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Google Pay replaced Google Wallet – now it's going away to make room for Wallet

25 points by Tomte 3y ago

tdb7893 3y ago
Having worked at Google every single article about them confirms my experience with project management there. By the end of my time there whenever starting a new project my first question is "why did the previous attempt fail" because there always was a previous (and generally unmaintained) service that did pretty much the same thing. About half the time the new project would be "deprioritized" for the same reason as the previous one and half the time it would be a different reason.
LightFog 3y ago
Has this aggressive churning ever actually produced a successful product at google? From the outside it’s hard to see how incentivising it is of any benefit to the company?
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  I guess if you're someone always eager to try something new and quickly get bored when asked to finish whatever project you currently work on, Google is the place to be. A dream come true.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  The thing is that Google is always making half-assed decisions to quickly roll out new products. That result in them failing and then couple years later being retired. If they had designed them better, they would be more likely to succeed. They also don't spend the effort to fix the problems. For Google Pay, adding transfers made some sense. But they should have added it to existing Google Pay app instead of making new Google Pay, and renaming the old one Google Wallet.
Zetobal 3y ago
From the outside google looks so chaotic in the last few years it's insane.
aluminum96 3y ago
Google needs much stronger SVP-level product leadership. Directors and VPs should not be fighting for product turf, and major user-facing products, such as an entire default Android app in this case, need to outlast the tenure of any individual VP-level patron.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  I get that the upper management is playboy billionaires at this point and have checked out, but at this point it would be B_A_S_I_C management to look at this churn and not thing "why aren't we conserving the codebases" because really this is just branding and reskinning fundamentally.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39473592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39473592

25 points by Tomte 3y ago

Having worked at Google every single article about them confirms my experience with project management there. By the end of my time there whenever starting a new project my first question is "why did the previous attempt fail" because there always was a previous (and generally unmaintained) service that did pretty much the same thing. About half the time the new project would be "deprioritized" for the same reason as the previous one and half the time it would be a different reason.

LightFog 3y ago

Has this aggressive churning ever actually produced a successful product at google? From the outside it’s hard to see how incentivising it is of any benefit to the company?

iforgotpassword 3y ago
I guess if you're someone always eager to try something new and quickly get bored when asked to finish whatever project you currently work on, Google is the place to be. A dream come true.
ianburrell 3y ago
The thing is that Google is always making half-assed decisions to quickly roll out new products. That result in them failing and then couple years later being retired. If they had designed them better, they would be more likely to succeed. They also don't spend the effort to fix the problems. For Google Pay, adding transfers made some sense. But they should have added it to existing Google Pay app instead of making new Google Pay, and renaming the old one Google Wallet.

Zetobal 3y ago

From the outside google looks so chaotic in the last few years it's insane.

aluminum96 3y ago

Google needs much stronger SVP-level product leadership. Directors and VPs should not be fighting for product turf, and major user-facing products, such as an entire default Android app in this case, need to outlast the tenure of any individual VP-level patron.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
I get that the upper management is playboy billionaires at this point and have checked out, but at this point it would be B_A_S_I_C management to look at this churn and not thing "why aren't we conserving the codebases" because really this is just branding and reskinning fundamentally.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39473592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39473592