24 ms·

Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

• fs2 8y ago
  The statements by Ars are overrated. Yes, it's annoying but without trying to create new and risky applications Google cannot exist.
• blablabla123 8y ago
  I was really disappointed when they were shutting down Wave. It seemed so innovative and even today there is no powerful Wiki-Messenger-Docs that is even close to it. I virtually stopped using Google because of privacy concerns but Wave was so unique, I might not have never considered to leave, who knows... About Inbox I don't really care but obviously the UX was amazingly intuitive.
• bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  Well in that case losing Google Reader was all worth it.
  • nerdjon 8y ago
    I am still upset about that. That single service being shut down is what started me to distance myself from all google services except search when possible (including making the decision to actually pay for services when necessary)
    • m-p-3 8y ago
      I pay for an Inoreader supporter account. It's cheap, it works, I don't have to maintain it, and it ensure some revenue to the developers to keep it going. I'm keeping my gmail.com because it's my main personal online identity, despite hating the UI. If I could pay to retain access to Google Inbox if I could like I'm already paying for Google One to hopefully gain some resemblance of support if shit hits the fan.
      • nerdjon 8y ago
        I use Feedly pro and the Reeder app on my iPhone for RSS now. Only because Feedly made migrating away from Google Reader super easy when that whole thing was happening. I stick with iCloud for my email, cloud stage, documents, and etc (with the 2TB plan) The last thing I am mulling over is moving my "professional" email away from Google Apps (or whatever its called now) to Amazon email or something... but the fact that I can't decouple that google account from the email has stopped me so far (Thanks to bad past decisions and single sign on).
      • rb808 8y ago
        I used inoreader. I'm happy with free, but you're right I should start paying as I keep moving off RSS readers that get shut down.
    • theandrewbailey 8y ago
      You don't want to use anything Google except search? That was about the easiest one to step away from (using duckduckgo now).
      • nerdjon 8y ago
        I want to love and use duckduckgo as my primary search engine.... But every time I try I am disappointed by the results. Unfortunately I realize that is mostly because of the profile they have already built on me.
• ChrisSD 8y ago
  So essentially Google's constant stream of new products leads to older ones falling by the wayside unless they can make very large piles of cash. It's also worth highlighting this: > Google rarely does anything as a singular company. Instead, the industry giant is made up of autonomous product groups that develop and launch things on their own schedule.
  • blakesterz 8y ago
    That's an interesting quote, makes more sense now. I guess they're running things more like a university than a business? All the internal drama and products make perfect sense now.
    • chii 8y ago
      > more like a university than a business which is wrong for google to behave this way, as the focus of university is to produce _new_ research, and a business's focus is to produce sustainable service for profit. Google should have a graduation mechanism for a product they launch, where they publicly announce that a product is out of beta, and can be depended on to exist. And if the product isn't ready to be supported, they should continue to have the 'beta' moniker attached to the product name.
      • ryandvm 8y ago
        I'd say they run it like a marketplace. If a product isn't generating revenue, it gets axed. Which, given the size of Google is probably about the only way to run things. Hierarchies don't scale indefinitely. How many companies have we seen collapse due to an inability to react to ever changing market demands? Besides having an oracle for a CEO, I'd say running your company as a bunch of autonomous business units is probably the only solution.
        • HALtheWise 8y ago
          Having worked at Google, this really isn't the case, at minimum because a large number of their business units are not and are never expected to be profitable. It is a bit difficult to describe what system is used to coordinate between business units, but it doesn't really resemble an economic marketplace.
• ergo14 8y ago
  Who... would... have.... thought... that?
• Finnucane 8y ago
  More than a few times over the past few years the first time I've heard about some new Google product is the announcement that it is being killed off. That's not the sort of marketing push that encourages one to look out for new Google products.
• blakesterz 8y ago
  I was never really a fan of Google+, but it's amazing how it went from MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER to being shutdown completely in such a short amount of time. I'm annoyed by all the other things they've ditched, but it scares me to think they did such an about face on Google+. I'll never use anything new from them, and I always tell anyone who asks to avoid using anything there. I'm kinda surprised anyone would run anything on GCP other than some test things. These shutdowns SHOULD damage their brand, and the shutdown of Google+ should send a very clear message to anyone using anything they've added recently.
  • gnur 8y ago
    As far as I am aware, Google hasn't shut anything down that you actually pay for. So fear mongering about GCP is just begin irrational.
    • ergothus 8y ago
      Right, they just let it wither. If you have a google apps domain, you run months to years behind getting new features compared to their free offerings. Then there's Google glass...when was the last update for that? Paid has not meant any kind 9f safety net from Google's mercurial attitudes.
      • javagram 8y ago
        I have a personal google apps domain and don’t mind this. Being on a slow, stable update release track means I have the better version of the product IMO. I don’t need the latest flashy updates pushed immediately to my gmail as long as the battle-tested version gets there eventually. Also, it’s ultimately an enterprise product and rapid changes aren’t appropriate for that space anyway.
    • matwood 8y ago
      Maybe not shutdown, but the Maps API 10x price increase has definitely made me gun shy about using GCP.
    • hellcow 8y ago
• holdenc 8y ago
  Hopefully Google will see this and better understand why Microsoft is beating them in cloud services. When I moved about a TB of S3 data into their cloud storage (as a cross-vendor backup) one of their product evangelists called me just to say hello. I was floored. But I mentioned that their constant shut downs are making me wary of a larger Google Cloud commitment.
  • jaimex2 8y ago
    Its too late for them. No one would trust their business to a company with a reputation of closing down services for no reason or worse yet entire business accounts with no ability appeal.
    • holtalanm 8y ago
      this is another concern I would have. The complete inability to get ahold of a real person when dealing with google support is just silly.
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    “one of their product evangelists called me just to say hello. ” They are good at that but if you need actual support they are much less eager to talk to you.
    • zaarn 8y ago
      Well, that's still better than Google, which is stopping short of launching short range missiles are everyone daring to call customer support in terms of support friendliness.
• 99052882514569 8y ago
  They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money (like Chromecast Audio), and they improve features that detract from the user experience and muddy the waters in terms of ads/monetization in their view (YouTube annotations). They run their company as a constant stream of trial-and-error product launches, some of which succeed wildly and make them billions, others fail and are killed off. Makes sense to me. Perhaps someone is confusing them with a charity or an Internet do-gooder enthusiasts club. That's unwise. You can be sure that successful services used by a lot of people will continue indefinitely, perhaps tweaked to generate more revenue. Otherwise, come on, as an avid Google+ user you must have known that the writing is on the wall for you and the other 500 avid Google+ users. No charities here.
  • josteink 8y ago
    > They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money (like Chromecast Audio) I got the Chromecast audio and think it is great. That this was discontinued was news to me. When did that happen? Do you have any links to the announcement?
    • Digit-Al 8y ago
      You can just, um, Google it :-)
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    • 99052882514569 8y ago
      I also got the Chromecast audio and I also think it's great. Historically, lots of great products have been discontinued because they didn't pan out, in business terms.
    • FiddlyPack 8y ago
      I went to buy one last week. Apparently discontinued Jan 2019. I just missed the boat, and I am sad.
• carrier_lost 8y ago
  These shutdowns might hurt Google's brand among the tech-savvy community that uses edge products like Google+ or Chromecast Audio (never even heard of that before today). But everyone I know still uses Google search and Chrome. Most use Gmail. Schools still give students Chromebooks and teach them Google Docs. I think Google will be fine.
  • AJ007 8y ago
    Yes, Google will be fine because they have an insanely favorable business model. However, if you can’t get the early adopters to use your products the late adopters never will. Why? Because the tech savvy early adopters are the ones who figure out new user interfaces and use cases, and transfer that knowledge to the less capable. They show them examples of why to use something and help when they run in to problems. I’m still helping people use Google search and Gmail. There is nothing wrong with a company testing and shutting down new products. There is a problem when you say this is Google _______ or Facebook _______ and your customers think it is on the same level as your first tier apps. Amazon does it all the time and most users never know it was an Amazon product. Most users don’t even know Instagram is owned by Facebook. Consider the exhaustive work Microsoft has done for decades to make things backwards compatible, often at the cost of their current product. No one would expect that from Google. They expect things to be killed off arbitrarily when the product isn’t popular enough. There are options: Sell the product to another company Publish the source code with an open license Or never stamp your name on the product in the first place
  • wetpaws 8y ago
    This is, arguably, a slippery slope. A lot of companies thought of themselves as too big to fail just to be ditched by customers very quickly. The side effect of being complacent is that things work for you until they don't - aol, myspace and yahoo died, microsoft barely dodged the bullet and apple with google are starting to venture into the danger zone.
  • mywittyname 8y ago
    Google will be "fine," but I've stopped investing in Google products and I'm sure a lot of the tech-savvy community feel the same way. This will make it more difficult for them to get new products off the ground in the future. They make excellent products, but they just don't want to invest in them long enough to gain widespread appeal. Inbox was a killer app. Now that I've experienced what brilliant email looks like, I'm going to keep a look out for a competing clone and will likely switch. It's a vicious cycle. Fewer people will invest in new products until they know it will be around in the future, but then Google will shut down product that don't gain enough users. This is a cancer that slowly eats away at the company bottom line.
• criley2 8y ago
  Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for people with long-standing accounts is untenable. The kitchen-sink approach of gmail has created a website/app that wants to meet every need and honestly meets none. In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly rolled up and ideal notifying Inbox back to the utterly uncontrollable insanity of Gmail. The "rollups" in Gmail don't work, the filtering is arcane and unchanged from the 2001-era, the "labels" are useless at intelligently combating spam/marketing, and my gmail inbox receives hundreds of emails a day, 0 of which I care about, and hundreds of which google desperately wants to mark important, put in my inbox, notify me about, and provide precisely 0 tools to intelligently control it. My gmail is a nightmare of anxiety that no man could ever wrestle control over (while my Inbox is a delightful walk through an orderly park) and I am honestly just considering abandoning this gmail account. Of course, this gmail account IS my google account, it IS my google existence. If Google has broken email, their core app, my core account --- maybe it's time to leave. I can't be the only one approaching Google this way. Sooner or later, they'll kill what you love about them, too.
  • Hamcha 8y ago
    The Inbox shutdown made me finally make the switch from Inbox/Gmail back to a mail program (Mailspring, but anything else could work), which is definitely good for me on the long term, as it means that switching to another provider will be completely seamless. I wonder if Google will ever learn that it can't teach users to like something they don't.
    • criley2 8y ago
      The reason I don't want a mail program is because 99.9% of my email is utter garbage, so the idea that I need to take up bandwidth and diskspace and processor time on my machine to basically download gigabytes of unwanted advertising, scams, phishing attempts, etc, is ridiculous.
      • Flockster 8y ago
• hello_friendos 8y ago
  Still sad about Google reader closing I've been hesitant to put my faith in any new Google product since.
  • forgotAgain 8y ago
    Given the push back against social media these days, Google could get a lot of good karma by resurrecting Reader.
    • adolph 8y ago
      Who'd trust them to keep a service running at this point?
  • 2sk21 8y ago
    Google Reader was great while it lasted - I had grown to really like it.
• jaimex2 8y ago
  Damaging? Its very clear the damage is done. I thought the whole point of Alphabet was to try and hide the Google brand so customers trust to use it.
  • johannes1234321 8y ago
    > Damaging? Its very clear the damage is done. In the HN community certainly, but also for consumers?
    • jacquesm 8y ago
      If you lose your early adopters you lose everything in the longer run. Every new product needs early adopters.
      • RPLong 8y ago
        That is such a wise and important point. I am no fan of Apple, but the one thing they have going for them is that they have never forgotten how to please their core fan base. I was such big Google fan that they actually featured me on their blog over a decade ago. They have destroyed everything that I ever liked about them, piece-by-piece and replaced it with advertising, the scourge of humanity.
        • TremendousJudge 8y ago
          >I am no fan of Apple, but the one thing they have going for them is that they have never forgotten how to please their core fan base. I'm no fan either, but their fanbase here HN has been criticizing the new macs for years now
• jacknews 8y ago
  I'm not so sure. In the eyes of users of those products, perhaps, but if those products are not succeeding, ie not becoming widely popular/turning a profit, I guess google are calculating limited collateral damage from shutting them down. I think the brand is tarnishing for more abstract reasons; privacy/surveillance, complicity in chinese censorship, being a (the?) prime example of tech-leveraged inequality (stories about founders' private jet parties probably don't help), and so on.
  • chopin 8y ago
    The problem is that the damage is cumulative. Each step may have little collateral damage but each is a step in the same direction where your reputation becomes bad.
• petercooper 8y ago
  I think this is most damaging to Google Cloud Platform as Amazon and Microsoft have demonstrated just how valuable such a platform is and it's often the developers who steer companies in choosing such platforms. But can we trust that any service on such a mission critical platform will last as long as our apps? Amazon and Microsoft have earnt our trust on this despite any other faults they may have.
• tyfon 8y ago
  It's one of the reasons I will never buy any games on google stadia when it launches, I expect it to be shut down in 2-3 years. I have the network to use streaming so I'm not so worried about performance, ps now for instance is almost indistinguishable from playing locally on my ps3.
  • ineedasername 8y ago
    Yeah, it looks like games will actually need to be built on stadia. It doesn't look like it just spins up an instance of vanilla install of the game. So there will need to be a deliberate choice by developers to support a new platform. Add that to the fact that many gamers already have a library of purchased games (like in steam) and aren't going to be thrilled at either buying them again or paying a subscription to play games they already own, and I really don't see how Stadia is going to work from a financial model standpoint. This makes me think that Stadia might be a "build now, monetize later" experiment that will quickly be shut down if/when people don't buy/subscribe and no other revenue stream is easily found. I might pay for Stadia if it was something like PaperSpace, where I can basically spin up a VPS optimized for game streaming, install steam, and play whatever games I have. Absent that, Stadia would need to provide offline copies of the games for backup should their service either go down or be cancelled.
    • tyfon 8y ago
      Afaik it's built to a ubuntu + vulkan setup, but I suspect the rendering will go directly to a proprietary encoders framebuffer and that it uses custom input mapping and not libinput. What would be nice if they released offline linux + vulkan versions in addition to the streaming version but that probably goes against their MO of tracking and monetising. It would make me much more inclined to buy on their service though.
• mark_l_watson 8y ago
  Well, I think it is wrong to rely on any company’s products and always have plan B options. I just switched to using G Suite for maintaining my collection of research material, emails, online storage, and most importantly using cloud search to find things quickly. This is convenient but I could adapt in a day if they shut down all these services. I use my own domain, keep google Takeout backups, and could get by nicely using spotlight on a Mac to search all my old research PDFs and notes. Compute platforms are a different story: if we as developers keep our cloud based systems ‘portable’ we miss value of specific AWS/GCP/Azure services and APIs. So, I would argue that it is very important for Google to provide better support and stability for GCP and everything else really is much less important. EDIT: I forgot to add: I have purchased about $300 in google play movies and books, so I would be annoyed if for some reason those stopped being available.
• meddlepal 8y ago
  Google's two (maybe three) core Google-branded products to non-tech people are Search, Gmail and maybe Chrome. I don't think non-techies could even tell you what some of the other products are or did. I would also wager most people outside of tech don't realize YouTube is owned by Google. Tech people pay a lot of attention to this stuff, but casual user's don't notice or don't care.
  • annodomini2019 8y ago
    Probably Google Drive as well.
    • cc439 8y ago
      Good point. Funny enough, the Google Drive desktop application was killed and replaced with Drive File Stream which broke the offline usefulness of Google Drive.
      • anonuser123456 8y ago
        The file stream app still does the old drive behavior if you enable it.
      • magduf 8y ago
        Luckily, there's open-source tools for Google Drive, such as "grive".
      • pradn 8y ago
        The Drive File Stream app lets you pin files for offline use. Disclaimer: I work on it.
  • chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    Last I checked, YouTube was/is kind of a big deal.
    • scarface74 8y ago
• o10449366 8y ago
  There isn't a single new Google product that I'm excited about. Even if there was, at this point I would be apprehensive at best given their track record of abandonment. It seems to be that they've forgotten how to innovate compared to their competitors. Facebook, despite their controversies, bought Instagram and managed to recapture the young market with new features and improvements. Amazon has been making strides with AWS and its Prime ecosystem. Google has been... Making more redundant messaging apps?
  • jtloong 8y ago
    I mean Facebook buying Instagram isn't really innovation. In terms of business strategy and feature enhancements, for sure its been great. But that's not really what I'd call innovation.
    • o10449366 8y ago
      I used Instagram as an example because I think Facebook has done a lot more with it than, say, Google has with their YouTube acquisition. YT has been largely stagnant in the face of competition from Twitch, Netflix, Spotify, etc. and I see fewer and fewer content creators using it, whereas Instagram continues to grow.
      • michaelt 8y ago
        You could argue that youtube's rate of innovation is low. But when it was launched it was Flash-based sub-10-minute low-resolution prerecorded videos that paid creators nothing, and so on. Now it supports long videos, 4k, streaming, html5¹, pays content creators enough there are a bunch of them doing it full time², has an ad-free premium option, it isn't at war with music labels, and it hasn't been bankrupted by bandwidth costs. Seems a fairly good track record to me. ¹ Arguably Youtube was one of the big forces getting decently working video out of flash and into browsers. Along with Apple refusing to ship Flash on iOS, that is! ² Admittedly at the whim of fickle algorithms, so not the best financial security there
• fixermark 8y ago
  I was going to make a comment about how Google's approach to service deprecation contrasts with Microsoft's, but then I spot-checked my assumptions and realized that MS has discontinued over 50% of the Office ecosystem of apps over the years. So I think I need to instead ask a question: Is Google's deprecation strategy actually unusual for a company with a wide ecosystem of offerings?
  • Jorge1o1 8y ago
    Disagree about the MS point a bit. Yes, nominally, MS has killed some programs in the Office Suite, but the core products of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook are still there. Even the weird, obscure products like Publisher and Access are still around. So maybe they killed Clippy, but that guy
    • fixermark 8y ago
      Google has killed some of its offerings, but the core products of search, ads, drive, and mail are still there. (... Inbox being only a UI on top of the mailbox and not the mailbox itself, not unlike Microsoft Schedule+ went away but the underlying Outlook functionality remained).
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • csixty4 8y ago
    Groove Music Pass and Microsoft Band stand out as good parallels, too. As does Windows 10 Mobile. The Microsoft Health service that went with Band & Mobile is shutting down soon. And they announced today that they'll no longer sell books in the Microsoft Store app. It's getting hard to trust both companies.
  • chillfox 8y ago
    Desktop software is different from cloud services. If I have a Windows XP and Office 2003 disc then I can still run Frontpage if I so wish (ideally in a VM not connected to the network). There is no way that I can run Google Notebook anymore (shut down in 2012).
• heavymark 8y ago
  Ever since Google shut down reader, always associated Google with a company that could shut down any of their products at anytime so in general to look else where for most everything other than Gmail. Use Docs and Drive which seem to be here to stay at least as well. Other companies like Apple shut down Ping and such but very rarely and most are things that were DOA unlike Google. The problem is Google tries everything but doesn't give it enough love to fix the issues and make successful, unless a product is successful. Which is a bit of a catch 22. People know a lot of these smaller initiatives may go away and/or have missing features/bugs so people don't heavily invest in them, and thus Google kills them since not enough interest. Also now people associate Google with privacy issues even though they do some incredible things with that data.
• mbesto 8y ago
  That's because Google is built like an accelerator. Look you can argue that Google's brand is being damaged but you know what's worse than a few dents in your brand? Destruction to your brand. Look at a company like Kodak who missed the boat on digital cameras (despite having created the first one). Google makes 100 bets a year so that it doesn't miss the next digital camera, or phone, and so on...
• theshrike79 8y ago
  Isn't this purely about their internal incentives? No one gets promoted or advances their career by doing boring upkeep tasks on an existing product. The only way to really advance your career inside Google is to launch a new product. (And then let it slowly rot as you and your team are promoted and moved to launch a new product)
• jfasi 8y ago
  Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially at the higher levels like SWE III -> Senior and especially at Senior -> Staff and above, explicitly talk about impact on the organization and the business. This has consequences for the kind of teams people try to join and kind of work they choose to do. Maintenance engineering is so not-rewarded that it's become an inside joke. Any team that isn't launching products starts bleeding staff, any project that isn't going to make a big splash is going to be neglected, and any design that doesn't "demonstrate technical complexity" will be either rejected or trumped up. This is as important in the product management, people management, and general leadership roles as in engineering. The incentive throughout is to create a product, launch it, apply for promotion, and move on to bigger and better things as soon as possible. In my time at Google I saw organization after organization pay lip service to rewarding maintenance and "preferring landings over launches" and “improving product excellence” but (at least in my experience) nothing stuck. Usually an organization starts with a top-down direction and the rest of the company is compensated for executing it. Not at Google. The "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach that developed from the early days of twenty percent time and total engineering independence has created a disorganized mess of a company. Multiply the individual incentives fifty thousand times and you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately. Edit/Addendum: This is also why GMail, YouTube, Search, GCP, Android, and others aren’t going anywhere. They’re making money, they’re core to the business, and there’s plenty of opportunity to work on them and get promoted. They all also share one thing in common: deep down they’re frontends for search or advertising (GCP and Apps are an exception because they make money on their own). Measuring and proving impact on search numbers is a well-known promo narrative at Google, so those products are a safe bet for employees and users. Streaming game services, not so much.
  • mrbonner 8y ago
    It is general true for any big organization. In my own firm, I could see the rush into machine learning direction as a door way to a promotion. Any engineer or PM who works on a ML related project and is able to ship it would have a higher chance of getting promoted. I could also say the same for the usage of AWS products. In the end, I often see projects resembling the messy mashup of AWS products to form a unnecessary complex ML solution to a mosquito problem. It’s a waste yes, but sure will make it looks challenging and boost people to promotions.
• arendtio 8y ago
  Maybe it is time Google thinks about decentralized products again. I mean, yes they are one of the biggest players in the cloud business, but decentralized doesn't mean you can't be a big cloud provider within an open ecosystem. And if you build open systems, you can abandon those without letting anybody down (unless you didn't even release the complete reference implementation as it happen with Wave). For example, with Stadia they could have opened up their platform for gaming marketplaces like Steam, GOG, etc. and let people play the games they already own via the Stadia streaming service. That way, nobody would have to be afraid of not being able to play their games when Stadia shuts down in 3 years.
• apexalpha 8y ago
  This only exists in our engineering bubble. No average user has ever heard of all the products listed. This does explain their lack of enterprise customers though.
• FabHK 8y ago
  My list of degooglifying actions (mostly from my older post [1]) * switch default search engine to DuckDuckGo (one can still use the !s bang when one wants to see what Google has) * use tracking blockers (uBlock origin, BlockBear on iOS) * use anonymous/private/porn mode browsing most of the time (except for sites I actually want to be logged in permanently) * use Zoho as a replacement for shared Google docs * use Youtube either in private window, and/or download content once with youtube-dl * use Apple Maps or OpenStreetMaps instead of Google maps, though still revert to Google maps sometimes, lamentably. It's good. (I never log in, though.) * long ago switched to different email for main email, and forwarded gmail account to it (and now, basically nobody emails to my old gmail address anymore). (In fact, I use a catch-all domain now (very easy to set up), and a fresh email for basically every account. Quite handy.) * for contacts, photos, etc. I use Apple's built-in stuff. I do trust Apple a bit more (different business model; look at recent iPhone prices.) * Signal, Wire, iMessage for messaging All in all, I think a fairly degooglified life is eminently possible. In response, people furthermore suggested: * Firefox with Multi-Account Container function to separate browsing, or just a temporary session with `firefox -no-remote -profile $(mktemp -d)` * Lineage OS for Android phones (though somewhat controversial) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057709
  • thefranke 8y ago
    I can also recommend Invidious [1] as a Youtube replacement. It's effectively a proxy in front of Youtube, only loading the source data (i.e. the video) in its own container. You can subscribe to channels via the builtin RSS functionality just like on Youtube. I use a redirector extension [2] in Firefox to automatically redirect any Youtube links to Invidious, since the signature for loading videos is identical. [1] https://www.invidio.us https://www.invidio.us (many other instances run on different addresses) [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ (Pattern: https://www.youtube.com/** https://www.youtube.com/**, Redirect to: https://invidio.us/$2 https://invidio.us/$2)
    • jerf 8y ago
      "It's effectively a proxy in front of Youtube," Then it will be killed when it gets popular, and is not a long-term replacement, because that's only dubiously legal at best (and I'm being generous there, I'd go with "not legal"), and the blocking-it arms race is going to be advantage Google. There isn't really a replacement for YouTube, because it's not a service, it's content.
• iamgopal 8y ago
  There are many many googlers from top are also here at hacker news, reading these very criticisms often, why nothing has changed in years and years ?
  • beckler 8y ago
    Google doesn't reward those who make things better, they reward those who launch new products.
• La-ang 8y ago
  Google+ hahahaha
• La-ang 8y ago
  I disagree with the idea that shutting down products damages the brand. It's quite the opposite. Google+ has always been a joke, and migrating and merging products sounds just as wise as creating new ones that work. On a side note, I'm happy Google+ will be buried for good.
  • ArtDev 8y ago
    Their history killing successful products makes everyone wary of using any new Google products: https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com
• Yajirobe 8y ago
  What is people's opinion on Tensorflow?
• johnnycab 8y ago
  This is a common practice for Google i.e. deprecating under-performing services borne out of 20% time policy. https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/the-myth-of-google-s-20-time https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/the-my... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...
• tosh 8y ago
  I wrote about this (the danger’s of brand extension) when Stripe launched Stripe Atlas https://medium.com/@__tosh/stripe-atlas-and-the-trap-of-brand-extension-4eb158569a37 https://medium.com/@__tosh/stripe-atlas-and-the-trap-of-bran...
• v7p1Qbt1im 8y ago
  This again. Not a week goes by without someone mentioning this. When a product is used by 0.001% of your user base you have to think about putting engineering resources towards that service. It just so happens that non-core products are often used by a vocal early adopter tech crowd like people on HN. Also 0.001% of Googles User base might still be 20,000 people. The other thing is Google's business practices. I always think of Google as hundreds or thousands of startups. Small agile team builds up a new service. Where are we within 3 to 5 years. Over a billion users yet? No? Ok scrap or integrate it somehow. One big problem of big slow boring corporate entities is that they always miss the next big thing that's gonna disrupt them. Google did it to many incumbents. So it makes sense that they might be worried to be next to be disrupted. Also I think it's important to differentiate between consumer and commercial offerings with SLA's. There is no difference between the service discontinuation policies in GCP vs AWS and Azure. And also, gaming is way to important to abandon. Plus they have first mover advantage now as opposed to G+.
• jillesvangurp 8y ago
  It's not the shutdowns that are the problem but the lack of vision with which these products are launched and abandoned almost right away. Inbox is a good example of a product that was launched and almost immediately stopped evolving with big question marks about transitioning from gmail to inbox, which ultimately a lot of users did not want to do, and more users who couldn't because some features just weren't there. The writing was on the wall when a year in there had been no meaningful updates to Inbox (i.e. somebody shut down that team almost right away) and then slowly gmail started getting new features. Inbox barely evolved and there never was a clear vision for transitioning from Gmail to Inbox. Unless of course the vision was to have two competing products with more or less the same goals out there. Same with chat. Google seems to suffer from a chronic internal not invented here syndrome. Where teams are competing with each other instead of working with each other. Google has a gazillion chat solutions, two consumer operating systems for laptops, tablets, and phones with lots of overlap. A bunch more for watches, misc IOT stuff, etc. And another OS in the works. Which of those three will be killed? Which won't be. It doesn't even matter. What matter is that we don't know and I suspect Google leadership doesn't know either. It's not acting like a company that actually knows which of those teams are going to get some bad news pretty soon.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• linsomniac 8y ago
  Do we have any idea yet why Google made the dk move of increasing Maps cost 14x? I understand that things change, but it sure is hard to give Google the benefit of the doubt with the information that has been made available thus far. As it is, it feels like a two-word goodbye.
• Zigurd 8y ago
  Killing some products makes a lot of sense, or is at least has a plausible rationale. Now that video Chromecast devices can do audio casting, it may not make sense to make separate audio products. Other things, like Google's utter botch of tablet software and hardware points toward senior management treating those businesses like hobbies. Hardware partners and customers are indeed victimized. Getting tablets right requires product management discipline across APIs (i.e. Fragment) app frameworks that have to use Fragment correctly, UI design that doesn't promote an "it's a big phone" approach to app designers, hardware specs, and the OS. Nothing that came after the Fragment API really handled tablet cases very well. In their latest move in tablets Google seems to have surrendered to the Windows tablet idea of a hybrid laptop/tablet OS, except Samsung, who vastly outsell Google's hardware, is still making their variants on Google's old laptop OS. WTF? If I were at Samsung I'd be pissed as hell at Google for muddying up their only successful tablet hardware partner's technology position. One could hardly do worse.
• teddyh 8y ago
  Who now can trust Google Stadia? http://bonkersworld.net/look-this-way http://bonkersworld.net/look-this-way
• ben7799 8y ago
  The Ars article misses the point that google is an ad company that uses it's dominance in search to keep the ad money machine going. Everything else is just playtime to google. So they have no interest in doing the hard work to support any play time projects at all. They are so horrific to deal with at an enterprise level. All this stuff that google shovels out, makes a splash with, and then cancels is just stuff that doesn't further the ad hegemony. You can take or leave the free stuff, if it works for you that's great, but don't expect it to hang around any longer than it serves it's purpose. They don't charge money for this stuff and keep it around once it stops being relevant for ads because the price tag to make a difference to them would be way too high for anyone to pay for it, especially at the consumer level. My exposure at this point is basically just Gmail & Calendar. I'd be pretty bummed if Youtube got the axe though.
• burtonator 8y ago
  I'm a developer of an app on Firebase. I really like the current iteration of Firebase but it's definitely languishing compared to what's happening at AWS. Firebase is great for our use case as it handles auth easily and has sort of a JSON-put API as well as support for blobs via cloud storage. https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ ... if you're interested. Anyway. This keeps me up at night. Google has a history of just flat out ignoring products and then killing them. They're not TOO bad in cloud but they're really getting their ass handed to them across the board. Microsoft is taking their lead in cloud and Amazon is at least 5 years ahead of Google. I think we're going to look back at 201 and realize that this is the year Google started dying. They're failing on Youtube with advertisers angry at them. Android developers are pissed on the constant platform changes and abuse from lack of customer support. Just last week I spent about half a day trying to implement chrome extension inline installation on my site only to find out that they killed that feature six months ago but didn't update their documentation. The chrome extension store developer console is a joke. Right now I'm asking for "all permissions" for our extension as I need to inject a header in an HTTP response for CORS. So we're under auditing for every update. This includes ASSETS! So if we update an image in our chrome extension we have to wait a WEEK for them to re-audit our app even though the binary didn't change. Something is seriously wrong at Google and they need to fix it ...
  • ArtDev 8y ago
    Firebase is an example of something that I would use except that I know Google is "behind it".
• VonGuard 8y ago
  I once asked Diane Greene straight up, when she took over Google Cloud, "How can you possibly win enterprise customers when there are 12 deprecated APIS in Google Cloud right now, and you haven't even started to turn the thing around." She dodged and said there were no deprecations.... I literally had the deprecated services listings from their site up on my phone. I think this is one of the reasons she moved on: it's never going to stop, there. They'll always leave things and move on to the next thing, not worrying about the old customers.
• tim333 8y ago
  I can understand why Google don't want to support a large number of small services but you'd think they could spin them off rather than closing them - maybe retain 60% ownership and option the rest to a team of enthusiasts? They'd have less annoyed customers and maybe make money out of it.
  • Zarel 8y ago
    They did that for Wave. Reader was too integrated with Google's internal APIs for that to be feasible, though. I assume Inbox is the same.
• carapace 8y ago
  Google Labs.
• fabricexpert 8y ago
  Just switched from inbox to gmail today after the notifications stopped working There are ads inside gmail that look just like emails, which I keep accidentally opening. This is just ridiculous why would I use an email provider that does this. What are they going to do next? Start adding ads to my email signature?
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > What are they going to do next? Start adding ads to my email signature? That's crazy, who would ever do that? ~ sent from my iPhone [0] [0] not really, but...
• Boulth 8y ago
  I think the biggest unforseen effect of these shutdowns is the consumers perception of Google's new products. Google announced gaming service? So what, it will be gone in 2 years tops. Google announced a new product? I don't want to be a beta tester for life. Edit: Just found this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553601
• elchief 8y ago
  Damaging? It's been damaged for years around here
• machiste77 8y ago
  I want to try using Google Hire to recruit talent at my company but unfortunately I feel as if I've been conditioned to believe that there is a higher probability of the product being killed compared to its alternatives.
• yuribit 8y ago
  I didn't realize how many projects have been killed during the years until I opened the google graveyard: https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com
• markstos 8y ago
  I would rather Google keep trying and failing than quit trying. If you don't keep the start-up spirit to keep trying new things, then some start-up will find a way to disrupt you.
  • purple_ducks 8y ago
    Google aren't inventing.They aren't even re-inventing. They're just re-implementing.
• anticensor 8y ago
  Google+ has shut down as of 10:00PT/18:00CET.
• stcredzero 8y ago
  Back in the 90's and 00's, I read some quips about how intra-company politics was starting to run counter to the welfare of Microsoft's user base. In 2019, it seems like Google has succumb to the same pathologies, but unfortunately amplified by certain societal currents. (No matter how idealistic and noble the goals, activism entails grabbing power, and power attracts sociopaths.)
• jamesgagan 8y ago
  Shameless self-promotion, but I've recently built a replacement for goo.gl url shortener with an API: https://plip.io https://plip.io
• dreamcompiler 8y ago
  Google has morphed into a boring low-growth sustain-mode advertising company that happens to employ a lot of very bright, creative people who really have no business working there any more. Thus we see a ton of hobby side projects that don't last. At this point if Google invented a Level 5 self-driving car, I'd probably just yawn until a more dependable company reinvented it.
• acdc4life 8y ago
  How long until stadia bites the dust?
• prolepunk 8y ago
  I'm sad to see Inbox go, I really got used to it, at this point I'm going down the path of de-googlification. I've been gradually moving away from Gmail to using my own configuration with Postfix/Courier/Spamassassin/rbl/letsencrypt certs everywhere etc... This has been my on-and-off side project for the past couple of months or so. I find how well filters based on from/subject work. Tunderbird has really good desktop experience, on android K9 Mail works but is a little bit annoying. The next thing I'm trying to automate my mail is to set up server-side mail filtering with courier/maildrop, because I haven't found a good way of synchronizing Thunderbird filters and I'm not willing to have a Thunderbird session just running all the time on a computer.
• lgleason 8y ago
  The majority of Googles profit/revenue still comes from search/advertising. It has generated wads of cash for them, but if they just sat on the cash it would not make Wall Street happy so they've thrown a bunch of money at different efforts to make it look like they have more than just search and advertising to boost the stock price. Because of that there has been no incentive to see these other products to fruition, but at the same time they could afford to throw money at it as it helped to boost the stock price. Now however there is the new threat of regulation in both the US and Europe with the later also starting to impose fines. This makes me wonder if part of the motivation is to retrench with investment because of some potentially significant headwinds. My guess is that what people have observed inside of the company is a manifestation of that.
• spork12 8y ago
  Google is pretty much evil now.
• blihp 8y ago
  Customers/users/developers don't care what the reasons are, only that it continues to happen. What is especially irksome to many is that they are shutting down products/services that found an audience... just not one large enough, fast enough to Google's taste. The more they shut down products, the longer many are going to wait before even considering using one of their new products/services especially if there's a cost associated with it. It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle: Google launches a new product, customers/users/developers wait to see if Google is really serious about it, Google shuts down product because it never attracts the critical mass it needs to see, customers/users/developers get even more jaded toward the next one... rinse and repeat.
  • JohnWilcox 8y ago
    It’s odd that Google/Alphabet doesn’t understand this basic negative feedback loop. It has become apparent to me, even if you ignore the rot that has pervaded throughout the organization, which is manifesting itself in Search results.
    • chibg10 8y ago
      I'm sure individuals within the company understand it. Maybe even most individuals. Get people in large groups though and throw career advancement in the mix for highly career-driven Googlers and all of a sudden what everyone knows to be good for the group ceases up be relevant.
  • kian 8y ago
    I couldn't agree more here. If only they had a habit of keeping services in beta until they could earn a net profit, and then released them. Then, if for some reason they can't find the level of profits that Google wants for them, they could spin the product off as a separate company and forget about it instead of shutting it down.
    • mvexel 8y ago
      That reminds me of the early days of Flickr, which was very visibly in beta for years (it was on the logo). That gave me an appropriate level of anxiety about the longevity of the service. (Well, that and the fact that all the page urls still had a .gne extension, suggesting that Flickr was perhaps not their end game.) Then they went into 'gamma'!? for another couple of years before it finally became just Flickr.
• martindale 8y ago
  Just this past weekend, I set out to finish a project [0] I'd started several years back using the Google+ API, hoping to wrap things up before they shut it down forever. Much to my chagrin, I found that they'd shuttered the API months in advance, effectively ruining any hopes I had of finishing. After a swath of other shutdowns, this was the last straw for me. [0]: project was "confluence", a stream aggregator designed for personal use. I'd accumulated > 40,000 followers on Google by writing long-form commentary on news, events, and technology, and wanted to merge all of that content into a self-hosted site that included my Twitter, Facebook, and other content: https://github.com/martindale/confluence https://github.com/martindale/confluence
• m0nty 8y ago
  My own "you'll never get another chance to do that to me again" was when I migrated an organisation from Microsoft Exchange to Google Mail and Apps. It was great with Outlook Connector for Gmail, then they killed it. I will never take the risk of committing to a Google product in a professional setting ever again. It hurts the organisation, and it hurts me.
• taormina 8y ago
  Who else is here is using Firebase? What are the odds of the whole thing getting canned with 2 years? For all of the "we promise GCP isn't going anywhere" comments from the Googlers in this thread, I'm seeing nothing about, well, GCP's equivalent of Inbox.
• srndh 8y ago
  This is true. Google cannot be relied upon. The axing of Google Talk & Reader is still fresh. Even the other day, a friend mentioned that instead of waiting for Gmail to be killed, its better to move email to your own domain. Even I moved off keep. I am confident that it is going to be axed soon. The thing that bugs me the most of why Google doesn't just opensource the code. Open-sourcing Google reader was the decent thing to do. Like netscape open-sourcing its code to Mozilla before it sank. I still treasure the Netscape CD I got with from my ISP in the late 1990s.
• MayeulC 8y ago
  I would even risk saying that what Google has been saying is damaging the trust in the industry, especially online services (if there ever was one). I reflected on my gut aversion to stadia, and realized I had the same to most walled-garden online services. To be fair, Google is far from the only one shutting services down (and users out of it). My solution is to use open source software, with a preference for federated or distributed solutions. Discord/Skype/MSN/Hangouts/etc -> Matrix/Mumble Twitter -> Mastodon YouTube -> PeerTube Etc. Those are the most recent ones I used. I still have some work to do before hosting a collabora online instance to offer to my family as an alternative to Google docs.
• amelius 8y ago
  Their hunger for data is also damaging their brand. It's disappointing to see that there seems to be no force whatsoever from the inside of Google to change from ad-based monetization (disrespecting a user's privacy) to a paid-for product. But I get it, having real customers is a pain, and most Google employees are happy without them.
• djabatt 8y ago
  I totally agree. Hence I haven't used their cloud services as much as AWS.
• xmly 8y ago
  Actually, it becomes Google's brand already....
• ggggtez 8y ago
  I'll be honest, the products listed that they think is "damaging" the Google brand is a mix between "I've literally never heard of that" and "I literally don't care about that". Of course, with Fiber being the "I've both heard, and care, but we all knew it was inevitable years ago".
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• sytelus 8y ago
  This is an issue that is dear to my heart. I think it is possible to almost always avoid killing a product. When a company doesn't want to invest further they can do combinations of the following: * Just open source it. * If code has external IP, isolate them behind interfaces. * If product is service and uses internal infrastructure, you can still isolate those interfaces (assume someone else would build necessary infrastructure) * If core devs have left or aren't interested, hire offshore or freelancers to do this work * Call for maintainers/fans who are invested in the product to participate * Instill culture in the company so every new project is architected with eventual open sourcing in future due to reasons such as shutdown * Put product up for sell to potential companies who are in same space and ask them to take on work for making sure IP and dependencies are abstracted
  • makecheck 8y ago
    My observation at companies has been that there is rarely the required foresight to be able to prune something off into a separate open-source project. Google uses a mono-repo I believe, which already makes it extremely unlikely that they’ll be able to even build a thing outside the company, much less let it thrive. And “cancellation time” is not when new resources will be diverted to fixing broken-only-outside-the-company behavior. I’ve only seen this work a couple different ways. One: if the company spins off something very large (like an entire division) that was already self-sufficient so it is pretty clear how to keep it all functional from the outside. Or, two: if, from the very beginning, the person pitching a project insists on an open-source/flexible model and takes lots of steps to ensure that it is constantly working in that way.
• rhizome 8y ago
  What "brand?" They sought to dilute it by creating Alphabet, then continued a habit of unreliability in everything that could be said to support their "brand." If you look at Google/Alphabet, they are a search engine, gmail/gdocs, and somewhat of a device maker. Everything else might be killed off today. Or not. Who knows? Certainly none of us. Regardless, they survive as long as they do as the gadgets that they started as during somebody's 20% time or pre-acquisition ramen-startup era. Might as well be toys.
• jrochkind1 8y ago
  Wait Chromecast audio is discontinued? dammit!
• mkstowegnv 8y ago
  With all the shutdowns, Google is also foolishly throwing away what will be an increasingly important asset - distinguishing between real human identities and bots. False bot negatives waste Google computing resources, while false bot positives waste users' time. I would happily opt in to having Google use AI on each of their services to see if I behave like a real human and then combine that information across services to give my identity a low-bot-risk rating. As it is I am constantly asked to Captcha prove myself (probably because I perform a large number of unusual complex search queries). Black hat AI will make bots harder and harder to detect and cybercrime (and disinformation dissemination) easier and easier. Detecting fake identities will soon become crucial and yet almost impossible - and Google could be best positioned to provide that information. But instead they will let MBA twit bean counters ruin the company. My advice to all corporations - keep MBAs in dungeons, bring them out occasionally for advice and never allow them to make decisions.
• abvdasker 8y ago
  For the last 6 years or so I -- foolishly it turns out -- chose to make Play Music my primary music platform. I was uncomfortable with subscribing to a music service and wanted to be able to keep my own library since the collection of music I own is a form of self expression for me. Google Play Music let me put my library in the cloud and listen to it on any device. Now it's looking like I will probably lose a big chunk of it when Google Play Music gets replaced with YouTube Music since Google doesn't really let you download everything you've uploaded. I'm upset enough by this I am motivated to find a way to move away from other Google products to the extent that it is practical to do so.
• T3RMINATED 8y ago
  Never build your business ecosystem around google. They are very unstable. Use Microsoft, Azure, Office 365 instead.
• robben1234 8y ago
  As a consumer, and Reader and Inbox user, I'd never buy a Google product (Pixel, Home, Fi, etc) I need to rely on in everyday life or use their cloud for hosting anything important. At this point I see all of their products as mayflies. They may be interesting and useful today, but tomorrow they'll be gone. And even if they change their internal policies, I'm not sure I could be able to change my opinion on them.