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I imagine Google views this as a positive thing, trying a million ideas, so that hopefully it increases the chances of having at least one good and popular idea

I imagine Google views this as a positive thing, trying a million ideas, so that hopefully it increases the chances of having at least one good and popular idea. The downside is, a lot of products they killed were good ideas, but its sink or swim and they don't get the products the needed love and attention so they don't take off and thus they kill them. And now even when releasing a good idea or good piece of hardware people will always be worried if it will be gone tomorrow, which leads to less adoption and more axing of products.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago
well one of the popular things said on HN is that ideas are cheap and execution is the determining factor for success. I think Google was deceived by their first idea which was so good that mistakes could not derail it and now they expect every idea to be of the same caliber. This is of course aside from all the other problems they have with a company culture rewarding ideas but not rewarding growing a product, and so forth.
harikb 7y ago
I am genuinely curious if we are only seeing tip of the iceberg so to speak and there are a much larger number of projects getting killed before they are even released? Although it does not affect end consumers, I am curious from an engineering point of view. Any Xooglers care to comment? I am not asking for actual numbers, but just ballpark numbers / estimates. If it turns out Google experiments in the open while others experiment internally and kill products too early, may be this isn't so bad after all. Society got to see what worked and what didn't.
jsight 7y ago
Maybe, but some are exceptionally bad. Why did Allo exist at all for example? And the merging, demerging involved with Messages, Hangouts, and Voice have been a complete mess. There's more there than just trying some ideas, as some of the ideas actively damaged older ideas.
- sct202 7y ago
  I don't understand why they announced that Google Hangouts (classic) is closing to move to Google Hangouts Chat, like it's a chat app am I going to notice a difference, but now you just made me think that the whole service is shutting down?
  - journalctl 7y ago
    This is what happens when companies are disorganized and don’t communicate internally.
- josteink 7y ago
  Yeah. The Gchat/Hangouts mess was what caused me to permanently move off all Google-based IM-platforms. You better believe I’m not coming back.
- zerocrates 7y ago
  I made a post recently on another article saying I thought the chatter about them killing product was overblown, but the chat/video stuff is truly a cluster that's doing them no favors whatsoever. We had a separate SMS app, Google Talk, the Hangouts app, Hangouts integration with SMS, the new Messages app pushing you to de-integrate from Hangouts, and whatever the hell is happening now with Allo and Duo, Allo dying, Hangouts moving to business use only, or to become a Teams competitor, or is that even happening? They successfully scared everyone away from Hangouts chat, whatever is actually happening to it, but all this time, the "chat" area of Gmail still presents what I assume is Hangouts? But I guess that's about to change also... Now Messages itself is slowly pivoting to "chat" with the RCS rollout and I really can't understand how this could have possibly come to be like this. The branding nonsense of introducing all-new, quite similar features for consumers and pivoting the existing brands everybody already knew to business must have been based on some analytics about Hangouts video chats being a Skype competitor for remote meetings, I guess, but it's still just baffling to think about. And I haven't even mentioned Voice's overlap in several of these areas. Putting aside the obvious confusion it creates, how can it be efficient to operate so many overlapping services that do such similar things?
lubujackson 7y ago
For all the fun people made of Yahoo back in the day, this is more or less the trajectory their many products went through. With the difference being a lot more of the internal discussions, consolidations and "new direction" decision-making was known, making them seem headless and chaotic. There seems to be a general problem supporting employee-led innovation at scale, when the bean-counters start to control the product pipeline (and rarely look beyond the next quarter).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
d0gbread 7y ago
These stand alone products get killed but I would be interested in seeing a similar summary by feature. It's always seemed like a strategy to me that they build and release an MVP, early adopters explore it, love or hate it, and the best of what's killed winds up integrating into the core suite. For example, I miss Google Latitude but location sharing is a feature of Google Maps now. I never used Inbox but I assume some of the new Gmail features are from what they learned there.
w0mbat 7y ago
Yes, I see this as healthy turnover, the circle of life. I can testify that every main project I worked on when at Google is gone now except Chrome, the last thing I coded for. However, I don't think my time on other stuff was wasted. Each of those previous projects shipped and did something useful for the public and helped Google in some way, like providing technical research or laying down infrastructure later used by other projects that still exist. At the very least something got killed because the team was needed on a high priority project, where they made a big difference.
leoh 7y ago
I find it amusing that, in a comments section that is generally irritated with Google about product shutdowns, there are also complaints that some of the products _suck_.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

well one of the popular things said on HN is that ideas are cheap and execution is the determining factor for success. I think Google was deceived by their first idea which was so good that mistakes could not derail it and now they expect every idea to be of the same caliber. This is of course aside from all the other problems they have with a company culture rewarding ideas but not rewarding growing a product, and so forth.

harikb 7y ago

I am genuinely curious if we are only seeing tip of the iceberg so to speak and there are a much larger number of projects getting killed before they are even released? Although it does not affect end consumers, I am curious from an engineering point of view. Any Xooglers care to comment? I am not asking for actual numbers, but just ballpark numbers / estimates. If it turns out Google experiments in the open while others experiment internally and kill products too early, may be this isn't so bad after all. Society got to see what worked and what didn't.

jsight 7y ago

Maybe, but some are exceptionally bad. Why did Allo exist at all for example? And the merging, demerging involved with Messages, Hangouts, and Voice have been a complete mess. There's more there than just trying some ideas, as some of the ideas actively damaged older ideas.

sct202 7y ago
I don't understand why they announced that Google Hangouts (classic) is closing to move to Google Hangouts Chat, like it's a chat app am I going to notice a difference, but now you just made me think that the whole service is shutting down?
- journalctl 7y ago
  This is what happens when companies are disorganized and don’t communicate internally.
josteink 7y ago
Yeah. The Gchat/Hangouts mess was what caused me to permanently move off all Google-based IM-platforms. You better believe I’m not coming back.
zerocrates 7y ago
I made a post recently on another article saying I thought the chatter about them killing product was overblown, but the chat/video stuff is truly a cluster that's doing them no favors whatsoever. We had a separate SMS app, Google Talk, the Hangouts app, Hangouts integration with SMS, the new Messages app pushing you to de-integrate from Hangouts, and whatever the hell is happening now with Allo and Duo, Allo dying, Hangouts moving to business use only, or to become a Teams competitor, or is that even happening? They successfully scared everyone away from Hangouts chat, whatever is actually happening to it, but all this time, the "chat" area of Gmail still presents what I assume is Hangouts? But I guess that's about to change also... Now Messages itself is slowly pivoting to "chat" with the RCS rollout and I really can't understand how this could have possibly come to be like this. The branding nonsense of introducing all-new, quite similar features for consumers and pivoting the existing brands everybody already knew to business must have been based on some analytics about Hangouts video chats being a Skype competitor for remote meetings, I guess, but it's still just baffling to think about. And I haven't even mentioned Voice's overlap in several of these areas. Putting aside the obvious confusion it creates, how can it be efficient to operate so many overlapping services that do such similar things?

lubujackson 7y ago

For all the fun people made of Yahoo back in the day, this is more or less the trajectory their many products went through. With the difference being a lot more of the internal discussions, consolidations and "new direction" decision-making was known, making them seem headless and chaotic. There seems to be a general problem supporting employee-led innovation at scale, when the bean-counters start to control the product pipeline (and rarely look beyond the next quarter).

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

d0gbread 7y ago

These stand alone products get killed but I would be interested in seeing a similar summary by feature. It's always seemed like a strategy to me that they build and release an MVP, early adopters explore it, love or hate it, and the best of what's killed winds up integrating into the core suite. For example, I miss Google Latitude but location sharing is a feature of Google Maps now. I never used Inbox but I assume some of the new Gmail features are from what they learned there.

w0mbat 7y ago

Yes, I see this as healthy turnover, the circle of life. I can testify that every main project I worked on when at Google is gone now except Chrome, the last thing I coded for. However, I don't think my time on other stuff was wasted. Each of those previous projects shipped and did something useful for the public and helped Google in some way, like providing technical research or laying down infrastructure later used by other projects that still exist. At the very least something got killed because the team was needed on a high priority project, where they made a big difference.

leoh 7y ago

I find it amusing that, in a comments section that is generally irritated with Google about product shutdowns, there are also complaints that some of the products _suck_.