11 ms·

You know Google has a serious credibility problem when half or more of the comments on tech sites covering product launches are questioning when Google will dec

You know Google has a serious credibility problem when half or more of the comments on tech sites covering product launches are questioning when Google will decide to randomly pull the plug.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
atarian 6y ago
The opposite end of this spectrum is a company supporting far too many different properties like Yahoo did. How do you strike the right balance?
- Guest42 6y ago
  They can sunset things better that way customers have clearer paths forward.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  A good argument for being careful adding new products.
- puranjay 6y ago
  Google has more resources than Yahoo ever did
- johnwheeler 6y ago
  They should release the financials of the app and let companies bid to acquire the app and its userbase. Smaller companies get a shot at growing the business, users stay happy(er than they would otherwise) and google gets a shot at acquiring the original idea back should it succeed under the hands of people who give a damn. Unfortunately, such a program would likely be sunset after a year.
  - ebiester 6y ago
    More importantly, this is all released on Google's internal infrastructure. Any such work would require moving to the external infrastructure, and the cost of it likely wouldn't make sense. The real issue is this: Why am I paying 10 dollars/user/month for this when G suite Business is 12? I could see using this for the organization, but not at that cost.
    - luka-birsa 6y ago
      Getting paying customers is great for idea validation. If nobody wants to pay, you at least know that.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    The way Google builds software makes that approach tough. Even if you had the source code to the app (which Google isn't about to give out at any price), what you'll find is that it's an app architected to link against libraries nobody has ever seen and run atop a distributed computing fabric that's loosely related to Kubernetes but, really, nobody's ever seen, storing data to a backing store nobody's ever seen, and identifying users via an authentication model that nobody's ever seen. Dangling references all over the place, leading to special sauce Google is even less likely to publish, because it's deeply tied into a physical hardware architecture that Google can't publish, because even if they did nobody's going to build it. Some of Google's user-facing stuff runs on the architectures they make public, like GCP. But a lot of it runs on Google's proprietary fabric of service management and distributed storage, which is an alien planet relative to the world outside their walls. Publishing an app out of that part of the ecosystem would be like Google handing a company a koala with no eucalyptus trees. It'd be dead in days.
- res0nat0r 6y ago
  Most of it is just the HN echo chamber. Folks commenting that GCP my be shut down because it doesn't make as much money as Azure, totally oblivious to the fact that Google has billions invested in physical buildings and hardware being hammered on and built out around the world as we speak, just shows that folks here are out of the loop on this type of thing.
  - machello13 6y ago
    > Most of it is just the HN echo chamber. I don't think this is true. Plenty of "normal", non-HN people bring this up too (I mean, not my mom, but like regular somewhat tech-savvy people). You can point to GCP all you want, but people are just going to keep pointing to https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/.
  - buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
    From what I can tell, there isn't a single person in this thread claiming GCP may be shut down. And if there is, it certainly isn't a meaningful number of people. What you're doing is claiming people hold an easily attackable position that they don't hold, and attacking that position. It's called strawmanning.
    - res0nat0r 6y ago
      Not in this thread, but it has happened a couple of times in the past any time Google products / GCP have been brought up, and that I've replied to saying that it is nonsense.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - zentiggr 6y ago
    Aside from an easily dismissed hardware-backed GCP case, Google _does_ have a long history of useful and interesting ideas that launch, gain some users, look really useful if some effort is put into it, and get dropped instead. Even if some solid use cases are building. I'm going to look at this idea, see what it might be able to do, and look at whether there's another alternative that would be likelier to survive.
- jfoster 6y ago
  Well there's two things to say about that: 1. Some of the things they launch they probably shouldn't be launching because they have next to no chance of ever being a meaningful business for Google. (eg. Google Helpouts) 2. Some of the things they launch are attempts to get into a particular area and Google's interest in that area lasts longer than their interest in whatever they initially launched. Chat is probably the best example of this; Google Talk, Hangouts, heck, I don't even know what it's called now! In such cases Google should be more disciplined about supporting whatever it is they've launched. Re-brand & iterate as much as they want, but never leave customers hanging. I think if Google followed these two rules they would be sunsetting a lot less stuff. They might still need to retire the odd product/service, but at least they wouldn't be doing it so much that customers doubt every single launch. Their current approach hasn't been working well for their customers, but it's actually going to begin affecting their customers less and affect Google more. Who in their right mind would put any medium/long term stock into Tables, for example? Customers no longer affected. Now Google can't launch a service that the market will take seriously.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
comeonseriously 6y ago
They don't care. They're revenue is from ads. If they get a bump in revenue from gleaning information off of Tables (tm) to display relevant ads to you for the year this will be active, then maybe it was worth it.
burtonator 6y ago
It seems like 80% of these projects are pet projects by VPs so they can launch a Google project for their career or Google can keep them from leaving for Facebook.
puranjay 6y ago
Google Docs and Sheets already feels like abandonedware. I haven't seen any substantial changes in years.
- lazharichir 6y ago
  Erm, the explore tab in Sheets is pretty awesome for small businesses and people unfamiliar with Excel-like formula. Not sure when that was released, though!
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Looks like 2015: https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/the-academy/google-sheets-now-automatically-analyzes-your-data-for-you/ https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/the-academy/google-sheet...
- markstos 6y ago
  Table of Contents navigator was recently added, I think "Document Compare" is fairly new.
- uponcoffee 6y ago
  The otherside of that coin is feature creep. Docs/sheets so their job fine, so aside from minor updates//fixes they don't need to substantially change; given their user based substantial redesigns should be their own product and if they prove to be substantially better then they can migrate away from the old docs/sheets
- delecti 6y ago
  I can't imagine what additional features the overwhelming majority of people need out of a word processor or spreadsheet software.
  - foobiekr 6y ago
    Docs still can't handle large documents with a long edit history. It slows to a crawl. This has been an issue since at least 2013. We are talking about document sizes that Word for Windows 95 could handle.
shallowthought 6y ago
I call it Promo-Driven Development. You have to launch things to get promoted at Google, but you're not going to get demoted for transferring to a better project afterward.
- president 6y ago
  Just like that one engineer on your team that says yes to everything the manager does while writing the worst spaghetti code because he knows once he gets promoted/leaves for greener pastures, someone else will take care of the mess and he will be long gone by then.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

You know Google has a serious credibility problem when half or more of the comments on tech sites covering product launches are questioning when Google will decide to randomly pull the plug.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

atarian 6y ago

The opposite end of this spectrum is a company supporting far too many different properties like Yahoo did. How do you strike the right balance?

Guest42 6y ago
They can sunset things better that way customers have clearer paths forward.
ashtonkem 6y ago
A good argument for being careful adding new products.
puranjay 6y ago
Google has more resources than Yahoo ever did
johnwheeler 6y ago
They should release the financials of the app and let companies bid to acquire the app and its userbase. Smaller companies get a shot at growing the business, users stay happy(er than they would otherwise) and google gets a shot at acquiring the original idea back should it succeed under the hands of people who give a damn. Unfortunately, such a program would likely be sunset after a year.
- ebiester 6y ago
  More importantly, this is all released on Google's internal infrastructure. Any such work would require moving to the external infrastructure, and the cost of it likely wouldn't make sense. The real issue is this: Why am I paying 10 dollars/user/month for this when G suite Business is 12? I could see using this for the organization, but not at that cost.
  - luka-birsa 6y ago
    Getting paying customers is great for idea validation. If nobody wants to pay, you at least know that.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  The way Google builds software makes that approach tough. Even if you had the source code to the app (which Google isn't about to give out at any price), what you'll find is that it's an app architected to link against libraries nobody has ever seen and run atop a distributed computing fabric that's loosely related to Kubernetes but, really, nobody's ever seen, storing data to a backing store nobody's ever seen, and identifying users via an authentication model that nobody's ever seen. Dangling references all over the place, leading to special sauce Google is even less likely to publish, because it's deeply tied into a physical hardware architecture that Google can't publish, because even if they did nobody's going to build it. Some of Google's user-facing stuff runs on the architectures they make public, like GCP. But a lot of it runs on Google's proprietary fabric of service management and distributed storage, which is an alien planet relative to the world outside their walls. Publishing an app out of that part of the ecosystem would be like Google handing a company a koala with no eucalyptus trees. It'd be dead in days.
res0nat0r 6y ago
Most of it is just the HN echo chamber. Folks commenting that GCP my be shut down because it doesn't make as much money as Azure, totally oblivious to the fact that Google has billions invested in physical buildings and hardware being hammered on and built out around the world as we speak, just shows that folks here are out of the loop on this type of thing.
- machello13 6y ago
  > Most of it is just the HN echo chamber. I don't think this is true. Plenty of "normal", non-HN people bring this up too (I mean, not my mom, but like regular somewhat tech-savvy people). You can point to GCP all you want, but people are just going to keep pointing to https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
  From what I can tell, there isn't a single person in this thread claiming GCP may be shut down. And if there is, it certainly isn't a meaningful number of people. What you're doing is claiming people hold an easily attackable position that they don't hold, and attacking that position. It's called strawmanning.
  - res0nat0r 6y ago
    Not in this thread, but it has happened a couple of times in the past any time Google products / GCP have been brought up, and that I've replied to saying that it is nonsense.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- zentiggr 6y ago
  Aside from an easily dismissed hardware-backed GCP case, Google _does_ have a long history of useful and interesting ideas that launch, gain some users, look really useful if some effort is put into it, and get dropped instead. Even if some solid use cases are building. I'm going to look at this idea, see what it might be able to do, and look at whether there's another alternative that would be likelier to survive.
jfoster 6y ago
Well there's two things to say about that: 1. Some of the things they launch they probably shouldn't be launching because they have next to no chance of ever being a meaningful business for Google. (eg. Google Helpouts) 2. Some of the things they launch are attempts to get into a particular area and Google's interest in that area lasts longer than their interest in whatever they initially launched. Chat is probably the best example of this; Google Talk, Hangouts, heck, I don't even know what it's called now! In such cases Google should be more disciplined about supporting whatever it is they've launched. Re-brand & iterate as much as they want, but never leave customers hanging. I think if Google followed these two rules they would be sunsetting a lot less stuff. They might still need to retire the odd product/service, but at least they wouldn't be doing it so much that customers doubt every single launch. Their current approach hasn't been working well for their customers, but it's actually going to begin affecting their customers less and affect Google more. Who in their right mind would put any medium/long term stock into Tables, for example? Customers no longer affected. Now Google can't launch a service that the market will take seriously.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

comeonseriously 6y ago

They don't care. They're revenue is from ads. If they get a bump in revenue from gleaning information off of Tables (tm) to display relevant ads to you for the year this will be active, then maybe it was worth it.

burtonator 6y ago

It seems like 80% of these projects are pet projects by VPs so they can launch a Google project for their career or Google can keep them from leaving for Facebook.

puranjay 6y ago

Google Docs and Sheets already feels like abandonedware. I haven't seen any substantial changes in years.

lazharichir 6y ago
Erm, the explore tab in Sheets is pretty awesome for small businesses and people unfamiliar with Excel-like formula. Not sure when that was released, though!
- tyingq 6y ago
  Looks like 2015: https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/the-academy/google-sheets-now-automatically-analyzes-your-data-for-you/ https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/the-academy/google-sheet...
markstos 6y ago
Table of Contents navigator was recently added, I think "Document Compare" is fairly new.
uponcoffee 6y ago
The otherside of that coin is feature creep. Docs/sheets so their job fine, so aside from minor updates//fixes they don't need to substantially change; given their user based substantial redesigns should be their own product and if they prove to be substantially better then they can migrate away from the old docs/sheets
delecti 6y ago
I can't imagine what additional features the overwhelming majority of people need out of a word processor or spreadsheet software.
- foobiekr 6y ago
  Docs still can't handle large documents with a long edit history. It slows to a crawl. This has been an issue since at least 2013. We are talking about document sizes that Word for Windows 95 could handle.

shallowthought 6y ago

I call it Promo-Driven Development. You have to launch things to get promoted at Google, but you're not going to get demoted for transferring to a better project afterward.

president 6y ago
Just like that one engineer on your team that says yes to everything the manager does while writing the worst spaghetti code because he knows once he gets promoted/leaves for greener pastures, someone else will take care of the mess and he will be long gone by then.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]