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It seems in recent times, Google product development is always backwards. They never fully commit to anything, with the mind that if they see an up-tick in ado

It seems in recent times, Google product development is always backwards. They never fully commit to anything, with the mind that if they see an up-tick in adoption, they'll invest in it. But maybe if they put more than a cursory effort into anything new, they might provide something valuable and generate another revenue stream. But perhaps they're just too comfortable with the loads of cash coming from ads?

asciident 6y ago
This is an ironic contrast as it appears next to the link on Hacker News about the 20-year anniversary of VideoLAN. A volunteer non-profit project versus a commercial subscription-based project from one of the richest companies.
- hiptobecubic 6y ago
  Google kills a lot of shit, but comparing VideoLAN to Stadia is bogus on many levels. VideoLAN is literally UI on top of ffmpeg that grew slowly over time. Stadia is an entirely new platform stuffed into a zillion data centers to keep latency low. Compare stadia to Virtual Boy or Jaguar or Betamax. If no one downloads VideoLAN for a year they won't burn a bunch of money, but also they had no chance at fundamentally changing the way people watch videos.
awill 6y ago
Bingo. Ads making so much money has destroyed Google, because they can make mistake after mistake and still be profitable. Most companies think this is good, but it's actually a curse. When decisions don't have consequences, people don't care. Google doesn't care if Stadia fails. What surprises me more is why people trusted Google enough to invest in Stadia in the first place. Had they let you import Steam games (like Nvidia does), fine, you're not risking anything. But actually paying Google for the license to a game that's ONLY available on Stadia? No thanks. This is exactly what HP looked like a couple of decades ago. Making billions from printers meant everything else suffered.
- mdgrech23 6y ago
  I bought one. I do feel like I made a mistake. Used it only a handful of times. The only way i can justified my purchase is I got the founders edition and paid maybe $100 for the chromecast ultra, the controller and 3 months of Stadia so considering i can still use the chromecast I chalk it up as maybe a $50 loss.
- spicyramen 6y ago
  This and Google internal promotion process focused on launches. Launch something, make a big splash of it and you will get more $$$. Recipe for disaster. In Enterprise world specifically in Cloud this still haunt them
  - lumost 6y ago
    In a large organization it's difficult to track if launches really were successful or not. "Striking while the iron is hot" is the expected behavior for leaders, and the folks who want to grow need to immediately look at the next big thing. I haven't seen a good model for incentivizing staying with a product or team in a large company. Most of the time the "ops" work or incremental growth work will never appear as significant as a new launch (particularly if 2 years on the product isn't performing to the launch teams projections)
    - spicyramen 6y ago
      That's very true, pushing for new projects regardless they are successful or not is a path for success. I think eventually this leadership need a successful track history to prove is worth investing in this person/leader projects
      - hiptobecubic 6y ago
        Requiring a successful track record pushes people even harder to try to build one by launching new projects.
mckeed 6y ago
Probably because the last product they put full commitment into was Google Plus.
- ruined 6y ago
  no they didn't. google plus was half-assed, underhanded, and self-destructive. profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off. they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks, which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect. they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same. they aggressively banned business accounts, with obvious results. google hasn’t done anything in earnest since gmail. youtube doesn’t count, that’s an acquisition.
  - zestyping 6y ago
    I was there. I'd say they did fully commit, and that included committing other teams by force. Everything was going to be integrated with Google Plus come hell or high water. Unfortunately, the evident intensity of their commitment did not correlate with the wisdom of their decisions. Perhaps it was inversely correlated, because boy were there a lot of terrible decisions in that product.
    - Judgmentality 6y ago
      Can you tell us any more about what happened?
    - exikyut 6y ago
      A few random very curious and potentially-rhetorical questions: - what was the situation around the shutdown? Was the whole thing knowingly on life support and just waiting for the right excuse, or...? - was the shutdown effectively coincidental, in the sense of "ok everyone's making a scene about $random_thing, kill it" (where $random_thing just happened to be what the internet interpreted as a data leak) - did the data get purged from the very last backup, or does it still get used to finetune improve AI models etc? - does G+ still exist in its original form anymore? Trying to visit https://plus.google.com/apps/activities https://plus.google.com/apps/activities still works, but only in the form of Google Currents, and visiting via an old Google Apps (yep :D) account that's somehow still eking along (for how long???) also works, but that's Currents too. It looks/feels just about identical to G+ though (https://imgur.com/a/rqvF03t https://imgur.com/a/rqvF03t). Is it being used for education or something?
selectodude 6y ago
Google basically has Dutch disease.
- GioM 6y ago
  Interesting. Could you comment a little further? I can see the analogy here to advertising making their other products appear less competitive internally, but it sounds like you may have further thoughts.
  - selectodude 6y ago
    It doesn't go too much further than that. The value of their employees is best spent on facilitating more ad clicks so without a decree from the top stating "we are pivoting" and having the political capital to follow through with that, they're stuck. Microsoft is so exceptionally lucky they found Satya Nadella. Saying "yes we make untold amounts of money on this but it cannot be our focus moving forward" is almost impossibly difficult. Heck, just look at Norway. They want us to look at them as some post-carbon futureland with their Teslas but everything there is tier-2 compared to oil. They're a petrostate in the same way that Google is an adtech company no less grimy than Facebook, no matter how "not evil" they are.
    - v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago
      Except Azure is the new thing that makes MS untold amounts of money via the same lock-in effect created by windows/office. It‘s adjacent business basically. Culturally it was much more difficult for Google to create a functioning cloud business, even though the tech is in it‘s nature. A better comparison would be Xbox for MS. Or AWS for Amazon. It‘s quite surprising that xbox wasn‘t cancelled or sold off, really. It was close. Someone has to advocate for these things. Even if you‘re a company making 50 billion a year. From the outside you have to either look enigmatically mysterious and visionary. Or you have to be cost-conscious and focused. Otherwise your stock is getting destroyed.
      - Mindwipe 6y ago
Osiris 6y ago
And on the other hand, Microsoft lost billions on Xbox (I can't find a citation, so I'm going from memory) and Xbox 360. They stuck with it for decades and have turned it into a great product.
- msh 6y ago
  But the original xbox launched with great exclusives like halo. There have been no hyped, got to play it game, that launched on stadia.
- catmanjan 6y ago
  I remember differently, it didn't do as well as PlayStation but original Xbox wasn't a failure...
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  Yes, but a) they were willing to keep investing billions and billions for years, and it appears Ruth Porat simply isn't going to let Google do that any more and b) they considered it a tactical must to do so. As an investment it probably wasn't a good one, truth be told. Google are stuck in a no-man's land. They keep going into sectors where you've got to invest a decade of money and hard work to get anywhere, but they have a CFO who basically demands any project makes money in two years or gets canned (for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not especially criticising this approach but it's clear most Googlers and their culture do not get it), and a generation of project managers who believe you can launch minimum viable products to consumers and fix it later. You can't make all three of those points work at the same time, and that's why literally anything they launch new at the moment is going to fail.
  - lumost 6y ago
    Ironically the "invest a decade of money" market is undertapped due to a myopic quarter on quarter focus of most businesses for ~50 years. Elon Musk's businesses could all be described as decade long investments with massive success, there are a vast number of pseudo monopolies that haven't done much of anything in 3-5 decades.
hiptobecubic 6y ago
Stadia would have been a GINORMOUS investment decision. It's not Allo. It is probably thousands of engineering years of work. Maybe they just couldn't get licensing deals they wanted and refused to let go of the idea until now? It seems like Stadia needs both heroic technical effort and really clever go to market and they just failed outright on the latter.

asciident 6y ago

This is an ironic contrast as it appears next to the link on Hacker News about the 20-year anniversary of VideoLAN. A volunteer non-profit project versus a commercial subscription-based project from one of the richest companies.

hiptobecubic 6y ago
Google kills a lot of shit, but comparing VideoLAN to Stadia is bogus on many levels. VideoLAN is literally UI on top of ffmpeg that grew slowly over time. Stadia is an entirely new platform stuffed into a zillion data centers to keep latency low. Compare stadia to Virtual Boy or Jaguar or Betamax. If no one downloads VideoLAN for a year they won't burn a bunch of money, but also they had no chance at fundamentally changing the way people watch videos.

awill 6y ago

Bingo. Ads making so much money has destroyed Google, because they can make mistake after mistake and still be profitable. Most companies think this is good, but it's actually a curse. When decisions don't have consequences, people don't care. Google doesn't care if Stadia fails. What surprises me more is why people trusted Google enough to invest in Stadia in the first place. Had they let you import Steam games (like Nvidia does), fine, you're not risking anything. But actually paying Google for the license to a game that's ONLY available on Stadia? No thanks. This is exactly what HP looked like a couple of decades ago. Making billions from printers meant everything else suffered.

mdgrech23 6y ago
I bought one. I do feel like I made a mistake. Used it only a handful of times. The only way i can justified my purchase is I got the founders edition and paid maybe $100 for the chromecast ultra, the controller and 3 months of Stadia so considering i can still use the chromecast I chalk it up as maybe a $50 loss.
spicyramen 6y ago
This and Google internal promotion process focused on launches. Launch something, make a big splash of it and you will get more $$$. Recipe for disaster. In Enterprise world specifically in Cloud this still haunt them
- lumost 6y ago
  In a large organization it's difficult to track if launches really were successful or not. "Striking while the iron is hot" is the expected behavior for leaders, and the folks who want to grow need to immediately look at the next big thing. I haven't seen a good model for incentivizing staying with a product or team in a large company. Most of the time the "ops" work or incremental growth work will never appear as significant as a new launch (particularly if 2 years on the product isn't performing to the launch teams projections)
  - spicyramen 6y ago
    That's very true, pushing for new projects regardless they are successful or not is a path for success. I think eventually this leadership need a successful track history to prove is worth investing in this person/leader projects
    - hiptobecubic 6y ago
      Requiring a successful track record pushes people even harder to try to build one by launching new projects.

mckeed 6y ago

Probably because the last product they put full commitment into was Google Plus.

ruined 6y ago
no they didn't. google plus was half-assed, underhanded, and self-destructive. profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off. they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks, which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect. they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same. they aggressively banned business accounts, with obvious results. google hasn’t done anything in earnest since gmail. youtube doesn’t count, that’s an acquisition.
- zestyping 6y ago
  I was there. I'd say they did fully commit, and that included committing other teams by force. Everything was going to be integrated with Google Plus come hell or high water. Unfortunately, the evident intensity of their commitment did not correlate with the wisdom of their decisions. Perhaps it was inversely correlated, because boy were there a lot of terrible decisions in that product.
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    Can you tell us any more about what happened?
  - exikyut 6y ago
    A few random very curious and potentially-rhetorical questions: - what was the situation around the shutdown? Was the whole thing knowingly on life support and just waiting for the right excuse, or...? - was the shutdown effectively coincidental, in the sense of "ok everyone's making a scene about $random_thing, kill it" (where $random_thing just happened to be what the internet interpreted as a data leak) - did the data get purged from the very last backup, or does it still get used to finetune improve AI models etc? - does G+ still exist in its original form anymore? Trying to visit https://plus.google.com/apps/activities https://plus.google.com/apps/activities still works, but only in the form of Google Currents, and visiting via an old Google Apps (yep :D) account that's somehow still eking along (for how long???) also works, but that's Currents too. It looks/feels just about identical to G+ though (https://imgur.com/a/rqvF03t https://imgur.com/a/rqvF03t). Is it being used for education or something?

selectodude 6y ago

Google basically has Dutch disease.

GioM 6y ago
Interesting. Could you comment a little further? I can see the analogy here to advertising making their other products appear less competitive internally, but it sounds like you may have further thoughts.
- selectodude 6y ago
  It doesn't go too much further than that. The value of their employees is best spent on facilitating more ad clicks so without a decree from the top stating "we are pivoting" and having the political capital to follow through with that, they're stuck. Microsoft is so exceptionally lucky they found Satya Nadella. Saying "yes we make untold amounts of money on this but it cannot be our focus moving forward" is almost impossibly difficult. Heck, just look at Norway. They want us to look at them as some post-carbon futureland with their Teslas but everything there is tier-2 compared to oil. They're a petrostate in the same way that Google is an adtech company no less grimy than Facebook, no matter how "not evil" they are.
  - v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago
    Except Azure is the new thing that makes MS untold amounts of money via the same lock-in effect created by windows/office. It‘s adjacent business basically. Culturally it was much more difficult for Google to create a functioning cloud business, even though the tech is in it‘s nature. A better comparison would be Xbox for MS. Or AWS for Amazon. It‘s quite surprising that xbox wasn‘t cancelled or sold off, really. It was close. Someone has to advocate for these things. Even if you‘re a company making 50 billion a year. From the outside you have to either look enigmatically mysterious and visionary. Or you have to be cost-conscious and focused. Otherwise your stock is getting destroyed.
    - Mindwipe 6y ago

Osiris 6y ago

And on the other hand, Microsoft lost billions on Xbox (I can't find a citation, so I'm going from memory) and Xbox 360. They stuck with it for decades and have turned it into a great product.

msh 6y ago
But the original xbox launched with great exclusives like halo. There have been no hyped, got to play it game, that launched on stadia.
catmanjan 6y ago
I remember differently, it didn't do as well as PlayStation but original Xbox wasn't a failure...
Mindwipe 6y ago
Yes, but a) they were willing to keep investing billions and billions for years, and it appears Ruth Porat simply isn't going to let Google do that any more and b) they considered it a tactical must to do so. As an investment it probably wasn't a good one, truth be told. Google are stuck in a no-man's land. They keep going into sectors where you've got to invest a decade of money and hard work to get anywhere, but they have a CFO who basically demands any project makes money in two years or gets canned (for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not especially criticising this approach but it's clear most Googlers and their culture do not get it), and a generation of project managers who believe you can launch minimum viable products to consumers and fix it later. You can't make all three of those points work at the same time, and that's why literally anything they launch new at the moment is going to fail.
- lumost 6y ago
  Ironically the "invest a decade of money" market is undertapped due to a myopic quarter on quarter focus of most businesses for ~50 years. Elon Musk's businesses could all be described as decade long investments with massive success, there are a vast number of pseudo monopolies that haven't done much of anything in 3-5 decades.

hiptobecubic 6y ago

Stadia would have been a GINORMOUS investment decision. It's not Allo. It is probably thousands of engineering years of work. Maybe they just couldn't get licensing deals they wanted and refused to let go of the idea until now? It seems like Stadia needs both heroic technical effort and really clever go to market and they just failed outright on the latter.