6 ms·

I feel that we are a little bit too hard on the big G on this one. They simply have their own inner startups, which they kill if product gains no traction. We

• LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  "No traction" for a Google product just means it's not the next Search or Gmail. It doesn't mean that zero people use it. Thousands or millions of people used Hangouts, Google Reader, Google Code, or Picasa - they'd have been considered big YC successes. If big YC companies all got shut down if they failed to turn into another letter in the FAANG acronym, maybe people would become reluctant to use services from YC companies. I still use some Google services, but I check out my data on a regular basis, I'm not buying a Fitbit, and I'm not subscribing to Stadia because I want those things to last longer than I think Google will keep them around.
  • pytester 7y ago
    >Thousands or millions of people used Hangouts, Google Reader, Google Code, or Picasa - they'd have been considered big YC successes. Other than google reader I doubt any of these would have gotten traction at all without big g behind them.
    • specialp 7y ago
      They wouldn't have true but that isn't the point. The point here is that Google is willing to kill products that are successful by all other metrics and burn the users because it just isn't enough for them. They are acting like a startup but not putting in the dedication or caring enough about more modest gains that a start-up would do. So if Google is going to launch something under the Google brand they either have to be happier with things that aren't making 10s of billions, or not make so many efforts and burning their users/customers/devs at every step. Why as someone downstream do I want to dedicate my time and money to their product when they've shown that unless it becomes a massive success it will be folded?
      • pytester 7y ago
        You don't.
    • OkGoDoIt 7y ago
      Picasa was quite popular before Google bought them, as was Google voice (aka GrandCentral)
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • WorldMaker 7y ago
      Picasa: Smug Mug/Flickr is rather highly valuated again today, now that they are free of the curse of Yahoo! Instagram and Snapchat are a part of this game now too. Google Code: GitHub sold to Microsoft for a good chunk of change. GitLab, Bitbucket, Source Hut, all seem to be doing fine. Hangouts: Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Portal, Matrix/Riot.im, iMessage, Skype is maybe back from the dead depending on who you ask (certainly not kids, though). It's almost easier to ask who isn't in the Messenger game right now. The fact that Google managed to fumble two huge market share leads between Google Talk and Hangouts is maybe only equaled by Microsoft's multiple, complicated fumbles of MSN Messenger and Skype.
      • officeplant 7y ago
        Sad thing is how many of us still use Hangouts while we wait for its eventual death to push us to different platforms.
      • pytester 7y ago
        I'm not denying that the market exists. I'm denying that the product google launched in these cases was comparable to the competition. Google code, for instance, was SO inferior to github that comparing the two is actually kind of funny.
        • WorldMaker 7y ago
          There were people that felt Google Code to be quite advanced for its time, with comparisons at the time more to SourceForge, Savannah, Trac, and some others that have past into the mists of time. It didn't keep up or maintain any of that "lead", but that just circles back around to the common aphorisms that Google loved big splashy launches and failed to incentivize steady maintenance or competition after a "product" launched.
  • officeplant 7y ago
    stop reminding me of the betrayal that was the death of google reader
  • Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
    I, for one, loved Google Wave. It was much better suited to write specs with my team, nested collapsing branches are way more comfortable to use than google docs comments. But the team needs to be disciplined not to get wave overblown, that's true.
• specialp 7y ago
  Yes that is the problem. The inner startups. Some startup from YC fails, oh well they disappeared. But Google isn't willing to put the time and effort to get something to stick as much as it would be for a company that it was their sole effort. For them it is not much of a loss, they just spent some money and moved on. But they also spent their customers' money who purchased some cloud item that is now a brick, they spent developers' time (money) who committed to that platform and now have a 30 day sunset. When you are a company that is as large as Google with a brand like Google, you don't want to be known to be making half baked marketing efforts, getting people on board and failing. Customers and developers then remember that and rightfully associate Google as a company that will gladly abandon you and cost you your money if it does not become big enough for Google to care (multi-billion). So Google cannot operate like a startup if they want to keep their reputation. A start-up would be very happy to have a low millions revenue but for Google that would be a rounding error and killed. So they need to make less bets, and put much more effort into getting their bets to the level that they can make acceptable money for Google while being mindful that killing a product does a lot more than lose Google the money invested.