4 ms·
I wonder in these situations: why don't they spin it off / sell it to some other smaller company that doesn't need a Billion Users to succeed? Never used it my
by eh_why_not 3y ago
I wonder in these situations: why don't they spin it off / sell it to some other smaller company that doesn't need a Billion Users to succeed?
Never used it myself, but it looks like a useful product. Shame to have it disappear if there are still enough people who would buy it.
- changoplatanero 3y agoProbably it is too tightly integrated with other google internal services to be able to give the code to a third party and have them operate the business.
- travem 3y agoIn some senses it is a bit of an indictment on Google's cloud offering that their teams don't build it on those.
- eklitzke 3y agoThe issue though would be the source code. Most projects at Google are developed in the monorepo and this makes it very difficult to split things out (to sell, or in some cases to open source) because the code likely links to all kinds of internal things.
- btilly 3y agoSteve Yegge had a great rant around a dozen years ago that explains why their teams don't. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
- btilly 3y agoAnd that also would be why they are shutting it down. Google internal services are always being rewritten, and code migrated from the old version of the service to the new one. If nobody is willing to migrate an externally visible product, it has to sunset at the same time that the internal service does. This philosophy does wonders for internal code quality and consistency. It also makes people outside the company wonder whether they should trust Google's public offerings.