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I wish that people would stop with this unproductive line of commentary. Google shuts down consumer products sometimes. Pruning back the set of unprofitable thi

I wish that people would stop with this unproductive line of commentary. Google shuts down consumer products sometimes. Pruning back the set of unprofitable things you're working on is good business. Expect to see Google and literally every other successful company continue to take this approach to unprofitable lines of business. Also, how would putting ads on a developer platform be profitable? It's far more likely that they would charge money for it.

malux85 8y ago
Google is distinct in their bad attitude though. What it feels like is: An engineer at google builds something cool. Management decide it could be a product, and a bit of tooling here and there and BAM it’s released. It goes well, then it stays. It goes poorly or even just average, then it gets thrown out. And what of the users who put faith in the new product? Screw them it’s not profitable enough. Compare to AWS, an engineer writes something cool, it gets evaluated by a project team, the business benefit and support infra is put in place, its trialed with a few users, its honed, then if it gets good KPIs then it’s generalised and released as a product. They subset very slowly and always make sure there’s a clear migration path, with humans in support to help the developers if need be. Saying “Google and literally every other successful company continue to take this approach to unprofitable lines of business” is too reductive : nobody is contesting that a business shouldn’t cut out unprofitable actions, but the repeated, drastic culling and the “f-you we know best” attitude they take makes developers distrust google. Google is too whimisical with both releasing and retiring products.
- ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago
  > Compare to AWS AWS is not a consumer-facing organization. The standards there are entirely different. Google Cloud has a much more stable offering than Google writ large. Very few of the products on gcemetery.co are cloud-related.
  - stingraycharles 8y ago
    How is AWS not being consumer facing relevant? Both Google and Amazon started out being consumer facing and now have a cloud division. Their cloud divisions not being consumer facing is irrelevant.
    - ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago
      The person I'm responding to is comparing product shutdowns between AWS (a cloud services divsion of Amazon) to Google (a company that contains both a cloud services division and a vastly larger consumper products division). This is an apples to oranges comparison. That's how it's relevant. Before you say, "Amazon never shuts anything down, even outside of cloud." A) They do [1]. B) They have a tiny range of products compared to Google, so of course the absolute frequency of shutdowns will also be lower. And before you say, "Well, better to have nothing than to have something and have it shut down." A) Some people [2] would disagree. B) Just don't use products in the category (consumer services) that Google tends to shut things down in. But, please, whatever you do, don't spam every single thread where Google launches a cloud product (a category where they have a decent track record) with your gripes about Google Reader or whatever. It's not helpful and it's not relevant. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/25/9605840/amazon-shuts-down-a-lot-of-things https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/25/9605840/amazon-shuts-dow... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson
      - stingraycharles 8y ago
        Oh I see now, you were essentially saying you cannot compare Google (consumer-facing, retiring apps) with Google Cloud or AWS (B2B). This makes sense. BTW: I'm on your side, I get tired about these "how long before google shuts X down" useless comments, I was just confused by your statement.

malux85 8y ago

Google is distinct in their bad attitude though. What it feels like is: An engineer at google builds something cool. Management decide it could be a product, and a bit of tooling here and there and BAM it’s released. It goes well, then it stays. It goes poorly or even just average, then it gets thrown out. And what of the users who put faith in the new product? Screw them it’s not profitable enough. Compare to AWS, an engineer writes something cool, it gets evaluated by a project team, the business benefit and support infra is put in place, its trialed with a few users, its honed, then if it gets good KPIs then it’s generalised and released as a product. They subset very slowly and always make sure there’s a clear migration path, with humans in support to help the developers if need be. Saying “Google and literally every other successful company continue to take this approach to unprofitable lines of business” is too reductive : nobody is contesting that a business shouldn’t cut out unprofitable actions, but the repeated, drastic culling and the “f-you we know best” attitude they take makes developers distrust google. Google is too whimisical with both releasing and retiring products.

ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago
> Compare to AWS AWS is not a consumer-facing organization. The standards there are entirely different. Google Cloud has a much more stable offering than Google writ large. Very few of the products on gcemetery.co are cloud-related.
- stingraycharles 8y ago
  How is AWS not being consumer facing relevant? Both Google and Amazon started out being consumer facing and now have a cloud division. Their cloud divisions not being consumer facing is irrelevant.
  - ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago
    The person I'm responding to is comparing product shutdowns between AWS (a cloud services divsion of Amazon) to Google (a company that contains both a cloud services division and a vastly larger consumper products division). This is an apples to oranges comparison. That's how it's relevant. Before you say, "Amazon never shuts anything down, even outside of cloud." A) They do [1]. B) They have a tiny range of products compared to Google, so of course the absolute frequency of shutdowns will also be lower. And before you say, "Well, better to have nothing than to have something and have it shut down." A) Some people [2] would disagree. B) Just don't use products in the category (consumer services) that Google tends to shut things down in. But, please, whatever you do, don't spam every single thread where Google launches a cloud product (a category where they have a decent track record) with your gripes about Google Reader or whatever. It's not helpful and it's not relevant. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/25/9605840/amazon-shuts-down-a-lot-of-things https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/25/9605840/amazon-shuts-dow... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson
    - stingraycharles 8y ago
      Oh I see now, you were essentially saying you cannot compare Google (consumer-facing, retiring apps) with Google Cloud or AWS (B2B). This makes sense. BTW: I'm on your side, I get tired about these "how long before google shuts X down" useless comments, I was just confused by your statement.