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And yet another Google service goes to the Google Graveyard. The only practical advice you can follow now is "if it's a Google product and it's not Search, You
by CM30 3y ago
And yet another Google service goes to the Google Graveyard.
The only practical advice you can follow now is "if it's a Google product and it's not Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail or Docs, don't bet on it being around in the long term"
- tlogan 3y agoNot sure about maps, gmail and docs…
- Night_Thastus 3y agoGoogle is stuck with gmail whether they like it or not. Gmail is used by what, 1.8 billion people? And e-mail isn't some small take-it-or-leave-it feature. Even disregarding the mail itself, e-mail is central as a form of online ID for accounts. If Google tried to kill Gmail there would be an uproar of incredible proportions. Realistically, their best bet for getting rid of it would be to gradually abandon it, making it slower, less reliable, taking away features, etc over the course of a decade or two. But even then, they'd likely need to wait another ~40 years for generational effects to kick in and most people to get off of it.
- Workaccount2 3y agoCrazy to think that technically Google has every right to just turn off gmail one day. No warning, no advisories. Just shut off the servers. They don't even have to acknowledge it.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoIn theory, but never in practice. The big kicker that makes it impractical is that most businesses and government organizations use GMail. There's so much money and power out there that would pressure Google into fixing it immediately. If they seriously tried it would be endless, endless lawsuits about all the lost productivity, valuable company information, etc. If Google made their intentions clear, I bet it wouldn't stay down for more than 3 days before they relented due to all that pressure.
- SahAssar 3y agoLets just say you have ~$2 Trillion burning a hole in your pocket and buy google, take it private. At day one you could shut down the normal gmail service for basically everyone who don't pay for it, right? For most business accounts I'm guessing you need to wait for the next billing cycle, but that would be next month in most cases. For special accounts it might be longer but those would be a very small number. Could anyone win a lawsuit against a serviceprovider for (completely within the terms of the contract) not wanting to provide a service anymore?
- science4sail 3y ago> Could anyone win a lawsuit against a serviceprovider for (completely within the terms of the contract) not wanting to provide a service anymore? The problem is that with a 1B+ people dependent on the product, shutting it off wouldn't just get you lawsuits, but also visits from scary men in suits and extralegal actions. You may very well be coerced into switching the service back on - at the end of the day, contracts are just pieces of paper.
- vel0city 3y agoCrazy to think that technically Apple has every right to just turn off iCloud or the App Store one day. No warning, no advisories. Just shut off the servers. They don't even have to acknowledge it. No more software for a few billion devices.
- benhurmarcel 3y agoThey sell it to companies as part of Google Workspace. That comes with guarantees.
- zamadatix 3y agoAll 3 carry massive non-consumer-sourced revenue streams which have been very profitable for nearing 20 years so why the uncertainty?.
- kiririn 3y agoPhotos has decent odds of survival too
- 6510 3y agoPicasa and Hello were fantastic. 1000 years ahead of anything else. Google photos? hahahaHAHAhaha..uhm... ill host my own thank you.
- knallfrosch 3y agoAt least Google Photos can sort images by date taken. That's light years ahead of Microsoft OneDrive.
- vel0city 3y agoOneDrive isn't meant to be a photo management app, its supposed to just be a storage app. The app to manage photos is called Photos, and its default view is sorted by date. The equivalent of OneDrive in Google is Google Drive, which is just as dismal for managing photos. At least with OneDrive/Photos, you can actually manage the underlying files of your photos as well as get the overall views as opposed to Google where the Photo storage counts against your Drive storage but you can't manage it outside of what Google Photos allows and accessing the actual files requires manually downloading them or doing a Takeout.
- 6510 3y agoThey did have google desktop search which seems a valid excuse to not have a second desktop indexing tool.
- callalex 3y agoThat’s what I thought when I laboriously migrated my library to Picasa.
- notatoad 3y agothis was not a service, it was a pricing scheme. if you add an entry to the graveyard every time a company changes their pricing structure, you're going to have a very big graveyard.
- nomel 3y agoI don't think calling it a "pricing structure" is really fair. It was a subscription program (Google's own words) that they stopped. > Pixel Pass All in One Subscription Program > Pixel Pass combines your phone and Google-powered services all in one monthly price. Upgrade every two years. Get a new Pixel after two years and continue While it's not a software service, I think most people consider subscription programs a "service", in the classical sense.