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So, who wants to make a bet on how long this "experiment" will last? I'm thinking 2 years before Google gets tired of it and abandons it, and another year befor

So, who wants to make a bet on how long this "experiment" will last? I'm thinking 2 years before Google gets tired of it and abandons it, and another year before it's taken behind the shed.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
I thought it was particularly ironic that Google is launching it's own game studio five days after closing it's own VR movie studio: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/google-spotlight-stories-shutting-down-1203163117/ https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/google-spotlight-stori...
- themacguffinman 8y ago
  It's not ironic at all. VR movies were always experimental and it looks like they realized there isn't a substantial market there, video games on the other hand are a proven industry that they've just entered.
gipp 8y ago
This comment has gotten so predictable and tedious on this site; I really don't get it. Google launches products. Some of them fail. That's life. Depreciation schedules for cloud services are one thing. Consumer products are another.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  The difference is they launch high-profile, promising-the-moon projects and put their full weight behind them, and then give up a couple short years later for inscrutable reasons ([cough] Google Fiber [cough])
  - gipp 8y ago
    I don't see how their reasons are any more "inscrutable" than any other company who cans failed products (all of them).
    - _bxg1 8y ago
      Google Fiber hadn't truly failed, it just turned out to require more work than they'd hoped, so they just said "never mind" to the cities they'd led along with big promises: https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-a-failed-experi-1833244198 https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-... They lack the ability to commit to a space and cultivate it, casually changing course on a whim and leaving masses of people spinning in their wake. Just look at how they've managed YouTube and its guidelines, bans, etc. Or the Play Store and all of its debacles. Were I a game developer, I would never want to be beholden to a Google gaming platform. Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702
      - jhall1468 8y ago
        > They lack the ability to commit to a space and cultivate it That's because states, entrenched providers and in some cases local governments made every inch of work cost a mile of time. The cost was making Fiber a non-starter... ISP's benefited from nationwide networks largely funded by governments, then used their monopoly influence to prevent any competition, and "hired" state governments to enforce their monopolies. But we can hand-wave all of that away and claim it was Google's lack of commitment.
        _bxg1 8y ago
        I don't deny that ISP's make it far harder than it needs to be. They make it impossible for small upstarts. But Google, of all companies, had plenty of resources to make it happen if they really wanted to.
        jhall1468 8y ago
        Blowing millions of dollars on an investment that will take decades to pay off isn't good business. Google decided, rightfully, that the answer was webpass. It's a better revenue generator, and has considerably lower barrier to entry.
  - killerdhmo 8y ago
    Google Fiber wasn't really that inscrutable. It's clearly outside of their core competency, it required collaboration and agreement with local governments, as well as construction projects, and to AT&T's snarkily made point, it's way harder than a typical software project. This is closer to their existing product portfolio, it doesn't have nearly as a difficult upstart cost relative to Fiber, and the business models are pretty clear. I think a closer analog would be the rumored reductions in their hardware division, but given that they're still making successful hardware + software, it could be more about reorganizing around priorities than it is an indication of their reduced investment
- koolba 8y ago
  There likely would be no offline option for this if (when? Ha!) it gets shut down. It’s not like a photo site where you can just download your content. Whatever is built to run on Stadia will not run on your home machine or anywhere else.
- Angostura 8y ago
  I think if we added them up, probably the majority of Google products have failed, no? It’s unusual.
  - jhall1468 8y ago
    The failure rate of startups is drastically higher than Google products, so it's only unusual in the sense that they have way more success than the industry as a whole.
    - Angostura 8y ago
      Does Google have 145 products and services at the moment? That’s how many it has canned to-date.
  - ehsankia 8y ago
    Have you actually added them up? If you really do, and look at it percentage-wise, Google is probably on the lower end.
    - Angostura 8y ago
      They have apparently canned 145 products and services.
- DiNovi 8y ago
  its not "some of them fail" its "all of them have terrible support and most fail"
- filoleg 8y ago
  It's less about them killing products and more about them following the same frustrating sequence of steps (for products that people actually liked): 1. Release a product, make it decently good. 2. Kill it in a few years after it has gotten widely adopted. 3. Release an alternative product that does the same thing, but, a lot of times, worse than the original and/or with missing functionality from the old one that people actually care about. 4. Bonus step: make it really confusing (looking at you, Hangouts => Allo/Duo). 5. Repeat the cycle. Notable examples of it that come to mind: * Messaging: GChat => Hangouts => Allo/Duo => I got tired of keeping up with that they are pushing now * Music streaming: Google Music => Google Play Music [just a rename, I think] => YouTube Remix => YouTube Music * First party Android experience: Google Play Edition => [I feel like I am missing something in-between here] => Android One + Android Go
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    From developers point of view each Android release feels like a platform reboot.
  - scep12 8y ago
    Agree messaging was bad, but music is still in progress so let's reserve judgement on whether or not that ends up being an OK transition or not. GPE -> Android Go does not fit the mold of the "cycle" you're talking about. Further, Android Go is substantially better than Android One. Do you have any other examples?
    - filoleg 8y ago
      See, that's part of the problem. As an end-user, to me all those sound kinda samey and fill the same niche, but technically are different products. As for others, I personally stopped using non-essential google products (i.e., the ones I believe that Google is unlikely to screw up without completely destroying faith in the company, like GMail or Maps), so I can't come up with anything. If you are curious, you can check out https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ and see if there is anything there that might fit the bill. Disclaimer: I have zero affiliation with that website. I found it by trying to look up a list of killed off Google products, hoping it would bring up some memories. Then I realized that there are way too many products on the list for me to parse through, and the website has a nice and clean UI/UX that I am not ashamed to share here.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  imo it's because google has burned us all one time too many. i don't trust anything they do anymore
jayd16 8y ago
They might roll it up into youtube or something, but the main components are cloud compute (GCP) and video streaming (Youtube). Its naturally aligned with their other initiatives so its pretty safe I would think.
bitmapbrother 8y ago
It was only a matter of time before this tired and predictable comment appeared. I'm surprised he didn't mention his withdrawal symptoms from the shutdown of Google Reader which he probably never used. As for your bet, I'll take it. Let's say $100 USD?
deegles 8y ago
I'd say one promotion cycle for the top executives on the product, 2-3 more for the next tier of engineers/product folks to ship some cool stuff, then a year or two for the product to coast before no one wants to take on the technical debt. So I'll predict its shutdown will be announced by July 2022.
debug-desperado 8y ago
With new consoles in 2020 and a stronger push from Microsoft for cloud gaming, I'd say 2022. Cloud gaming needs a killer multiplayer game that requires massive parallel compute (thus it can't be run locally) to make a case for sticking around.
sofaofthedamned 8y ago
Flip it the other way - shouldn't we be glad that a company is prepared to spent a crapton of money on these moonshots/lottery tickets?

So, who wants to make a bet on how long this "experiment" will last? I'm thinking 2 years before Google gets tired of it and abandons it, and another year before it's taken behind the shed.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

I thought it was particularly ironic that Google is launching it's own game studio five days after closing it's own VR movie studio: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/google-spotlight-stories-shutting-down-1203163117/ https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/google-spotlight-stori...

themacguffinman 8y ago
It's not ironic at all. VR movies were always experimental and it looks like they realized there isn't a substantial market there, video games on the other hand are a proven industry that they've just entered.

gipp 8y ago

This comment has gotten so predictable and tedious on this site; I really don't get it. Google launches products. Some of them fail. That's life. Depreciation schedules for cloud services are one thing. Consumer products are another.

_bxg1 8y ago
The difference is they launch high-profile, promising-the-moon projects and put their full weight behind them, and then give up a couple short years later for inscrutable reasons ([cough] Google Fiber [cough])
- gipp 8y ago
  I don't see how their reasons are any more "inscrutable" than any other company who cans failed products (all of them).
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    Google Fiber hadn't truly failed, it just turned out to require more work than they'd hoped, so they just said "never mind" to the cities they'd led along with big promises: https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-a-failed-experi-1833244198 https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-... They lack the ability to commit to a space and cultivate it, casually changing course on a whim and leaving masses of people spinning in their wake. Just look at how they've managed YouTube and its guidelines, bans, etc. Or the Play Store and all of its debacles. Were I a game developer, I would never want to be beholden to a Google gaming platform. Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702
    - jhall1468 8y ago
      > They lack the ability to commit to a space and cultivate it That's because states, entrenched providers and in some cases local governments made every inch of work cost a mile of time. The cost was making Fiber a non-starter... ISP's benefited from nationwide networks largely funded by governments, then used their monopoly influence to prevent any competition, and "hired" state governments to enforce their monopolies. But we can hand-wave all of that away and claim it was Google's lack of commitment.
      - _bxg1 8y ago
        I don't deny that ISP's make it far harder than it needs to be. They make it impossible for small upstarts. But Google, of all companies, had plenty of resources to make it happen if they really wanted to.
        jhall1468 8y ago
        Blowing millions of dollars on an investment that will take decades to pay off isn't good business. Google decided, rightfully, that the answer was webpass. It's a better revenue generator, and has considerably lower barrier to entry.
- killerdhmo 8y ago
  Google Fiber wasn't really that inscrutable. It's clearly outside of their core competency, it required collaboration and agreement with local governments, as well as construction projects, and to AT&T's snarkily made point, it's way harder than a typical software project. This is closer to their existing product portfolio, it doesn't have nearly as a difficult upstart cost relative to Fiber, and the business models are pretty clear. I think a closer analog would be the rumored reductions in their hardware division, but given that they're still making successful hardware + software, it could be more about reorganizing around priorities than it is an indication of their reduced investment
koolba 8y ago
There likely would be no offline option for this if (when? Ha!) it gets shut down. It’s not like a photo site where you can just download your content. Whatever is built to run on Stadia will not run on your home machine or anywhere else.
Angostura 8y ago
I think if we added them up, probably the majority of Google products have failed, no? It’s unusual.
- jhall1468 8y ago
  The failure rate of startups is drastically higher than Google products, so it's only unusual in the sense that they have way more success than the industry as a whole.
  - Angostura 8y ago
    Does Google have 145 products and services at the moment? That’s how many it has canned to-date.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  Have you actually added them up? If you really do, and look at it percentage-wise, Google is probably on the lower end.
  - Angostura 8y ago
    They have apparently canned 145 products and services.
DiNovi 8y ago
its not "some of them fail" its "all of them have terrible support and most fail"
filoleg 8y ago
It's less about them killing products and more about them following the same frustrating sequence of steps (for products that people actually liked): 1. Release a product, make it decently good. 2. Kill it in a few years after it has gotten widely adopted. 3. Release an alternative product that does the same thing, but, a lot of times, worse than the original and/or with missing functionality from the old one that people actually care about. 4. Bonus step: make it really confusing (looking at you, Hangouts => Allo/Duo). 5. Repeat the cycle. Notable examples of it that come to mind: * Messaging: GChat => Hangouts => Allo/Duo => I got tired of keeping up with that they are pushing now * Music streaming: Google Music => Google Play Music [just a rename, I think] => YouTube Remix => YouTube Music * First party Android experience: Google Play Edition => [I feel like I am missing something in-between here] => Android One + Android Go
- pjmlp 8y ago
  From developers point of view each Android release feels like a platform reboot.
- scep12 8y ago
  Agree messaging was bad, but music is still in progress so let's reserve judgement on whether or not that ends up being an OK transition or not. GPE -> Android Go does not fit the mold of the "cycle" you're talking about. Further, Android Go is substantially better than Android One. Do you have any other examples?
  - filoleg 8y ago
    See, that's part of the problem. As an end-user, to me all those sound kinda samey and fill the same niche, but technically are different products. As for others, I personally stopped using non-essential google products (i.e., the ones I believe that Google is unlikely to screw up without completely destroying faith in the company, like GMail or Maps), so I can't come up with anything. If you are curious, you can check out https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ and see if there is anything there that might fit the bill. Disclaimer: I have zero affiliation with that website. I found it by trying to look up a list of killed off Google products, hoping it would bring up some memories. Then I realized that there are way too many products on the list for me to parse through, and the website has a nice and clean UI/UX that I am not ashamed to share here.
kkarakk 8y ago
imo it's because google has burned us all one time too many. i don't trust anything they do anymore

jayd16 8y ago

They might roll it up into youtube or something, but the main components are cloud compute (GCP) and video streaming (Youtube). Its naturally aligned with their other initiatives so its pretty safe I would think.

bitmapbrother 8y ago

It was only a matter of time before this tired and predictable comment appeared. I'm surprised he didn't mention his withdrawal symptoms from the shutdown of Google Reader which he probably never used. As for your bet, I'll take it. Let's say $100 USD?

deegles 8y ago

I'd say one promotion cycle for the top executives on the product, 2-3 more for the next tier of engineers/product folks to ship some cool stuff, then a year or two for the product to coast before no one wants to take on the technical debt. So I'll predict its shutdown will be announced by July 2022.

debug-desperado 8y ago

With new consoles in 2020 and a stronger push from Microsoft for cloud gaming, I'd say 2022. Cloud gaming needs a killer multiplayer game that requires massive parallel compute (thus it can't be run locally) to make a case for sticking around.

sofaofthedamned 8y ago

Flip it the other way - shouldn't we be glad that a company is prepared to spent a crapton of money on these moonshots/lottery tickets?