9 ms·

Sigh, all I can think is yet another promising startup vanishes into the depths of Google, never to be seen again. Google, please stop buying companies, please

Sigh, all I can think is yet another promising startup vanishes into the depths of Google, never to be seen again. Google, please stop buying companies, please learn to support your products and build a loyal customer base. You are not a startup anymore, you need to make the transformation that companies like Microsoft did, and quit moving fast and breaking things. People don't want an agile foundation, they want a hundred year foundation.

chimerasaurus 6y ago
Disclaimer - I’m a Googler. As a counterpoint, Cloud has acquired several companies that haven’t disappeared; rather, are fairly foundational in the portfolio: - Cask (now Cloud Data Fusion as a product, CDAP as an OSS project) - Looker - Stackdriver
- sidcool 6y ago
  Firebase?
- lowdose 6y ago
  Isn't Looker a talent acquisition for Data Studio?
  - chimerasaurus 6y ago
    No, they are quite separate.
- macNchz 6y ago
  Stackdriver did not disappear, but having used it daily for the past 4 years and witnessed its painfully slow and buggy migration into the GCP admin, I can't say it's a product that has visibly gotten much love. We kept using it for some things out of inertia, but I can't say it ever impressed me.
  - three_seagrass 6y ago
    How so? I've only ever used it on GC, not pre-acquisition.
    - troutwine 6y ago
      Prior to the acquisition Stackdriver was never best of breed among its peer group but it was acceptable. Post-acquisition the feature set appears as an end user to have more or less frozen and their UIs feel haphazard: dashboarding is a mess, the trace UI is very complex without really giving me greater query power over alternatives and the options for converting one kind of data stream into another (logs to metrics, traces to logs to metrics etc) just aren't there. Google tightly integrates Stackdriver into its other products -- I assume that's where most of the labor for the Stackdriver team has gone -- but it feels cheap and like they've had to intentionally limit options to force buy-in. For what it is, Stackdriver is surprisingly expensive and their SDKs are quite complicated for what they end up accomplishing. Why should the end-user need to internalize Stackdriver Metrics' API to be able to produce metrics about their application? (I am sympathetic to the notion that this SDK is low-level and meant to be consumed by higher-level APIs like OpenTelemetry et al). Nowadays the Stackdriver suite just feels left behind. There's plenty of other options in this space that have a nice internal integration and are reasonably inexpensive to purchase, or run yourself. If Stackdriver weren't so tightly integrated with Google's other cloud products I have to imagine it would get even less use than it does now.
    - macNchz 6y ago
      Most of the things that bothered me were fairly minor, but taken together they just didn't give me the impression that there was a lot of effort going into the product. Lots of janky UI (filtering/browsing logs being particularly cumbersome), and a bunch of things that seem promising at first but are very much "lite" versions of more powerful products like Pingdom/Sentry/DataDog. Also I always felt like the monitoring metrics were not as well integrated into the GCP system as they should have been, given that they're under the same roof...we spun up a Prometheus cluster to do it by hand instead. Also, until recently the admin lived outside of the main GCP admin and logging into it required some kind of redirect-bouncing oauth handshake that was consistently buggy for me. Something to do with browser defaults/3rd party cookies along the chain of redirects that would cause an infinite loop. I managed to work around it on my work computer, but it was broken for at least a year...not awesome for a tool you'll be logging into in emergencies, often from other devices.
sidcool 6y ago
I agree with your sentiment but I also feel that a hundred year foundation starts with nimbleness and agility in mind.
rvz 6y ago
> Google, please stop buying companies, please learn to support your products and build a loyal customer base. You are not a startup anymore, you need to make the transformation that companies like Microsoft did, and quit moving fast and breaking things. It's actually not Google's fault. It's the founders of these startups who can't resist their offer nor can they do anything to control the company once they have taken lots of venture capital and are driven for an exit. Snap resisted acquisition from Facebook and Google. Dropbox resisted Apple buying them, so the fault isn't with the acquirers. It's all the founders fault for accepting it.
- leadingthenet 6y ago
  Are Snap and Dropbox really examples of what companies should do??
  - rvz 6y ago
    For resisting to selling your company because of another competitor wanting to buy you out? Yes, that is the example I'm talking about, not what they actually do which you seem to have insinuated. You would have asked the exact same question 24 years ago when Apple was months away from bankruptcy at the time even when it was in legal battle with Microsoft and Intel. It's also not limited to those companies I mentioned, but 15 years ago, Microsoft, Google, Viacom, Myspace, Yahoo, AOL all wanted to buy Facebook pre-IPO and FB resisted all attempts and they have now become highly profitable themselves as such that they have owned the social media market. Even Netflix was approached an offer of $50 million by Blockbuster and resisted a buyout. Given the hindsight of the growth of those companies, including Apple and Facebook, had you'd been the CEO of either of them, you'd think that selling wouldn't have been a good idea.
    - leadingthenet 6y ago
      Right, but my point was that both Snap and Dropbox would’ve been better off being bought out, imo. Netflix and Facebook, sure, but you didn’t quite use a convincing example to support the argument. Not that I disagree with the spirit of what was said...
peeters 6y ago
I'm not sure "promising startup" describes North (previously Thalmic Labs) that well. Everything I've heard around the Waterloo tech scene is that it was mostly smoke and mirrors from the founders who were able to maintain their own lifestyles using grants from the Canadian government. Tales from past employees are not flattering. Being bought by Google is likely the best thing that could happen to both the founders and the employees, if Google acquires the latter. https://www.reddit.com/r/kitchener/comments/hg11tl/a_vision_fades_alphabet_buying_canadian_smart/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kitchener/comments/hg11tl/a_vision_...
- corobo 6y ago
  > mostly smoke and mirrors In fairness isn't that how this tech works
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - justinclift 6y ago
    The smoke bit is only for development, when accidentally plugging things in the wrong way around. ;)
- ornornor 6y ago
  > mostly smoke and mirrors from the founders who were able to maintain their own lifestyles using grants from the Canadian government This describes a surprisingly high number of companies I’ve worked at in Canada. These SRED credits keep afloat so many companies that should have otherwise perished and that won’t ever go anywhere. You can even hire SRED consultants that will help you milk those credits as much as possible (for a fee of course). You can then apply for more credits to pay off these SRED consultants fees, as I understand it... While producing little to no commercial value, and coast on these for years.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    Supposedly SRED accountants are some of the best paid in Canada, next to transfer pricing accountants.
wvenable 6y ago
Given that this is the first mention of North I've heard in a long time it was probably necessary for them to be acquired.
outside1234 6y ago
This was a talent acquisition from the looks of it. North had failed and this was an exit that was better than bankrupcy.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  There's no talent to acquire. Google is in for the patents. Employment is explicitly not guaranteed at Google, and if so it'll be from their satellite office. And no words on the founders coming onboard at Google which is a sign that they really aren't interested by the company itself. North shipped about 1'000 units in its lifetime, barely different than the Intel Vaunt, and their V2 was still exclusively CGI rendering on their website with no launch data in sight.
bserge 6y ago
Yeah, I remember when they acquired that impressive autocorrect startup (they had something about context awareness and closest letter misspells)... Android's gboard autocorrect still sucks :/
- frandroid 6y ago
  Swype. I really miss my swype keyboard. I kept it installed for the longest time after it got acquihired, until they shut down one of the remote servers or something, and then it would crash. Why could they not move that code over to Gboard? It was so good.
  - andybak 6y ago
    I'm still using swipe keyboards out of pure muscle memory but they suck compared to how Swype used to be. I swear I'd be better off learning to type conventionally now but it's been too long.
    - frandroid 6y ago
      Especially when it comes to dual-language support... Swype was excellent at determining which language you meant to use.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vikramkr 6y ago
North was not doing so hot - they've been looking for an acquirer for a while now and were facing running out of money. So, not exactly a promising startup at the current moment unfortunately. Based on the announcement that second gen focals are cancelled as a part of this acquisition, it doesn't even seem like they're pretending it's to continue the product line etc - it seems pretty clearly for the tech/patents/etc https://9to5google.com/2020/06/25/alphabet-north-focals/ https://9to5google.com/2020/06/25/alphabet-north-focals/
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  They barely produced 1'000 units. It would be pretty hard to support these.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Frost1x 6y ago
If corporate personhood is an accepted philosophy (corporations, businesses, etc. gain many legal abilities as real people in our society)... Is an acquisition of a startup akin to slavery (buying another person to do work for you), adoption (raising an orphaned kid), cannibalism (consuming the entity to be apart of yourself to feed some entity life-force need), or something else?
narrator 6y ago
This trend will continue forever because, the way modern corporate capitalism is set up, publicly traded companies have a VASTLY lower cost of capital than private companies. Thus, private companies who are profitable at a much higher cost of capital can be bought almost risk free by public companies and run poorly and still be worth it because the public companies get money so cheaply.
kartayyar 6y ago
"Promising" could not be a more incorrect choice of words. It almost sounds like Google did them a favor. This looks like a distressed fire sale rather than a good exit, considering the product failed.
mike_d 6y ago
> all I can think is yet another promising startup vanishes into the depths of Google, never to be seen again. Like what? Android, YouTube, DoubleClick, ReCAPTCHA, Waze, VirusTotal, Nest, DeepMind? Aside from search every major Google product is built on an acquisition. Maps was Keyhole and Where2. AdWords was Applied Semantics. Google Docs is Writely, and Tonic. Google Voice is GrandCentral. Google Analytics is Urchin. Google Shopping is BeatThatQuote. Google Flight is ATA. etc. etc. etc. Whatever startup you're bitter about probably wasn't going to make it outside Google anyway and it was an aquihire, or Google gave them the runway to prove it out and it didn't work.

chimerasaurus 6y ago

Disclaimer - I’m a Googler. As a counterpoint, Cloud has acquired several companies that haven’t disappeared; rather, are fairly foundational in the portfolio: - Cask (now Cloud Data Fusion as a product, CDAP as an OSS project) - Looker - Stackdriver

sidcool 6y ago
Firebase?
lowdose 6y ago
Isn't Looker a talent acquisition for Data Studio?
- chimerasaurus 6y ago
  No, they are quite separate.
macNchz 6y ago
Stackdriver did not disappear, but having used it daily for the past 4 years and witnessed its painfully slow and buggy migration into the GCP admin, I can't say it's a product that has visibly gotten much love. We kept using it for some things out of inertia, but I can't say it ever impressed me.
- three_seagrass 6y ago
  How so? I've only ever used it on GC, not pre-acquisition.
  - troutwine 6y ago
    Prior to the acquisition Stackdriver was never best of breed among its peer group but it was acceptable. Post-acquisition the feature set appears as an end user to have more or less frozen and their UIs feel haphazard: dashboarding is a mess, the trace UI is very complex without really giving me greater query power over alternatives and the options for converting one kind of data stream into another (logs to metrics, traces to logs to metrics etc) just aren't there. Google tightly integrates Stackdriver into its other products -- I assume that's where most of the labor for the Stackdriver team has gone -- but it feels cheap and like they've had to intentionally limit options to force buy-in. For what it is, Stackdriver is surprisingly expensive and their SDKs are quite complicated for what they end up accomplishing. Why should the end-user need to internalize Stackdriver Metrics' API to be able to produce metrics about their application? (I am sympathetic to the notion that this SDK is low-level and meant to be consumed by higher-level APIs like OpenTelemetry et al). Nowadays the Stackdriver suite just feels left behind. There's plenty of other options in this space that have a nice internal integration and are reasonably inexpensive to purchase, or run yourself. If Stackdriver weren't so tightly integrated with Google's other cloud products I have to imagine it would get even less use than it does now.
  - macNchz 6y ago
    Most of the things that bothered me were fairly minor, but taken together they just didn't give me the impression that there was a lot of effort going into the product. Lots of janky UI (filtering/browsing logs being particularly cumbersome), and a bunch of things that seem promising at first but are very much "lite" versions of more powerful products like Pingdom/Sentry/DataDog. Also I always felt like the monitoring metrics were not as well integrated into the GCP system as they should have been, given that they're under the same roof...we spun up a Prometheus cluster to do it by hand instead. Also, until recently the admin lived outside of the main GCP admin and logging into it required some kind of redirect-bouncing oauth handshake that was consistently buggy for me. Something to do with browser defaults/3rd party cookies along the chain of redirects that would cause an infinite loop. I managed to work around it on my work computer, but it was broken for at least a year...not awesome for a tool you'll be logging into in emergencies, often from other devices.

sidcool 6y ago

I agree with your sentiment but I also feel that a hundred year foundation starts with nimbleness and agility in mind.

rvz 6y ago

> Google, please stop buying companies, please learn to support your products and build a loyal customer base. You are not a startup anymore, you need to make the transformation that companies like Microsoft did, and quit moving fast and breaking things. It's actually not Google's fault. It's the founders of these startups who can't resist their offer nor can they do anything to control the company once they have taken lots of venture capital and are driven for an exit. Snap resisted acquisition from Facebook and Google. Dropbox resisted Apple buying them, so the fault isn't with the acquirers. It's all the founders fault for accepting it.

leadingthenet 6y ago
Are Snap and Dropbox really examples of what companies should do??
- rvz 6y ago
  For resisting to selling your company because of another competitor wanting to buy you out? Yes, that is the example I'm talking about, not what they actually do which you seem to have insinuated. You would have asked the exact same question 24 years ago when Apple was months away from bankruptcy at the time even when it was in legal battle with Microsoft and Intel. It's also not limited to those companies I mentioned, but 15 years ago, Microsoft, Google, Viacom, Myspace, Yahoo, AOL all wanted to buy Facebook pre-IPO and FB resisted all attempts and they have now become highly profitable themselves as such that they have owned the social media market. Even Netflix was approached an offer of $50 million by Blockbuster and resisted a buyout. Given the hindsight of the growth of those companies, including Apple and Facebook, had you'd been the CEO of either of them, you'd think that selling wouldn't have been a good idea.
  - leadingthenet 6y ago
    Right, but my point was that both Snap and Dropbox would’ve been better off being bought out, imo. Netflix and Facebook, sure, but you didn’t quite use a convincing example to support the argument. Not that I disagree with the spirit of what was said...

peeters 6y ago

I'm not sure "promising startup" describes North (previously Thalmic Labs) that well. Everything I've heard around the Waterloo tech scene is that it was mostly smoke and mirrors from the founders who were able to maintain their own lifestyles using grants from the Canadian government. Tales from past employees are not flattering. Being bought by Google is likely the best thing that could happen to both the founders and the employees, if Google acquires the latter. https://www.reddit.com/r/kitchener/comments/hg11tl/a_vision_fades_alphabet_buying_canadian_smart/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kitchener/comments/hg11tl/a_vision_...

corobo 6y ago
> mostly smoke and mirrors In fairness isn't that how this tech works
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- justinclift 6y ago
  The smoke bit is only for development, when accidentally plugging things in the wrong way around. ;)
ornornor 6y ago
> mostly smoke and mirrors from the founders who were able to maintain their own lifestyles using grants from the Canadian government This describes a surprisingly high number of companies I’ve worked at in Canada. These SRED credits keep afloat so many companies that should have otherwise perished and that won’t ever go anywhere. You can even hire SRED consultants that will help you milk those credits as much as possible (for a fee of course). You can then apply for more credits to pay off these SRED consultants fees, as I understand it... While producing little to no commercial value, and coast on these for years.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  Supposedly SRED accountants are some of the best paid in Canada, next to transfer pricing accountants.

wvenable 6y ago

Given that this is the first mention of North I've heard in a long time it was probably necessary for them to be acquired.

outside1234 6y ago

This was a talent acquisition from the looks of it. North had failed and this was an exit that was better than bankrupcy.

908B64B197 6y ago
There's no talent to acquire. Google is in for the patents. Employment is explicitly not guaranteed at Google, and if so it'll be from their satellite office. And no words on the founders coming onboard at Google which is a sign that they really aren't interested by the company itself. North shipped about 1'000 units in its lifetime, barely different than the Intel Vaunt, and their V2 was still exclusively CGI rendering on their website with no launch data in sight.

bserge 6y ago

Yeah, I remember when they acquired that impressive autocorrect startup (they had something about context awareness and closest letter misspells)... Android's gboard autocorrect still sucks :/

frandroid 6y ago
Swype. I really miss my swype keyboard. I kept it installed for the longest time after it got acquihired, until they shut down one of the remote servers or something, and then it would crash. Why could they not move that code over to Gboard? It was so good.
- andybak 6y ago
  I'm still using swipe keyboards out of pure muscle memory but they suck compared to how Swype used to be. I swear I'd be better off learning to type conventionally now but it's been too long.
  - frandroid 6y ago
    Especially when it comes to dual-language support... Swype was excellent at determining which language you meant to use.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

vikramkr 6y ago

North was not doing so hot - they've been looking for an acquirer for a while now and were facing running out of money. So, not exactly a promising startup at the current moment unfortunately. Based on the announcement that second gen focals are cancelled as a part of this acquisition, it doesn't even seem like they're pretending it's to continue the product line etc - it seems pretty clearly for the tech/patents/etc https://9to5google.com/2020/06/25/alphabet-north-focals/ https://9to5google.com/2020/06/25/alphabet-north-focals/

908B64B197 6y ago
They barely produced 1'000 units. It would be pretty hard to support these.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Frost1x 6y ago

If corporate personhood is an accepted philosophy (corporations, businesses, etc. gain many legal abilities as real people in our society)... Is an acquisition of a startup akin to slavery (buying another person to do work for you), adoption (raising an orphaned kid), cannibalism (consuming the entity to be apart of yourself to feed some entity life-force need), or something else?

narrator 6y ago

This trend will continue forever because, the way modern corporate capitalism is set up, publicly traded companies have a VASTLY lower cost of capital than private companies. Thus, private companies who are profitable at a much higher cost of capital can be bought almost risk free by public companies and run poorly and still be worth it because the public companies get money so cheaply.

kartayyar 6y ago

"Promising" could not be a more incorrect choice of words. It almost sounds like Google did them a favor. This looks like a distressed fire sale rather than a good exit, considering the product failed.

mike_d 6y ago

> all I can think is yet another promising startup vanishes into the depths of Google, never to be seen again. Like what? Android, YouTube, DoubleClick, ReCAPTCHA, Waze, VirusTotal, Nest, DeepMind? Aside from search every major Google product is built on an acquisition. Maps was Keyhole and Where2. AdWords was Applied Semantics. Google Docs is Writely, and Tonic. Google Voice is GrandCentral. Google Analytics is Urchin. Google Shopping is BeatThatQuote. Google Flight is ATA. etc. etc. etc. Whatever startup you're bitter about probably wasn't going to make it outside Google anyway and it was an aquihire, or Google gave them the runway to prove it out and it didn't work.