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The metric you need to keep in mind here is revenue per employee. Keeping one product up and running necessarily means withholding engineers from another. As an

by jfasi 8y ago

The metric you need to keep in mind here is revenue per employee. Keeping one product up and running necessarily means withholding engineers from another. As an extreme example, ads engineers make Google many times their salary, benefits, and ephemeral costs, and even non-revenue-generating services like Photos and Assistant indirectly drive traffic to the money makers. Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only a couple million users, mostly pointy-headed techie types, that doesn’t drive business to any money-making effort, with no alignment with any stategic effort, that could be reimplemented by a particularly talented and hardworking high school senior, staffed by about a dozen engineers. That product will be the first on the chopping block, if only to encourage those engineering resources to find more profitable employment.

RPLong 8y ago
This comment makes it sound as if you don't think generating massive amounts of goodwill among your most passionate customer base "drives business." Google Reader was the loss leader that drove me deeply into Google's whole suite of applications and made me a paying customer of theirs.
throw_away 8y ago
I feel this is a sort of corporate Dutch Disease. Highly profitable sectors drive out investment in the rest. I get this, but then why even launch if there's no vision at all beyond cancel it in a couple years since they're not willing to even try to drive new revenue with these? No profits, burnt goodwill—cynically, I wonder, is it just make-work to keep restless engineers happy and out of the arms of potential upstarts and competitors? Cool cool, if that's what you must do. Google can go on making piles of cash with their money engines and on the side, going through an elaborate game of charades as if they were making real products so they can figure out who gets get a promotion for best pretending to create anything of actual value. But, I'm going to ignore all Google product launches and treat them as the mistimed april fools jokes they are.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  For people (like me) who hadn't heard of Dutch Disease: "In economics, the Dutch disease is the apparent causal relationship between the increase in the economic development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
yoodenvranx 8y ago
> Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only a couple million users, mostly pointy-headed techie types, that doesn’t drive business to any money-making effort, And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled. But what those direct metrics do not show is the long term trust which is destroyed by such short-term behavior. Google has proved again and again that they are not a reliable company and because of this I will never ever spend any money on any of their products (apart from a cheap android phone every 3 years). Why should I pay for Google Drive? Why should I pay for Youtube Red (or whatever its called nowadays)? Why should I buy a Chromebook? If I start rely on them they will be canceled after a year. They might have saved a few million dollar by axing Google Reader but they lost _me_ as a customer forever.
- user5994461 8y ago
  > And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled. Microsoft doesn't consider a product unless it can generate more than $100M a year. It's a general mode of operation for big companies, not limited to Google.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    How much money do you think AWS loses still supporting old deprecated services like running EC2 instances outside of a VPC and SimpleDB? I’m not aware of a single feature on AWS that has ever been abandoned.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      I don't know of any service that was dropped on either of AWS or GCP. Features are dropped though, they can't be ordered from new accounts then they disappear eventually. I don't think that you can order older instances, or run instances outside of a VPC, not sure if non-HVM AMI are still supported. AWS has a strategy of leaving offerings to rot and making a new thing that you have to migrate to yourself. For example, the 3 different types of reserved instances or ELB vs ALB. It has its pros and cons. Google has less products that are more capable and feature complete. They are both rather new and creating new products instead of removing products, it will take one more decade to see how they handle depreciation of core products, when any actually gets retired.
erik_seaberg 8y ago
> staffed by about a dozen engineers That's part of the problem. You should be able to leave Reader unstaffed for as long as it isn't strategic (it's not as if borg has trouble keeping the tasks up), but in practice it will randomly fail because somebody in infra went for promo, so every project faces a choice: staff this indefinitely or kill it now.
bad_user 8y ago
I disagree. Google killing Reader was very shortsighted because they’ve hurt the open web in an effort to promote Google+. And it was all an effort to promote Google+, nothing more. Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained. Don’t tell me that Google couldn’t spare an intern for the occasional fix. And I don’t have any numbers however I’m willing to bet that Reader was, as a social network, far more popular and active than Google+ ever was. Also such metrics don’t count the brand damage. I will never forgive Google for killing Reader and as a result I have rejected again and again Google’s products. Even at work I just convinced everyone that we must not depend on Google’s Firebase because we can’t trust Google.
- dlubarov 8y ago
  > Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained. Google products like Reader tend to use internal APIs for storage, authentication, request routing, deployment, logging, builds/tests, etc. It can be a lot of work just to keep up with those internal changes.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    It was actually worse than that - Google+ used Reader as a backend. A lot of the stream-merging and ingestion features of Google+ were built on top of the Reader codebase. That meant that when Google+ product needs changed and they needed to alter the backend, they couldn't really do so without branching & disentangling or shutting down the external-facing Reader product. The latter was a much easier course for a time-constrained engineering organization, particularly since Reader as a project had been de-staffed and the engineers (that didn't leave the company) transferred to the Google+ org.
- arebop 8y ago
  FANG interns aren't coffee-runners; you can't give them work you wouldn't give to a real junior engineer. First: doing so undermines your efforts to recruit the intern. Second: doing so undermines your efforts to evaluate the intern. Third: doing so wastes a valuable eng resource you could deploy on something worth launching! The real problem for Reader was that it wasn't worth any engineering effort (because it only had a couple of million daily active users).
scarface74 8y ago
What if they tried the novel concept of charging users for stuff? How many people liked Reader enough to pay for it if they had started charging?

by jfasi 8y ago

RPLong 8y ago

This comment makes it sound as if you don't think generating massive amounts of goodwill among your most passionate customer base "drives business." Google Reader was the loss leader that drove me deeply into Google's whole suite of applications and made me a paying customer of theirs.

throw_away 8y ago

I feel this is a sort of corporate Dutch Disease. Highly profitable sectors drive out investment in the rest. I get this, but then why even launch if there's no vision at all beyond cancel it in a couple years since they're not willing to even try to drive new revenue with these? No profits, burnt goodwill—cynically, I wonder, is it just make-work to keep restless engineers happy and out of the arms of potential upstarts and competitors? Cool cool, if that's what you must do. Google can go on making piles of cash with their money engines and on the side, going through an elaborate game of charades as if they were making real products so they can figure out who gets get a promotion for best pretending to create anything of actual value. But, I'm going to ignore all Google product launches and treat them as the mistimed april fools jokes they are.

cpeterso 8y ago
For people (like me) who hadn't heard of Dutch Disease: "In economics, the Dutch disease is the apparent causal relationship between the increase in the economic development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

yoodenvranx 8y ago

> Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only a couple million users, mostly pointy-headed techie types, that doesn’t drive business to any money-making effort, And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled. But what those direct metrics do not show is the long term trust which is destroyed by such short-term behavior. Google has proved again and again that they are not a reliable company and because of this I will never ever spend any money on any of their products (apart from a cheap android phone every 3 years). Why should I pay for Google Drive? Why should I pay for Youtube Red (or whatever its called nowadays)? Why should I buy a Chromebook? If I start rely on them they will be canceled after a year. They might have saved a few million dollar by axing Google Reader but they lost _me_ as a customer forever.

user5994461 8y ago
> And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled. Microsoft doesn't consider a product unless it can generate more than $100M a year. It's a general mode of operation for big companies, not limited to Google.
- scarface74 8y ago
  How much money do you think AWS loses still supporting old deprecated services like running EC2 instances outside of a VPC and SimpleDB? I’m not aware of a single feature on AWS that has ever been abandoned.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    I don't know of any service that was dropped on either of AWS or GCP. Features are dropped though, they can't be ordered from new accounts then they disappear eventually. I don't think that you can order older instances, or run instances outside of a VPC, not sure if non-HVM AMI are still supported. AWS has a strategy of leaving offerings to rot and making a new thing that you have to migrate to yourself. For example, the 3 different types of reserved instances or ELB vs ALB. It has its pros and cons. Google has less products that are more capable and feature complete. They are both rather new and creating new products instead of removing products, it will take one more decade to see how they handle depreciation of core products, when any actually gets retired.

erik_seaberg 8y ago

> staffed by about a dozen engineers That's part of the problem. You should be able to leave Reader unstaffed for as long as it isn't strategic (it's not as if borg has trouble keeping the tasks up), but in practice it will randomly fail because somebody in infra went for promo, so every project faces a choice: staff this indefinitely or kill it now.

bad_user 8y ago

I disagree. Google killing Reader was very shortsighted because they’ve hurt the open web in an effort to promote Google+. And it was all an effort to promote Google+, nothing more. Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained. Don’t tell me that Google couldn’t spare an intern for the occasional fix. And I don’t have any numbers however I’m willing to bet that Reader was, as a social network, far more popular and active than Google+ ever was. Also such metrics don’t count the brand damage. I will never forgive Google for killing Reader and as a result I have rejected again and again Google’s products. Even at work I just convinced everyone that we must not depend on Google’s Firebase because we can’t trust Google.

dlubarov 8y ago
> Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained. Google products like Reader tend to use internal APIs for storage, authentication, request routing, deployment, logging, builds/tests, etc. It can be a lot of work just to keep up with those internal changes.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  It was actually worse than that - Google+ used Reader as a backend. A lot of the stream-merging and ingestion features of Google+ were built on top of the Reader codebase. That meant that when Google+ product needs changed and they needed to alter the backend, they couldn't really do so without branching & disentangling or shutting down the external-facing Reader product. The latter was a much easier course for a time-constrained engineering organization, particularly since Reader as a project had been de-staffed and the engineers (that didn't leave the company) transferred to the Google+ org.
arebop 8y ago
FANG interns aren't coffee-runners; you can't give them work you wouldn't give to a real junior engineer. First: doing so undermines your efforts to recruit the intern. Second: doing so undermines your efforts to evaluate the intern. Third: doing so wastes a valuable eng resource you could deploy on something worth launching! The real problem for Reader was that it wasn't worth any engineering effort (because it only had a couple of million daily active users).

scarface74 8y ago

What if they tried the novel concept of charging users for stuff? How many people liked Reader enough to pay for it if they had started charging?