13 ms·

Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them l

Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN. It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes. Anyone wanna bet on if/when Bard gets axed?

usrusr 4y ago
What would you consider a lesson lernt from that perception? Never ever start anything new unless you want to bet the company on running it forever?
- detourdog 4y ago
  GOOG went wrong when they stopped using XMPP, CALDAV and forked Webkit. Those actions broke cross platform development and re-ignited the browser wars. I see those moves as totally motivated by privacy invasion of the users. Never trust a free product with advertising.
chongli 4y ago
I've never worked at Google so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Everything I've heard (mostly on HN) about working there is that there are simply too many perverse incentives to abandon products. People get promoted for creating exciting new products and then leave those products behind at their new position. Up-and-comers are also incentivized to do the same thing. There seems to be no appetite whatsoever for hiring "steady hand on the tiller" type people. The whole company DNA is built around hiring elite graduates fresh out of school. It's the classic "too many chefs in the kitchen" problem.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Put in concrete terms, do you want to be one of the two engineers exiled to maintaining Reader because you pissed someone off to keep the geeks off Google’s back?
  - zztop44 4y ago
    For $400k a year I’d be okay with it yeah
    - jiggawatts 4y ago
      I'd do it for $300K! Anyone from Google want to check my post history and reach out to someone able and willing to do boring maintenance?
      - fancl20 4y ago
        Part of the problem is when you are in that position it’s also easy to move to other interesting projects internally. Then the real choice is between doing boring maintenance or useful new things at same pay.
        falcolas 4y ago
        Not everyone wants to chase the new shiny. There are many folks out there who enjoy the challenge of working in a legacy database. Blue sky folks see a rats nest of wires, maintenance engineers see cable porn in potentia.
        layer8 4y ago
        Maintenance doesn’t need to be boring, and I also don’t see how you wouldn’t add interesting new features and improvements to existing products. The basic issue, it seems, is that the higher-ups simply don’t care about the products themselves, other than for them to serve as a profit center.
        fancl20 4y ago
        Those projects have real difficulties to retain enough developers even to keep lights on. And even higher-ups want, they can’t force allocate developers (in Google’s current power structure) other than providing some incentives including promotion. The end result is a doom loop that if the team can’t retain enough staffing, developers will be overwhelmed by the boring maintenance work, which leads to more team transfers. They do use contractors to mitigate the issue but IMO it doesn’t work in every case.
- aleksiy123 4y ago
  This comes up literally every google thread. At this point it feels like a meme which originated on HN at some point. People keep repeating because it sounds plausible. The promo system has changed in the last year. So to some extent this info is outdated. And while obviously culture and incentives play a role I think the statement that this is the major reason for Google killing products is largely false. New grads aren't making any big decisions about products. And Google has many steady seniors because of the high tenure rate. In fact the one of the major complaints is that it is too steady , too bureaucratic and too slow.
  - chongli 4y ago
    So to some extent this info is outdated The OP we're all discussing is about six products Google cancelled in 2023! If Google has decided to change course on this issue then their efforts have yet to bear fruit. The ball is completely in their court. We're all sitting here waiting to see when Google will decide to place some emphasis on trust and long-term stewardship. Of course, you can't build a reputation for those things overnight, so it will take a while. But there is no sign whatsoever that they have actually changed course.
    - aleksiy123 4y ago
      My point is that the promo process being the root cause of this comes up often but doesn't really have any evidence to back it up except a long chain of repetitions.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vitus 4y ago
> Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN. Yes, but we're not the people making the product decisions. Stadia's shutdown was inevitable in part because we had already established this distrust, and also because leadership handled every aspect of it incredibly poorly. It was technically impressive, but the economics relied on the addressable market actually being willing to go all-in on the service. Sure, you can blame part of it on the promo culture encouraging people to move to new and shiny projects, and part of it on the fact that we release a lot more experimental stuff than you see at more established companies, but there's also plenty of cases where there was exactly one person who understood the codebase and was keeping the product running, and said person is no longer at the company for one reason or another. In my opinion, Bard should never have been released in its current state, but, that's leadership for you.
- kennyadam 4y ago
  Bard should have been released as an upgrade to Google Assistant imo. Imagine how much better a voice assistant would be if you could actually hold a decent back and forth conversation with it without having to know the exact phrasing needed to accomplish something. Google Assistant still feels so stunted and lifeless when I know Google can produce more realistic generated speech audio, interpret requests in plain English and respond in a helpful manner.
  - yafbum 4y ago
    I don't think it would be an upgrade at this point yet. Bard / LLM lacks precision in ways that are pretty important when carrying out the user's wishes.
  - Workaccount2 4y ago
    IIRC google has purposely kept assistant stunted and lifeless. Remember how originally it was the inhuman "Okay Google" key phrase? They did explicitly to keep people from humanizing it. Also its the only assistant with no name, its just called "assistant" It wasn't until Alexa and Siri gained traction that they let "Hey google" slip in.
onion2k 4y ago
It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes. I think the 'problem' is that reputation damage doesn't really impact Google's revenue. They get the overwhelming majority of their money from publishing adverts, with a significant amount on their own properties (search and YouTube). It really doesn't matter if a bunch of gamers decide Stadia screwed them over, or if some devs decide to avoid GCP because they killed Reader. Google still makes a staggering amount of money no matter what. The only way Google killing products will ever impact the company is either if people have an alternative to Google Search (very unlikely) or if people stop wanting to work for Google because they see it as a dead end working on things that only last a few years (also unlikely because $$$ talks). Google will continue to launch, run, and then kill products forever. I suspect that if you're at Google and you're not working on ads or something that displays ads then you're being paid to build something frivolous that won't go anywhere mainly so you don't go and work at a different company that could impact one of Google's cash cows. I'm a bit envious if I'm honest. That sounds fun.
- LeBit 4y ago
  Google Search is in great perils because of ChatGPT.
  - snapdeus 4y ago
    Agreed, it's all up to open AI to bring them down,
  - onion2k 4y ago
    It could be. I don't think Google are likely to just roll over and let OpenAI/MSFT take that market though. Obviously Google will try to compete. Maybe they'll fail, maybe they won't. If nothing else, as a user of these tools, it's going to be exciting to see some innovation in search UIs for the first time in decades.
    - narrator 4y ago
      They were saying on the all-in podcast that Google is under lots of political pressure from all sides and that makes it difficult for them to launch controversial tech like LLMs. Bard feels very hobbled and, for example, refuses to answer any medical questions.
Paul-Craft 4y ago
> Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? Yeah, about like this: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ I don't really care if Google is unable, unwilling, or uninterested in supporting anything that isn't G-Suite, search, or ads. Their track record is more than enough for me to dismiss using Google Cloud Platform, or even saving anything of any importance to Google Drive. I'm occasionally involved some of those types of vendor decisions, and I imagine others in similar positions feel the same way, so I can't imagine this is all theoretical fake losses they've suffered from this MO. I don't know how you'd even begin to measure the amount of revenue opportunities lost in this way, but I will say this: I'm really glad I'm not a part of Google's marketing department.
- creshal 4y ago
  Even G-Suite isn't really getting that much support, it's on life support at best. There's so many missing features and bugs and just painfully unergonomic workflows that have been ignored for 10+ years at this point; the long overdue and minimal UI facelift recently didn't really solve any pain points.
  - eknkc 4y ago
    It is not compatible with a lot of stuff. Can't subscribe to youtube premium family. Can't use android automotive. Can't use this that etc. I switched to my old basic google account for google services and probably move my domains away from gsuite at this point.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I still have the weird issue where I have a google domain with email and stuff, and the same email address is somehow also a separate google account of the personal variety. No idea how it somehow kinda works and when it’ll finally explode in my face.
      - dannyw 4y ago
steveBK123 4y ago
I will continue my existing strategy of ignoring everything GOOG releases so I can also ignore when they inevitably shut it down too.
qumpis 4y ago
Why would Bard get axed? Or do you mean Bard in its current form? Last I heard they mentioned about rolling out higher-scale models, since apparently current models were 'efficient' ones, to see if the demand can be met, according to them.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
> Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? Yeah, outside of tech enthusiasts, the majority of people don’t care. Street view was an app for marketing. In 2010 it looked really cool and helped their image. None of these projects/products looked financially feasible. And a code jam? Jesus Christ, my public library hosts code meetups. This blog post is boring and weird. It comes off as a weak attempt to find more reasons to hate Google.
trasz3 4y ago
>It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes. I guess this means a "reputation" doesn't influence their profits. Some companies aren't in impression-making business, or even pretending-to-be-trying-to-make-their-customers-happy business.
- GVIrish 4y ago
  Reputation may not affect Google's ad based revenue, but it absolutely affects their ability to profit in lines of business outside of ads. Google might have made more inroads with enterprises with G suite and GCP if they didn't have that reputation. The gaming industry is a 200 billion/year market that Google could've captured a decent size of if potential customers trusted that they wouldn't quickly give up. All of that represents billions of dollars in lost opportunities.
  - trasz3 4y ago
    [dead]
apexalpha 4y ago
>Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN. Surely the people on Hackrnews understand that no one outside of tech enthusiasts even knows about this, right? I have to imagine so... they're smart people and surely sometimes interact with regular people in real life?! But on a more serious note: none of these projects have ever had any traction. That's why they're killed! Try asking anyone who's not in tech but does play videogames what Stadia is. You'll soon find out why it's axed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
reactor 4y ago
Do you think anyone beside who are vocal (HN/tech crowd esp) care about this 'killed by google' and refrain from using their main source of revenue such as Search, Gmail, Android, Youtube, Map, Photos? Zilch. GCP/Gsuite's money pouring clients are enterprise customers (not HN crowd), who for the large majority won't bother much about that either. So they clearly know their act doesn't actually make a dent in their revenue stream, but in fact that spring cleaning is a win for them.
- Kye 4y ago
  It happens one "maybe we should use [alternative] until Google gets its act together" at a meeting at a time. Microsoft was still a behemoth when no one still took it seriously outside people who were on a first name basis with a licensing auditor, and it's struggling to gain trust and respect back. Same with IBM, though they seem unconcerned with image. Collapses are never quick or complete at this scale. It starts with a loss of cultural cachet among the people who influence spending. It looks like hip startups with rows of desks with Apple machines where Windows was the default for a decade or two before.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  of course people do. anytime you have to buy into a google product that could be killed off anytime. It was the primary reason stadia never took off - you had to buy stadia only game licenses that no one was confident would still exist later.
graboidhunter 4y ago
These services aren't that important, but the theme is. It's precisely why my company will not use Google's cloud platform.
dgellow 4y ago
Something I never understood is why not create new products under a different brand name (something not Google associated), try the idea out, and they end up working move them under the Google brand. I feel that would allow the company to continue to experiment with product ideas without damaging their main brand image. Or is that just a naïve take from somewhere who knows nothing about branding and marketing?
clnq 4y ago
Google has already lost the GPT race, so I assume Bard won’t make it past three years from now. Of course, I’d like to eat my words on this in 2026. But much more innovation in GPTs and LLMs is coming from GitHub randoms than Google. I don’t think Google can innovate anymore. They did a lot of great work as a startup and when they were much smaller (<10k headcount). Now most of what they do fails.

usrusr 4y ago

What would you consider a lesson lernt from that perception? Never ever start anything new unless you want to bet the company on running it forever?

detourdog 4y ago
GOOG went wrong when they stopped using XMPP, CALDAV and forked Webkit. Those actions broke cross platform development and re-ignited the browser wars. I see those moves as totally motivated by privacy invasion of the users. Never trust a free product with advertising.

chongli 4y ago

I've never worked at Google so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Everything I've heard (mostly on HN) about working there is that there are simply too many perverse incentives to abandon products. People get promoted for creating exciting new products and then leave those products behind at their new position. Up-and-comers are also incentivized to do the same thing. There seems to be no appetite whatsoever for hiring "steady hand on the tiller" type people. The whole company DNA is built around hiring elite graduates fresh out of school. It's the classic "too many chefs in the kitchen" problem.

ghaff 4y ago
Put in concrete terms, do you want to be one of the two engineers exiled to maintaining Reader because you pissed someone off to keep the geeks off Google’s back?
- zztop44 4y ago
  For $400k a year I’d be okay with it yeah
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    I'd do it for $300K! Anyone from Google want to check my post history and reach out to someone able and willing to do boring maintenance?
    - fancl20 4y ago
      Part of the problem is when you are in that position it’s also easy to move to other interesting projects internally. Then the real choice is between doing boring maintenance or useful new things at same pay.
      - falcolas 4y ago
        Not everyone wants to chase the new shiny. There are many folks out there who enjoy the challenge of working in a legacy database. Blue sky folks see a rats nest of wires, maintenance engineers see cable porn in potentia.
      - layer8 4y ago
        Maintenance doesn’t need to be boring, and I also don’t see how you wouldn’t add interesting new features and improvements to existing products. The basic issue, it seems, is that the higher-ups simply don’t care about the products themselves, other than for them to serve as a profit center.
        fancl20 4y ago
        Those projects have real difficulties to retain enough developers even to keep lights on. And even higher-ups want, they can’t force allocate developers (in Google’s current power structure) other than providing some incentives including promotion. The end result is a doom loop that if the team can’t retain enough staffing, developers will be overwhelmed by the boring maintenance work, which leads to more team transfers. They do use contractors to mitigate the issue but IMO it doesn’t work in every case.
aleksiy123 4y ago
This comes up literally every google thread. At this point it feels like a meme which originated on HN at some point. People keep repeating because it sounds plausible. The promo system has changed in the last year. So to some extent this info is outdated. And while obviously culture and incentives play a role I think the statement that this is the major reason for Google killing products is largely false. New grads aren't making any big decisions about products. And Google has many steady seniors because of the high tenure rate. In fact the one of the major complaints is that it is too steady , too bureaucratic and too slow.
- chongli 4y ago
  So to some extent this info is outdated The OP we're all discussing is about six products Google cancelled in 2023! If Google has decided to change course on this issue then their efforts have yet to bear fruit. The ball is completely in their court. We're all sitting here waiting to see when Google will decide to place some emphasis on trust and long-term stewardship. Of course, you can't build a reputation for those things overnight, so it will take a while. But there is no sign whatsoever that they have actually changed course.
  - aleksiy123 4y ago
    My point is that the promo process being the root cause of this comes up often but doesn't really have any evidence to back it up except a long chain of repetitions.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

vitus 4y ago

> Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN. Yes, but we're not the people making the product decisions. Stadia's shutdown was inevitable in part because we had already established this distrust, and also because leadership handled every aspect of it incredibly poorly. It was technically impressive, but the economics relied on the addressable market actually being willing to go all-in on the service. Sure, you can blame part of it on the promo culture encouraging people to move to new and shiny projects, and part of it on the fact that we release a lot more experimental stuff than you see at more established companies, but there's also plenty of cases where there was exactly one person who understood the codebase and was keeping the product running, and said person is no longer at the company for one reason or another. In my opinion, Bard should never have been released in its current state, but, that's leadership for you.

kennyadam 4y ago
Bard should have been released as an upgrade to Google Assistant imo. Imagine how much better a voice assistant would be if you could actually hold a decent back and forth conversation with it without having to know the exact phrasing needed to accomplish something. Google Assistant still feels so stunted and lifeless when I know Google can produce more realistic generated speech audio, interpret requests in plain English and respond in a helpful manner.
- yafbum 4y ago
  I don't think it would be an upgrade at this point yet. Bard / LLM lacks precision in ways that are pretty important when carrying out the user's wishes.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  IIRC google has purposely kept assistant stunted and lifeless. Remember how originally it was the inhuman "Okay Google" key phrase? They did explicitly to keep people from humanizing it. Also its the only assistant with no name, its just called "assistant" It wasn't until Alexa and Siri gained traction that they let "Hey google" slip in.

onion2k 4y ago

It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes. I think the 'problem' is that reputation damage doesn't really impact Google's revenue. They get the overwhelming majority of their money from publishing adverts, with a significant amount on their own properties (search and YouTube). It really doesn't matter if a bunch of gamers decide Stadia screwed them over, or if some devs decide to avoid GCP because they killed Reader. Google still makes a staggering amount of money no matter what. The only way Google killing products will ever impact the company is either if people have an alternative to Google Search (very unlikely) or if people stop wanting to work for Google because they see it as a dead end working on things that only last a few years (also unlikely because $$$ talks). Google will continue to launch, run, and then kill products forever. I suspect that if you're at Google and you're not working on ads or something that displays ads then you're being paid to build something frivolous that won't go anywhere mainly so you don't go and work at a different company that could impact one of Google's cash cows. I'm a bit envious if I'm honest. That sounds fun.

LeBit 4y ago
Google Search is in great perils because of ChatGPT.
- snapdeus 4y ago
  Agreed, it's all up to open AI to bring them down,
- onion2k 4y ago
  It could be. I don't think Google are likely to just roll over and let OpenAI/MSFT take that market though. Obviously Google will try to compete. Maybe they'll fail, maybe they won't. If nothing else, as a user of these tools, it's going to be exciting to see some innovation in search UIs for the first time in decades.
  - narrator 4y ago
    They were saying on the all-in podcast that Google is under lots of political pressure from all sides and that makes it difficult for them to launch controversial tech like LLMs. Bard feels very hobbled and, for example, refuses to answer any medical questions.

Paul-Craft 4y ago

> Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? Yeah, about like this: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ I don't really care if Google is unable, unwilling, or uninterested in supporting anything that isn't G-Suite, search, or ads. Their track record is more than enough for me to dismiss using Google Cloud Platform, or even saving anything of any importance to Google Drive. I'm occasionally involved some of those types of vendor decisions, and I imagine others in similar positions feel the same way, so I can't imagine this is all theoretical fake losses they've suffered from this MO. I don't know how you'd even begin to measure the amount of revenue opportunities lost in this way, but I will say this: I'm really glad I'm not a part of Google's marketing department.

creshal 4y ago
Even G-Suite isn't really getting that much support, it's on life support at best. There's so many missing features and bugs and just painfully unergonomic workflows that have been ignored for 10+ years at this point; the long overdue and minimal UI facelift recently didn't really solve any pain points.
- eknkc 4y ago
  It is not compatible with a lot of stuff. Can't subscribe to youtube premium family. Can't use android automotive. Can't use this that etc. I switched to my old basic google account for google services and probably move my domains away from gsuite at this point.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I still have the weird issue where I have a google domain with email and stuff, and the same email address is somehow also a separate google account of the personal variety. No idea how it somehow kinda works and when it’ll finally explode in my face.
    - dannyw 4y ago

steveBK123 4y ago

I will continue my existing strategy of ignoring everything GOOG releases so I can also ignore when they inevitably shut it down too.

qumpis 4y ago

Why would Bard get axed? Or do you mean Bard in its current form? Last I heard they mentioned about rolling out higher-scale models, since apparently current models were 'efficient' ones, to see if the demand can be met, according to them.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

> Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? Yeah, outside of tech enthusiasts, the majority of people don’t care. Street view was an app for marketing. In 2010 it looked really cool and helped their image. None of these projects/products looked financially feasible. And a code jam? Jesus Christ, my public library hosts code meetups. This blog post is boring and weird. It comes off as a weak attempt to find more reasons to hate Google.

trasz3 4y ago

>It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes. I guess this means a "reputation" doesn't influence their profits. Some companies aren't in impression-making business, or even pretending-to-be-trying-to-make-their-customers-happy business.

GVIrish 4y ago
Reputation may not affect Google's ad based revenue, but it absolutely affects their ability to profit in lines of business outside of ads. Google might have made more inroads with enterprises with G suite and GCP if they didn't have that reputation. The gaming industry is a 200 billion/year market that Google could've captured a decent size of if potential customers trusted that they wouldn't quickly give up. All of that represents billions of dollars in lost opportunities.
- trasz3 4y ago
  [dead]

apexalpha 4y ago

>Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN. Surely the people on Hackrnews understand that no one outside of tech enthusiasts even knows about this, right? I have to imagine so... they're smart people and surely sometimes interact with regular people in real life?! But on a more serious note: none of these projects have ever had any traction. That's why they're killed! Try asking anyone who's not in tech but does play videogames what Stadia is. You'll soon find out why it's axed.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

reactor 4y ago

Do you think anyone beside who are vocal (HN/tech crowd esp) care about this 'killed by google' and refrain from using their main source of revenue such as Search, Gmail, Android, Youtube, Map, Photos? Zilch. GCP/Gsuite's money pouring clients are enterprise customers (not HN crowd), who for the large majority won't bother much about that either. So they clearly know their act doesn't actually make a dent in their revenue stream, but in fact that spring cleaning is a win for them.

Kye 4y ago
It happens one "maybe we should use [alternative] until Google gets its act together" at a meeting at a time. Microsoft was still a behemoth when no one still took it seriously outside people who were on a first name basis with a licensing auditor, and it's struggling to gain trust and respect back. Same with IBM, though they seem unconcerned with image. Collapses are never quick or complete at this scale. It starts with a loss of cultural cachet among the people who influence spending. It looks like hip startups with rows of desks with Apple machines where Windows was the default for a decade or two before.
LegitShady 4y ago
of course people do. anytime you have to buy into a google product that could be killed off anytime. It was the primary reason stadia never took off - you had to buy stadia only game licenses that no one was confident would still exist later.

graboidhunter 4y ago

These services aren't that important, but the theme is. It's precisely why my company will not use Google's cloud platform.

dgellow 4y ago

Something I never understood is why not create new products under a different brand name (something not Google associated), try the idea out, and they end up working move them under the Google brand. I feel that would allow the company to continue to experiment with product ideas without damaging their main brand image. Or is that just a naïve take from somewhere who knows nothing about branding and marketing?

clnq 4y ago

Google has already lost the GPT race, so I assume Bard won’t make it past three years from now. Of course, I’d like to eat my words on this in 2026. But much more innovation in GPTs and LLMs is coming from GitHub randoms than Google. I don’t think Google can innovate anymore. They did a lot of great work as a startup and when they were much smaller (<10k headcount). Now most of what they do fails.