7 ms·

> Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop Why does Google have this bad habit of changing product names, they do it with Chat as wel

by sumedh 5y ago

> Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop Why does Google have this bad habit of changing product names, they do it with Chat as well.

deepsun 5y ago
Promotions.
- tyingq 5y ago
  I see you're being downvoted, but I do wonder to what degree that might be true. Working on a team that maintains something old isn't terribly glorious. Rename the product, and now you have a "product launch" on your resume.
  - deepsun 5y ago
    My comment wasn't downvoted, it's actually my most upvoted comment on HN.
- zomglings 5y ago
  I think my parent comment gets pretty close to the heart of the issue. I don't think it deserves its downvotes. It is a problem of employee incentives. There are multiple internal approaches to building things. Several of these approaches get funding and head count based on the amount of influence of the people who back them. Decisions about which product to present to the public are made on technical merit with little consideration to consistency in user experience. The resulting chaos leaks to the end user. Once a product has launched successfully, the best members (not just engineers) of the team that built it diffuses back into the main body of Google to work on other cool projects (they now have the required political momentum). Product enters stagnation phase. In 2 - 4 years a technologically slightly better alternative is picked. No one thinks about how to make this switch seamless for their users. End users suffer even harder. Used to work at Google.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    Plenty of people think about it, but the incentives are not set up to center these thoughts in the conversation about what to do. As with most publicly visible problems at any company, this is at its heart a failure of leadership. (Or a success of leadership, if it is indeed what the market and cost structure of the business rewards. I do not have sufficient insight into the financial side to know which. Just because a business makes a decision that is unpopular with its customers does not automatically mean that the decision is bad for the business.)
    - zomglings 5y ago
      I agree, it is hard to say whether a decision that fucks over customers is actually bad for Google. For example, the decision to start charging users for storage beyond 15GB. Even though I am not happy about it, I am paying and it looks unlikely that I will leave the Google ecosystem anytime soon. The interesting thing about Google, though, is that they have so many products that they can actually run experiments over different approaches to product development. Unfortunately, I doubt many people at Google would want to experiment with a product development approach by putting their career progression at risk.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
        > For example, the decision to start charging users for storage beyond 15GB. If a company decides to stop giving customers free goods, it is not "fucking over customers." Doing something nice for a person for a time does not create any kind of moral or social obligation to keep doing that thing. That said, I would love to see experimentation in maintenance and consistency. It turns out that type of thing is happening in Cloud at least with enterprise APIs. https://cloud.google.com/apis/docs/resources/enterprise-apis https://cloud.google.com/apis/docs/resources/enterprise-apis
        zomglings 5y ago
        Haha, I agree with you in general, but I still see that particular decision as fucking over customers. I was still at Google when the design doc for that particular decision leaked and was not convinced by the reasoning. These are the kind of decisions that don't affect the wealthy fuck over the poor. Unfortunately, it is really difficult to measure the opportunity cost of lost data and lost users.

by sumedh 5y ago

> Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop Why does Google have this bad habit of changing product names, they do it with Chat as well.

deepsun 5y ago

Promotions.

tyingq 5y ago
I see you're being downvoted, but I do wonder to what degree that might be true. Working on a team that maintains something old isn't terribly glorious. Rename the product, and now you have a "product launch" on your resume.
- deepsun 5y ago
  My comment wasn't downvoted, it's actually my most upvoted comment on HN.
zomglings 5y ago
I think my parent comment gets pretty close to the heart of the issue. I don't think it deserves its downvotes. It is a problem of employee incentives. There are multiple internal approaches to building things. Several of these approaches get funding and head count based on the amount of influence of the people who back them. Decisions about which product to present to the public are made on technical merit with little consideration to consistency in user experience. The resulting chaos leaks to the end user. Once a product has launched successfully, the best members (not just engineers) of the team that built it diffuses back into the main body of Google to work on other cool projects (they now have the required political momentum). Product enters stagnation phase. In 2 - 4 years a technologically slightly better alternative is picked. No one thinks about how to make this switch seamless for their users. End users suffer even harder. Used to work at Google.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  Plenty of people think about it, but the incentives are not set up to center these thoughts in the conversation about what to do. As with most publicly visible problems at any company, this is at its heart a failure of leadership. (Or a success of leadership, if it is indeed what the market and cost structure of the business rewards. I do not have sufficient insight into the financial side to know which. Just because a business makes a decision that is unpopular with its customers does not automatically mean that the decision is bad for the business.)
  - zomglings 5y ago
    I agree, it is hard to say whether a decision that fucks over customers is actually bad for Google. For example, the decision to start charging users for storage beyond 15GB. Even though I am not happy about it, I am paying and it looks unlikely that I will leave the Google ecosystem anytime soon. The interesting thing about Google, though, is that they have so many products that they can actually run experiments over different approaches to product development. Unfortunately, I doubt many people at Google would want to experiment with a product development approach by putting their career progression at risk.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
      > For example, the decision to start charging users for storage beyond 15GB. If a company decides to stop giving customers free goods, it is not "fucking over customers." Doing something nice for a person for a time does not create any kind of moral or social obligation to keep doing that thing. That said, I would love to see experimentation in maintenance and consistency. It turns out that type of thing is happening in Cloud at least with enterprise APIs. https://cloud.google.com/apis/docs/resources/enterprise-apis https://cloud.google.com/apis/docs/resources/enterprise-apis
      - zomglings 5y ago
        Haha, I agree with you in general, but I still see that particular decision as fucking over customers. I was still at Google when the design doc for that particular decision leaked and was not convinced by the reasoning. These are the kind of decisions that don't affect the wealthy fuck over the poor. Unfortunately, it is really difficult to measure the opportunity cost of lost data and lost users.