13 ms·

"it was limited to India for its entire life." Limited launch provided proof that it was a bad market fit and so they 'failed quickly' and shut it down. Isn't

"it was limited to India for its entire life." Limited launch provided proof that it was a bad market fit and so they 'failed quickly' and shut it down. Isn't this supposed to be how it's done?

Donald 7y ago
Except when their rapid product cycle creates a feedback loop where users are afraid to adopt in fear of a shutdown, thereby increasing the risk of falsely determining a bad market fit.
- diminoten 7y ago
  Users aren't afraid to adopt Google products in any meaningful quantity.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    I know I am. After they killed Health, Reader, Finance and Moderator, it became clear their new services weren't worth my time investing in. They've killed 143 services, 14 apps and 14 pieces of hardware since 2001. [1] I'm not even sure Finance is accurately reflected on this list since it just got neutered. I don't care how big a company you are, killing 10 products per year is one heck of a pace. [1] https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com
    - libraryatnight 7y ago
      Same here. Some time in the past hearing of a new Google product got me excited. I'd sign up for beta, get my friends onboard etc etc, now I just think "oh something they'll shut down" and largely ignore it.
    - diminoten 7y ago
      Yeah but you're not representative of a significantly sized user population.
    - izacus 7y ago
      > I know I am. That's great, but do you have non-anectodal evidence that there's a enough people to make business sense for Google to change their strategy? This is a startup-oriented site after all, you don't run business on a single-person's gut feeling, but on data. Do you have a firm basis on which Google should change their, currently extremely profitable, strategy?
      - darkmarmot 7y ago
        Their history is why a lot of people at my Fortune 100 are looking to go with AWS and Azure over GCP. I'd guess they are damaging their enterprise prospects at other companies as well.
        mondoshawan 7y ago
        This is an anecdote -- not data.
        mayankkaizen 7y ago
        Your point is fair but I have read too many stories of people not preferring Google cloud services exactly because they think Google can't be trusted in long term. Also, I believe data is available to at least show that Google Cloud is behind both AWS and Azure in terms of clients.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        scarface74 7y ago
        Is it not data that GCP is far behind AWS and Azure when it comes to adoption in large enterprises?
        diminoten 7y ago
        There's no causal link between the two.
    - DannyBee 7y ago
      What were you using moderator for?
  - hu3 7y ago
    For what is worth I just asked around in family barbecue if anyone knows a Google product that shutdown. No one knows. Non tech savvy hardly know that Youtube belongs to Google even. Tech forums like this are a bubble and we must take care when generalizing our assumptions.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Compare GCP adoption to AWS and Azure.
    - v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
      To be fair, AWS still has first mover advantage. And Azure has lock-in advantages because of existing enterprise relationships. From anecdotal evidence I know that that base products are largely the same, as is top tier support. If anything GCP seems to have great documentation, may be a shade cheaper and devs seem to like it. Then everyone has their strengths. If you want to run a lot of containers or ML for example, GCP seems a save bet.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        GCPs customer support is light years behind AWS’s business or enterprise support. I’ve yet to hear anyone say anything positive about any part of Google’s customer support. Then everyone has their strengths. If you want to run a lot of containers or ML for example, GCP seems a save bet. And that’s a minuscule part of the market. But as far as I know, AWS has never outright abandoned a product. They may make it unavailable to new accounts.
        v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
        > GCPs customer support is light years behind AWS’s business or enterprise support. I’ve yet to hear anyone say anything positive about any part of Google’s customer support. I‘ve heard positive things. But yeah, that‘s not really something you can measure easily. > And that‘s a minuscule part of the market. Yes, for now. Eventually everything might be containers and serverless. > But as far as I know, AWS has never outright abandoned a product. They may make it unavailable to new accounts. Can‘t recall GCP ever abandoning something. Regardless, all the providers have the same deprecation policy I believe. Announce at least one year prior to deprecation.
        scarface74 7y ago
        Can‘t recall GCP ever abandoning something. Regardless, all the providers have the same deprecation policy I believe. Announce at least one year prior to deprecation. One example I can think of is running an EC2 instance (VM) in AWS outside of VPC. That’s been deprecated for almost a decade, you can’t do it in new accounts, but AWS still supports it for old accounts.
charles_f 7y ago
Agreed ; but the fact that people notice the pattern and are either amused or disappointed by it, to me is telling that maybe they're doing something wrong about it. Google isn't a startup and tends to shutdown services that are popular but on which they can't find a correct business model (e.g. Reader or Inbox) without much warning, actual replacement options, or open sourcing solutions for self hosting. Since they're so large, that creates a discrepancy between the stability you would expect from an established company, and the "kill your babies" culture they clearly have. Past behaviour predicts future behaviour, and so people start to notice that and lose trust, which is a problem when you start asking for significant investments from your customers (e.g. Stadia or Nest).
- AJ007 7y ago
  They need to stop slapping their name on every product launch. Look at Amazon, they have a lot of white label brands and almost none of the customers have a clue they are purchasing Amazon's own brands. This clearly isn't the only problem Google is having. They need a top and mid level management purge, and new leadership needs to figure out why the hell they need over 200,000 employees and contractors to run a search engine and Youtube.
  - jogjayr 7y ago
    Google's offers a bit more than "a search engine and Youtube." They also have Android, Maps, Drive, Chrome, Photos, Cloud, and hardware (Nest, Pixel, Chromebooks).
    - andrewnc 7y ago
      Agreed, I think the parent comment was implying that those few services are making a disproportionate amount of the company's revenue compared to what most employees are working on
    - matheussampaio 7y ago
      Also Google Docs/Spreadsheet/Forms/Slides, Google Calendar, Google Translate, GMail, Inbox, Google Analytics, and lot of internal tools.
jchw 7y ago
Exactly; I don't think many folks deny Google has had a bit of an issue with shutting down widely used products after they stagnate, but this was none of the above. It was a beta that had "10,000+" installs according to Play Store, which I am guessing that places the active users a fair bit lower. Products like Blog Compass are not new. Google has probably had hundreds of these smaller, more experimental products that got canned after a while, like Sidewiki (remember that?) but until relatively recently it's never been used as a sign that Google is unreliable; in hindsight most of them made sense. If I had to guess, I think the continued soreness from a few big ones like G+ and Reader have just left many jaded. I mean I was bitten by the G+ shutdown, but honestly, looking for things to complain about is really worse than just beating a dead horse. In other words, you may as well just complain about the one that really frustrates you, since I doubt anyone here actually used Blog Compass. Disclosure, I am a Googler, had no idea what Blog Compass was until today.
- JeremyBanks 7y ago
  Quit
  - dang 7y ago
    Besides being unsubstantive, that crosses into personal attack. We've had to warn you against that before. Please don't post like this to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- itronitron 7y ago
  I was wondering this yesterday and maybe you can answer, what do most Google employees do during their workday (given that so many products that people used to work on have been terminated)?
  - jchw 7y ago
    A few thoughts. (Needless to say, this is all personal opinions and not those of my employer.) - Products that are doing well have more folks working on them, I assume. - There is plenty of mobility at Google and no shortage of things to work on. - The churn rate of products is probably lower than the perception, at least relatively speaking. I perceive Cloud as being pretty stable. - There’s a lot of tooling that is not specific to any unit or product, like Bazel for example.

"it was limited to India for its entire life." Limited launch provided proof that it was a bad market fit and so they 'failed quickly' and shut it down. Isn't this supposed to be how it's done?

Donald 7y ago

Except when their rapid product cycle creates a feedback loop where users are afraid to adopt in fear of a shutdown, thereby increasing the risk of falsely determining a bad market fit.

diminoten 7y ago
Users aren't afraid to adopt Google products in any meaningful quantity.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- arcticbull 7y ago
  I know I am. After they killed Health, Reader, Finance and Moderator, it became clear their new services weren't worth my time investing in. They've killed 143 services, 14 apps and 14 pieces of hardware since 2001. [1] I'm not even sure Finance is accurately reflected on this list since it just got neutered. I don't care how big a company you are, killing 10 products per year is one heck of a pace. [1] https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com
  - libraryatnight 7y ago
    Same here. Some time in the past hearing of a new Google product got me excited. I'd sign up for beta, get my friends onboard etc etc, now I just think "oh something they'll shut down" and largely ignore it.
  - diminoten 7y ago
    Yeah but you're not representative of a significantly sized user population.
  - izacus 7y ago
    > I know I am. That's great, but do you have non-anectodal evidence that there's a enough people to make business sense for Google to change their strategy? This is a startup-oriented site after all, you don't run business on a single-person's gut feeling, but on data. Do you have a firm basis on which Google should change their, currently extremely profitable, strategy?
    - darkmarmot 7y ago
      Their history is why a lot of people at my Fortune 100 are looking to go with AWS and Azure over GCP. I'd guess they are damaging their enterprise prospects at other companies as well.
      - mondoshawan 7y ago
        This is an anecdote -- not data.
        mayankkaizen 7y ago
        Your point is fair but I have read too many stories of people not preferring Google cloud services exactly because they think Google can't be trusted in long term. Also, I believe data is available to at least show that Google Cloud is behind both AWS and Azure in terms of clients.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        scarface74 7y ago
        Is it not data that GCP is far behind AWS and Azure when it comes to adoption in large enterprises?
        diminoten 7y ago
        There's no causal link between the two.
  - DannyBee 7y ago
    What were you using moderator for?
- hu3 7y ago
  For what is worth I just asked around in family barbecue if anyone knows a Google product that shutdown. No one knows. Non tech savvy hardly know that Youtube belongs to Google even. Tech forums like this are a bubble and we must take care when generalizing our assumptions.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Compare GCP adoption to AWS and Azure.
  - v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
    To be fair, AWS still has first mover advantage. And Azure has lock-in advantages because of existing enterprise relationships. From anecdotal evidence I know that that base products are largely the same, as is top tier support. If anything GCP seems to have great documentation, may be a shade cheaper and devs seem to like it. Then everyone has their strengths. If you want to run a lot of containers or ML for example, GCP seems a save bet.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      GCPs customer support is light years behind AWS’s business or enterprise support. I’ve yet to hear anyone say anything positive about any part of Google’s customer support. Then everyone has their strengths. If you want to run a lot of containers or ML for example, GCP seems a save bet. And that’s a minuscule part of the market. But as far as I know, AWS has never outright abandoned a product. They may make it unavailable to new accounts.
      - v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
        > GCPs customer support is light years behind AWS’s business or enterprise support. I’ve yet to hear anyone say anything positive about any part of Google’s customer support. I‘ve heard positive things. But yeah, that‘s not really something you can measure easily. > And that‘s a minuscule part of the market. Yes, for now. Eventually everything might be containers and serverless. > But as far as I know, AWS has never outright abandoned a product. They may make it unavailable to new accounts. Can‘t recall GCP ever abandoning something. Regardless, all the providers have the same deprecation policy I believe. Announce at least one year prior to deprecation.
        scarface74 7y ago
        Can‘t recall GCP ever abandoning something. Regardless, all the providers have the same deprecation policy I believe. Announce at least one year prior to deprecation. One example I can think of is running an EC2 instance (VM) in AWS outside of VPC. That’s been deprecated for almost a decade, you can’t do it in new accounts, but AWS still supports it for old accounts.

charles_f 7y ago

Agreed ; but the fact that people notice the pattern and are either amused or disappointed by it, to me is telling that maybe they're doing something wrong about it. Google isn't a startup and tends to shutdown services that are popular but on which they can't find a correct business model (e.g. Reader or Inbox) without much warning, actual replacement options, or open sourcing solutions for self hosting. Since they're so large, that creates a discrepancy between the stability you would expect from an established company, and the "kill your babies" culture they clearly have. Past behaviour predicts future behaviour, and so people start to notice that and lose trust, which is a problem when you start asking for significant investments from your customers (e.g. Stadia or Nest).

AJ007 7y ago
They need to stop slapping their name on every product launch. Look at Amazon, they have a lot of white label brands and almost none of the customers have a clue they are purchasing Amazon's own brands. This clearly isn't the only problem Google is having. They need a top and mid level management purge, and new leadership needs to figure out why the hell they need over 200,000 employees and contractors to run a search engine and Youtube.
- jogjayr 7y ago
  Google's offers a bit more than "a search engine and Youtube." They also have Android, Maps, Drive, Chrome, Photos, Cloud, and hardware (Nest, Pixel, Chromebooks).
  - andrewnc 7y ago
    Agreed, I think the parent comment was implying that those few services are making a disproportionate amount of the company's revenue compared to what most employees are working on
  - matheussampaio 7y ago
    Also Google Docs/Spreadsheet/Forms/Slides, Google Calendar, Google Translate, GMail, Inbox, Google Analytics, and lot of internal tools.

jchw 7y ago

Exactly; I don't think many folks deny Google has had a bit of an issue with shutting down widely used products after they stagnate, but this was none of the above. It was a beta that had "10,000+" installs according to Play Store, which I am guessing that places the active users a fair bit lower. Products like Blog Compass are not new. Google has probably had hundreds of these smaller, more experimental products that got canned after a while, like Sidewiki (remember that?) but until relatively recently it's never been used as a sign that Google is unreliable; in hindsight most of them made sense. If I had to guess, I think the continued soreness from a few big ones like G+ and Reader have just left many jaded. I mean I was bitten by the G+ shutdown, but honestly, looking for things to complain about is really worse than just beating a dead horse. In other words, you may as well just complain about the one that really frustrates you, since I doubt anyone here actually used Blog Compass. Disclosure, I am a Googler, had no idea what Blog Compass was until today.

JeremyBanks 7y ago
Quit
- dang 7y ago
  Besides being unsubstantive, that crosses into personal attack. We've had to warn you against that before. Please don't post like this to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
itronitron 7y ago
I was wondering this yesterday and maybe you can answer, what do most Google employees do during their workday (given that so many products that people used to work on have been terminated)?
- jchw 7y ago
  A few thoughts. (Needless to say, this is all personal opinions and not those of my employer.) - Products that are doing well have more folks working on them, I assume. - There is plenty of mobility at Google and no shortage of things to work on. - The churn rate of products is probably lower than the perception, at least relatively speaking. I perceive Cloud as being pretty stable. - There’s a lot of tooling that is not specific to any unit or product, like Bazel for example.