If my boss says “we are giving you a worse machine because we think that will make you write better code” I am out of there. There are plenty of ways to emulate weaker hardware and do performance testing and to make it a development priority that don’t involve intentionally hamstringing your engineers.
You’re all over the place. Please explain why you think using underpowered hardware is the only legitimate way to write software that works on that hardware.
In particular I often fight the slowest machine leaving the office. That should stay for a long time, set aside for testing.
Testing only in a VM on a beefy dev box leads to terribly performing software on customer machines. There's a multitude of performance problems that only come up when a system starts paging to disk, a machine has a HDD, or a CPU gets maxed out. These issues will be completely occulted on a dev machine with tons of RAM, 16 cores, and an NVMe disk.
Far too many developers have the beefy dev box with no requirements to test on more prosaic configurations. Even limiting a VM's CPU and memory isn't a good environment for performance testing because it's still faster than actual low end hardware.
Basically: An end-user has computer with 4GB of DDR3. Devs for <software> wrote for and tested on a machine with 64GB of DDR5. <Software> ends up running like shit on end-user's computer.
It isn't the end-user's problem that the software runs like shit, because the devs programmed to an unrealistic common denominator. The end-user is going to find <software> that doesn't run like shit on his computer, and the devs only have themselves to blame for losing a customer because they were so out of tune with reality.
It may not be their fault but it almost certainly is their problem…
I have to say, I appreciate the insane expertise browser engine developers have in making JS and layouting run fast.
Which, unlike making everyone develop on palm-pilots, is the correct solution to performance problems.
Make sure nothing else is running, start the application, expect failure, start it again, works as expected.
The end result is that anything I type gets jumbled or overwritten multiple times before the page settles down and can actually be used.
Obviously, it can be done right, but it seems that most devs who are so eager to jump on the async bandwagon have no idea that they have to make that effort now.
I was a SRE on Gmail, and I can assure you that the experience for devs was not great intentionally. We had a pool of dedicated machines that ran various versions specifically used for development. I made sure those where always on our worst clusters (slowest CPUs and disks) so the dev experience was always the worst case scenario for performance. :-)
Those should never have been approved, if the thing was shutting down. In those cases, it's normal to stop making approvals for new games, for anything expected to finish within six months of your termination date. You don't necessarily need to make an announcement yet, but you shouldn't have anyone expecting a launch when the service is dead or dying.
I once casually speculated to a director that product X felt like it was going to get the axe. He was visibly freaked out and responded with a fervent Shakespearean lady-doth-protest-too-much denial, complete with demanding to know where I'd heard this from. Inevitably, it turns out that X's days were already numbered, but he already knew and I didn't.
When you approve something for launch, and then kill the product before it can either launch or launch effectively, then you become liable for the investment in the launched failure. Google can absolutely be sued by those that just had a failed launch. They misrepresented themselves. This risk, tends to be higher for the company, than allowing people to guess that the product is about to die, because game products tend to be rather large investments.
I can “launch” (pun intended) AAA title on a cloud VM in the time it takes for steam to download the game.
I haven’t used stadia; honestly curious.
There's stories like this [0] which suggests that the performance for Stadia was different than other platforms you might deploy for. The threading behaviour is a little bit different than just a VM, which is to be expected, but can come out surprising. So there's probably Stadia-specific patching for different games.
[0] "Stadia Adventures in slow server code on Unity" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-SpWSEWYbU
Never build a business on a Google project, only ever use Google as a side hustle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
Is there even an RCS client for iOS? There is for signal…
When you're making a decision like this, you have to go full steam ahead until you decide to stop. Because not going full steam ahead compromises you in the event that you choose not to cancel.
It's like a negotiation. If you're thinking of completely folding to your counterparty, the last thing you ever want to do is tell them that they have you on the ropes.
This is fine for some situations, like games, and can even be fun.
It is not ”fun” if you are a paying customer and and X is ”Suddenly kill the service I’m using.”
The only remedy to this is trust. (Which a simple short term zero sum game theoretic analysis does not account for.)
[1] https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/06gGKvZPUYACk...
[2] https://mashable.com/article/google-engineer-manu-cornet-com...
They don’t have a real vision for the company. All they know how to do is search and ads.
Google's refunding all Stadia game and hardware purchases.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on Stadia.
It looks like it applies to basically any online post/comment, regardless of if it's anonymous.
https://nitter.net/OldeSkuul/status/1575863134857793536
https://nitter.net/burgerbecky/status/1575721820904632320
I don't really know if there's a better way to do it. If you're going to shut down and refund everyone's purchases, you need to disable purchases at the exact moment you make the announcement, otherwise people will buy things for semi-free knowing they'll get refunded in the future. If you tell game devs before the general public, it's going to leak out. If it leaks out you either need to lie and say it's not shutting down, or announce that it is shutting down, in which case the game devs didn't really get much advance notice.
I also guess there are legal complications about telling employees early. Google employees are Google investors.
For a non-Google example: Costco and their roasted whole chickens they sell for $5 USD each. There is no fucking way Costco makes a profit, let alone break even, on those, but they do it and run the red ink anyway because the customers that come to buy them will also grab other stuff on the way out, generating black ink to offset and surpass the red ink.
Streaming a game requires an actual real GPU being (I guess) exclusively used by that customer while they're playing. Not feasible to put those in edge locations.
Completely different set of costs.
So, I think Stadia died for reasons other than trust of Google.
So lack of trust also prevented Google from getting that huge game library.
As far as I understand it, Amazon Luna’s official controller does the same thing.
I really hope they make a Bluetooth update so it can be used with a PC.
( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33054216 )
Here - no one wants to work with google on this one. They have to port their games to linux at the least (which is amazing on its right own).
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/
Even the gaming press was pretty harsh on this in general.
The early announcements hardly explained what it was.
There seemed to be little outreach to gamers.
Gaming press folks described constantly having to fiddle with getting access as they normally would expect / consistently.
I don’t doubt people were trying, but it looked like a half hearted effort from the start as far as google goes.
Nobody in the gaming industry trusts anyone.
Customers don't trust developers, see "never pre-order anything."
Developers don't trust publishers, "executive meddling via focus groups."
Publishers don't trust each other. The difference is publishers have lawyers so they write legal contracts to fix that.
Google, Did, Not, Produce, The, Goods.
Full-stop.
Their service was light on content and offered terrible value for money.
A subscription, which allowed you access to the entire library of games in stadia, akin to netflix, is a compelling product.
It would probably be better if I plugged it in more often, but it pisses me off so much I usually stick it back in a box once it accepts my password.
Even Netflix mostly funds their own content. A “Netflix for games” would involve Google funding exclusive games to be made for their platform.
Well, the current situation is that stadia is defunct, because their business model doesn't work!
I'm saying that i reckon an alternative business model such as a subscription service for games would've worked, but require much more up front investments. Epic games have managed to attract a large dev following using incentives like grants (in exchange for exclusivity). Google's pockets is much deeper than Epic; obviously, google isn't really ready to invest in the stadia platform or make it succeed commercially - it's likely no more than a technology demonstration, something that someone at google intended to further their careers (like all things cancelled at google).
The branding of google services is highly tarnished by now. If you are a business, you will not purchase any google services, short of the monopoly on advertising.
Xbox Gamepass or Playstation Plus
Or 3rd party via Amazon Luna
Stadia had their own first party games that they canceled rather early - Feb 2021, year and two/three months after launch. The writing was on the wall. Stadia was a failure through and through, and they knew it.
I preorder things all the time and have never been disappointed. Granted I specifically avoided some preorders (Cyberpunk comes to mind) because it was obvious it was gonna be a shot show at launch
I wouldn't trust a Google product with the same.
Stadia was a bad product, but a lack of trust (combined with a business model which requires trust) is certainly part of it.
I've been buying games on Steam since 2006. The "never pre-order anything" take is overblown, IMO. Or rather, it is the default when you don't have a specific list of brands you trust to deliver (i.e. it's the attitude that a new gamer should start with) - but such list does accumulate over the years.
So, no. Trust does matter, and Google lacks trust specifically on the matter of not abandoning things.
As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense. You had to buy games at real $40-$60 prices but you could only play them through this limited service. I don't think anyone wants that.
Compare that to paying the same price for a regular PC game which you can play via streaming using a streaming service, but also play locally, and know that you can take that game with you through multiple hardware decides and streaming services.
With Stadia, if I move somewhere with bad internet, there is no way to recover the value of my games I purchased. There is no other gaming system like that. All other systems either have an offline possibility or are pure streaming where you aren't making a game purchase investment, like Xbox Gamepass or Luna.
It just doesn't make sense except to a really small niche and is not competitive to the average gamer.
First they had an almost year-long waiting list. Now you have to pay a hefty commissioning fee.
For me that makes no sense as a cloud setup. The benefit of cloud is paying when you need it (like when I travel and didn't bring my PC) and not when I don't need it.
Stadia did offer that but because you had to pay for the games it also wasn't worthwhile.
I use plutosphere now for VR when I'm traveling and that's great and not too expensive. Still a bit buggy and slow to boot the machines though.
And, there hasn’t been a waitlist for some time now. At least in California. I was up and running within 30 minutes of starting my subscription, and can cancel any time.
And, regardless of the exact implementation, the Shadow approach is infinitely more desirable to me than the complete lock in, and limited selection, of Stadia.
And yes I know you use your own games.. But it's not suited for casual use for me. I use plutosphere instead. That's only intended for VR but that's all I use anyway :) Plutosphere is also a "PC in the cloud" but you pay $2 per hour and a $10 monthly fee if you want persistent storage. No sign-up fees though. But its pricing is pretty ideal for holidays, whereas Shadow PC is now completely unviable for that with the activation fee.
With the associated UX of manually logging in, handling disk space, waiting for installations and updates, etc. etc. etc.
> manually logging in
You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.
You do have to boot with a different device, first for VR with their Quest app (implementation detail of the Beta) or Virtual Desktop (required).
You have to login to each and every store (Steam, Epic, Ubi, etc.) you want to play games with.
> there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores
As of now. Some games' ToS already state you can't play them remotely, and technically Shadow would be in violation of that. It's enough for EA or whatever to threaten to sue them and they might implement restrictions.
I agree that the flexibility and continued ownership of the games is a massive bonus.
Once, as you also need to do when booting up your a console for the first time.
If I could just play the game and not worry about the hardware, I’d be tempted as long as the service was reliable. Had Stadia become a real business, I’d have jumped on in 5 years or something.
They probably spent millions on getting the whole Ubisoft and EA catalogues on Stadia. There was also Red Dead Redemption 2 quite early on, Football Manager 2020, Destiny 2, some Doom, Hitman, Cyberpunk. Not to mention hundreds of indie games. Saying Google didn't invest enough is showing lack of knowledge about the platform.
Thet didn't need an exclusive, that money would have been better spent on convincing more studios to port, marketing. And reassuring potential users with a promise for a refund.
I'm surprised at how many people are discounting what Stadia offered. My reasons for not investing in it are pretty much just data caps and lack of trust in Google.
Also, I've owned every Playstation since PS2, and I've never played an online multiplayer game on one (with the exception of Journey, which does so silently), nor do I give the slightest damn about achievements.
It's probably possible to turn some of these people into regular gamers with a service like Stadia. But a lot of them won't buy many games, and those that do might bite the bullet and go out and buy a console, so probably not the best audience for a product?
There are effectively 3 consoles and it takes about a minute to set it up.
They don't strike me as common reasons to choose Stadia.
Which happens once and requires no intervention from the user.
The rest of the time it's as simple as take DVD out of box and put in drive.
If you meant "setup" as in literally just playing a game you've already setup, then sure, that can be fairly quick, but still not as quick as Stadia was.
I still didn't see any value in Stadia though. The cloud-only full-price approach was the main issue (GeForce Now had them beat there), but also their investment in hardware has been pitiful, so you're effectively playing at low graphics settings. Rather than addressing that, they chased the 4K buzzword. The kind of gamers who insist on 4K aren't the kind who want to use cloud gaming services. GeForce Now understood this, Stadia didn't.
Incidentally Google were sued for supposedly misleading promotion of their 4K support: https://www.pcgamer.com/stadias-4k-gaming-claims-come-back-t...
But you own the console for life, whereas a game on Stadia is known to disappear at any moment (because we know google will drop it).
I'm sick that you can't buy ("license") something on one platform and then immediately use it on another.
I understand that the platform costs and taxes are meant to recoup development and upkeep (to a certain extent), but it still pisses me off as a consumer.
If I buy ("license") a game or movie on Google, I should be able to watch it on Netflix or play it on Steam.
The whole walled garden "app store" system sucks.
And yet those programs do not magically work on Windows or Linux because that's not how computers work. Developers have to specifically target and build their programs for the devices they wish to support.
And many apps (in particular SaaS ones) allow you to buy one license and use their program on whatever device they support. App Store doesn't stop you.
If I can get it to run, licensing shouldn't be another road block
It's never been as reliable as Apple platforms are way more of a moving target, so it's never got as feature complete and dependable as wine
* - I am taking developers at their word on this. I haven't sold anything on the Mac App Store.
My knowledge about this is limited to a couple board game programs I used to use on a Mac and now run on Linux.
It’s not gog type freedom from drm but it seems to be cross platform. Well of course not on iOS….
Never heard of that before. Googled it, and it appears to be an american only thing. Any suggestions for the rest of the world?
I don't really see the value in transferring my Steam games to GOG for example. So I don't really see what the criticism is here.
Game store and some multiplayer integration is not that limiting. It's preferrable to every single game building their own awful mini-stores/platforms (like EAs and Ubisofts. Even Battle.net's can be annoying and naggy).
I was also wondering if the licence could be some form of asymmetric key which could be used to "unlock" the game, but that might be a solution looking for a problem.
I don't think this would ever work in reality, because it limits the ability of the delivery service to double dip.
Except on Steam. Never buy your games on the app store. Get them on Steam and you get all platforms* (at least most of the time).
* PC platforms of course. Hell will freeze over before you also get the console version.
It's a bit weird because other games haven't had those issues. It's common for racing games to get delisted because of expired licenses, but if you purchased it that licensed content is yours to download forever. Every 2 years or so a Forza game has to get pulled and goes on sale for $1 for the final week.
Edit: Doing some further digging it looks like it's because they kept selling Alan Wake after the music rights expired, so they had to push an update or delist the game. That's pretty crappy.
https://www.pcgamer.com/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas-steam-u...
Just because it’s on the disc doesn’t mean the binary has to load it.
As for mandatory patches: you would at least have the option to play single-player offline without updating.
Microsoft did something similar with the Xbox (people forget that it was basically done because they were afraid that consoles would become general purpose computers and destroy the Windows monopoly) but they also actually made a business with it and made it profitable in its own right.
It's not always going to work out, but I do think Google's actions helped stifle competition in that market. Google could have successfully stopped another company from blowing up in that market and becoming a real competitor to worry about in other markets down the line.
It sounds like a financially smart thing to do but it cuts your legs out because nobody is doing research anymore, and you select for people with half a billion potential and an eagerness to lie.
No one devs on a 8 year old budget laptop or a slow internet connection. Some devs forget that those even exist.
Fast internet isn't a given either. It's slow in some areas, and slower in most hotels. I've had sub-10mbps, 1500ms ping internet quite often, especially while travelling.
That's without counting cultural assumptions SV companies make, especially when their staff is lacking in cultural diversity.
1) pick a high risk / high reward opportunity
2) invest heavily in the fundamental tech behind it and see if it works out
3) when it doesn’t work out, shut it down, take the tech you built and use it for something.
So for example, let’s look at dart.
There was never any way it was going to work, really… but, at the time, maaaaybe, it could have worked. …and google would have owned the web stack entirely.
…but, they’ve put it to work in flutter now and that’s going ok.
The point I’m making is that if you look at this from the perspective of investment in fundamental technology (Ie. Steaming video say) what’s better?
A) develop it with no specific use case
B) work really hard on a very difficult use case that might end up failing
If you can afford it, the latter is maybe not the worst way of doing it.
You end up with battle tested technology and no users to bother you for the made-in-a-rush service you made to go with it.
You could easily argue that more successfully outcomes could come from less risky investments… but do you want 50 kind of bleh services in your portfolio?
I don’t think google does. They want a few unicorns.
You don’t get unicorns by playing it safe.
So… I’m not saying it’s the right strategy, or even a good one, but from that perspective you can see why you’d try.
Bet: we’ll see something fancy using the streaming tech roll out eventually, probably linked to a more successful existing product, it will be unremarkable and well liked by most people.
Every time Google shuts down a product, they hurt their reputation. They’re pissing in the pool that future Google products need to survive. At this point I don’t know if Google can make successful new products because nobody trusts their follow through.
I only use the products that are very unlikely to go away quickly. Search, Gmail and Android. I'd like to get off Gmail for other reasons, but it's a pain. And I mostly use DuckDuckGo for search these days.
I used to think that, but I was actually surprised how easy it was to get off GMail. I gave Fastmail my credit card number, clicked a few buttons in their UI to get my mail transferred over, moved my MX records, and I was done. I ended up migrating contacts, too, but that was just a couple more clicks in Fastmail's UI, as they have an OAuth flow that interacts directly with Google's APIs.
I still haven't migrated my calendar, and a few other email-adjacent things, but it's fine; it can all operate this way until I'm ready.
Edit: right after posting, realized you might be using an @gmail.com address, so yeah, migrating off GMail in that case is much harder than if you have a custom domain.
Beyond that, especially given that I assume (hope?) such sites are rare, a simple workaround would be to have a GMail account just for such signups, and set it up to forward to your main mail account hosted elsewhere. I think that's a pretty small price to pay if you really do want to get off GMail.
In my case, I still have my GSuite (or Google Workspaces or whatever they hell they're calling it now) account (really the only difference is now my MX records point somewhere else), so if I did have any sites left where I hadn't switched from Google auth to email/password auth, it would still work.
they should use TS. or kotlin or Swift ... or just Java.
look at React. the simplest piece of shit and it's eating the world because people got into the cult of React. similarly with Go.
...
streaming tech: they'll just fold it into YouTube somehow.
unicorns: did they ever launch any since Gmail?
Maps
Docs
Go
/shrug
I dunno, I think it’s fair to say they’ve had a few winners.
Got any winners that they started themselves instead of acquiring?
Credit where it's due though: A lot of companies destroy their acquisitions, which hasn't happened in these cases.
Go doesn't make them money directly. Similarly k8s is great, but doesn't make them money. (At best it's the classic commoditize your complement strategy. Though I have no idea where Go comes from. Well, I guess if you hire enough language developers you're bound to eventually get a new language, even if it's a bit meh, so they at least matched React in that.)
It’s a product I’ve shied away from because Google.
Angular (and angularjs before it) are typical Google engineering. (Too much rxjs solutioning in search of a problem to solve. Compare it to svelte using an observable interface to get 80% of the benefit with the rest of the absolute insanity that junior devs bounce off and make angular a dreaded framework compared to react, vue, svelte)
Google is an anti-brand at this point.
r/ps5: 2.6m
r/steamdeck: 230k
r/stadia: 119k
What jumps out from that thread you linked is the casualness of the gamers. So not only did Google find a tiny market, but that market wasn't terribly motivated.
Stadia relied on casuals who happen to have a stable fiber optic cable internet connection.
Xbox game pass doesn't work for me but I understand it's value proposition will work others - I pay a smaller fee and in return I get cloud or local, for a large variety of games. Geforce now you still had to buy games, but you got to keep them regardless of gfn, and you still had local or cloud options. Different systems but both understandable. I never understood stadia value - it seemed worst of all worlds and full of restrictions.
Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success. They made their billions on low hanging fruit, by throwing a lot of resources at problems with very high demand for a solution that weren't yet tackled well (e.g. query the internet, keep in touch with friends). So it's no wonder that in this day in age they are incapable of understanding product market fit, innovating, or competing in a market with competent players and a lower barrier to entry.
I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products.
When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it makes it much easier to do; you can also see this in case of Google Maps. You can just push your products inside the ecosystem, and be almost guaranteed success.
Stadia drifted away from that ecosystem (as does Google Cloud for that matter), and as such is much more difficult to pull off. Combine that with Google’s reputation for killing things, and the writing was on the wall from the start.
Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.
Making sure the other guy loses isn’t great motivation to do anything. Especially once the “other guy” has lost. Google isn’t especially excited by OS, because their bread and butter is all in the cloud they just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake. It’s always looked at through the lens of how it will help advertisers and since the zeitgeist for the last few years has been about privacy as it relates to personal devices, they can’t really “innovate” much without hurting their core business.
And the rest of it: "Ok, we killed Microsoft here, now what?" "Eh... whatever."
I worked in Google consumer hardware and yes this is how it is. Quite a few motivated and talented people, for sure, but organizationally it just ended up being "copy Apple and/or Amazon's roadmap."
There are whole product areas at Google whose entire existence boils down to "everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"
Their Pixel line hasn't dominated the market by any means, but has also done well enough that they can at least claim to some extent that they don't "need" the other manufacturers. Of course they do, but they can use "whatever, we'll just make $COOL_THING a Pixel exclusive and leave you behind" a threat with teeth. They actually do sometimes make features Pixel exclusive (sometimes just for a limited time), and that seems to be working out ok for them.
Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning, but I'd wager these days they've also clawed back most of that control. If Apple tells their customers, "we wanted to give you this cool new feature, but Verizon wouldn't let us", that will not go well for Verizon.
So I do agree that there's some compromise, and Google (and Apple) don't get to do literally anything they want, they are in a much better position to control their ecosystems and dictate terms than they were back when they started.
What concessions would those have been? The way I recall it, Apple in the early iPhone years would always favor retaining control over the phone experience over carrier reach, so they were available on very few carriers initially (especially compared to Android), but would not make concessions to them. Eventually, iPhones became a must-have item for carriers, so they all signed on under Apple's terms — and nowadays, unlocked phones are mostly the norm anyway.
The first phone with a capacitive touch screen was the LG Prada. Of course, resistive touch screen phones existed for a long, long time before that.
Sony Ericsson Liveview, MOTOACTV, the Pebble watch, even the Samsung Galaxy Gear predates the Apple Watch.
As always, downvotes are welcome but where I am wrong?
If you ask me, Apple's main innovation with the iPhone was making the UI usable with just a finger instead of a stylus.
But you’re just seeing the screen 1 dimensionally yes capacitive screens existed but when I say the “iPhone screen” is why it was a success I mean the technology (capacitive) + the interaction design (momentum scroll and pinch to zoom) + heavy optimization (jerky scrolling was unacceptable, every interaction had to move exactly with the finger, even browser redrawing was decoupled from the scroll to enable this).
All these parts together in unison and to a high level of polish is what made that product magical and a success.
On the other hand the LG Prada devs and designers just had jerky scrolling and no one on the team said “this isn’t good enough”
The reason Apple’s success at product development is so hard is that it involves orchestrating many, many different technologies together to create a powerful set of capabilities accessed through a consistent seamless user experience. That’s not a simple thing to even describe or discuss, let alone understand. It’s why they take years to develop products, and are almost never first in a new category, such as smart watches as you say.
That said, the LG Prada beat the iPhone to market by a month but the iPhone was in development for longer. What’s really interesting is the LG Prada II included a physical keyboard showing they where backing away from the design rather than doubling down.
Opera Mini was well optimized for cellphones of the time and bandwidth limited cellphone plans, but Apple’s deal with AT&T to allow unlimited bandwidth flipped a lot of those design decisions on their head. IMO what really separated the iPhone’s browser was a larger screen + better UI + better rendering + unlimited bandwidth meant it could just be used to casually browse the web.
Opera Turbo was always disabled on my phone, never needed it. But I never used GPRS, only EDGE and later.
The iPhone was released June 29, 2007 but announced in January. “On 7 November 2007, Opera Mini 4 was released. According to Johan Schön, technical lead of Opera Mini development, the entire code was rewritten.[28] Opera Mini 4 includes the ability to view web pages similarly to a desktop based browser by introducing Overview and Zoom functions, and a landscape view setting. In Overview mode, the user can scroll a zoomed-out version of certain web pages.[29] Using a built-in pointer, the user can zoom into a portion of the page to provide a clearer view”
Hmm, perhaps I had a beta version of that. I definitely had it before the iPhone came out. Or it might have been a different browser? Not sure.
Mobile hardware wasn't capable of delivering such smoothness. Apple's innovation was to prioritize UI rendering over everything else. When you're zooming, rendering stops and browser only deals with zooming. Regardless of current CPU capabilities and load, scrolling and zooming is always smooth. And turns out people care about those way more than parallel rendering.
That's some underappreciated outside of the box thinking.
You call it innovative, I call it draconian anti-consumer walled garden that needs to be eliminated
And that’s because it was a terrible phone.
I’m confused by your comment. Android pioneered a good 80% of the modern smartphone UX. Apple makes nice phones but they are pretty much always late mover.
> The fact that Tesla has failed to output a new car or really innovate much lately
They literally turned into a battery company with their own batteries, their own chemistry and their own end to end manufacturing process. They are making state of the art batteries when only 5 years ago this company had never even made single high volume car.
You can like or dislike FSD but it is innovative.
In terms of manufacturing, things like Gigapress is now getting copied all over the car industry.
Innovation is not just new products.
And in capital intensive business, scale itself requires innovation.
And they are doing this while having 30% growth every year with exploding profits at the same time. After 10 years when people were screaming about how EV wouldn't ever be profitable.
> spacex appears to be stuck in a morass of engine troubles for their latest big rockets
What? SpaceX is currently reaching an incredibly high operational cadence. That requires innovation.
SpaceX is launching Starlink sats with laser communication and deploying it large scale. They are producing incredibly advanced antenna technology as consumer electronics.
The Raptor engine is the most advanced rocket engine in human history and they are on their second major iteration building them as fast as very few rocket engine in history have ever been produced. They are regularly doing full duration test of these engines. Currently its not really the engines that is holding them back.
Claiming that being a little bit late on building the by far the most advanced rocket system in human history is taking his eye of the ball is pretty absurd.
Tesla were early adopters by making use of them, but not innovators.
There are two versions of the Gigapress history going around. In one version the idea came to the Idra CEO in a dream, while in the other version Elon gave multiple die casting manufacturers a call and got a hard no from everyone, expect for Idra who gave him a ‘maybe’.
Whichever it it is not that important in my view. What is undisputed is that Tesla put their money where their mouth is and took a real money bet on this new unproven technology early on. That is as much innovation as actually coming up with the machine and idea yourself.
Edit: to add to my point about innovation, from what I understand, no car company has ever used die casted parts in structural components due to concerns about internal stresses resulting from the die cast process. Normally this requires expensive post treatments but Tesla developed a custom alloy that makes this post treatment unnecessary. I am a bit light on details; someone with a metallurgy or structural engineering background pls chime in.
Structural die-casting has been a trend in the automotive industry, having started before the Gigapress. One article on this, from 2018, is https://www.spotlightmetal.com/opportunities-for-die-casting... and in that you see an analysis of the economic benefits, even though it's an article for public consumption.
The article itself, back in 2018, mentions cars already using structural die-casting and basically forecasts structural die-casting becoming a more typical manufacturing method.
Also its a part of company from China operating in Italy.
These machines are also continuously improved in prosecution at Tesla and that knowlage is flowing back to the company. The machines deployed in Texas are already an improvement over those in California. There is a lot around the core machine that needs to be improved as well.
My understanding is that they saw the usefulness of these machines quite early and were developing them in this direction and that they had already produced 4000 tonne presses of this general type. Now it's at 6000 and 8000 tonnes.
Customers are needed to make use of good ideas-- you can't take them otherwise, but the innovation is the work the Italians did.
Machines that like still wouldn't exist today had Tesla not done the necessary investment.
There is the machine and then the application of the machine to an actual production process.
It's like Germany and its heavy presses, during WWII. Lack of manpower, or in this case, something else that is wrong, leads to an player going for the most complete realization of that is easier and has major advantages.
All other car companies?
> If the other manufacturers have that down, then their need for very large components of this kind is lower.
This is not how this works. Tesla also 'has it down' with the Model 3 manufacturing line.
Its still lower CAPX and lower OPEX to use gigapress.
This is a large part why even the former CEO of VW said they were behind in some ways.
Yes, but at the time when they went after these presses as the thing for the future, they didn't quite have it down.
>Its still lower CAPX and lower OPEX to use gigapress.
Now, probably, yes.
That’s Panasonic, not Tesla. You are confused by the Tesla marketing here. Tesla makes plenty of interesting things but that’s not part of it.
Yes, Tesla is buying batteries from Panasonic. They are also buying batteries from LQ and CATL. Nobody questions that.
In addition to that Tesla has its totally own production process and chemistries. These are not shared with LG, CATL or Panasonic. Its own fully owned battery factory and research facility in California. They are currently building a battery plan in Austin and in Berlin, these are fully owned and operated Tesla plants.
These plants have their own manufacturing processes developed in-house. They even built the machines them selves. A lot of this is done in Germany in a former well known German supplier that Tesla bought outright like 5 years ago. They also bought a company in Canada that makes the battery filling machines and pumps in Canada.
If you still think we are in 2014 and Tesla is just being supplied by Panasonic, you have not been paying attention.
This may be part of the problem. Google was founded by algorithm nerds, and that's now part of the DNA of the company. Apple (Tesla/Starlink/etc) was founded upon vision - what could the future look like? How do I make that happen today? - and then, somehow, to pare that back to something that's economically viable in a reasonable time frame.
That said, taking existing problems and trying to better apply algorithms to make a better product is still a thing in AI space though - and even here plenty of start ups are taking the lead.
Within high technical complexity space, they differ in significant ways with Apple or Tesla – they don't have organizational mechanisms to do deep vertically integrated problem solutioning. Even when they have academically much superior AI tech, their ability to productize those capabilities is slow and less effective due to how cross-organization collaboration works.
On the business side, they don't have a business team really. There's no MBAs scheming new pricing or bundling models nor are there people wanting to chase/beat market competitors. So, whenever they do SKU based pricing or subscription based pricing, they tend to get it less right than, say, Microsoft.
Edit: One thing to add... Google's history of 'solving highly technical problems' has really been more around scaling infrastructure, with their notable successful products being Google search, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube - with Android being an exception that rule if you'd call that a 'product'. Maps and Google assistance have some technical aspects, but nothing really out of the grasp of a modern startup. Technical ability for SaaS companies isn't really the moat it used to be.
Not any more. These days their DNA is ads.
Stadia was a rich technical problem with an application area that’s accessible to Googlers. Even if Googlers don’t video game, real life is a game to them. But Stadia failed because it lacked the artistic passion behind Nintendo and the best gaming studios.
If Google set themselves up like McKinsey—- i.e. turn their engineering workforce into a contracting service—- then Google might be able to contribute to a real product. But Googlers just don’t care about people. They care about puzzles and systematicity.
PageRank actually originates from Economics[0] where Input–output model tells you that you need to care about balancing inputs and outputs in order to have an efficient economy. Speaking of internet search engines and ranking websites inputs would be links(backlinks) and outputs would be ranked web documents.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model
It was totally low hanging fruit. Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder. Finding useful sites and filtering out spam are much more difficult now than when Google started. The signal to noise ratio on the internet has plummeted.
And that is just the difficulty of building an application. Actually gaining marketshare in search is a whole other problem to solve and also very difficult. Even if you manage to build a superior search engine you’ll have an uphill battle convincing people to use it.
This is what it means to have all the low hanging fruit cleaned out. Google built their application at a time when most people weren’t even on the internet and spam was barely getting started as a social problem. Sure, what they had was remarkable and innovative, but only because everything else at the time was so bad. But now? Different story.
You can actually read Page & Brin’s original paper online [1] and implement it yourself. It’s not very difficult. In fact, it was an assignment question in my 3rd year numerical methods class. Unfortunately if you just point the basic algorithm at a crawl (which you can download for free here [2]) you’re going to get useless results. The spammers are optimized to fool this algorithm (Pagerank) so you need to find a way to filter out the spam. And that is a very very deep rabbit hole!
[1] https://research.google/pubs/pub334/
[2] https://commoncrawl.org/
But that's not where others failed. Instead, it's coming up with the idea, realizing that it's a truly good idea, that was the important thing. (Remember, Yahoo and other(s) didn't want to buy Google and the algorithm, when they had the chance.)
Maybe if you replace "totally low hanging fruit", with "It was undiscovered winner-takes-it-all markets" I'd agree.
In hindsight, everything is obvious. But initially, discovering that opportunity — looking at how many people (how few, just 2) did, it wasn't easy.
The big guys at that time were blinded by their own success, Google wanted users to do their search and leave the site which was completely opposite to what the Yahoo's of that day wanted to do, they wanted users to hang out on their portal.
I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make. I think what's being proposed is that the more undiscovered markets get discovered, the fewer undiscovered markets are left, and the more difficult they are to discover. Pagerank was a good idea that worked.
And back at the time, before Google Search, many many related markets didn't, couldn't, yet exist. And, back then, I'd think PageRank could count as one of the few and difficult thing to discover.
I think "low hanging fruit" makes it sound too easy :- )
Then you missed the point. It doesn't matter whether PageRank was something trivial any grad student could come up with or if it was on the level of Einstein's General Relativity in difficulty. The point is that it was one basic idea.
Today if you want to dethrone Google you need to overcome the enormous amount of engineering that has gone into Google Search and Maps. You can't do that by just "discovering" something as a grad student. It's going to take thousands (or millions) of engineering hours to achieve.
That is what it means for the low-hanging fruit to be gone. It's like the difference between discovering electricity, as we all know took quite a while but was achieved by a small number of scientists and inventors over a period of a couple centuries, and trying to compete against the modern-day electrical distribution network on your own, which is essentially impossible without some kind of Star Trek alien galactic empire level technology.
This is what everyone thought in 1999. Search engines were a solved problem in a crowded market where there could be little room for new contender And whatever limitations we had in search were just inherent in how it all worked and we just had to deal with it.
We must have lived in different 1999's
I’ve often heard the saying how “everything easy has already been invented” and that it’s so much harder today to invent new things.
I think it’s a fallacy. Things were just as hard in the past.
I owned an ISP in 1998 and there were plenty of search engines at the time. Google invented something unique and innovative and they were rewarded tremendously for it. There were literally hundreds of other companies trying to do the same thing but Google was better. If it was low hanging fruit then Hotbot or any of the other major players could’ve done it.
In 1998 there were plenty of search engines and their use was distributed more evenly. The internet was still fairly new and most people weren't online yet. It certainly wasn't an integral part of most people's life. Google came along and improved on the existing search engines and in doing so wiped out a lot of that competition, becoming what they are today.
A new search engine now has to compete with global network effects, orders of magnitudes more data, Android, and a complex web of interconnected functionality.
Even only looking at the advantage that Google Maps brings to the table totally blows past any barriers present in 1998. Sure, you could build a much better search engine but who's going to use it when it can't give them directions?
Then consider that if you look like you'll end up making some headway, you're likely to just get bought and killed off/integrated.
Are you a pessimist in life? You’re focusing on only the negative aspects of starting a search engine today.
24 years after Google was formed we have orders of magnitude cheaper processing, orders of magnitude better AI, the ability to start small with cloud computing and work your way up from there. We have 24 years of search engine research to a large extent publicly available.
I really think all this “things would’ve been so much easier back then” are simply excuses as to why someone can’t do something today.
They do exist, have you heard of any of them?
My intention wasn't to dismiss the possibility of popular new search engines. Only to highlight that the environment is substantially more complex/challenging than in 1997.
I actually think that their entrepreneur spirit and business attitude made them successful. Other guys thought of their search engines as of technical experiments and hobbies, they weren't serious about it. In another words Google cared more for innovating their search engine, making money and then reinvesting it back in R&D and staying ahead of everybody. The same story was with Microsoft and Digital Research; Bill Gates simply cared more business wise and was more fanatical in making money than Gary Kildall.
I'm not a programmer but I can write down on a piece of paper an algorithm which is more efficient than Google's in filtering out "spam" websites. I'm from southeast Europe and for my local market there are numerous ecommerce phishing websites that are popping up on a first page of search results. Some even ranked first. I reported them to Google but 6 months after nothing changed.
There were 10 search engines when Google launched, and a megalith called Yahoo dominating the Internet.
Emphasis added. It took putting the right money and the right minds towards doing it well. There aren't a lot of SaaS ideas that scale to close to 100% of world population that don't yet have an incumbent. Tiktok was lucky that Twitter dumped Vine. Zoom was lucky that Skype, Hangouts, Facetime dropped the ball by trying to keep their users in walled gardens, and not really solving the teleconference problem well.
So they are big because they were there early. But being there early didn't guarantee you'd get big.
Call me shallow, but I liked the simple, distraction free landing page and the "feeling lucky" button.
Altavista was certainly better than what came before, but you had to get your query just right in order to find what you wanted. And if you couldn't find the right words for the query, you were sunk. With Google, you could get ok-ish results with a sub-standard query, and the ok-ish results would often help you figure out a better query.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile
Search technology wasn't new or innovative, the innovation was when Google bolted on AdWords.
I think the problem is simply that it's too disorganized with that many people. I used to work on Google Fiber, and something that our customers complained about was that they couldn't upload files to Google Drive at 1Gbps. That wasn't our fault, we were happy to route data at that speed, and we had the peering capacity with Google to support it. (Different ASNs!) The reality was, we identified performance problems with Google Drive, and they simply didn't care. They had other stuff to worry about; only one city in the US had 1Gbps Internet at the time, but they still didn't have 100% of the docs/file sharing market (hi Dropbox), so they were like "it's not a priority" and worked on something that would actually make them money instead. I get it, but it never felt good. That's what's sad about companies with such a large scope; supporting your own company's initiative is rarely the right business.
The reason I like small companies is because if there was jrockway Fiber and jrockway Drive, obviously they would work perfectly together. I would simply not sleep a few nights to make it happen. But at big companies, that's not a thing, and it really confuses people that imagine the brand name means something. (I have similar complaints about calling shitty Android tablets "Chromebooks", when they didn't run Chrome OS. The Chrome OS team was a level above Android in terms of technical excellence, so it just felt bad to have some bug-ridden third-party tablet ruin the brand name like that. But, money. I'm sure people bought them, hated them, and still use Chrome instead of Firefox. But it always makes me a little sad.)
IMO from the outside the problem with Google seems to be a lack of saying ‘no’ to people - they start so many different offerings without enough/any cohesion, bring stuff to market quite fast, then seemingly strip resources away as soon as they have gone live if the product isn’t instantly an overnight success.
I don't use iCloud with Keynote myself, but those sort of sync issues always happen in multiuser apps that also allow offline editing (e.g. I get the same conflicts in O365 with Powerpoint because they are inevitable if you are allowing offline editing).
This is the issue. If it’s not #1, or maybe #2, in the market then google is certainly going to drop it after a while.
This is accurate. What makes a company good a defending market leadership makes them terrible at innovation - and you see this with both Google and Meta as they churn though building 100 million dollar products only to discontinue them because they aren't worth billions yet.
Google wants googlers and high school students to not use Windows for any reason, and only use chromebooks.
Stadia was a way for people with a chromebook to play Windows games.
However, the lack of subscriptions, separate purchase model, lack of discoverability (no search bar for years! from the Search company!) and porting model make it clear Stadia was very much not targeted at casuals.
This is coming from someone who now has no free time for video games, and only plays indie roguelikes because AAA games are too much of a time commitment to ever finish.
By sales, the highest-selling games are [1] Minecraft (now AAA), Grand Theft Auto V (AAA), EA Tetris, PUBG (before becoming freemium), Mario games, Pokémon, Terraria, and Red Dead Redemption 2.
So by sales, the vast majority of top-selling games are AAA. For what it's worth, I think similarly to you about preferring indie games to AAA games due to lack of time. But for most gamers and people in general, I don't think people even calculate the 40-60 hours per week. Most players probably just spend a lot of free time and weekend days gaming, and then the hours add up.
You do have a point that a large number of players play free-to-play games (e.g. League of Legends and many phone games), but there's a fair argument that AAA games are also targeted at "casual players," by evidence of their wide popularity in terms of massive sales numbers.
[1] https://gamertweak.com/most-played-popular-games/
AAA game industry agrees with you, releasing mega titles like Halo w/o a story to finish, just online "service game" that will always be there for you (until they shut the service off).
And in my mind, those are enthusiast games, because only enthusiasts are spending $500 on a graphics card.
If we gave some gamer the funds to run the gaming equivalent of archive.org I might have more trust in the service. Earning money and archiving cultural goods for future generations are not easily compatible goals.
I wrote this on another article comment but I don't think it's just about Google not understanding gamers, but gaming in general.
- People who play games are fickle and distrustful (and rightfully so, cause gaming in general has a sordid history of screwing the player-base repeatedly). Google didn't understand this and seem to have understood it as "built it and they will come", ignoring the handful of failed consoles that claimed to revolutionize gaming
- People who play games are fiercely fanatic towards specific games/platforms (that the console wars still continue is very strange to me; preference sure, but the outright militant approach towards different platforms is just silly). Google didn't understand this and thought it would be enough to just put platform out there and everyone would switch over
- Developers understand the resource allocation for making a game pretty well, and they constantly are missing deadlines and/or releasing half-baked games. Google didn't understand this and just released a platform that was costly to port to and might as well have been another console
- The games that were the showcase of Stadia were not games you want to just pick up and play on the go, they're something you sit down and put a few hours into. Google didn't understand this and apparently just thought "well, AAA game X is popular, let's get that on our platform"
- Google already _has_ a platform for gaming called Android, and they didn't seem to understand what makes it work and what doesn't, or how to use that as a base for their idea, and instead tried to make a whole new platform
- Stadia was a new gaming platform no matter how you slice it, but Google seemed to have the idea that Stadia was just something everyone would love and convert to immediately no matter how complex it was to put games on it. Developers even as late as 2022 still had trouble porting games to Stadia and if it's hard to port, naturally they're not going to develop something specifically for it
The list can go on, but really Google just didn't understand what they were trying to do. The tech was pretty neat, but they didn't understand that what they were offering simply wasn't the way people wanted to play games or develop games for.
Combine this with the fact that _everyone_ (devs and players alike) knew that it had a limited window to be successful before Google shut it down due to lack of $$$, and not having a strong showing from day 1 was not even a nail in the coffin, it was shoveling dirt atop the platform the moment it arrived.
Google was never poised to disrupt gaming in my opinion -- what they were poised to do was to provide the datacenter and audience for developers to create their own vision of what Stadia should have been, but Google tried to make a video game platform, and instead made another entry in the "Failed Video Game console/platforms" lists that will be content for Youtube in the future.
Well people who just care which console has MOAR FPS deserve what they get.
But as long as console exclusives still exist, there is an argument for a platform preference.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-death-of-google-stad...
That’s where the market is moving towards however. A lot of the game you "purchased" on the other platforms refuse to work if you can’t connect to their weird anti-piracy scheme.
I agree with the article. Stadia was an interesting offer. The revolving free games coming with the pro subscription was a good deal and the idea of being able to keep playing games at their rendering best without having to fuss and constantly upgrade a PC - by far the worst platform to game for occasional players like me - sounded great.
Stadia issue was for most it wasn’t offering what it claimed to offer. Games didn’t look that good on the free tier for exemple and as pointed no one trusts Google so I didn’t want to invest more than the strict minimum. Apparently I have played Cyberpunk for free so that’s nice.
It's a lot harder to build a walled garden from scratch as a late-comer, and even harder when you're building it in a swamp where people are less confident about moving in.
The idea of Stadia made a lot of sense to me when I first heard of it. I guess the implementation wasn't very good though.
Of course, the average consumer has also never heard of Stadia. I've barely heard of it and I was at the Google Cloud event where they either launched it or gave it a lot of air time.
Like any other console.
Admittedly this approach has worked once, and extremely successfully: Android. But Google tend to believe that being from Google will make a product more attractive when the exact opposite is true. (For many reasons, including the simple lack of trust that Google will still be in a market in five years time.)
They are - Google is still the most trusted brand in any studies you can find (and if you find one where it's not, it's probably #2)
It is going down rather than climbing right now, but that's also not that uncommon - Apple/etc is also seeing the same thing.
Now, among tech, and maybe even gamers, i would bet this is less true, and that is highly problematic to the degree it needs to sell to tech/people who listen to tech.
But the latter also often consistently overestimates how much influence it has (IE tech people often believe that the whisper effect they have makes a difference, and that is only true in certain cases over a long period of time).
In most cases, social influencers in completely unrelated fields can generate more tech product sales than happy/angry tech people :)
Put another way - the simplistic notion that Stadia, or anything from Google, failed simply due to lack of tech trust is silly. While it's a fun headline that plays to their audience, things are rarely that simple
We are talking about trust for Google to launch a new product or service. It's not worth to users nor businesses to direct any money or effort into anything new Google makes because it's not for long.
Google simply can't be trusted to do that. Partial list of products estalishing this trend: Meebo, Buzz, Orkut, Google+, Notebook, SideWiki, Google Schemer, Google Spaces, Google Checkout, Google Directory, Google Sync, Google Hangouts, iGoogle, Google Knol, Google Lively, Google Moderator, .... Complete list is over 200 items long.
Rather then assert your feelings as truth, please show any meaningful data that says the general public doesn't trust Google to launch products. It should not be hard to find if you're right.
As an aside, I was responsible for Google moderator for the majority of its life. It was never launched except as a "use this if you like it" type thing (we considered it but chose not to make a formal product offering).
The launch blog post (which only appeared on the app engine blog) makes this super clear: "Several of our colleagues and visitors to Google have asked if we could make it available externally for any kind of talk, presentation and/or event. Conveniently, Google App Engine launched in April and made it easy for us to do this! As a result, we're pleased to release this tool, now called Google Moderator, on Google App Engine."
We were asked by some folks to let them use it, and it was easy enough, do we did it. We kept it around for folks for 7 years. Just about everyone using it had moved on.
The turndown notice was a generic one I approved because we got asked to have some random public facing answer in case anyone cared. IE so that Michael Arrington didn't just make stuff up out of thin air to support whatever his narrative of the week was. We were spending our time helping the small number of users, so I didn't care about the accuracy of the notice. It is correct that we didn't productize it due to usage and other reasons. It still remains used internally.
I know that data doesn't fit your narrative either, so I suspect you'll discard it or argue rather than change your view.
This is actually why your view doesn't match the data - you are focused on conforming the data to your view instead of your view to the data. Citing moderator in the same list as actual products shows that.
sigh As a gamer and actual Stadia user this is not a complete or fair depiction. Like almost every other cloud/gaming service including Xbox etc. Stadia had a "Pro" subscription model which have you access to dozens (hundreds?) of games.
Furthermore "you could only play them through this limited service" is exactly the same model as every other gaming service!
I guess it's not trivial to get such "floating" windows licenses and prevent people from mining with a mouse jiggler?
Though I did subscribe to the 3080 tier for a month when my gaming machine was out of comission.
In theory, yes. In practise, if Steam shuts down tomorrow, I still have all my games on my hard disk and cracking Steam's DRM is pretty easy, and quite possibly completely legal in the circumstance.
It was a shitty platform to develop for, end of story. I’m the games industry, there are 100 more failures that look like that.
Specifically Vulkan is bad, and Linux is worse.
The solution is obvious and done by the extant and thriving streaming services.
Latency isn't an issue for movies or TV. Streaming will never work for games in the same way playing a game locally does.
I bought RDR2 for stadia in 2020 and played it everywhere - my phone, laptop, desktop. I played through the whole game and never once had any technical issues. That ability is what gives cloud gaming a real value beyond PC gaming or console gaming. You tell someone without a high spec gaming PC and no PS5 that they can play a new AAA game without buying anything new, then I think lots of people will love that. The article mentions you can't use your own controller, which is flat wrong. I used a Microsoft Xbox controller for both computer and android when I played. For someone who only plays games for 10-20 hours a month or so, it's great to not have to worry about buying new equipment.
However, after the introductory free month of the service I gave it up. Only a few games, and the ones I liked were so short and simple that I was done with them after a week or so. GeForce now has the right idea here - the cloud gaming IS the service and it connects to your existing games on steam and origin.
I imagine that if you work on such stuff at Google, you probably need the attitude that you're only there to earn money. If you get too involved, it would suck big time if it got thrown out.
So I would think that devs not getting too involved with what they work on, will probably reflect in product quality.
The marketing at the beginning was confusing. Everyone had the impression Stadia was like a Netflix for games. But it was almost the inverse, Stadia is a free gaming console but the games cost money. At the very least Google's number one pitch should have been "We're giving you a gaming console for free. You could buy a PS5 for $500 or you could play on Stadia for $0!" (In practice the free tier of Stadia didn't have the greatest quality but many people didn't even know Stadia had a free tier...)
Game streaming could have opened up new possibilities. Any YouTube game video could have a button for 'play instantly, one click' that loaded an already running Stadia session into a game-state with the player in a fun spot. YouTubers could have been able to hand off controls of their game session to viewers. "Okay GodGamer420 spamming in chat, if you think this boss is so easy, now you have control. Show us how it's done."
Even the lowest hanging fruit. The biggest advantage of game streaming is that it works on any device but Stadia didn't even work on most Android phones at launch, and for many months after.
This is very true, and it sounds really good on paper, but it seems like anything that attempts to transition content consumers to participants fail.
For example, Mixer had incredible low-latency technology and game integration, yet failed because (at least, I think) a lot of it was banking on that consumers would want to take control.
For me, at least, this would never be the case. If I'm watching my favorite Twitch streamer, I don't really want to play, I want to watch them play and see their reactions. If I wanted to play the game they're playing, I would do so (in fact, I just bought Railbound because I saw the Twitch streamer Atrioc playing it)
I think the line a lot of people have are small tokens of support (bits, donations, subscriptions), because many people don't want to be that involved.
I think the tech that this feature requires would be a huge thing for computing in general. Easy, lightweight state-saves for any program. Quick hibernation for any game. Imagine how much easier the Windows update problem would be if users knew they could open everything as it was before in a few seconds.
Stadia died due to:
- business model
- cloud only
- conjuncture and anti-competitive nature of their competitors
cloud gaming is 20years too early anyways, i'm not saying it's pointless, i am saying it shouldn't be your sole offering
they own android and they didn't capitalize on it, instead they went rogue with web only
a dedicated handheld gaming console with cloud capabilities would have been 1000x better and smarter strategy to penetrate the premium gaming market
These are core services. Google is trusted for their core services. Everything else faces an uphill battle for coming from Google.
GeForce Now allowed me to play the games I already own with a more powerful machine than I could buy myself, for just $10/month. Artifacts were noticeable but not enough for me to care. If I bought my own gaming PC later, I would be able to continue playing the game there. GeForce Now offered "Hey, you're playing Cyberpunk at 720p@25fps? Wanna play at 1080p@60fps for $10? And you can leave any time" And I said heck yes.
Stadia would have denied me the ability to continue playing on my own machine while charging me even more money. There are a bunch of stories of people with saved games trapped in Stadia. Google made no attempt to be better than the competition. It's like they're unaware of anything other than themselves.
Being a purely PC game (slash arcade) platform. As much as Xbox is trying to evolve and games being cross-console/PC is getting far more common the Xbox cloud platform is still largely just an extension of Xbox games.
For ex: with Divinity and Pathfiner: WOTR they all had to release "Enhanced Editions" to support Xbox and it takes many years after the PC release to get a lot of PC games. It's not one-to-one.
That said I see Xbox Cloud completely dominating this space. Their library, pricing, and service quality is A+
Earlier this year Microsoft announced[1] that they are going to be allowing cloud enabled games that you own to be played without them needing to be Gamepass games.
[1] https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/06/09/whats-next-for-gaming... (section titled Get More Out of Your Xbox Game Pass Membership, just over halfway down)
This is the curse of Google products. They don't care about what the competion is doing.
Competition is good.
It is said the biggest motivator for people is fear and lock-in results in fear. It's powerful anti-marketing.
Epic in particular basically forced their way in by using Fortnite/Unreal money to fund a combination of price dumping and exclusivity agreements.
The actual problem for game developers was that the architecture was home-grown (Vulkan-only), with little tooling, annoying licensure requirements, and not enough profit incentive to dedicate the effort. Companies have no (financial) problem releasing for GOG, which has fewer users than Stadia, because you barely have to take any effort to do so, but porting to Stadia took the effort of porting to Xbox. This both counted as a direct incentive not to port to Stadia, as well as the writing on the wall for how well-managed this product would be.
To add: Trust (lack of it) played a big role also, in the sense that to capitalize with Stadia, one needed to produce a quite different port of their game. I can imagine that making the decision to invest your developers' time on a new port and that being a product that its known track record is "https://killedbygoogle.com/."
But also google, as other sibling comments have pointed out also, did not integrate at all with their other products, did not offer more than some free games, had no offline offering -- I would pay 110% the price for physical + online access to the game for life.
They could have actually been a serious Steam competitor, they have the money to do so. Instead of supporting linux gaming, they went with their own approach. They did not offer a console, or hardware, besides the initial giveaway. Minute point, but doesn't help, when competition in the space gives weekly games, deep discounts and has a great API and track record.
Everyone knew they would fail, and they did, despite their resources, which tells us a lot. I think it is high time and paramount to retrospect and learn.