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Why are people still so surprised when Google makes a thing and then two years later cuts apart the thing into oblivion? How many more times are they expecting

Why are people still so surprised when Google makes a thing and then two years later cuts apart the thing into oblivion? How many more times are they expecting their users to be Charlie Brown to their Lucy?

adamc 6y ago
I think this has pretty well cemented that perception.
- ortusdux 6y ago
  I thought the same about reader.
  - Laforet 6y ago
    I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there. Stadia, on the other hand, has been a product designed to be commercially self-standing. Yet somehow it was never that attractive from the beginning. It makes one wonder if it was simply a "me too" gesture to please shareholders and they simply left it at that. Now let us make a wager on when gmail and maps will be cancelled...
    - acdha 6y ago
      > I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there. None of those assertions match the public history: they rejected attempts to monetize Reader, it wasn't getting much (if any) maintenance time, and the decline in demand was in no small part due to Google's decision to kill the most popular product in that space hoping to boost Google+, providing no counterbalance to Facebook's attempt to lock up the syndication market. Gmail and Maps will not be cancelled because those sell a ton of advertising data. The Google products to worry about are the ones which don't funnel data into their ad system.
      - Laforet 6y ago
        What attempts/proposals have been made to monetise reader? Genuine question as I was not aware of any. The maintenance cost I mentioned refers to the cost of bandwidth and storage capacity required to cache and push content to the clients. No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product. The service they pushed to replace reader was not Google+, but Google Now which ended up in the same graveyard in a few years.
        detaro 6y ago
        > No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product. What criticial feature did Reader have that is not comparable in the competitors? Honest question, when Reader shutdown I imported my data in a competitor service that I use to this day.
        Laforet 6y ago
        Reader essentially had, on its backend, a complete archive of every single feed it had been indexing since 2005. A lot of personal sites and blogs have since disappeared entirely or lost some of their content through various misadventure, yet I was able to recover a lot of invaluable information with reader. This is, of course, something of questionable legality and hence my earlier comments about potential liabilities. Other feed aggregators may have better UX or social integration (IIRC reader have always had an open API available in case you preferred a different client software) but none was or is able to replicate what reader has done for me.
        detaro 6y ago
        True, letting you access posts from before you subscribed (if that's what you mean) was unique (as far I know) to Reader.
        acdha 6y ago
        Re: costs, don’t forget that Google was already saving all of that content for search - they still use feeds to get content updates. On the topic of monetization, this was covered in some of the articles at the time. This isn’t the best one but: https://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/ https://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/ “ Wetherell agreed. “The reader market never went past the experimental phase and none was iterating on the business model,” he said. “Monetization abilities were never tried.” “There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,” he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.” http://massless.org/?p=174 http://massless.org/?p=174 goes into more detail about the history and I think in retrospect the subsequent decade really supports his argument that Google leadership is unwilling to try to create new markets rather than enter already proven ones. Trying to barge in on Facebook with an unwanted, un-QAed Google+ only left Facebook stronger and ensured that all subsequent Google products had launch-day questions about cancellation because so many influential people used Reader.
rcxdude 6y ago
I saw far more people saying 'I don't think stadia will be around in 5 years' than I saw people buying into it. I don't think people are very suprised by this, google has basically destroyed people's faith in the staying power of their products outside of a small core.
readams 6y ago
Google isn't cancelling Stadia; they're just not making their own games.
- akmarinov 6y ago
  It’s the first step to cancelling it in an year or so.
- acdha 6y ago
  Yet. If they don't believe in their own product, how many other companies will, and how many of them will jump into a service which has a roadmap they don't control versus setting up their own service?
  - readams 6y ago
    Running a cloud infrastructure is something Google is good at. Making AAA games is not. It is entirely consistent with a deep belief in the product for them to reallocate resources toward partnerships rather than trying to spin up a AAA game studio internally.
    - acdha 6y ago
      That's not wrong but I think they've put themselves in a tricky position here: this requires companies to make a non-trivial commitment to their platform. There haven't been any new deals or increased partnerships announced to make this look less like they're just giving up on the idea, and anyone thinking about partnering with them has to be wondering about the odds of getting much return on their investment relative to the risk of Google changing direction again. Google is good at infrastructure but they're not uniquely so and all of their competitors are better at building platforms. They have competitors from both of the dominant console vendors, dominant cloud service, and nVidia. Whatever technological edge they believe they have is going to be a tough sell, especially since both AWS and Microsoft can match or exceed their cloud infrastructure and all three services are available to any publisher who wants to roll their own.
    - glangdale 6y ago
macspoofing 6y ago
>Why are people still so surprised Are they surprised? I did not see a lot pro-Stadia support. It was clear right from the start this was a DOA product.

adamc 6y ago

I think this has pretty well cemented that perception.

ortusdux 6y ago
I thought the same about reader.
- Laforet 6y ago
  I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there. Stadia, on the other hand, has been a product designed to be commercially self-standing. Yet somehow it was never that attractive from the beginning. It makes one wonder if it was simply a "me too" gesture to please shareholders and they simply left it at that. Now let us make a wager on when gmail and maps will be cancelled...
  - acdha 6y ago
    > I sort of get it about reader. It had ways been a high maintenance product with many liability issues and ultimately proven difficult to monetise. Not to mention feed aggregators as a whole has been in decline since so the demand is probably not even there. None of those assertions match the public history: they rejected attempts to monetize Reader, it wasn't getting much (if any) maintenance time, and the decline in demand was in no small part due to Google's decision to kill the most popular product in that space hoping to boost Google+, providing no counterbalance to Facebook's attempt to lock up the syndication market. Gmail and Maps will not be cancelled because those sell a ton of advertising data. The Google products to worry about are the ones which don't funnel data into their ad system.
    - Laforet 6y ago
      What attempts/proposals have been made to monetise reader? Genuine question as I was not aware of any. The maintenance cost I mentioned refers to the cost of bandwidth and storage capacity required to cache and push content to the clients. No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product. The service they pushed to replace reader was not Google+, but Google Now which ended up in the same graveyard in a few years.
      - detaro 6y ago
        > No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product. What criticial feature did Reader have that is not comparable in the competitors? Honest question, when Reader shutdown I imported my data in a competitor service that I use to this day.
        Laforet 6y ago
        Reader essentially had, on its backend, a complete archive of every single feed it had been indexing since 2005. A lot of personal sites and blogs have since disappeared entirely or lost some of their content through various misadventure, yet I was able to recover a lot of invaluable information with reader. This is, of course, something of questionable legality and hence my earlier comments about potential liabilities. Other feed aggregators may have better UX or social integration (IIRC reader have always had an open API available in case you preferred a different client software) but none was or is able to replicate what reader has done for me.
        detaro 6y ago
        True, letting you access posts from before you subscribed (if that's what you mean) was unique (as far I know) to Reader.
      - acdha 6y ago
        Re: costs, don’t forget that Google was already saving all of that content for search - they still use feeds to get content updates. On the topic of monetization, this was covered in some of the articles at the time. This isn’t the best one but: https://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/ https://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/ “ Wetherell agreed. “The reader market never went past the experimental phase and none was iterating on the business model,” he said. “Monetization abilities were never tried.” “There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,” he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.” http://massless.org/?p=174 http://massless.org/?p=174 goes into more detail about the history and I think in retrospect the subsequent decade really supports his argument that Google leadership is unwilling to try to create new markets rather than enter already proven ones. Trying to barge in on Facebook with an unwanted, un-QAed Google+ only left Facebook stronger and ensured that all subsequent Google products had launch-day questions about cancellation because so many influential people used Reader.

rcxdude 6y ago

I saw far more people saying 'I don't think stadia will be around in 5 years' than I saw people buying into it. I don't think people are very suprised by this, google has basically destroyed people's faith in the staying power of their products outside of a small core.

readams 6y ago

Google isn't cancelling Stadia; they're just not making their own games.

akmarinov 6y ago
It’s the first step to cancelling it in an year or so.
acdha 6y ago
Yet. If they don't believe in their own product, how many other companies will, and how many of them will jump into a service which has a roadmap they don't control versus setting up their own service?
- readams 6y ago
  Running a cloud infrastructure is something Google is good at. Making AAA games is not. It is entirely consistent with a deep belief in the product for them to reallocate resources toward partnerships rather than trying to spin up a AAA game studio internally.
  - acdha 6y ago
    That's not wrong but I think they've put themselves in a tricky position here: this requires companies to make a non-trivial commitment to their platform. There haven't been any new deals or increased partnerships announced to make this look less like they're just giving up on the idea, and anyone thinking about partnering with them has to be wondering about the odds of getting much return on their investment relative to the risk of Google changing direction again. Google is good at infrastructure but they're not uniquely so and all of their competitors are better at building platforms. They have competitors from both of the dominant console vendors, dominant cloud service, and nVidia. Whatever technological edge they believe they have is going to be a tough sell, especially since both AWS and Microsoft can match or exceed their cloud infrastructure and all three services are available to any publisher who wants to roll their own.
  - glangdale 6y ago

macspoofing 6y ago

>Why are people still so surprised Are they surprised? I did not see a lot pro-Stadia support. It was clear right from the start this was a DOA product.