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> 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

by 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.
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
>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. This is what I don’t understand. Is leadership really this dumb or are we missing large pieces of context? The prevailing sentiment is google is flakey. Don’t rely on their stuff. Now removing redundant services is one thing. But from the outside it looks like they don’t care about regaining confidence. And they don’t care about creating new stable products that I want. Did they really think Stadia would be an instant success with their shit reputation in a market that has been already carved up by the incumbents? A naïve observer would say it would take years and a ton of money.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sanderjd 4y ago
  Remember how Microsoft was flailing for what seemed like forever under Ballmer, and now in what still feels to me like a relatively short period of time under Nadella, they seem to be thriving again? Yeah... leadership actually matters a lot...
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Why would management care? Ads, the entire point of google as a business, will continue making gobs of money no matter what. The point of these toy side projects is to entertain developers in between "track users more" and "Show users more ads" tickets.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
    To create more streams of revenue, gradually evolve the business. They can’t just be an ad company forever.
ouid 4y ago
Stadia failed because gaming is already hilariously cheap. even at the AAA "price point", you pay 60 dollars for 80 hours. No subscription can compete with just owning the games and the hardware.
- vitus 4y ago
  The hardware is a big up-front cost. If you want a gaming PC, that can potentially set you back $1000 or more, and there's ongoing maintenance cost as you have to keep upgrading your graphics card if you want to keep playing the latest titles. Stadia Pro at $10/month was the equivalent of building a $600 PC every 5 years, plus with a bunch of free games thrown in over that time. Buying the latest console can set you back hundreds of dollars in one go, and now you also have vendor lock-in (which means you have to commit to one platform, or buy multiple consoles each generation). The marketing was... not executed well. Most people didn't realize that you could actually just buy games on the platform and play them without paying the monthly subscription for Pro. The backbone of the business model was supposed to be driven by that 30% cut of game sales revenue that most gaming platforms / stores take. The infrastructure was supposed to be further subsidized by selling off-peak compute as a cloud service. That never materialized. The exclusives were lackluster compared to other platforms (Breath of the Wild? Halo Infinite? God of War Ragnarok?), and leadership shuttered the in-house game studios before they were able to release much of anything. Beyond all that -- there were plenty of features that owning your own hardware simply could not compete with. Just to list a few: - Not having to wait for video game downloads was an incredibly underrated feature -- being able to start playing a game within seconds meant you could play a game immediately after an impulse purchase, rather than having to wait half an hour (100GB download at 500Mbps) first. - Family sharing meant that you could play Cyberpunk 2077 (which, by the way, launched with serious performance issues across most platforms... but played smoothly on Stadia), while the kids next to you on the couch played, I dunno, Paw Patrol, all on hardware you already owned, e.g. your laptop, or phone, or the Chromecast that came with the founder's edition (also 100% optional). - You could seamlessly continue a game across multiple devices -- play a game at home on your TV, then continue at a friend's house on your phone.

by vitus 4y ago

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.

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago

>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. This is what I don’t understand. Is leadership really this dumb or are we missing large pieces of context? The prevailing sentiment is google is flakey. Don’t rely on their stuff. Now removing redundant services is one thing. But from the outside it looks like they don’t care about regaining confidence. And they don’t care about creating new stable products that I want. Did they really think Stadia would be an instant success with their shit reputation in a market that has been already carved up by the incumbents? A naïve observer would say it would take years and a ton of money.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sanderjd 4y ago
Remember how Microsoft was flailing for what seemed like forever under Ballmer, and now in what still feels to me like a relatively short period of time under Nadella, they seem to be thriving again? Yeah... leadership actually matters a lot...
mrguyorama 4y ago
Why would management care? Ads, the entire point of google as a business, will continue making gobs of money no matter what. The point of these toy side projects is to entertain developers in between "track users more" and "Show users more ads" tickets.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  To create more streams of revenue, gradually evolve the business. They can’t just be an ad company forever.

ouid 4y ago

Stadia failed because gaming is already hilariously cheap. even at the AAA "price point", you pay 60 dollars for 80 hours. No subscription can compete with just owning the games and the hardware.

vitus 4y ago
The hardware is a big up-front cost. If you want a gaming PC, that can potentially set you back $1000 or more, and there's ongoing maintenance cost as you have to keep upgrading your graphics card if you want to keep playing the latest titles. Stadia Pro at $10/month was the equivalent of building a $600 PC every 5 years, plus with a bunch of free games thrown in over that time. Buying the latest console can set you back hundreds of dollars in one go, and now you also have vendor lock-in (which means you have to commit to one platform, or buy multiple consoles each generation). The marketing was... not executed well. Most people didn't realize that you could actually just buy games on the platform and play them without paying the monthly subscription for Pro. The backbone of the business model was supposed to be driven by that 30% cut of game sales revenue that most gaming platforms / stores take. The infrastructure was supposed to be further subsidized by selling off-peak compute as a cloud service. That never materialized. The exclusives were lackluster compared to other platforms (Breath of the Wild? Halo Infinite? God of War Ragnarok?), and leadership shuttered the in-house game studios before they were able to release much of anything. Beyond all that -- there were plenty of features that owning your own hardware simply could not compete with. Just to list a few: - Not having to wait for video game downloads was an incredibly underrated feature -- being able to start playing a game within seconds meant you could play a game immediately after an impulse purchase, rather than having to wait half an hour (100GB download at 500Mbps) first. - Family sharing meant that you could play Cyberpunk 2077 (which, by the way, launched with serious performance issues across most platforms... but played smoothly on Stadia), while the kids next to you on the couch played, I dunno, Paw Patrol, all on hardware you already owned, e.g. your laptop, or phone, or the Chromecast that came with the founder's edition (also 100% optional). - You could seamlessly continue a game across multiple devices -- play a game at home on your TV, then continue at a friend's house on your phone.