11 ms·

This is why I don't sign on to anything new google does for a few years now. It's going to be buggy but promising initially, then be poorly supported, and then

This is why I don't sign on to anything new google does for a few years now. It's going to be buggy but promising initially, then be poorly supported, and then be cancelled leaving you high and dry. If I was a large shareholder I'd be yelling to ditch Sundar everyday. The guy is a total idiot just floating by on ads dollars. Google could be so much more if they reorganized into conventional dedicated teams and stopped trying to cover their shortcomings with political virtue signalling.

Qahlel 4y ago
Actually, this strategy works for google. Google enters these markets and then kills it for any possible future competitors. In the short run, it's a loss, in the long run, you nullify new possible competitors.
- manimino 4y ago
  A better strategy would be to win the markets and profit from them.
  - staticassertion 4y ago
    lol yes, the uh "traditional" approach is just... discover market, deliver product, profit. This "new" strategy of "deliver product, lose money, shut product down" seems like it may not work well long term.
- harha 4y ago
  That only plays out if you offer anything to customers once the competitors are gone. Also: there’s still PlayStation, Xbox and even Apple Arcade doing perfectly fine in this space
  - roody15 4y ago
    Is Apple Arcade doing fine? In my small world I don’t know a single person who uses it.
    - avianlyric 4y ago
      Still doing better than Stadia will be after shutting down, assuming this rumour pans out. At least with Apple you know the service is gonna hang around for awhile, even if it doesn’t set the world alight.
    - harha 4y ago
      Looks like overall Apple subscriptions have solid growth. [0] I use it after I got bored of Netflix and other programs, because it’s ad and in-app purchase free and loads quickly on all devices. The games are obviously not the best, but then again the PS4 games I have don’t really justify the long start up time and I don’t have enough spare hours for Civilization. [0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/28/apple-860-million-paid-subscribers/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/28/apple-860-million-paid-...
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      I have arcade through their Apple One subscription and uh I think sometimes my family tries to buy a game and it’s free so that’s nice? But i don’t know anyone who intentionally uses it as a library. I assume that it’s just a nice way to redirect money to devs they like in a rare scheme to appease their game dev partners.
- conradfr 4y ago
  Geforce Now seems to be doing alright.
  - hiptobecubic 4y ago
    GFN solved stadia's main problem by integrating with Steam.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    It also pre-dated Stadia by some number of years. (I agree with you, if that's not clear: it didn't even create/define the market or take in any way significantly away from the incumbent.)
- ctvo 4y ago
  > Actually, this strategy works for google. Google enters these markets and then kills it for any possible future competitors. In the short run, it's a loss, in the long run, you nullify new possible competitors. They're no longer in the market. Now others are also slow to enter the market, in this case video game streaming as a service, and it's good for Google? This new product market isn't a core competency for Google and only tangentially fits into their wider portfolio. This 5D chess is quite the take. How about this instead? Google isn't a great product company. The work of making a product good isn't the same as the work of solving the engineering challenges to launch a product. Google overwhelmingly enjoys and excels at the latter, not the constant iteration and polish and listening to stakeholders of the former. Edit: To expand on this a little. Stadia no doubt received a lot of buyin internally from engineers because of the technical challenges. Keeping latency low, potentially hardware level challenges to running / rendering the games at scale and optimizing for costs, etc. I bet many promotions were given for the various contributions. Now that it's launched, the not so fun work that won't get much recognition due to Google's culture, but is important: - Iterate on the user experience - Iterate on performance: latency, frame rates, streaming quality. Potentially add support for higher resolutions, etc.. - Fix bugs, keep it running - Work with video game publishers, large and small, on licensing agreements. Since Stadia only has a small market share, Google has to go to them. This isn't a position Google likes to be in. - Work with video game developers on the SDK or other technical challenges. Answer their questions. Get their buyin. Support them during development. This isn't a position Google likes to be in. The last two points are interesting. When was the last time, outside of an acquisition (YouTube, Android both acquired), Google actually built a successful platform? This is what Stadia needed to be.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jfim 4y ago
    I'd phrase it differently. Google got lucky in the sense that they set out to build a search engine, someone said "hey why don't we do text ads," it made money, and they've been riding that ever since. They're the kind of company that drilled a few holes, found oil once, and is now drilling holes everywhere without understanding where oil comes from.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  In this case, I think that's a good thing in the long run. This entire class of game streaming product is as anti-customer as it's possible to be. It's basically the wet dream of DRM control freaks in the industry. If the death of stadia kills the category, stadia's impact was a net positive.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Wut? Geforce NOW absolutely trampled Stadia. It was just no contest at all. And if Geforce Now goes under I retain all my games, because it’s all linked to Steam and Epic.
  - msabalau 4y ago
    That being said, the user experience of Stadia is so much cleaner, GEforce now has much jank in linking accounts, staring up your instance, checking if a game you might buy is even supported, and then deciding the storefront to get it from if it is. But I still prefer Geforce for exactly the reason you give--still having the games regardless of what happens with the streaming service.
staticassertion 4y ago
Yeah, I'm always very skeptical of new Google services. I use GSuite and Chromebooks, but I know those are heavily used internally at Google and I believe that they'll continue to invest in those. But every other service, nah. Between their inability to provide support while a service is up and their consistent lack of long term vision/ investment for the services they create, it's just not worth it. I can't imagine I'm the only one making significant financial decisions based on this sort of thought process.
- solardev 4y ago
  Exactly. Lol I'm just imagining a company trying to use their chat services. "OK guys sorry, I know we just did this three weeks ago, but they've launched a new chat service and are deprecating the old one. Yeah, again. What's new? Uh... there's a new logo this time. And you can install it as a progressive web app."
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    They overcompensate by plugging chat functionality in every app. Maps, GPay India and Drive all have chat features
    - olyjohn 4y ago
      Wait, there's chat in Google Maps? What?!
      - cuteboy19 4y ago
        You can chat with certain business on the map. Not sure if it's just an India thing. They also snuck chat into the Photos app btw
    - solardev 4y ago
      A few years ago, they added a compatibility layer for Google Talk inside Hangouts, which I think then became Meet. In other words... they built a chat app inside their chat app.
napolux 4y ago
> This is why I don't sign on to anything new google does for a few years now. It's going to be buggy but promising initially, then be poorly supported, and then be cancelled leaving you high and dry. I can't really understand how people can trust google domains.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Domains are transferrable. If a registrar goes belly-up you can always and easily transfer the domains out to a new registrar, and if the old registrar doesn't want to release the domain the TLD registry can and will intervene on your side.
  - sieabahlpark 4y ago
  - napolux 4y ago
    Mmmm. It's easy on paper, but I don't trust it anyway.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Not just google. See playsforsure, amazon drive etc
- nwatson 4y ago
  Yeah I just noticed Amazon Drive is going away. No more uploads after 2023 January, no more access for non-photo/video files some time toward end of 2023. Years ago I got tired of the mess that was Google Picasa and transferred all photos, videos, and most important docs to Amazon Drive. Now I need to find yet another service.
  - robotnikman 4y ago
    It seems when it comes to cloud storage, you best bet is going with a company who's main product is cloud storage, and not just an afterthought or value-add like it was for Amazon. Or build your own NAS is you have the time and experience.
    - prepend 4y ago
      I’ve been pretty happy with my NAS choice (knock on wood). I spent about $1000 on a synology and drives and that’s given me 10 years of 10TB so it’s actually pretty cost effective too. Cheaper than Dropbox or OneDrive. I only wish there was some community disk swap program that would be good for reliable off sites. I looked into storj but you have to share like 100mb or something to make enough to pay for 1mb.
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      Amazon had a short period where they offered unlimited storage… and a few people took advantage of it too much so they stopped that. The product never really took off as a value add (too many other services). Amazon is also known to kill products but only ones no one uses.
      - robotnikman 4y ago
        Oh yeah I forgot about that. I think they originally planned to have integration with Plex too, but for somewhat obvious reasons that got axed.
bushbaba 4y ago
Sundar is doing what the shareholders want. Grow ads revenue while distracting regulators from a google anti trust lawsuit.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Good tech CEOs also plan for the long term. Google needs a near-death experience to get some management discipline.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    I’m not sure there exists any business that is as high of revenue and margin as ads. So google cannot diversify without impacting its financials. You could argue bezos was a genius in this regard by religiously avoiding disclosing to wall street his true margins.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  Exactly, technically I don't think shareholders much care about where the revenue comes from. Killing off product that don't make a profit within a year launch might actually be what shareholders want. We tend to forget that modern shareholders don't care much about which companies their money is invested in, it's just a stock with some numbers in a spreadsheet making the difference between investing in Google vs. Exxon.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  I don't know, I'm not sure that's sustainable in the long term. They need to branch out, even if it's just to find new places to put ads-- like in streaming games. But they never fully commit. Strong hyped launch, not follow through. Google has more than enough resources that they should have been able to get major game publishers to sign on to allow owners of their games on l, say, Steam to freely game access on Stadia. Heck even a very minor player like GOG was able to do this in a limited way! Linked my steam account to GOG and was able to get free Gog copies of about a dozen games I already owned on steam that way. But it seems like Google put practically zero effort into growing Stadia into having a respectable library at all. It looks like they gave up almost immediately and the last few years have been the inevitable stagnation into the graveyard.
JJMcJ 4y ago
Maps, Voice, and Docs, seem to be here to stay. Not sure about anything else. Except Search, of course, I suppose they won't close that down any time soon.
- theamk 4y ago
  Voice doesn't seem too well. It had no new features in a long while, and some essential features, like connecting to third party voice number, still require logging into old website... I use it daily but I worry that it will be gone any time.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    I've been idly looking at migrating my stuff away from voice, but it's problematic because some 2FA stuff is on the underlying phone number because various stuff refused to accept Google Voice numbers due to it being a SIP number... and not everything will allow you to just disable 2FA while you're doing the switch, some stuff wants to always be tied to a functional phone number. Thinking the solution may be that next time I upgrade my phone, I get a new SIM and run both phones at the same time for a month, transfer the google voice number to the new phone, and then do all the 2fa transfers to google voice (now AT&T) number. (if anyone has any tips to get google voice numbers to be recognized as a cell and not a SIP I'd be delighted... that's the major functional complaint I've got with GV.)
- snoopy_telex 4y ago
  I don’t think voice is as sure as you say it is. They has a push recently to kick off low traffic users. I’m concerned about my voice number personally.
  - JJMcJ 4y ago
    Don't use it myself but friends do. Didn't know about the changes.

Qahlel 4y ago

Actually, this strategy works for google. Google enters these markets and then kills it for any possible future competitors. In the short run, it's a loss, in the long run, you nullify new possible competitors.

manimino 4y ago
A better strategy would be to win the markets and profit from them.
- staticassertion 4y ago
  lol yes, the uh "traditional" approach is just... discover market, deliver product, profit. This "new" strategy of "deliver product, lose money, shut product down" seems like it may not work well long term.
harha 4y ago
That only plays out if you offer anything to customers once the competitors are gone. Also: there’s still PlayStation, Xbox and even Apple Arcade doing perfectly fine in this space
- roody15 4y ago
  Is Apple Arcade doing fine? In my small world I don’t know a single person who uses it.
  - avianlyric 4y ago
    Still doing better than Stadia will be after shutting down, assuming this rumour pans out. At least with Apple you know the service is gonna hang around for awhile, even if it doesn’t set the world alight.
  - harha 4y ago
    Looks like overall Apple subscriptions have solid growth. [0] I use it after I got bored of Netflix and other programs, because it’s ad and in-app purchase free and loads quickly on all devices. The games are obviously not the best, but then again the PS4 games I have don’t really justify the long start up time and I don’t have enough spare hours for Civilization. [0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/28/apple-860-million-paid-subscribers/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/28/apple-860-million-paid-...
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    I have arcade through their Apple One subscription and uh I think sometimes my family tries to buy a game and it’s free so that’s nice? But i don’t know anyone who intentionally uses it as a library. I assume that it’s just a nice way to redirect money to devs they like in a rare scheme to appease their game dev partners.
conradfr 4y ago
Geforce Now seems to be doing alright.
- hiptobecubic 4y ago
  GFN solved stadia's main problem by integrating with Steam.
- OJFord 4y ago
  It also pre-dated Stadia by some number of years. (I agree with you, if that's not clear: it didn't even create/define the market or take in any way significantly away from the incumbent.)
ctvo 4y ago
> Actually, this strategy works for google. Google enters these markets and then kills it for any possible future competitors. In the short run, it's a loss, in the long run, you nullify new possible competitors. They're no longer in the market. Now others are also slow to enter the market, in this case video game streaming as a service, and it's good for Google? This new product market isn't a core competency for Google and only tangentially fits into their wider portfolio. This 5D chess is quite the take. How about this instead? Google isn't a great product company. The work of making a product good isn't the same as the work of solving the engineering challenges to launch a product. Google overwhelmingly enjoys and excels at the latter, not the constant iteration and polish and listening to stakeholders of the former. Edit: To expand on this a little. Stadia no doubt received a lot of buyin internally from engineers because of the technical challenges. Keeping latency low, potentially hardware level challenges to running / rendering the games at scale and optimizing for costs, etc. I bet many promotions were given for the various contributions. Now that it's launched, the not so fun work that won't get much recognition due to Google's culture, but is important: - Iterate on the user experience - Iterate on performance: latency, frame rates, streaming quality. Potentially add support for higher resolutions, etc.. - Fix bugs, keep it running - Work with video game publishers, large and small, on licensing agreements. Since Stadia only has a small market share, Google has to go to them. This isn't a position Google likes to be in. - Work with video game developers on the SDK or other technical challenges. Answer their questions. Get their buyin. Support them during development. This isn't a position Google likes to be in. The last two points are interesting. When was the last time, outside of an acquisition (YouTube, Android both acquired), Google actually built a successful platform? This is what Stadia needed to be.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jfim 4y ago
  I'd phrase it differently. Google got lucky in the sense that they set out to build a search engine, someone said "hey why don't we do text ads," it made money, and they've been riding that ever since. They're the kind of company that drilled a few holes, found oil once, and is now drilling holes everywhere without understanding where oil comes from.
Karunamon 4y ago
In this case, I think that's a good thing in the long run. This entire class of game streaming product is as anti-customer as it's possible to be. It's basically the wet dream of DRM control freaks in the industry. If the death of stadia kills the category, stadia's impact was a net positive.
Aeolun 4y ago
Wut? Geforce NOW absolutely trampled Stadia. It was just no contest at all. And if Geforce Now goes under I retain all my games, because it’s all linked to Steam and Epic.
- msabalau 4y ago
  That being said, the user experience of Stadia is so much cleaner, GEforce now has much jank in linking accounts, staring up your instance, checking if a game you might buy is even supported, and then deciding the storefront to get it from if it is. But I still prefer Geforce for exactly the reason you give--still having the games regardless of what happens with the streaming service.

staticassertion 4y ago

Yeah, I'm always very skeptical of new Google services. I use GSuite and Chromebooks, but I know those are heavily used internally at Google and I believe that they'll continue to invest in those. But every other service, nah. Between their inability to provide support while a service is up and their consistent lack of long term vision/ investment for the services they create, it's just not worth it. I can't imagine I'm the only one making significant financial decisions based on this sort of thought process.

solardev 4y ago
Exactly. Lol I'm just imagining a company trying to use their chat services. "OK guys sorry, I know we just did this three weeks ago, but they've launched a new chat service and are deprecating the old one. Yeah, again. What's new? Uh... there's a new logo this time. And you can install it as a progressive web app."
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  They overcompensate by plugging chat functionality in every app. Maps, GPay India and Drive all have chat features
  - olyjohn 4y ago
    Wait, there's chat in Google Maps? What?!
    - cuteboy19 4y ago
      You can chat with certain business on the map. Not sure if it's just an India thing. They also snuck chat into the Photos app btw
  - solardev 4y ago
    A few years ago, they added a compatibility layer for Google Talk inside Hangouts, which I think then became Meet. In other words... they built a chat app inside their chat app.

napolux 4y ago

> This is why I don't sign on to anything new google does for a few years now. It's going to be buggy but promising initially, then be poorly supported, and then be cancelled leaving you high and dry. I can't really understand how people can trust google domains.

mschuster91 4y ago
Domains are transferrable. If a registrar goes belly-up you can always and easily transfer the domains out to a new registrar, and if the old registrar doesn't want to release the domain the TLD registry can and will intervene on your side.
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
- napolux 4y ago
  Mmmm. It's easy on paper, but I don't trust it anyway.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Not just google. See playsforsure, amazon drive etc

nwatson 4y ago
Yeah I just noticed Amazon Drive is going away. No more uploads after 2023 January, no more access for non-photo/video files some time toward end of 2023. Years ago I got tired of the mess that was Google Picasa and transferred all photos, videos, and most important docs to Amazon Drive. Now I need to find yet another service.
- robotnikman 4y ago
  It seems when it comes to cloud storage, you best bet is going with a company who's main product is cloud storage, and not just an afterthought or value-add like it was for Amazon. Or build your own NAS is you have the time and experience.
  - prepend 4y ago
    I’ve been pretty happy with my NAS choice (knock on wood). I spent about $1000 on a synology and drives and that’s given me 10 years of 10TB so it’s actually pretty cost effective too. Cheaper than Dropbox or OneDrive. I only wish there was some community disk swap program that would be good for reliable off sites. I looked into storj but you have to share like 100mb or something to make enough to pay for 1mb.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    Amazon had a short period where they offered unlimited storage… and a few people took advantage of it too much so they stopped that. The product never really took off as a value add (too many other services). Amazon is also known to kill products but only ones no one uses.
    - robotnikman 4y ago
      Oh yeah I forgot about that. I think they originally planned to have integration with Plex too, but for somewhat obvious reasons that got axed.

bushbaba 4y ago

Sundar is doing what the shareholders want. Grow ads revenue while distracting regulators from a google anti trust lawsuit.

KerrAvon 4y ago
Good tech CEOs also plan for the long term. Google needs a near-death experience to get some management discipline.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  I’m not sure there exists any business that is as high of revenue and margin as ads. So google cannot diversify without impacting its financials. You could argue bezos was a genius in this regard by religiously avoiding disclosing to wall street his true margins.
mrweasel 4y ago
Exactly, technically I don't think shareholders much care about where the revenue comes from. Killing off product that don't make a profit within a year launch might actually be what shareholders want. We tend to forget that modern shareholders don't care much about which companies their money is invested in, it's just a stock with some numbers in a spreadsheet making the difference between investing in Google vs. Exxon.
ineedasername 4y ago
I don't know, I'm not sure that's sustainable in the long term. They need to branch out, even if it's just to find new places to put ads-- like in streaming games. But they never fully commit. Strong hyped launch, not follow through. Google has more than enough resources that they should have been able to get major game publishers to sign on to allow owners of their games on l, say, Steam to freely game access on Stadia. Heck even a very minor player like GOG was able to do this in a limited way! Linked my steam account to GOG and was able to get free Gog copies of about a dozen games I already owned on steam that way. But it seems like Google put practically zero effort into growing Stadia into having a respectable library at all. It looks like they gave up almost immediately and the last few years have been the inevitable stagnation into the graveyard.

JJMcJ 4y ago

Maps, Voice, and Docs, seem to be here to stay. Not sure about anything else. Except Search, of course, I suppose they won't close that down any time soon.

theamk 4y ago
Voice doesn't seem too well. It had no new features in a long while, and some essential features, like connecting to third party voice number, still require logging into old website... I use it daily but I worry that it will be gone any time.
- paulmd 4y ago
  I've been idly looking at migrating my stuff away from voice, but it's problematic because some 2FA stuff is on the underlying phone number because various stuff refused to accept Google Voice numbers due to it being a SIP number... and not everything will allow you to just disable 2FA while you're doing the switch, some stuff wants to always be tied to a functional phone number. Thinking the solution may be that next time I upgrade my phone, I get a new SIM and run both phones at the same time for a month, transfer the google voice number to the new phone, and then do all the 2fa transfers to google voice (now AT&T) number. (if anyone has any tips to get google voice numbers to be recognized as a cell and not a SIP I'd be delighted... that's the major functional complaint I've got with GV.)
snoopy_telex 4y ago
I don’t think voice is as sure as you say it is. They has a push recently to kick off low traffic users. I’m concerned about my voice number personally.
- JJMcJ 4y ago
  Don't use it myself but friends do. Didn't know about the changes.