9 ms·

You may not be the target audience though, the target audience are probably people that aren't yet "bough into" the google ecosystem. So they are unaware of thi

You may not be the target audience though, the target audience are probably people that aren't yet "bough into" the google ecosystem. So they are unaware of this axing policy. Anyone logging into chromium, using gmail and google calendar and an android device is already "theirs". What they want is to increase the share of people that are in the MS ecosystem (and presumably also OSX ecosystem, but that's mostly a status signaling thing, so the strategy there is probably different).

addicted 6y ago
You will be surprised how many people are indeed aware of Google’s axing policy, if not even consciously. The reality is that so many of them have been burnt by Google. Picasa was an extremely popular photo management platform used by many. Google Play Music was extremely popular. Google Plus was not exactly popular but touched nearly every Google user, was highly promoted, and then disappeared. And then you come to the massive list of chat and calling apps that Google has arbitrarily spun up, promoted, and then killed. But even if we go with the idea that regular people are unaware of Google’s tendency, even subconsciously, there’s also the fact that the way most products become popular is through a smaller subset of influencers. And tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  My grandmother mourns Picasa and PicasaWeb to this day.
  - ballenf 6y ago
    My father was so proud of having uploaded all his music to Google Play. It was the single largest source of loyalty for him to Android over iPhone. With the iPhone's missing back button being second. And since Hangout chat used to be integrated with gmail, many a gmail user saw deprecation notices for ages now. And terribly unhelpful deprecation notices at that. They basically said something like "I'm going to stop working soon. You should do something about that."
    - deaddodo 6y ago
      To be fair, the music he uploaded does transfer to YouTube Music; but that doesn’t help that it’s a far inferior streaming platform.
      - harry8 6y ago
        To be fair to the customer who lacks anything like the power of one of the world's largest corporations: he is the victim of a bait-and-switch.
- deaddodo 6y ago
  > Google Play Music This one irritates me most. GPM was mature and required...what? Minimal maintenance at this point? But no, how about we completely rebuild a music service on top of YouTube, miss a bunch of minor simple features that every streaming service offers (you know, like save current playlist/radio as Playlist) and FORCE every user over to this far inferior service. At least with transitions like MOG->Beats->Apple Music, it made since as the entire corporate entity changed. But Google just...literally can’t invest in anything that takes a small ounce of manpower to manage. At this point, OP is correct. The Google “curse” is well known and few people trust their whim-products, no matter their investment/marketing budget.
  - hobs 6y ago
    This was the one digital service I was happy to pay google for and caused me a 100% ban on their consumer services going forward. Google music hadnt changed in a few years, so of course we need to get a promotion by destroying it and replacing it with something that might grow faster but definitely wont.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their endless rebrands, but its not like they rewrote Lync from scratch when they renamed it to Skype for Business. Google seems to have adopted a similar marketing-driven rebrand culture ("Google Play is a confusing brand and right now consumer confidence is in the YouTube brand, we should move our media streaming holdings to the YouTube brand") but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken. I think that inverts history. The YT Music implementation and brand existed long before the decision to replace GPM with it. The branding decision followed most of the reimplementation, it didn't provide an excuse for it. Google has a strong tendency to have multiple parallel offerings in a field for a while before consolidating them (and, also, a history of botching the consolidation.)
- ssully 6y ago
  I was surprised when my Dad, someone completely detached from the tech world, brought up Google's tendency to cancel stuff. He was a Google Music subscriber and still uses Chromecast Audio. Last year he tried buying another Audio device to discover it was discontinued, and then over the summer got notifications related to Music being cancelled. He was super disappointed! In January he started looking into getting some IoT cameras for his house (a doorbell and something for the backyard, nothing crazy). He was looking at Nest, but the moment I mentioned Nest is owned by Google, he stopped looking at their products. Cancelling products and services that people use and rely on leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. I used to excuse it, but in the last 5-6 years Google has done away with about 4-5 services that I used daily. It's honestly too much and I won't put the time into using their products anymore.
- abrookewood 6y ago
  I honestly think that this attitude to shutting things down, plus their piss-poor customer service, is killing any chance that Google Cloud has of succeeding. I'm just not willing to invest any time into the Google ecosystem where there's a high chance that the service will be discontinued or I'll get locked out of my account.
- mjcohen 6y ago
  We still use Picasa on Windows 7 & 10 and Mac OS X. It works easily on 10.13 (High Sierra) and with some annoyance on 10.14 (Mojave) (requires clicking 5 times on complaining popup when starting, then runs fine). A good incentive not to upgrade.
- harry8 6y ago
  > tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies. This is huge, bigger than most acknowledge. Most people don't understand the tech and why should they? "none of my nerd friends use it" vs "all of my nerd friends are on it" is a massive, massive signal about whether something is good or incredibly dangerous, dishonest and a foul trap. There's plenty of the latter about so we're talking about degrees of badness for most. The thinking resembles: "I'm not super happy with any of this tech and definitely not something that my niece the computer-hacker and cousin the IT guy aren't using. I'll definitely draw a line there." vs "Have you heard about signal? It's whatsapp but no facebook tracking." From a family member, friend or acquaintance who you know knows more than you about this stuff.

addicted 6y ago

You will be surprised how many people are indeed aware of Google’s axing policy, if not even consciously. The reality is that so many of them have been burnt by Google. Picasa was an extremely popular photo management platform used by many. Google Play Music was extremely popular. Google Plus was not exactly popular but touched nearly every Google user, was highly promoted, and then disappeared. And then you come to the massive list of chat and calling apps that Google has arbitrarily spun up, promoted, and then killed. But even if we go with the idea that regular people are unaware of Google’s tendency, even subconsciously, there’s also the fact that the way most products become popular is through a smaller subset of influencers. And tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies.

roywiggins 6y ago
My grandmother mourns Picasa and PicasaWeb to this day.
- ballenf 6y ago
  My father was so proud of having uploaded all his music to Google Play. It was the single largest source of loyalty for him to Android over iPhone. With the iPhone's missing back button being second. And since Hangout chat used to be integrated with gmail, many a gmail user saw deprecation notices for ages now. And terribly unhelpful deprecation notices at that. They basically said something like "I'm going to stop working soon. You should do something about that."
  - deaddodo 6y ago
    To be fair, the music he uploaded does transfer to YouTube Music; but that doesn’t help that it’s a far inferior streaming platform.
    - harry8 6y ago
      To be fair to the customer who lacks anything like the power of one of the world's largest corporations: he is the victim of a bait-and-switch.
deaddodo 6y ago
> Google Play Music This one irritates me most. GPM was mature and required...what? Minimal maintenance at this point? But no, how about we completely rebuild a music service on top of YouTube, miss a bunch of minor simple features that every streaming service offers (you know, like save current playlist/radio as Playlist) and FORCE every user over to this far inferior service. At least with transitions like MOG->Beats->Apple Music, it made since as the entire corporate entity changed. But Google just...literally can’t invest in anything that takes a small ounce of manpower to manage. At this point, OP is correct. The Google “curse” is well known and few people trust their whim-products, no matter their investment/marketing budget.
- hobs 6y ago
  This was the one digital service I was happy to pay google for and caused me a 100% ban on their consumer services going forward. Google music hadnt changed in a few years, so of course we need to get a promotion by destroying it and replacing it with something that might grow faster but definitely wont.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their endless rebrands, but its not like they rewrote Lync from scratch when they renamed it to Skype for Business. Google seems to have adopted a similar marketing-driven rebrand culture ("Google Play is a confusing brand and right now consumer confidence is in the YouTube brand, we should move our media streaming holdings to the YouTube brand") but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken. I think that inverts history. The YT Music implementation and brand existed long before the decision to replace GPM with it. The branding decision followed most of the reimplementation, it didn't provide an excuse for it. Google has a strong tendency to have multiple parallel offerings in a field for a while before consolidating them (and, also, a history of botching the consolidation.)
ssully 6y ago
I was surprised when my Dad, someone completely detached from the tech world, brought up Google's tendency to cancel stuff. He was a Google Music subscriber and still uses Chromecast Audio. Last year he tried buying another Audio device to discover it was discontinued, and then over the summer got notifications related to Music being cancelled. He was super disappointed! In January he started looking into getting some IoT cameras for his house (a doorbell and something for the backyard, nothing crazy). He was looking at Nest, but the moment I mentioned Nest is owned by Google, he stopped looking at their products. Cancelling products and services that people use and rely on leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. I used to excuse it, but in the last 5-6 years Google has done away with about 4-5 services that I used daily. It's honestly too much and I won't put the time into using their products anymore.
abrookewood 6y ago
I honestly think that this attitude to shutting things down, plus their piss-poor customer service, is killing any chance that Google Cloud has of succeeding. I'm just not willing to invest any time into the Google ecosystem where there's a high chance that the service will be discontinued or I'll get locked out of my account.
mjcohen 6y ago
We still use Picasa on Windows 7 & 10 and Mac OS X. It works easily on 10.13 (High Sierra) and with some annoyance on 10.14 (Mojave) (requires clicking 5 times on complaining popup when starting, then runs fine). A good incentive not to upgrade.
harry8 6y ago
> tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies. This is huge, bigger than most acknowledge. Most people don't understand the tech and why should they? "none of my nerd friends use it" vs "all of my nerd friends are on it" is a massive, massive signal about whether something is good or incredibly dangerous, dishonest and a foul trap. There's plenty of the latter about so we're talking about degrees of badness for most. The thinking resembles: "I'm not super happy with any of this tech and definitely not something that my niece the computer-hacker and cousin the IT guy aren't using. I'll definitely draw a line there." vs "Have you heard about signal? It's whatsapp but no facebook tracking." From a family member, friend or acquaintance who you know knows more than you about this stuff.