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Google to shut down Google One VPN on June 20
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoMore discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40010047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40010047
- saurik 2y agoAnd here (both from 2 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40027182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40027182
- zuhsetaqi 2y agoNumber 293 of killed things by Google: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- DANmode 2y agoIs there a Facebook/Meta version of this?
- mgiampapa 2y agoMost of the spaghetti against the wall MVP from meta fails to gain any traction, and if it does it becomes a feature in a main app. Post year of efficiency it might happen again, but every successful Meta app outside of FB was an acquisition of an existing viable product. (Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, Occulus) I was really hoping Portal was going to catch on, I really liked it and found it to be a great home VC platform.
- sureIy 2y ago> acquisition of an existing viable product. (Messenger, Messenger is native at Facebook. It's born on Facebook.com as a floating non-permanent window that only works when the other person is online. Wikipedia seems to confirm this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_(software)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_(software)#History I agree on the Portal, it's perfect to call my grandma. I dread the day it will stop working because the alternative is an iPad that is worse in nearly every way (as a tabletop VC device for grandma)
- mgiampapa 2y agoMessenger is a product born of an app called Beluga, https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/facebook-messenger-beluga/ https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/facebook-messen.... It wasn't an app where they took the userbase, but the app was bought and the team tasked to build Messenger. (Source, I worked at FB from 2009-2016)
- baxtr 2y agoThreads seems to be gaining some traction though.
- mgiampapa 2y agoThreads was a bolt on feature on top of Instagram. It may eventually have the umbilical cut, but I think the only reason it has any traction is because Musk is insane. Had Musk not lit 44 Billion dollars on fire, Threads wouldn't be a thing. So yeah, a black swan in play.
- baxtr 2y agoYeah but I mean come on, there are always market dynamics outside your control. The only thing you can do as a company is to react and sometimes exploit market dynamics. That’s what Meta did with Threads. You have to give em credit for that.
- SOVIETIC-BOSS88 2y agoOf course there is, although not as crazy as goog's: https://www.killedbymeta.xyz https://www.killedbymeta.xyz
- PunchTornado 2y agoI was surprised when they announced they're killing workplace. A lot of businesses relied on it.
- ignoramous 2y agoWait till you find out the kind of intrusive spyware that got CISO at Meta, Guy Rosen, his job.
- devsda 2y agoIt's not like Google is going to stop here. So, at this point I think the site owner can go the extra mile and create a bot that keeps track of HN or reddit topics for related headlines and post the running count along with a summary of popular products that Google axed and may be some trivia too.
- belter 2y agoRight now, 60 Apps, 211 Services and 24 Hardware pieces shutdown for a total of 295. It's only Wednesday, so before the weekend can we make it to 296? "Google Business Messages in Maps and Search shutting down" - https://9to5google.com/2024/05/28/google-business-messages-shutting-down/ https://9to5google.com/2024/05/28/google-business-messages-s...
- ravetcofx 2y agoAs a business owner thank God. That was an annoying stressful platform I disabled ages ago. Even when enabled it led to little to no leads, but created stress in response time which affected your placement and was featured prominently on the listing.
- leokennis 2y agoWith this track record, I'm still in awe that there are any serious companies that use GCP. Unless you have a good migration strategy / contingency plan, you're letting your companies' bottom line being held hostage by a fickle and unfocused dog chasing every garbage truck that comes into his field of vision...
- Trufa 2y agoThis take is completely ridiculous, Google is absolutely not to be trusted in many of this fickle experiments it does and it will hurt them, but putting GCP, a paid system with a track record that powers so many important businesses is just bending the metaphor to a point where it makes no sense. That said, that's what they get for doing this kind of thing I guess.
- tom1337 2y agogoogle selling their entire domain stuff to squarespace and the elimination of data transfer when you migrate from GCP to another provider doesn't shine a bright light on them imo. [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/eliminating-data-transfer-fees-when-migrating-off-google-cloud https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/eliminatin...
- speedgoose 2y agoThe likelihood of Google killing BigQuery or any of their other main cloud products anytime soon without a migration plan is low enough I assume.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y agoWhat I'd like to understand is what Google thought the end game was here.
- g15jv2dp 2y agoGoogle is not a single person. Some manager or engineer at google thought, "how can I add the launch of a new product to my CV", cobbled this up, and someone in the hierarchy gave a green light. Six years later, someone else probably thought "this costs too much and doesn't improve the ad-money printing machine" so decided to shut it down.
- danpalmer 2y agoOr more charitably, someone thought "I wonder if users would like this feature", so shipped it to see, and then saw they didn't use it, so removed it to reduce complexity and move on to more important things. I'm not saying you're wrong, but in my experience few are thinking just about their CV or promotions, and most product changes are driven (at least publicly, within the company) by a desire to improve offerings for users.
- kortilla 2y ago“improve offerings for users” without basing it on anything other than “let’s see if they like it” is CV development. It gives you an excuse to build something new rather than squeeze out a tiny performance gain in the money machine.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago> most product changes are driven (at least publicly, within the company) by a desire to improve offerings for users. The key is: "publicly, within the company"
- oxfordmale 2y agoProduct Managers are only as great as the last new shiny product feature they deliver. This is a systematic problem for companies. Product Teams rarely prioritise fixing technical debt that is actually resulting in significant operational overhead. They prefer to focus on yet another shiny feature, as it is much easier to market. "We need to spend some time fixing technical debt for the last product feature we rushed to market, as it generates too many support tickets." versus "We delivered dark mode. Shiny!"
- Takennickname 2y agoAnother one bites the dust
- LunaSea 2y agoWonder if this is linked with their introduction of IP protection, another VPN, within Google Chrome?
- resolutebat 2y agoThat's a very limited purpose service to avoid tracking, it's not going to help you torrent all the warez. https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/protections/ip-protection https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/protections/ip...
- okokwhatever 2y agoGoogle googling Google things.
- nolist_policy 2y agoApparently they had all kind of problems with the Windows client. DNS hijacking, route injection, etc. IMHO understandable that they didn't want to deal with the Windows mess.
- robertlagrant 2y agoJust having it as an Android feature would be pretty good. Millions of phones, all paying $5/month for these features.
- Rinzler89 2y agoExcept Android users are not known for paying for things (for SW I mean).
- johnnyanmac 2y agothis was fixed some 8-10 years ago when most apps trying to make money shifted to subscription services. You can't pirate an APK if it's just a thin client. There's definitely free/OS ways to run a VPN, but it definitely a clunky process with limited locations available.
- vetinari 2y agoSwitch to subscriptions was caused by many different factors, like non-existent way to sell upgrades to new versions through app stores or forced BS activities by appstores with crazy deadlines. And yes, more regular, even though lower, cashflow too.
- adithyassekhar 2y agoThat's an invalid argument to make against a service that's only available for people who are already paying for Google one.
- robertlagrant 2y agoYes - I didn't mean all Android users would have it. I mean making it available means they basically have an iCloud competitor they can release on all Play-enabled phones, which millions of people would likely pay for.
- vsnf 2y agoI'm of two minds on Google's MO on products. On one hand, I appreciate that they try all sorts of things and seem to have almost no hesitation with launching some things which are quirky or of niche usefulness. On the other hand, the only things that have ever survived are Docs, GCP, and tenuously, Voice. I don't mind them launching and shutting down a lot of products, but it's really stunning just how few things actually make it.
- buro9 2y ago> it's really stunning just how few things actually make it which echoes my experience in the music industry, and what I've seen of VCs in tech, and small businesses in my town. very, very, few things are successful, and even fewer of those are successful at the kind of scale that Google needs to ensure that they don't become a sprawling mess of millions of employees. they need very high margin high value products at high scale, supported by the fewest possible engineers (even if that number is still thousands or tens of thousands of engineers)... and the truth is, for that business model, very few things are possible, and that the understanding of what those things are is going to be the result of trial and error. I'm almost completely de-Googled now, so these announcements affect me less and less as time passes, but I do understand why they do this, and it does make business sense
- Lutger 2y agoRight, a great number of companies would absolutely fly on the userbase of most of the apps on killedbygoogle. Some of these had hundreds of millions of users when google turned off the lights.
- robertlagrant 2y agoMaps, Android, Earth, Translate, I guess? What's odd about One is it seems such a small thing for them to do given all the things they already do. They already have a global network, so VPN makes sense. They already have a lot of cloud storage, and know how to run cloudy things. They already have the phones to put it on.
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- ArkimPhiri 2y ago[dead]
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- abhayhegde 2y agoHopefully many other important things by Google don't bite the dust. I extensively use Keep, Scholar, and Finance. I don't see if any of them make money for Google which is what seems like the only metric they care about anyway.
- pennybanks 2y agoi disagree. im sure they have an idea about how much they will lose on constantly trying stuff out. i always glad companies, people are willing to try, test, risk, create, things because thats how progression and innovation works. the more the merrier, the crazier the better. ill never criticize people/companies/ceos that are willing to try/create new things but it seems like people are the opposite and are very quick to do so. but i get it.
- abhayhegde 2y agoI didn't understand what you disagree with. I'm glad companies create such useful tools. I'm just saying the prospect of continuation seems to be contingent on whether it's profitable (at least in the long run). Hopefully, Google doesn't take that approach with some of its products is all I'm saying.
- ulfw 2y agoWhat's that silly company not shutting down? Does anyone even bother getting into Gemini? How long will it be around?
- dapf 2y ago[dead]
- aranw 2y agoTo be honest I don't think anyone will really care too much about Google killing a VPN product there's probably companies out there better suited to offer this as a service. I think the one that still bothers me and I think was a big mistake considering there cloud computing platform was Google Domains. Wasn't that profitable product and perfectly suited to be fully integrated into GCP? Edit: As someone else has stated it's good that they try things and try different products and I think it's good that they shutdown products that they are not good at running
- blitzar 2y agoallegedly squarespace paid $180mil for it and there were 10mil domains registerd through the service. Even on googles scale that is a decent side hustle.
- altdataseller 2y agoAnd i think in the long term, it is going to benefit consumers. Squarespace lives and breathes domains. Google doesnt.
- belter 2y agoThink again: "Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343006
- altdataseller 2y agocues football coach OOOFF meme
- aranw 2y agoDoesn't Google live and breath domains? They index the internet and have Google Cloud Platform so surely Domains should be part of Google's core businesses?
- worldwidelies 2y agoHad no idea Google had a VPN. I don’t know why anyone would use it. As if their other data gathering methods weren’t enough. Imagine funneling all of your internet traffic through them.
- nalekberov 2y agoMost people think of VPN as a magic tool to be completely anonymous on the internet.
- fellerts 2y agoCan you fault them when that's what NordVPN and others claim in their YouTube ads? Tom Scott said it better than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY
- nalekberov 2y agoIt's called capitalism. Unfortunately people rarely question the things they buy as a necessity.
- blitzar 2y agoIt's called fraud
- fellerts 2y agoIt's also called false advertising. Not all responsibility lies with the consumer.
- nalekberov 2y agoHow many advertisings you know are "true"?
- ignoramous 2y agoFor the same reason Apple operates Private Relay. Google also cares a tonne about state censorship blocking access to its web services. A refresher: Google runs world's largest public DNS resolver, builds a browser used by 3b+, and an OS by 2b+. If they need to harvest data, they most certainly don't need a VPN (and may be that's why they killed it).
- unixhero 2y agoUnserious. I can't rely on any new thing from G-daddy any more.
- PunchTornado 2y agohttps://killedbymicrosoft.info/ https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ 163 services killed by Microsoft. But they still didn't manage to kill Internet Explorer. I don't know why Google gets the hate for killing things.
- nalekberov 2y ago293 vs 163. Microsoft was founded in 1975, Google in 1998. Extreme greed over Principles. Also this: https://openrss.org/blog/how-google-helped-destroy-adoption-of-rss-feeds https://openrss.org/blog/how-google-helped-destroy-adoption-...
- LeonidasXIV 2y agoIt lists Internet Explorer right there?
- PunchTornado 2y agostill getting hits from IE users on my site. 69.71 million people around the world used Internet Explorer to access the web in 2021.
- deely3 2y agoPersonally I feel like Google kills are more brutal and abrupt. For example MS killed Movie Maker, but you can still use it if you have it installed. Google killed service - and there nothing you can do with it.
- jrhey 2y agoHow many years from now will Gmail be on that chopping block? “We’re shutting down Gmail, here’s an export of your inbox. We promise to forward your email for 5 years.”
- datadeft 2y agoDaily reminder that Google is an ad tech company. Everything they do is financed by ads. If the service is not relevant to ads it is going to be shut down eventually.
- gigapotential 2y agoIf you're looking for VPN alternatives checkout https://UpVPN.app https://UpVPN.app
- Alifatisk 2y agoYou forgot to mention that you’re behind the product
- gigapotential 2y agoI'd say front and center
- Alifatisk 2y agoHahahahaha
- asim 2y agoThey are ruthless and actually that's probably a good thing. At the scale they operate it's more obvious and affects many more users but if a product is not working e.g not reaching Google scale, then you gotta kill it. Maintaining it just to save face isn't the answer. Doesn't stop it being really annoying when largely everything is deprecated on Google Cloud or they kill your favourite niche product but I'm still a big google search and gmail user.
- walteweiss 2y agoYeah, very good. They created a situation when you simply cannot trust them on any product they have. A calendar, do you use it today? What if they’ll kill it tomorrow?
- mulmen 2y agoIn what way is it good?
- azangru 2y agoAvoiding sunk cost fallacy? I.e. if their metrics show that a certain service is a net loss for them, they kill it? At least I hope that's their reasoning and data.
- Gigachad 2y agoWhich is why I just don’t bother integrating any Google products in to my life. They throw random shit at the wall and most of it won’t last a year.
- lenkite 2y agoIf they want to be ruthless, they should also highlight this bold and center at product launch in any Terms & Conditions. This product will be deprecated and shutdown in the future if it doesn't consistently bring in $X billion within $Y quarters and within $Z operating cost. Kindly use at your own risk.
- gadders 2y agoMove fast and break things. Customer good will mainly.
- ngrilly 2y agoI used to think the “killed by Google” meme was exaggerated, but this doesn’t look good. Why go through all the trouble of developing and promoting a VPN service as part of Google One, to eventually shut it down? If Apple is able to do it as part of iCloud, then why not Google? It’s like Google is launching new products without any strategic thinking, to eventually realize the product is not a good fit for them, after having wasted their own resources, and more importantly the time and attention of their customers. Google is slowly but surely destroying their brand. Which is kind of sad.
- robingchan 2y agoI have Google One VPN which comes with the storage, I don't use it. If I were going to use a VPN I'd probably use a different provider even though I have the free access of one. I think it's because of trust - I'm nervous about the fact it's linked to my Google account. Using a separate provider with a virtual credit card and an Apple email relay would be my choice.
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- SXX 2y agoThis really show how Google One subscriptions are useless: * AI features introduced on special plan so f you if paid for yearly 2TB plan. * Features like VPN being removed at will. It's not like their VPN was all that useful due to absolutely unreliability, but if it was working properly I would certainly find some use for it.
- Alifatisk 2y agoAnd I guess my Google One subscription will keep costing the same?
- glimshe 2y agoThe Google One VPN was a silly product all along, given that one of the advantages of using a VPN is to protect yourself from Google's tracking (assumes one doesn't use Chrome)