4 ms·

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, u

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.

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.