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It's a bit of a conundrum: every company is going to shut down products. What's the best way to launch new, risky things? Startups can simply go all in on the p

It's a bit of a conundrum: every company is going to shut down products. What's the best way to launch new, risky things? Startups can simply go all in on the product, and if it fails, the company dissolves, though people rightly are hesitant to go with a fly by night startup for exactly that reason. I'm not even sure that Google has shut down more products than an equivalently sized company. But it's certainly shut those products down in such a way that it's generated far more backlash and ill will than anyone else. Just brainstorming, but perhaps a large company, when launching a new product, could establish some kind of dedicated trust to provide credible assurances that e.g. the product would be supported for at least 10 years.

csydas 4y ago
> What's the best way to launch new, risky things? To show great confidence in it and address the elephants in the room as directly and clearly as possible. I think the main issue here is that the perception of Google being fickle and uncommitted means it's harder for third parties to want to commit resources to. Strong signaling from Google on long term commitments has to be made, but I think that Stadia is in a bit of a pickle because of its nature. With a console, I assume there are some general timelines developers get on how long the console is going to be around, so it's a lot easier to develop a strategy for working with it because you know off the bat you likely have at least N years, your projects will take Y years, thus you understand how many projects you can put onto it before the console obsoletes. With Stadia though, since it was just PC games and Android games being streamed, there are two ways you can try to understand it: - It never obsoletes as Google just upgrades the hardware and OS to keep new fresh games coming in - It obsoletes as soon as it's too costly for Google to refresh the hardware and they decide to cut their losses My guess is a lot of people thought it would be the latter and just didn't want to invest time into it. I'm not sure how the process for getting a game on Stadia was, but based on a quick look at some articles, seems that Google was struggling with this aspect even as late as 2022 [0] with trying to help make the process more convenient and faster. That's 3 years into the platform already and they were still teaching developers how to get their games onto Stadia efficiently, and I have to imagine Google was already looking at the numbers for the datacenter costs and going "welp". So how could Google have really changed it? My take is have this convenience and strategy for the porting from Day 1. I did not use Stadia or really follow it (just not interested in Cloud gaming in general), but looking at this article and the history of articles on porting games to Stadia, seems that it wasn't an attractive process from the beginning, for an already iffy platform for developers, with the looming fear that Stadia would not make the numbers to keep Google's interest. Combine that with Players already unhappy with not actually owning a lot of their games and distrusting Stadia, I guess it seems like Google just couldn't quite sweeten the pot enough to convince them to pay full physical game price for a game they didn't really own and ran the risk of being removed due to obsolescence (a perception on players part perhaps, but this is again a communication issue for Google) [0] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/03/15/google-stadia-low-change-porting/?sh=7bb6b1804816 https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/03/15/google-stad...
coldpie 4y ago
Microsoft, Nvidia, and Sony have all launched game streaming products without this kind of coverage. It's a Google problem.
- potatolicious 4y ago
  Importantly all of their products are still alive, supported, and even if they're doing superbly do not appear to be on the verge of shutdown. There are a few problems to Google's way of doing things, having witnessed it from the inside. In no particular order: 1) Google tends to be over-optimistic and under-skeptical when it comes to new products. This is largely driven by organizational dynamics: Google's corporate structure encourages fiefdoms that come up with the Next Big Thing(tm) - everyone involved is encouraged to be wildly over-optimistic about their products, and there is not a countering skepticism from upper management to impose the right amount of discipline re: these wild-eyed claims of TAM, growth, etc. The net effect is that Google launches products that aren't sufficiently baked, with vastly overestimated initial growth. This creates disappointment as the products bounce off the market and do not get anywhere near the (completely fictional) projections. 2) Google's go-to-market strategy tends to be under-baked as well. This is related to point #1 - heavily over-optimistic projections causes Google to accept woefully substandard GTM plans. Stadia launched with an incredibly poor lineup and burned a lot of the initial goodwill and press which stalled any kind of momentum they could've gotten. 3) Google organizationally isn't set up to reward individuals that turn around troubled products. Promotions heavily favor new product, not fixing existing broken product, especially once the product has lost executive favor. This causes team death spirals - failing products experience intense team attrition that further hampers any kind of turnaround plan. 4) Google has comparatively high executive turnover vs. similar companies. This results in rapidly shifting high-level strategy. Products and projects fall in/out of favor so quickly it causes whiplash. Other companies (see: Nvidia, Sony, MS, Apple) seem to be able to identify product areas of strategic importance to the company, executing against it, and having the executive support to continue resourcing these projects even if they initially fail/disappoint (see: Apple Maps, PSVR). Google constitutionally does not have this ability - they talk a lot about multi-year investments in strategic areas but in reality their commitments are fickle.
- zerocrates 4y ago
the_snooze 4y ago
>What's the best way to launch new, risky things? Slow-roll invite-only launch to establish a core user base, work out the bugs, show staying power, and build from there. Exactly what Google did in 2004 with Gmail.
- pb7 4y ago
  The same strategy that failed with Google+. It's not as foolproof as you're making it out to be.
  - bink 4y ago
    That's not really apples to apples though. Gmail worked with external SMTP services to send and receive mail. Google+ required that anyone you wanted to connect to also have been offered and accepted an invite (or received one of your limited invites).
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    It seems plausible that social networks have more of a network effect than things like a game streaming platform. Obviously there's still some network effect and a certain marketing aspect to it, but I don't think they're directly comparable.
    - pb7 4y ago
      You have to convince game developers to port their games. If the reward is a few thousand users, it's going to be a hard sell. Also the R&D and infrastructure required to even start up the project is too high. Building a Gmail (especially back then) is small potatoes in comparison.
- Thaxll 4y ago
  Well for a thing like Stadia it's not doable, you have very complex hardware and r&d to do first.
- theptip 4y ago
  That works great for a service where costs scale with users so you can run lean in beta. Unfortunately I don’t think Stadia fits that description well; you need to build hardware, network PoPs, license games, etc. Maybe there is a private-beta approach that really iterates, initially uses off-the-shelf hardware, only launches in one state, has limited games, etc. but it’s hard to make a splash like that. I think if Stadia had just been better (so everyone using it was raving about it) the Google reputation might not have mattered. It just ended up not being a game-changer economically, people still want to buy consoles etc. The model of thin-client gaming might win long-term but it’s just not a clear winner yet.
nobodyandproud 4y ago
Shutting down most product lines doesn’t mean said product is rendered unusable. It does mean any further support is non-existent. With PaaS and SaaS, this implicit contract between buyer and seller no longer holds.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> every company is going to shut down products There's typically a fight, though.
jedberg 4y ago
> I'm not even sure that Google has shut down more products than an equivalently sized company. AWS has shut down I believe only one service in its entire existence (SDB). And only when they had a viable alternative (DynamoDB) and helped their biggest users make the move. I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down without an alternative. They've certainly cancelled hardware programs, but that doesn't break your existing hardware. And they give plenty of warning for iOs phase outs. They pissed some people off by dropping support for old apps, but only after most of the big ones had been converted. And Microsoft is the king of long term support. How long did they keep supporting DOS in Windows? Or 32 bit programs. Or Windows 2000!
- mosburger 4y ago
  > I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down without an alternative. I can think of an esoteric one that no one misses: Ping (their music-based social media network)
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    There were a decent number of features in Apple's iTools / MobileMe package which were discontinued with no replacement. One big one that comes to mind was iWeb (static web hosting).
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      Also their "Print a photo book" from Photos (at the time it was call iPhoto I think?). You could design a photo album and they would send you a really nice bound copy. They discontinued it but had 3rd-party plugins that filled the gap for a while before even those died (I think).
      - mikebonnell 4y ago
        Ironically enough, Google Photos still has this capability.
- 4y ago
lewisl9029 4y ago
It does sound like their distribution power is a double-edged sword when it comes to launching new products. On one hand, the distribution power makes it extremely easy for new products to get lots and lots of users really quickly. On the other hand, it can give a false sense of security when it comes to product-market fit. The only real solution I can think of is deliberately launching new products without the Google branding and without relying on the built-in distribution channels, working towards product market fit the hard way, and only after that should they consider taking advantage of Google's distribution power to accelerate growth.
josephcsible 4y ago
They should have split Stadia into two conceptual halves: one with the technology to split the processing from the input and output, and one to do the hosting of the processing. Then when they decided to kill Stadia, they could have let other people run the latter, so that the former would still be useful to people who already owned it.

csydas 4y ago

> What's the best way to launch new, risky things? To show great confidence in it and address the elephants in the room as directly and clearly as possible. I think the main issue here is that the perception of Google being fickle and uncommitted means it's harder for third parties to want to commit resources to. Strong signaling from Google on long term commitments has to be made, but I think that Stadia is in a bit of a pickle because of its nature. With a console, I assume there are some general timelines developers get on how long the console is going to be around, so it's a lot easier to develop a strategy for working with it because you know off the bat you likely have at least N years, your projects will take Y years, thus you understand how many projects you can put onto it before the console obsoletes. With Stadia though, since it was just PC games and Android games being streamed, there are two ways you can try to understand it: - It never obsoletes as Google just upgrades the hardware and OS to keep new fresh games coming in - It obsoletes as soon as it's too costly for Google to refresh the hardware and they decide to cut their losses My guess is a lot of people thought it would be the latter and just didn't want to invest time into it. I'm not sure how the process for getting a game on Stadia was, but based on a quick look at some articles, seems that Google was struggling with this aspect even as late as 2022 [0] with trying to help make the process more convenient and faster. That's 3 years into the platform already and they were still teaching developers how to get their games onto Stadia efficiently, and I have to imagine Google was already looking at the numbers for the datacenter costs and going "welp". So how could Google have really changed it? My take is have this convenience and strategy for the porting from Day 1. I did not use Stadia or really follow it (just not interested in Cloud gaming in general), but looking at this article and the history of articles on porting games to Stadia, seems that it wasn't an attractive process from the beginning, for an already iffy platform for developers, with the looming fear that Stadia would not make the numbers to keep Google's interest. Combine that with Players already unhappy with not actually owning a lot of their games and distrusting Stadia, I guess it seems like Google just couldn't quite sweeten the pot enough to convince them to pay full physical game price for a game they didn't really own and ran the risk of being removed due to obsolescence (a perception on players part perhaps, but this is again a communication issue for Google) [0] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/03/15/google-stadia-low-change-porting/?sh=7bb6b1804816 https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/03/15/google-stad...

coldpie 4y ago

Microsoft, Nvidia, and Sony have all launched game streaming products without this kind of coverage. It's a Google problem.

potatolicious 4y ago
Importantly all of their products are still alive, supported, and even if they're doing superbly do not appear to be on the verge of shutdown. There are a few problems to Google's way of doing things, having witnessed it from the inside. In no particular order: 1) Google tends to be over-optimistic and under-skeptical when it comes to new products. This is largely driven by organizational dynamics: Google's corporate structure encourages fiefdoms that come up with the Next Big Thing(tm) - everyone involved is encouraged to be wildly over-optimistic about their products, and there is not a countering skepticism from upper management to impose the right amount of discipline re: these wild-eyed claims of TAM, growth, etc. The net effect is that Google launches products that aren't sufficiently baked, with vastly overestimated initial growth. This creates disappointment as the products bounce off the market and do not get anywhere near the (completely fictional) projections. 2) Google's go-to-market strategy tends to be under-baked as well. This is related to point #1 - heavily over-optimistic projections causes Google to accept woefully substandard GTM plans. Stadia launched with an incredibly poor lineup and burned a lot of the initial goodwill and press which stalled any kind of momentum they could've gotten. 3) Google organizationally isn't set up to reward individuals that turn around troubled products. Promotions heavily favor new product, not fixing existing broken product, especially once the product has lost executive favor. This causes team death spirals - failing products experience intense team attrition that further hampers any kind of turnaround plan. 4) Google has comparatively high executive turnover vs. similar companies. This results in rapidly shifting high-level strategy. Products and projects fall in/out of favor so quickly it causes whiplash. Other companies (see: Nvidia, Sony, MS, Apple) seem to be able to identify product areas of strategic importance to the company, executing against it, and having the executive support to continue resourcing these projects even if they initially fail/disappoint (see: Apple Maps, PSVR). Google constitutionally does not have this ability - they talk a lot about multi-year investments in strategic areas but in reality their commitments are fickle.
zerocrates 4y ago

the_snooze 4y ago

>What's the best way to launch new, risky things? Slow-roll invite-only launch to establish a core user base, work out the bugs, show staying power, and build from there. Exactly what Google did in 2004 with Gmail.

pb7 4y ago
The same strategy that failed with Google+. It's not as foolproof as you're making it out to be.
- bink 4y ago
  That's not really apples to apples though. Gmail worked with external SMTP services to send and receive mail. Google+ required that anyone you wanted to connect to also have been offered and accepted an invite (or received one of your limited invites).
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  It seems plausible that social networks have more of a network effect than things like a game streaming platform. Obviously there's still some network effect and a certain marketing aspect to it, but I don't think they're directly comparable.
  - pb7 4y ago
    You have to convince game developers to port their games. If the reward is a few thousand users, it's going to be a hard sell. Also the R&D and infrastructure required to even start up the project is too high. Building a Gmail (especially back then) is small potatoes in comparison.
Thaxll 4y ago
Well for a thing like Stadia it's not doable, you have very complex hardware and r&d to do first.
theptip 4y ago
That works great for a service where costs scale with users so you can run lean in beta. Unfortunately I don’t think Stadia fits that description well; you need to build hardware, network PoPs, license games, etc. Maybe there is a private-beta approach that really iterates, initially uses off-the-shelf hardware, only launches in one state, has limited games, etc. but it’s hard to make a splash like that. I think if Stadia had just been better (so everyone using it was raving about it) the Google reputation might not have mattered. It just ended up not being a game-changer economically, people still want to buy consoles etc. The model of thin-client gaming might win long-term but it’s just not a clear winner yet.

nobodyandproud 4y ago

Shutting down most product lines doesn’t mean said product is rendered unusable. It does mean any further support is non-existent. With PaaS and SaaS, this implicit contract between buyer and seller no longer holds.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> every company is going to shut down products There's typically a fight, though.

jedberg 4y ago

> I'm not even sure that Google has shut down more products than an equivalently sized company. AWS has shut down I believe only one service in its entire existence (SDB). And only when they had a viable alternative (DynamoDB) and helped their biggest users make the move. I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down without an alternative. They've certainly cancelled hardware programs, but that doesn't break your existing hardware. And they give plenty of warning for iOs phase outs. They pissed some people off by dropping support for old apps, but only after most of the big ones had been converted. And Microsoft is the king of long term support. How long did they keep supporting DOS in Windows? Or 32 bit programs. Or Windows 2000!

mosburger 4y ago
> I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down without an alternative. I can think of an esoteric one that no one misses: Ping (their music-based social media network)
- duskwuff 4y ago
  There were a decent number of features in Apple's iTools / MobileMe package which were discontinued with no replacement. One big one that comes to mind was iWeb (static web hosting).
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    Also their "Print a photo book" from Photos (at the time it was call iPhoto I think?). You could design a photo album and they would send you a really nice bound copy. They discontinued it but had 3rd-party plugins that filled the gap for a while before even those died (I think).
    - mikebonnell 4y ago
      Ironically enough, Google Photos still has this capability.
4y ago

lewisl9029 4y ago

It does sound like their distribution power is a double-edged sword when it comes to launching new products. On one hand, the distribution power makes it extremely easy for new products to get lots and lots of users really quickly. On the other hand, it can give a false sense of security when it comes to product-market fit. The only real solution I can think of is deliberately launching new products without the Google branding and without relying on the built-in distribution channels, working towards product market fit the hard way, and only after that should they consider taking advantage of Google's distribution power to accelerate growth.

josephcsible 4y ago

They should have split Stadia into two conceptual halves: one with the technology to split the processing from the input and output, and one to do the hosting of the processing. Then when they decided to kill Stadia, they could have let other people run the latter, so that the former would still be useful to people who already owned it.