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Which means that both our company, and any other company, that thought it had a sustainable model for running such a project, and at this point would probably b

Which means that both our company, and any other company, that thought it had a sustainable model for running such a project, and at this point would probably be "pretty awesome", never started, and we are all suddenly thrust back into 2005, unable to search for code. I see two viable reactions to this: 1. There's now a vacuum where Code Search was, and, evidently, some demand. Why not startup now? 2. Not even Google could find a viable model for Code Search, even with their resources and scale, and (ugh) synergy. Google did the research for me. (And if you think Google dropped it because they couldn't find a viable free model, and you think there's a viable paid model, see #1.) As for startups, the phenomenon you describe seems to apply mostly to things that depend on network effect and probably advertising. If you have an idea that brings value to someone and can demonstrate a sustainable business model based on charging for that value, I would imagine that to be a much more attractive option for people who want something they can depend on than a VC funded free product startup.

saurik 15y ago
1) I am not whining as an entrepreneur that I did not start the company in 2005: I did other things that I am quite proud of, and which frankly have probably been more interesting and successful than having worked on that code searching mechanism. Instead, I am whining as a user of Google Code search that we have just lost six years of progress on searching source code. Having a company that starts today in this space, while they will have an easier time (due to advances) starting and getting up quickly, is drastically different than a company that started six years ago, and might have a large index, advanced algorithms, etc. at this point. 2) I don't think Google even tries to make things sustainable. During all of these "Google shuts down X" that have been happened recently, some posts here by ex-Google people indicated that Google internally didn't even have reporting on per-project costs... hopefully now that they see how much certain things cost they will cause less market-level problems going forward. (edit: I forgot to add this point) I mean, seriously: Google, a company that makes all of its money on advertisements, and for whom ads permeate everything, doesn't have ads on Google Code Search, and AFAIR never did. If you do absolutely nothing else for such a service, as Google, you'd put some ads on it; even Gmail has ads, and that's a place where people find them creepy. I therefore simply cannot believe that they actually are looking at this project as something that is worth their time to make sustainable: they are a giant company with a thousand things to do; this was cool one day, maybe useful to some engineers internally, and they kind of just did it, and dumped the result on the ecosystem, where it created a little vortex-of-free-and-good that eventually has collapsed into a singularity, and will be gone in the next couple months, leaving us with the "vacuum" that you mention. Meanwhile, it might simply be because even if it was successful, the userbase would be tiny, and the revenue generated would be "not enough to justify the lack of focus" (Google is getting behind the whole "more wood, fewer arrows" thing lately); whereas, to a small company, it might have enough margins to sustain a few people, which is "enough to bother with" at that level. ~3) The point here isn't that people who care about sustainability should be using Pinboard.in instead of del.icio.us (although they should, and those that didn't got burned at the last minute): it is that society is worse off because there are people in the ecosystem who are operating unsustainably.
- joebadmo 15y ago
  I see your point. It's a good one, and I sort of agree with you, but I also think it's more complicated than that. For example, it's hard to say whether the six years of code search we got from google was better or worse than what a sustainable startup could have provided. And if was better, how do you measure that against its sudden disappearance until there's some viable replacement (if there will ever be one). It's also hard to say whether it was ever possible to run it sustainably. I think for every code search, there's an equally unsustainable (at first) Google product that provides a lot of value for free to users. Yes, sometimes it means that they kill opportunities for others who could possible make sustainable businesses, but it also means that they can run something unsustainably for some period of time to see whether it's worth it to even make sustainable. It's hard to say whether overall for society there have been more cons than pros. Anecdotally, my experience is that Google has provided me a lot of value for free.
  - saurik 15y ago
    I am not certain if you saw the edit I added to my previous comment (I added it reasonably immediately, but you also responded within 10 minutes, so maybe you missed it), but I believe it addresses some of these points; I will restate, however, more directly targeting this post, just in case. Google doesn't seem to try to make things sustainably, and in this case didn't even try their bread-and-butter business model (ads), possibly because to them the result would have been "chump change", whereas to a smaller company it might have been "enough to man a few bright people" (which I'd argue is enough to have something great occur). I'll add, though, that these services Google (or the VCs whose money is being used in an unsustained burn) is providing "for free" are coming from somewhere: from other projects, if nothing else. In the end, everything has a cost, "there is no free lunch", yadda yadda. Regardless, point taken that as a user who only cares about that one specific feature (which I admit my arguments skewed towards), it might be the situation where a large company burning money into a pit for six years may actually cause more money to be thrown at a small problem over the lifetime of that problem than a sustainable market, and therefore we might be glad in some twisted way about that. ;P I still feel, however, that from a market-level, projects like this are bad for everyone, in the same extrinsic way that we look at people using seemingly cheap materials like styrofoam and partially-hydrogenated oils to build empires that eventually have seriously bad costs; put simply, I look at Google and VC-backed startups in the same way people look at companies polluting the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. (and yes: this is now pretty abstract, but I feel this conversation started getting to a position where the abstract-ness was fun.)
sebastianavina 15y ago
I think google code was very expensive to run because of the regular expression search feature, which was awesome, but cpu intensive... I'm sure they are killing the project because of feautres like that.
- gnosis 15y ago
  If that was the problem, they could have simply eliminated that feature and kept a simple substring search.

saurik 15y ago

1) I am not whining as an entrepreneur that I did not start the company in 2005: I did other things that I am quite proud of, and which frankly have probably been more interesting and successful than having worked on that code searching mechanism. Instead, I am whining as a user of Google Code search that we have just lost six years of progress on searching source code. Having a company that starts today in this space, while they will have an easier time (due to advances) starting and getting up quickly, is drastically different than a company that started six years ago, and might have a large index, advanced algorithms, etc. at this point. 2) I don't think Google even tries to make things sustainable. During all of these "Google shuts down X" that have been happened recently, some posts here by ex-Google people indicated that Google internally didn't even have reporting on per-project costs... hopefully now that they see how much certain things cost they will cause less market-level problems going forward. (edit: I forgot to add this point) I mean, seriously: Google, a company that makes all of its money on advertisements, and for whom ads permeate everything, doesn't have ads on Google Code Search, and AFAIR never did. If you do absolutely nothing else for such a service, as Google, you'd put some ads on it; even Gmail has ads, and that's a place where people find them creepy. I therefore simply cannot believe that they actually are looking at this project as something that is worth their time to make sustainable: they are a giant company with a thousand things to do; this was cool one day, maybe useful to some engineers internally, and they kind of just did it, and dumped the result on the ecosystem, where it created a little vortex-of-free-and-good that eventually has collapsed into a singularity, and will be gone in the next couple months, leaving us with the "vacuum" that you mention. Meanwhile, it might simply be because even if it was successful, the userbase would be tiny, and the revenue generated would be "not enough to justify the lack of focus" (Google is getting behind the whole "more wood, fewer arrows" thing lately); whereas, to a small company, it might have enough margins to sustain a few people, which is "enough to bother with" at that level. ~3) The point here isn't that people who care about sustainability should be using Pinboard.in instead of del.icio.us (although they should, and those that didn't got burned at the last minute): it is that society is worse off because there are people in the ecosystem who are operating unsustainably.

joebadmo 15y ago
I see your point. It's a good one, and I sort of agree with you, but I also think it's more complicated than that. For example, it's hard to say whether the six years of code search we got from google was better or worse than what a sustainable startup could have provided. And if was better, how do you measure that against its sudden disappearance until there's some viable replacement (if there will ever be one). It's also hard to say whether it was ever possible to run it sustainably. I think for every code search, there's an equally unsustainable (at first) Google product that provides a lot of value for free to users. Yes, sometimes it means that they kill opportunities for others who could possible make sustainable businesses, but it also means that they can run something unsustainably for some period of time to see whether it's worth it to even make sustainable. It's hard to say whether overall for society there have been more cons than pros. Anecdotally, my experience is that Google has provided me a lot of value for free.
- saurik 15y ago
  I am not certain if you saw the edit I added to my previous comment (I added it reasonably immediately, but you also responded within 10 minutes, so maybe you missed it), but I believe it addresses some of these points; I will restate, however, more directly targeting this post, just in case. Google doesn't seem to try to make things sustainably, and in this case didn't even try their bread-and-butter business model (ads), possibly because to them the result would have been "chump change", whereas to a smaller company it might have been "enough to man a few bright people" (which I'd argue is enough to have something great occur). I'll add, though, that these services Google (or the VCs whose money is being used in an unsustained burn) is providing "for free" are coming from somewhere: from other projects, if nothing else. In the end, everything has a cost, "there is no free lunch", yadda yadda. Regardless, point taken that as a user who only cares about that one specific feature (which I admit my arguments skewed towards), it might be the situation where a large company burning money into a pit for six years may actually cause more money to be thrown at a small problem over the lifetime of that problem than a sustainable market, and therefore we might be glad in some twisted way about that. ;P I still feel, however, that from a market-level, projects like this are bad for everyone, in the same extrinsic way that we look at people using seemingly cheap materials like styrofoam and partially-hydrogenated oils to build empires that eventually have seriously bad costs; put simply, I look at Google and VC-backed startups in the same way people look at companies polluting the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. (and yes: this is now pretty abstract, but I feel this conversation started getting to a position where the abstract-ness was fun.)

sebastianavina 15y ago

I think google code was very expensive to run because of the regular expression search feature, which was awesome, but cpu intensive... I'm sure they are killing the project because of feautres like that.

gnosis 15y ago
If that was the problem, they could have simply eliminated that feature and kept a simple substring search.