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They pivoted to Hangouts to boost Google+ when they were chasing Facebook. This is also why they killed Google Reader. So much collateral damage with nothing to

by sylens 5y ago

They pivoted to Hangouts to boost Google+ when they were chasing Facebook. This is also why they killed Google Reader. So much collateral damage with nothing to show for it.

nextos 5y ago
> So much collateral damage with nothing to show for it. Yes. I think if Google wants to keep its dominant position, they need to rethink how they do management. What I said in the parent post about Google Talk could also apply to other product lines. They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards. As a consumer, I don't take most of their offerings seriously because they are so short-lived and confusing. Why shall I put my money on something that might be killed or phased out soon? From what I've heard from some insiders, other Alphabet branches seem to have equivalent management issues. It's sad because they have a significant amount of resources and they could be delivering tons of value to the society.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  I've mentioned this before, but I agree wholly. Google's product "strategy" gets shit on all the time (killedbygoogle.com), but the real issue is that the company is structured as if that's what they want to have happen. It's a loose association of warring VPs trying to establish big enough fiefdoms to be able to buy a third house. There's no real benefit to maintaining existing products for them. They just want to reorg things so they can amass more and more reports and justify their next enormous equity refresh. Killing old products to "make room" for new hotness is a pretty good way to do that.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    That sounds like the stories we used to hear of Microsoft. It only took them like, what, 2 decades to get things back together?
    - pmontra 5y ago
      It took them the failure to dominate the next two new markets and the fear of remaining rich but becoming marginal. With the internet they had a success with IE but saw companies developing their services with new non Visual*/.Net languages and running them on Linux and MySQL. With mobile they lost on all the line.
- KKKKkkkk1 5y ago
  > They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards. And the latest: TensorFlow -> TensorFlow 2 -> JAX{Haiku, Flax}. This one is especially egregious because it's foundational for Google's own technology.
michaelbuckbee 5y ago
I've always felt that the shuttering of Google Reader really was the end of an "age" of the web. We went from a really vibrant blog culture with a ton of platforms and different setups to the super closed gardens of the social platforms. F'ing painful.
- gumby 5y ago
  You skipped the first part, where Google Reader drove out most of the rest of the rss ecosystem, replacing it with something more centralized around Google. Then killed it. The worst of both worlds.
  - voakbasda 5y ago
    Microsoft may have popularized the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish modus operandi, but Google loves that play too. Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can trust them. It really only seems like a matter of time until they have stabbed every single one of their customers in the back.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - yayr 5y ago
      I wonder if that strategy is an unavoidable modus operandi, if so much of your management / work force motivation is derived from increasing the stock price. ...and at least consumers in that are not the customers, but the product...
    - Zak 5y ago
      I don't think any for-profit entity can be trusted with a monopoly over an important piece of infrastructure. It's healthy to have competing options. It remains to be seen whether a non-profit entity can be trusted with such a position.
rubatuga 5y ago
Google buzz and Google wave are also casualties.
- mnd999 5y ago
  Did anyone miss wave? I found it to be a solution looking for a problem, which it eventually found in gsuite which is successful.
  - Corrado 5y ago
    I actually think Wave was a bit before it's time and couldn't really find a place to settle. It kind of reminds me of the laser. At first, it was a fun playtoy but no one had any real uses for it. Over time, it became more and more important until now it's ingrained in almost everything we do. Google Wave had that same kind of feel but it was never give the time to develop and grow. I don't know if it would have been as important as something like the laser, but it sure did feel like something that would change the world. But that's just me.
    - mavhc 5y ago
      It was weird, Wave's main reason for existing is for businesses with massive email chains of 100 versions of a document, but they killed it about a month after enabling it for business accounts
hiptobecubic 5y ago
I wasn't there for the beginning of it, but I was for at least some of it, including the end. Google+ was a devastating event for Google. Like finding out that I can't even imagine how much time and money was wasted on making it, shoehorning it into other products, trying to foster adoption of it and ultimately deprecating it and trying to _extract_ it from those same products.
- rhizome 5y ago
  You spend as many years as they did talking about only hiring the best of the best, it was inevitable that they would disappear up their own asses and lose any ability they ever had to tell good from bad. In that light I can't imagine them being devastated by anything other than the humiliation of a golden child getting a B. Beyond that, when you're sucking untold billions out of the industry (and society) while they slept, the "waste" of money was just points on a chalkboard. I mean, look at it from a few steps back: even with what you/they would describe as an existential competition against Facebook, that's what they came up with. "The best of the best." As a corporation they aren't businesspeople, they're rich kids with more money than they can ever spend and they have been that for at least 20 years.
- joeblubaugh 5y ago
  The amount of time we all spent getting the G+ unified-account thing through every system! But that and Photos are the two good results of the work.
- hyperman1 5y ago
  It's kind of weird to claim they tried to foster adoption with the whole real name thing going on. Google was nuking accounts if they decided something was not your real name, and destroying e.g. a gmail account for someone who decided to join Google+ with the same name. Any cry for help was met with the usual Google Wall Of Silence. After a few very visible failures, people got the message quickly: Stay away from plus if you have any other valuable data in the Google world. I still wonder what they were smoking. If you want users on your platform, not banning them randomly seems a good start.
skinkestek 5y ago
I sometimes wonder if Mozilla conspires to drive Firefox into the ground. But I also sometimes wonder if someone inside Google and MS are actively sabotaging or if it is possible that all this self harm has been inflicted unintentionally.
- mulmen 5y ago
  Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    - eecc 5y ago
      It’s plausible deniability
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      Good point :-) But I think it is more common and makes more sense too to put it the other way around: Any sufficiently advanced stupidity/incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
    - mulmen 5y ago
      It is as correct to say that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. The difference between these claims and Hanlon's Razor is that the razor warns against assuming the malice in the absence of evidence.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Stupidity is malice when you are supposed to be competent. I.e. if a politician puts a first aid kit on some wounded person in the wrong way, it is not malice, but if a doctor can't do it properly, it is. How Mozilla treats us Firefox lusers is malice. E.g. silently enabling spying via updates, pushing disruptive UI changes, or what not.
Aeolun 5y ago
Like a hyperactive toddler that wants all the toys his friends have.

by sylens 5y ago

They pivoted to Hangouts to boost Google+ when they were chasing Facebook. This is also why they killed Google Reader. So much collateral damage with nothing to show for it.

nextos 5y ago

> So much collateral damage with nothing to show for it. Yes. I think if Google wants to keep its dominant position, they need to rethink how they do management. What I said in the parent post about Google Talk could also apply to other product lines. They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards. As a consumer, I don't take most of their offerings seriously because they are so short-lived and confusing. Why shall I put my money on something that might be killed or phased out soon? From what I've heard from some insiders, other Alphabet branches seem to have equivalent management issues. It's sad because they have a significant amount of resources and they could be delivering tons of value to the society.

hiptobecubic 5y ago
I've mentioned this before, but I agree wholly. Google's product "strategy" gets shit on all the time (killedbygoogle.com), but the real issue is that the company is structured as if that's what they want to have happen. It's a loose association of warring VPs trying to establish big enough fiefdoms to be able to buy a third house. There's no real benefit to maintaining existing products for them. They just want to reorg things so they can amass more and more reports and justify their next enormous equity refresh. Killing old products to "make room" for new hotness is a pretty good way to do that.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  That sounds like the stories we used to hear of Microsoft. It only took them like, what, 2 decades to get things back together?
  - pmontra 5y ago
    It took them the failure to dominate the next two new markets and the fear of remaining rich but becoming marginal. With the internet they had a success with IE but saw companies developing their services with new non Visual*/.Net languages and running them on Linux and MySQL. With mobile they lost on all the line.
KKKKkkkk1 5y ago
> They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards. And the latest: TensorFlow -> TensorFlow 2 -> JAX{Haiku, Flax}. This one is especially egregious because it's foundational for Google's own technology.

michaelbuckbee 5y ago

I've always felt that the shuttering of Google Reader really was the end of an "age" of the web. We went from a really vibrant blog culture with a ton of platforms and different setups to the super closed gardens of the social platforms. F'ing painful.

gumby 5y ago
You skipped the first part, where Google Reader drove out most of the rest of the rss ecosystem, replacing it with something more centralized around Google. Then killed it. The worst of both worlds.
- voakbasda 5y ago
  Microsoft may have popularized the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish modus operandi, but Google loves that play too. Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can trust them. It really only seems like a matter of time until they have stabbed every single one of their customers in the back.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - yayr 5y ago
    I wonder if that strategy is an unavoidable modus operandi, if so much of your management / work force motivation is derived from increasing the stock price. ...and at least consumers in that are not the customers, but the product...
  - Zak 5y ago
    I don't think any for-profit entity can be trusted with a monopoly over an important piece of infrastructure. It's healthy to have competing options. It remains to be seen whether a non-profit entity can be trusted with such a position.

rubatuga 5y ago

Google buzz and Google wave are also casualties.

mnd999 5y ago
Did anyone miss wave? I found it to be a solution looking for a problem, which it eventually found in gsuite which is successful.
- Corrado 5y ago
  I actually think Wave was a bit before it's time and couldn't really find a place to settle. It kind of reminds me of the laser. At first, it was a fun playtoy but no one had any real uses for it. Over time, it became more and more important until now it's ingrained in almost everything we do. Google Wave had that same kind of feel but it was never give the time to develop and grow. I don't know if it would have been as important as something like the laser, but it sure did feel like something that would change the world. But that's just me.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    It was weird, Wave's main reason for existing is for businesses with massive email chains of 100 versions of a document, but they killed it about a month after enabling it for business accounts

hiptobecubic 5y ago

I wasn't there for the beginning of it, but I was for at least some of it, including the end. Google+ was a devastating event for Google. Like finding out that I can't even imagine how much time and money was wasted on making it, shoehorning it into other products, trying to foster adoption of it and ultimately deprecating it and trying to _extract_ it from those same products.

rhizome 5y ago
You spend as many years as they did talking about only hiring the best of the best, it was inevitable that they would disappear up their own asses and lose any ability they ever had to tell good from bad. In that light I can't imagine them being devastated by anything other than the humiliation of a golden child getting a B. Beyond that, when you're sucking untold billions out of the industry (and society) while they slept, the "waste" of money was just points on a chalkboard. I mean, look at it from a few steps back: even with what you/they would describe as an existential competition against Facebook, that's what they came up with. "The best of the best." As a corporation they aren't businesspeople, they're rich kids with more money than they can ever spend and they have been that for at least 20 years.
joeblubaugh 5y ago
The amount of time we all spent getting the G+ unified-account thing through every system! But that and Photos are the two good results of the work.
hyperman1 5y ago
It's kind of weird to claim they tried to foster adoption with the whole real name thing going on. Google was nuking accounts if they decided something was not your real name, and destroying e.g. a gmail account for someone who decided to join Google+ with the same name. Any cry for help was met with the usual Google Wall Of Silence. After a few very visible failures, people got the message quickly: Stay away from plus if you have any other valuable data in the Google world. I still wonder what they were smoking. If you want users on your platform, not banning them randomly seems a good start.

skinkestek 5y ago

I sometimes wonder if Mozilla conspires to drive Firefox into the ground. But I also sometimes wonder if someone inside Google and MS are actively sabotaging or if it is possible that all this self harm has been inflicted unintentionally.

mulmen 5y ago
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- teddyh 5y ago
  Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity.
  - eecc 5y ago
    It’s plausible deniability
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Good point :-) But I think it is more common and makes more sense too to put it the other way around: Any sufficiently advanced stupidity/incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    It is as correct to say that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. The difference between these claims and Hanlon's Razor is that the razor warns against assuming the malice in the absence of evidence.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Stupidity is malice when you are supposed to be competent. I.e. if a politician puts a first aid kit on some wounded person in the wrong way, it is not malice, but if a doctor can't do it properly, it is. How Mozilla treats us Firefox lusers is malice. E.g. silently enabling spying via updates, pushing disruptive UI changes, or what not.

Aeolun 5y ago

Like a hyperactive toddler that wants all the toys his friends have.