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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 r

by 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.
- Twirrim 8y ago
  > and the fact that all the page urls still had a .gne extension What's significant about .gne as an extension? Not sure I've consciously come across that one before.
  - mz00 8y ago
    It’s an allusion to Game Neverending, which eventually led to development of Flickr