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They might not be wrong. Engineers who could be maintaining mildly profitable products could be invented new products that have some percentage chance of being

They might not be wrong. Engineers who could be maintaining mildly profitable products could be invented new products that have some percentage chance of being much more profitable. If someone did the math and said the expected value of "engineer working on new projects" was bigger than the expected value of of the the profits of an existing project divided by the number of engineers needed to maintain it, then it'd be logical to abandon a bunch of seemingly profitable products. Bad for PR and for getting folks to trust you on new projects, and you'd need to bake that cost into the calculation, but still potentially the right call.

thfuran 7y ago
What's the expected value of not having your brand known for routinely canceling products without much notice? It seems like any company would have to be crazy to want to depend on any new Google service for anything important - and that's bad for Google.
- rudolph9 7y ago
  Do you use cloud print?
  - privateSFacct 7y ago
    I have yes - at our office I just bought some cloud print enabled printers so that I could print without some quirks in the AD deployment and remotely. That said, I'm sure traction was low - I saw VERY few others using it. Still very annoying.
  - dasil003 7y ago
    The more relevant question is: for a new service by Google for which you are a target market would you have any reluctance to use it based on your perceived likelihood that Google will kill in the future?
    - kristianc 7y ago
      Based on them killing a service like Cloud Print? No.
  - rmsaksida 7y ago
    I've never used Cloud Print, but I have used Reader and Hangouts that were shut down. The perception that Google has no commitment to their products is very strong and transfers to other areas. I'd rather use AWS or Azure than GCP, because I don't trust Google to continue their services offerings or API contracts.
- 0xEFF 7y ago
  > It seems like any company would have to be crazy to want to depend on any new Google service for anything important. Companies depend heavily on AdWords, gSuite, and Cloud and all three continue to grow. The reputation for canceling projects which aren't working may matter to consumers, but I haven't seen anyone in business mention it in their purchasing decisions.
  - foobiekr 7y ago
    It might be your vantage point. For several companies I personally engage with this has absolutely been a point of discussion for Gsuite vs O365.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Looking at adoption in the enterprise, it didn’t go much beyond a discussion....
    - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      While I can believe that, there's an obvious distinction between GSuite and most of the services Google kills with abandon: businesses actually pay to use GSuite, which means that unlike Google Reader, Cloud Print, Inbox, and many others, it's a direct revenue generator and it's immensely popular. I don't know that that guarantees its continued existence, but I think it does offer a pretty serious shield.
      - angry_octet 7y ago
        Then make me pay for Cloud Print. I'm already paying for Drive and GSuite, I think I can handle $1/year more. Heck, add features like secure job release, integration with enterprise directory services, and services for brochure printing and online photo printing/albums. Document management and printing services is a huge industry. Companies and universities hate doing printer driver and device management, and hence all the outsourcing of printers. But the outsourcing companies have to bolt an extra box on many printers to enable printing, or write special printer GUI firmware, makes it expensive. Could all be on your phone instead. Cf https://www.oki.com/ge/printing/services-and-solutions/smart-solutions/followme-printing/index.html https://www.oki.com/ge/printing/services-and-solutions/smart... https://www.office.xerox.com/software-solutions/xerox-workplace-cloud/enus.html https://www.office.xerox.com/software-solutions/xerox-workpl... Once again, Google has screwed itself and it's users.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- olivierduval 7y ago
  Yeah... for example, it's a problem for Google Stadia! Who wants to invests time and money in a platform that can be cancelled at any time?
- koala_man 7y ago
  >any company would have to be crazy to want to depend on any new Google service for anything important If the company has an equally good alternative available, chances are Google wouldn't have launched theirs in the first place.
- com2kid 7y ago
  90s and 00s Microsoft was successful in part because they were an incredibly stable platform to develop against. 10 year support goes a long way, and if you paid enough money you could email in your bugs and get custom hot fixes made for issues that annoyed you. Even their /bad/ technologies had long term support. If you built on top of shiny new thing and Microsoft dropped it in the next release, it was still going to get patches, bug fixes, and the documentation for it wasn't going to vanish from the world as if it never existed. Of course this was all before cloud services existed. Back then you'd pay for a product and you got software on a disk/CD and there was an expectation that it'd keep working. One thing that gets overlooked so frequently, by all companies, is that ongoing costs are ongoing. Whenever I see a new fitness tracker kickstarter advertising amazing cloud services for free, my first thought is that the costs from cloud services will eventually exceed the tiny profit that comes from selling physical consumer hardware. And a few years later another "It's been a great journey" message goes out as the company runs out of money. Obviously Google won't run out of $, but costs do add up. Doing the math on how to distribute funding to bundled cloud services is actually rather hard. You have to figure out for a given product / subscription, how much of that purchase price needs to be distributed to the various teams. That sort of attribution is not easy, and not properly allocating those funds to development resources can kill a product. e.g. someone buys a Chromebook, of course the OS team gets money, but the team making Google docs can argue they deserve a split, after all without them the Chromebooks would be somewhat useless. Analytics helps, but only to an extent.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    You've hit the nail on the head. Google doesn't run out of money; what Google runs out of is the things money can't buy in the short run, and at their scale that's employee hours and (surprisingly) compute and storage bandwidth (because they're building infrastructure at such volume that they end up saturating supplies and literally can't get more hardware at a reasonable price-point to run all the services they want to run). Too much breadth of services cuts into how much load they can bear on services that are business-core or revenue-positive.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Microsoft didn’t care about developers that was always a talking point. Microsoft maintained backwards compatibility because of a new operating system broke old code, companies wouldn’t upgrade and it made its money from operating systems. Apple doesn’t care as much about backwards compatibility because it doesn’t really care if you upgrade your operating system - especially on the Mac - or stick with your old one until you buy a new computer. It doesn’t make money on operating system upgrades.
dehrmann 7y ago
> Engineers...could be invent[ing] new products that have some percentage chance of being much more profitable Doubtful. The successful products to come out of Google are Search, GMail, and GCP. They bought Adwords, Doubleclick, Android, Youtube, and Nest and Fitbit, I suppose. GCP is their only recent win, but it's a me-too late entrant in a market Google should have invented.
- r00fus 7y ago
  Is Nest profitable?
- icebraining 7y ago
  I'm not sure it was profitable, but Orkut, at its peak, had 300 million users, and that purely a result of an experiment by an engineer.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  You're forgetting Maps, Earth, Docs, Translate, Drive... Also, many of the acquisitions you mention were tiny when bought, and Google has a much better track record of growing and improving them than, say, Yahoo.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Growing and improving yes. Do any of those products help Google’s bottom line or to diversify where their profits come from? I can see Docs with GSuite especially in education and maybe Drive.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    Docs and Drive were also acquisitions. I'll give you Maps and Translate.
mushufasa 7y ago
What if they just sold their low-margin-yet-profitable businesses instead of killing them? There are several tech PE firms that specialize in that niche. KKR bought Corel (of WordPerfect fame) recently. I'm also confident someone at Google already had this obvious idea. Any ex-googlers know why they chose not to / cannot do this?
- thfuran 7y ago
  I strongly suspect that it would generally be a massive undertaking to decouple products from their internal ecosystem and render them able to be spun off.
- Mindwipe 7y ago
  They did it with Sketchup I guess. But that was also an acquisition, so I guess it lifted out of Google's infrastructure more easily.
- scarface74 7y ago
  The only reason that Google can throw stuff against the wall and scale it immediately is because they have the infrastructure in place. I can’t imagine you can decouple Googke’s products from their infrastructure.
  - angry_octet 7y ago
    Picassa? Could have open sourced it. There are a few others in the graveyard that were easily able to live on any infrastructure.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      How do you know how much of Picasa’s code was intertwined with Google’s? Could it have been a profitable in going concern by itself? How?
      - angry_octet 7y ago
        It's traditional software, it runs offline, client side. Which is great for low bandwidth places and the privacy concious. It has some basic ML for face recog. The money is in photo printing, which is a pretty big industry which Google has failed to capture any of. It had a huge installed base, but of course Google would not sell user engagement in bulk, only in tiny pieces as ads. Advertising the things people take photos of is pretty straightforward too, another reason why Google killed Picasa instead of letting it free.
dodobirdlord 7y ago
> If someone did the math and said the expected value of "engineer working on new projects" was bigger than the expected value of of the the profits of an existing project divided by the number of engineers needed to maintain it, then it'd be logical to abandon a bunch of seemingly profitable products. In case anyone is wondering, the math has been done. I have been told that Google even has an internal page devoted to informing engineers how much something has to be worth before it is worth their time, and it's a big number.

thfuran 7y ago

What's the expected value of not having your brand known for routinely canceling products without much notice? It seems like any company would have to be crazy to want to depend on any new Google service for anything important - and that's bad for Google.

rudolph9 7y ago
Do you use cloud print?
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  I have yes - at our office I just bought some cloud print enabled printers so that I could print without some quirks in the AD deployment and remotely. That said, I'm sure traction was low - I saw VERY few others using it. Still very annoying.
- dasil003 7y ago
  The more relevant question is: for a new service by Google for which you are a target market would you have any reluctance to use it based on your perceived likelihood that Google will kill in the future?
  - kristianc 7y ago
    Based on them killing a service like Cloud Print? No.
- rmsaksida 7y ago
  I've never used Cloud Print, but I have used Reader and Hangouts that were shut down. The perception that Google has no commitment to their products is very strong and transfers to other areas. I'd rather use AWS or Azure than GCP, because I don't trust Google to continue their services offerings or API contracts.
0xEFF 7y ago
> It seems like any company would have to be crazy to want to depend on any new Google service for anything important. Companies depend heavily on AdWords, gSuite, and Cloud and all three continue to grow. The reputation for canceling projects which aren't working may matter to consumers, but I haven't seen anyone in business mention it in their purchasing decisions.
- foobiekr 7y ago
  It might be your vantage point. For several companies I personally engage with this has absolutely been a point of discussion for Gsuite vs O365.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Looking at adoption in the enterprise, it didn’t go much beyond a discussion....
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    While I can believe that, there's an obvious distinction between GSuite and most of the services Google kills with abandon: businesses actually pay to use GSuite, which means that unlike Google Reader, Cloud Print, Inbox, and many others, it's a direct revenue generator and it's immensely popular. I don't know that that guarantees its continued existence, but I think it does offer a pretty serious shield.
    - angry_octet 7y ago
      Then make me pay for Cloud Print. I'm already paying for Drive and GSuite, I think I can handle $1/year more. Heck, add features like secure job release, integration with enterprise directory services, and services for brochure printing and online photo printing/albums. Document management and printing services is a huge industry. Companies and universities hate doing printer driver and device management, and hence all the outsourcing of printers. But the outsourcing companies have to bolt an extra box on many printers to enable printing, or write special printer GUI firmware, makes it expensive. Could all be on your phone instead. Cf https://www.oki.com/ge/printing/services-and-solutions/smart-solutions/followme-printing/index.html https://www.oki.com/ge/printing/services-and-solutions/smart... https://www.office.xerox.com/software-solutions/xerox-workplace-cloud/enus.html https://www.office.xerox.com/software-solutions/xerox-workpl... Once again, Google has screwed itself and it's users.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
olivierduval 7y ago
Yeah... for example, it's a problem for Google Stadia! Who wants to invests time and money in a platform that can be cancelled at any time?
koala_man 7y ago
>any company would have to be crazy to want to depend on any new Google service for anything important If the company has an equally good alternative available, chances are Google wouldn't have launched theirs in the first place.
com2kid 7y ago
90s and 00s Microsoft was successful in part because they were an incredibly stable platform to develop against. 10 year support goes a long way, and if you paid enough money you could email in your bugs and get custom hot fixes made for issues that annoyed you. Even their /bad/ technologies had long term support. If you built on top of shiny new thing and Microsoft dropped it in the next release, it was still going to get patches, bug fixes, and the documentation for it wasn't going to vanish from the world as if it never existed. Of course this was all before cloud services existed. Back then you'd pay for a product and you got software on a disk/CD and there was an expectation that it'd keep working. One thing that gets overlooked so frequently, by all companies, is that ongoing costs are ongoing. Whenever I see a new fitness tracker kickstarter advertising amazing cloud services for free, my first thought is that the costs from cloud services will eventually exceed the tiny profit that comes from selling physical consumer hardware. And a few years later another "It's been a great journey" message goes out as the company runs out of money. Obviously Google won't run out of $, but costs do add up. Doing the math on how to distribute funding to bundled cloud services is actually rather hard. You have to figure out for a given product / subscription, how much of that purchase price needs to be distributed to the various teams. That sort of attribution is not easy, and not properly allocating those funds to development resources can kill a product. e.g. someone buys a Chromebook, of course the OS team gets money, but the team making Google docs can argue they deserve a split, after all without them the Chromebooks would be somewhat useless. Analytics helps, but only to an extent.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  You've hit the nail on the head. Google doesn't run out of money; what Google runs out of is the things money can't buy in the short run, and at their scale that's employee hours and (surprisingly) compute and storage bandwidth (because they're building infrastructure at such volume that they end up saturating supplies and literally can't get more hardware at a reasonable price-point to run all the services they want to run). Too much breadth of services cuts into how much load they can bear on services that are business-core or revenue-positive.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Microsoft didn’t care about developers that was always a talking point. Microsoft maintained backwards compatibility because of a new operating system broke old code, companies wouldn’t upgrade and it made its money from operating systems. Apple doesn’t care as much about backwards compatibility because it doesn’t really care if you upgrade your operating system - especially on the Mac - or stick with your old one until you buy a new computer. It doesn’t make money on operating system upgrades.

dehrmann 7y ago

> Engineers...could be invent[ing] new products that have some percentage chance of being much more profitable Doubtful. The successful products to come out of Google are Search, GMail, and GCP. They bought Adwords, Doubleclick, Android, Youtube, and Nest and Fitbit, I suppose. GCP is their only recent win, but it's a me-too late entrant in a market Google should have invented.

r00fus 7y ago
Is Nest profitable?
icebraining 7y ago
I'm not sure it was profitable, but Orkut, at its peak, had 300 million users, and that purely a result of an experiment by an engineer.
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
You're forgetting Maps, Earth, Docs, Translate, Drive... Also, many of the acquisitions you mention were tiny when bought, and Google has a much better track record of growing and improving them than, say, Yahoo.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Growing and improving yes. Do any of those products help Google’s bottom line or to diversify where their profits come from? I can see Docs with GSuite especially in education and maybe Drive.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Docs and Drive were also acquisitions. I'll give you Maps and Translate.

mushufasa 7y ago

What if they just sold their low-margin-yet-profitable businesses instead of killing them? There are several tech PE firms that specialize in that niche. KKR bought Corel (of WordPerfect fame) recently. I'm also confident someone at Google already had this obvious idea. Any ex-googlers know why they chose not to / cannot do this?

thfuran 7y ago
I strongly suspect that it would generally be a massive undertaking to decouple products from their internal ecosystem and render them able to be spun off.
Mindwipe 7y ago
They did it with Sketchup I guess. But that was also an acquisition, so I guess it lifted out of Google's infrastructure more easily.
scarface74 7y ago
The only reason that Google can throw stuff against the wall and scale it immediately is because they have the infrastructure in place. I can’t imagine you can decouple Googke’s products from their infrastructure.
- angry_octet 7y ago
  Picassa? Could have open sourced it. There are a few others in the graveyard that were easily able to live on any infrastructure.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    How do you know how much of Picasa’s code was intertwined with Google’s? Could it have been a profitable in going concern by itself? How?
    - angry_octet 7y ago
      It's traditional software, it runs offline, client side. Which is great for low bandwidth places and the privacy concious. It has some basic ML for face recog. The money is in photo printing, which is a pretty big industry which Google has failed to capture any of. It had a huge installed base, but of course Google would not sell user engagement in bulk, only in tiny pieces as ads. Advertising the things people take photos of is pretty straightforward too, another reason why Google killed Picasa instead of letting it free.

dodobirdlord 7y ago

> If someone did the math and said the expected value of "engineer working on new projects" was bigger than the expected value of of the the profits of an existing project divided by the number of engineers needed to maintain it, then it'd be logical to abandon a bunch of seemingly profitable products. In case anyone is wondering, the math has been done. I have been told that Google even has an internal page devoted to informing engineers how much something has to be worth before it is worth their time, and it's a big number.