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Why does Google get grilled so badly for pulling products? Don’t other companies do the exact same thing, and isn’t it their full right to abandon projects when

Why does Google get grilled so badly for pulling products? Don’t other companies do the exact same thing, and isn’t it their full right to abandon projects when it no longer makes sense?

adamors 4y ago
What other company has a literal graveyard of products? https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com
- izacus 4y ago
  Pretty much every single corporation of that size and age. And many startups too (they call it "pivoting" though - it's not like startup workers complaining over Google here are first in line to maintain failing products forever).
- jsnell 4y ago
  Amazon and Microsoft would have graveyeards just as large, if compiled via the same criteria. You know all that shit Google gets about chat apps? Microsoft has also launched and killed more than a dozen of them. Jeff Bezos used to brag about how many failed products they launched and killed. So it comes back to the question that ed_mercer had: why is there such a double standard? Why does somebody obsessively maintain that site, and why does a large part of the HN audience love spamming "when will Google cancel search lol" into any discussion about Google, when Amazon putting two bullets into the neck of yet another product goes unnoticed?
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Microsoft has also launched and killed more than a dozen of them Microsoft is religious about maintaining backward compatibility and support. They also have some concept of service, which makes cancellations smoother. (All this makes product development aware of the costs of abandonment. Google doesn’t have that in its culture, and it’s a constant problem with hiring from them now.)
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      I think this is what makes the receptions between Microsoft and Google's axings different, the former at least tries to axe things with some cushioning while Google just offs things like it's Tuesday.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Mostly, they really messed up in Win32 => WinRT => UAP => UWP => WinUI 3.0, and .NET Framework to .NET Core, to the point .NET Framework is the "Python 2" of Microsoft's ecosystems, and no one besides WinDev themselves takes WinUI/WinAppSDK seriously.
  - barneygale 4y ago
    https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    Why are you and ed_mercer so intent on defending Google here? I mean I HATE Microsoft and I have to admit they do a much better job of handling product shutdowns than Google. Microsoft tells you the dog is going to "Aunt Joy Ann's farm" and gives you a puppy. Google blasts the dog right in front of you and leaves you to bury the poor thing.
    - jsnell 4y ago
      My claim is just that they're not actually exceptional in how many products they cancel or how they cancel them. If the HN community realized that, then we'd get fewer low-quality submissions like this, and fewer low-quality comments in any Google article. That'd make HN a better place. Which of the "products" on _this list_ was shut down badly, in comparison to what MS would do? Not products on some other list, but this list that's at the top of the front page. Code Jam was not a product. Stadia refunded all purchases. Street View is still accessible from the Maps app, this is just removing some ancient standalone app that nobody had heard of. Currents and the wifi routers had long deprecation cycles. I bet nobody here knows anything about the wearable computing stuff or how it was shut down. If these are all products that were reasonable to shut down, and were shut down reasonably well, then what's newsworthy about this?
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > and were shut down reasonably well Nobody who developed for Stadia thinks this. And this is far from a HN view—it regularly comes up at conferences for financial types.
        jsnell 4y ago
        People who developed for Stadia mainly did so because Google paid them outrageous amounts of money for ports, not because users they were making a lot of money buying games. If there were no users buying games, shutting it down would not have had any meaningful impact on the developers. How do you think they should have done it instead? What would have changed for those developers when done your way?
- rippercushions 4y ago
  This exists: https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ But if you search for "killed by Amazon", you get back news articles about people actually dying in its warehouses. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-warehouse-worker-deaths https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-wa...
  - apocalyptic0n3 4y ago
    Looking at the Microsoft link, the big difference seems to be age and relevance. 1. Skype for Business - 18 years old. Upgrade path to Microsoft Teams 2. Windows Server Essentials - 26 years old. Unsure how relevant this is today with everything going cloud-based 3. Atom - Wasn't originally a Microsoft product and they maintained it despite there already being a better Microsoft alternative for longer than expected. Also 9 years old 4. Internet Explorer - 27 years old and a clear upgrade path was available 5. Forza Street - F2P racing game. Can't excuse this one 6. Microsoft Academic - No excuse, however the data had an open license and migrated elsewhere 7. Channel 9 - 17 years old 8. Silverlight - 16 years old and the web had evolved beyond it long ago Microsoft has killed 13 products since 2021 and many of them had simply run their course. Comparatively, Google has killed 57 products in that same time frame. Most of them are under 10 years old, many of them under 5. Many of them had not run their course and almost all of them had no clear upgrade or migration path.
- belter 4y ago
  https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/
- jsheard 4y ago
  That site really stretches the definition of killed sometimes, like "Backup and Sync" (the old desktop Google Drive client) is on there because it was renamed to "Google Drive for desktop" as part of a redesign. The only thing that was killed was the "Backup and Sync" branding, the actual functionality it provided still exists.
- GuB-42 4y ago
  Microsoft has already been mentioned but Mozilla also has quite a significant graveyard for its size. https://killedbymozilla.com/ https://killedbymozilla.com/
infinitezest 4y ago
Google has the right to create or kill share products it wants. Consumers are not obligated to like it, refrain from complaining, or to keep adopting their products.
eviks 4y ago
Isn't it person's full right to write blog posts listing said abandoned projects? Why do people get criticized for such simple observations re. the behavior of some giant company?
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  Carrying water for billionaires and trillion dollar companies is a common thing on HN. So many threads are "Trillion dollar company did a shitty thing" ... "Yes, they have every right to do that, you shouldn't complain and it's your own fault since you should have known better and stop whinging on HN about it". At least in this case, they may be Google employees.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    Or, uncharitably, people being paid to minimize negative press and stymying discussions. Oh, wait, you already mentioned Google employees. My bad.
jzb 4y ago
They have a history of pulling projects that people like, and seem capricious / chaotic about it. How many different chat / messaging platforms has Google put out in the last ten years, for example? Other companies cancel things, but I’m not aware of any that seem to do so as often. Google started developing a reputation for this more than a decade ago and has just kept doing it if not even doing it more often! Is it Google’s right? This is always a weird question. Sure, it’s their right. It’s also people’s right to criticize them for doing so. I do question anybody who adopts anything from Google these days. I just have zero confidence that I can expect any new Google product or service to stick around.
- orra 4y ago
  > How many different chat / messaging platforms has Google put out in the last ten years, for example? This is a good point. They don't iterate on products, at least that's my obvious perception. Instead, they launch competitor products, so in the end they end up pulling more products.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Microsoft has had various tools and programs that they sunset (lynk becoming Skype for business becoming teams) but they do try to make a migration path available (or, arguably, they just put window dressing on the same backends).
    - poopooracoocoo 4y ago
      There's no migration path from Skype to Microsoft Teams (Personal). Microsoft hasn't picked one as far as I know. Microsoft similarly has a bunch of duplicate services and products. They've got chat functionality spread across many apps, specifically Teams, Skype, and Xbox. Windows also has widgets in Windows 11 and widgets in Xbox Game Bar. There's also the mess that is developing apps for Windows that has just become Chromium, partially due to Microsoft's own messes.
- Nathanba 4y ago
  I think it only seems worse from Google because their product shutdowns don't seem to be tied to financials and if that isn't the case then it makes them unpredictable to us as consumers. Let's remember that Google offers a lot of their products entirely for free. Yet the reason for shutting down Stadia was: "it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected". But how does that make logical sense given that Gmail is free which means it costs money to Google and yet it gets to live forever but Stadia has paying customers and it's not good enough? It seems wild, it initially makes no sense. Unless I'm being more than naive and we the users are quite LITERALLY sold out to advertisers. I always assumed it was a bit exaggerated. But then you still have to wonder why the Stadia users can't be sold out for a profit but the Gmail users can be? Video too expensive? I guess that must be it.
imgabe 4y ago
Other companies kill projects when they’ve clearly failed and basically nobody is using. Google will kill things that are moderately successful and people are dependent on, but they aren’t a blockbuster success that makes a difference compared to their ad revenue. But mostly we’ve just never forgiven them for killing Google Reader. And we never will.
- jsnell 4y ago
  Which product on this list do you think was "moderately successful" and had "people depend on it"?
  - imgabe 4y ago
    It's not about this particular list. People have been burned multiple times in the past by Google so they're going to be bitter and jump all over them whenever they cancel anything.
  - ryanbrunner 4y ago
    Maybe not "moderately successful", but if I bought a router from Google and it was no longer supported / discontinued, I would probably avoid buying a Google product again.
    - AraceliHarker 4y ago
      I think that general routers, such as TP-LINK products, become obsolete faster than Google routers because they only receive one or two firmware updates with no significant feature additions during their product cycle.
      - edude03 4y ago
        Not really, because other than things like newer standards (that'd necessitate new hardware anyway) there isn't really any changes that need to made once it works.
mejutoco 4y ago
That is why they are getting grilled and not taken to court.
rsynnott 4y ago
Some of this stuff is normal. Some, though… the OnHub thing in particular should serve as a warning never to buy hardware from Google, I think.
magicalhippo 4y ago
I can only speak for myself, but in my view Google is an notoriously unreliable partner because it often pulls products and services with relatively short notice, and often with a poor path forward if at all. Not saying Microsoft is perfect, but in my personal experience they've been a lot better in these key metrics.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sys_64738 4y ago
If you get a rep for doing it then why would a company invest their infra into a GOOG product knowing it could get pulled at anytime? Businesses want services that are reliable and consistent. That's not GOOG.

Why does Google get grilled so badly for pulling products? Don’t other companies do the exact same thing, and isn’t it their full right to abandon projects when it no longer makes sense?

adamors 4y ago

What other company has a literal graveyard of products? https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com

izacus 4y ago
Pretty much every single corporation of that size and age. And many startups too (they call it "pivoting" though - it's not like startup workers complaining over Google here are first in line to maintain failing products forever).
jsnell 4y ago
Amazon and Microsoft would have graveyeards just as large, if compiled via the same criteria. You know all that shit Google gets about chat apps? Microsoft has also launched and killed more than a dozen of them. Jeff Bezos used to brag about how many failed products they launched and killed. So it comes back to the question that ed_mercer had: why is there such a double standard? Why does somebody obsessively maintain that site, and why does a large part of the HN audience love spamming "when will Google cancel search lol" into any discussion about Google, when Amazon putting two bullets into the neck of yet another product goes unnoticed?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Microsoft has also launched and killed more than a dozen of them Microsoft is religious about maintaining backward compatibility and support. They also have some concept of service, which makes cancellations smoother. (All this makes product development aware of the costs of abandonment. Google doesn’t have that in its culture, and it’s a constant problem with hiring from them now.)
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    I think this is what makes the receptions between Microsoft and Google's axings different, the former at least tries to axe things with some cushioning while Google just offs things like it's Tuesday.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Mostly, they really messed up in Win32 => WinRT => UAP => UWP => WinUI 3.0, and .NET Framework to .NET Core, to the point .NET Framework is the "Python 2" of Microsoft's ecosystems, and no one besides WinDev themselves takes WinUI/WinAppSDK seriously.
- barneygale 4y ago
  https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  Why are you and ed_mercer so intent on defending Google here? I mean I HATE Microsoft and I have to admit they do a much better job of handling product shutdowns than Google. Microsoft tells you the dog is going to "Aunt Joy Ann's farm" and gives you a puppy. Google blasts the dog right in front of you and leaves you to bury the poor thing.
  - jsnell 4y ago
    My claim is just that they're not actually exceptional in how many products they cancel or how they cancel them. If the HN community realized that, then we'd get fewer low-quality submissions like this, and fewer low-quality comments in any Google article. That'd make HN a better place. Which of the "products" on _this list_ was shut down badly, in comparison to what MS would do? Not products on some other list, but this list that's at the top of the front page. Code Jam was not a product. Stadia refunded all purchases. Street View is still accessible from the Maps app, this is just removing some ancient standalone app that nobody had heard of. Currents and the wifi routers had long deprecation cycles. I bet nobody here knows anything about the wearable computing stuff or how it was shut down. If these are all products that were reasonable to shut down, and were shut down reasonably well, then what's newsworthy about this?
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > and were shut down reasonably well Nobody who developed for Stadia thinks this. And this is far from a HN view—it regularly comes up at conferences for financial types.
      - jsnell 4y ago
        People who developed for Stadia mainly did so because Google paid them outrageous amounts of money for ports, not because users they were making a lot of money buying games. If there were no users buying games, shutting it down would not have had any meaningful impact on the developers. How do you think they should have done it instead? What would have changed for those developers when done your way?
rippercushions 4y ago
This exists: https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ But if you search for "killed by Amazon", you get back news articles about people actually dying in its warehouses. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-warehouse-worker-deaths https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-wa...
- apocalyptic0n3 4y ago
  Looking at the Microsoft link, the big difference seems to be age and relevance. 1. Skype for Business - 18 years old. Upgrade path to Microsoft Teams 2. Windows Server Essentials - 26 years old. Unsure how relevant this is today with everything going cloud-based 3. Atom - Wasn't originally a Microsoft product and they maintained it despite there already being a better Microsoft alternative for longer than expected. Also 9 years old 4. Internet Explorer - 27 years old and a clear upgrade path was available 5. Forza Street - F2P racing game. Can't excuse this one 6. Microsoft Academic - No excuse, however the data had an open license and migrated elsewhere 7. Channel 9 - 17 years old 8. Silverlight - 16 years old and the web had evolved beyond it long ago Microsoft has killed 13 products since 2021 and many of them had simply run their course. Comparatively, Google has killed 57 products in that same time frame. Most of them are under 10 years old, many of them under 5. Many of them had not run their course and almost all of them had no clear upgrade or migration path.
belter 4y ago
https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/
jsheard 4y ago
That site really stretches the definition of killed sometimes, like "Backup and Sync" (the old desktop Google Drive client) is on there because it was renamed to "Google Drive for desktop" as part of a redesign. The only thing that was killed was the "Backup and Sync" branding, the actual functionality it provided still exists.
GuB-42 4y ago
Microsoft has already been mentioned but Mozilla also has quite a significant graveyard for its size. https://killedbymozilla.com/ https://killedbymozilla.com/

infinitezest 4y ago

Google has the right to create or kill share products it wants. Consumers are not obligated to like it, refrain from complaining, or to keep adopting their products.

eviks 4y ago

Isn't it person's full right to write blog posts listing said abandoned projects? Why do people get criticized for such simple observations re. the behavior of some giant company?

Ensorceled 4y ago
Carrying water for billionaires and trillion dollar companies is a common thing on HN. So many threads are "Trillion dollar company did a shitty thing" ... "Yes, they have every right to do that, you shouldn't complain and it's your own fault since you should have known better and stop whinging on HN about it". At least in this case, they may be Google employees.
- falcolas 4y ago
  Or, uncharitably, people being paid to minimize negative press and stymying discussions. Oh, wait, you already mentioned Google employees. My bad.

jzb 4y ago

They have a history of pulling projects that people like, and seem capricious / chaotic about it. How many different chat / messaging platforms has Google put out in the last ten years, for example? Other companies cancel things, but I’m not aware of any that seem to do so as often. Google started developing a reputation for this more than a decade ago and has just kept doing it if not even doing it more often! Is it Google’s right? This is always a weird question. Sure, it’s their right. It’s also people’s right to criticize them for doing so. I do question anybody who adopts anything from Google these days. I just have zero confidence that I can expect any new Google product or service to stick around.

orra 4y ago
> How many different chat / messaging platforms has Google put out in the last ten years, for example? This is a good point. They don't iterate on products, at least that's my obvious perception. Instead, they launch competitor products, so in the end they end up pulling more products.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Microsoft has had various tools and programs that they sunset (lynk becoming Skype for business becoming teams) but they do try to make a migration path available (or, arguably, they just put window dressing on the same backends).
  - poopooracoocoo 4y ago
    There's no migration path from Skype to Microsoft Teams (Personal). Microsoft hasn't picked one as far as I know. Microsoft similarly has a bunch of duplicate services and products. They've got chat functionality spread across many apps, specifically Teams, Skype, and Xbox. Windows also has widgets in Windows 11 and widgets in Xbox Game Bar. There's also the mess that is developing apps for Windows that has just become Chromium, partially due to Microsoft's own messes.
Nathanba 4y ago
I think it only seems worse from Google because their product shutdowns don't seem to be tied to financials and if that isn't the case then it makes them unpredictable to us as consumers. Let's remember that Google offers a lot of their products entirely for free. Yet the reason for shutting down Stadia was: "it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected". But how does that make logical sense given that Gmail is free which means it costs money to Google and yet it gets to live forever but Stadia has paying customers and it's not good enough? It seems wild, it initially makes no sense. Unless I'm being more than naive and we the users are quite LITERALLY sold out to advertisers. I always assumed it was a bit exaggerated. But then you still have to wonder why the Stadia users can't be sold out for a profit but the Gmail users can be? Video too expensive? I guess that must be it.

imgabe 4y ago

Other companies kill projects when they’ve clearly failed and basically nobody is using. Google will kill things that are moderately successful and people are dependent on, but they aren’t a blockbuster success that makes a difference compared to their ad revenue. But mostly we’ve just never forgiven them for killing Google Reader. And we never will.

jsnell 4y ago
Which product on this list do you think was "moderately successful" and had "people depend on it"?
- imgabe 4y ago
  It's not about this particular list. People have been burned multiple times in the past by Google so they're going to be bitter and jump all over them whenever they cancel anything.
- ryanbrunner 4y ago
  Maybe not "moderately successful", but if I bought a router from Google and it was no longer supported / discontinued, I would probably avoid buying a Google product again.
  - AraceliHarker 4y ago
    I think that general routers, such as TP-LINK products, become obsolete faster than Google routers because they only receive one or two firmware updates with no significant feature additions during their product cycle.
    - edude03 4y ago
      Not really, because other than things like newer standards (that'd necessitate new hardware anyway) there isn't really any changes that need to made once it works.

mejutoco 4y ago

That is why they are getting grilled and not taken to court.

rsynnott 4y ago

Some of this stuff is normal. Some, though… the OnHub thing in particular should serve as a warning never to buy hardware from Google, I think.

magicalhippo 4y ago

I can only speak for myself, but in my view Google is an notoriously unreliable partner because it often pulls products and services with relatively short notice, and often with a poor path forward if at all. Not saying Microsoft is perfect, but in my personal experience they've been a lot better in these key metrics.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sys_64738 4y ago

If you get a rep for doing it then why would a company invest their infra into a GOOG product knowing it could get pulled at anytime? Businesses want services that are reliable and consistent. That's not GOOG.