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> How does a company like Google end up doing this? I haven't worked at Google, but I have worked on other hardware that you might own if you're in the Hacker
by PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> How does a company like Google end up doing this?
I haven't worked at Google, but I have worked on other hardware that you might own if you're in the Hacker News demographic.
Usually what happens is someone wants to make some breaking changes somewhere, or otherwise stop supporting some old feature/API/use case. Or maybe nobody wants to deal with some old system that isn't a hot ticket on their promotion path.
Everyone is incentivized to work on new features, new products, and other forward-looking things, so it's not hard to get approval to just abandon something for which the cash flow has already occurred in favor of some future initiative.
Customer outrage is temporary. Some may swear off your products, but a surprising number will just shrug and buy something new, so the company wins.
Frustrating, but it's how things work at big companies who control large portions of the market.
- websap 5y agoI don't work at Google, but do at a large tech firm. Backward compatibility is sacrosanct, breaking older clients, means getting approvals many levels up in the chain, writing decision docs and showing data about what % of customers will be affected. We don't even build consumer products. "Customer outrage is temporary." -> Till it's not. If I could migrate my gmail (not even sure how many services I'd need to update) and use something else for Maps, I'd be off of all Google services.