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Incidentally, this is why I don't use any Google products other than search. It's never clear to me which ones are real products that are trying to win and make

• bitpush 2y ago
  Business strategy is more than just launch product, make money. Companies operate in a dynamic space, and if you play any game (basketball, chess ..) you know that moving forward at all cost is not how you play the game. Sometimes you side-step, sometimes you take a step back, sometimes you sacrifice your piece. If you expect you team to just go-go-go, you might something in the short term but you'll fail miserably in long-term.
  • chrisandchris 2y ago
    That is totally fine, but Google is a case where they go into new business units and fairly often kill those units quite soon. It's not like they're doing cereals and now they're doing other cereals, so you can fall back to their previous cereals. You always have to find a new supplier, or then just start buying bread.
    • adamc 2y ago
      Yeah, there are so many examples. It's one of the reasons I was unwilling to jump on board Google Stadia... I kept thinking "let's wait and see how it does". Particularly since you had to buy non-transferable game licenses. And, of course, they shut it down. At this point, Google is going to have to be in a space for at least 5 years and clearly be highly successful before I would even think about using them.
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    And I worked at AWS Professional Services and sat in on sales calls all of time where one of our talking points was “a company couldn’t trust Google to not to abandon a service they were going to be dependent on”. Was that partially FUD? Probably. But there were plenty of services sales could point to.
• magicalist 2y ago
  Eh, when it happened the world was ready. It felt like a different internet back then, and it was pretty great for a company to say that everyone was already on github anyways, so let's all go there (Microsoft followed almost the exact same timeline with Codeplex, and really who cares). More Google style would be shortly after shutting down Google Code starting up a new code hosting project, migrating several times to always slightly incompatible frontends requiring developer changes, shutting down the project, and shortly afterwards starting up a new code hosting project...
• 0x1ch 2y ago
  Every project by Google I was willing to jump platforms for, they killed. So outside of email, maps, and search, sometimes voice, they have nothing left that is worth investing time into. It will disappear within a couple years or less.
  • sureIy 2y ago
    Voice? Could easily fold and be sold to Sprint. I’m honestly surprised (and thankful) it’s been working for 15+ years. Completely out of Google character. I hope they forgot about it running on a server under someone’s desk in the basement just below a red stapler.
    • inanutshellus 2y ago
      Presumably because it's still providing value. It was originally about mass collecting voice data so they could train their speech-to-text capabilities with various dialects. Dialects are always in flux and there are plenty of languages out there they haven't conquered, so ... I'd guess they're just leaving it running to detect new speech or languages or dialets or ... personal data gathering or... ?
      • 0x1ch 2y ago
        Man, they collected a lot of prank calls from my younger-self lol.
      • kortilla 2y ago
        Youtube has significantly better voice data
        • aniviacat 2y ago
          The audio quality of Youtube videos is not representative of the audio quality of someone speaking into their phone. The speech patterns also differ heavily, with Youtubers (usually) talking in a presentative manner and speaking very clearly. I think the way people talk in private phone calls, as well as the call audio quality, are much more similar to that of someone speaking to an assistant.
• richardlblair 2y ago
  Unrelated to the thread - do you use any email providers with a custom domain? If so, would you suggest them? Who are they?
  • softfalcon 2y ago
    Fastmail has been solid for the last several years. I would recommend it.
    • queuebert 2y ago
      Fastmail is just about perfect. Feels like email 30 years ago but with a spam filter.
    • datadrivenangel 2y ago
      Also a happy fastmail paying customer. The aliases are really good.
  • dasil003 2y ago
    Fastmail
  • jampekka 2y ago
    You can also use gmail with a custom domain. Helps with not being locked in to Google, doesn't of course help in them selling your data. E.g. https://juri.dev/notes/email-routing-gmail-cloudflare/ https://juri.dev/notes/email-routing-gmail-cloudflare/
  • homebrewer 2y ago
    If you need something cheap and are willing to deal with a tiny company, have a look at <https://purelymail.com https://purelymail.com>. I've been happy with them for two years, never had any problems with delivery, and they support infinite domains/aliases, and custom Sieve rules. But do not use it if you need 99.999999% SLAs or anything like that, because again -- it's a one-man show.
  • jacooper 2y ago
    Proton mail
• dgellow 2y ago
  That's the big question mark I have for Flutter. Looks like a pretty nice platform from the outside, but I cannot see Google NOT killing it
  • saghm 2y ago
    I assumed Flutter is open source; if they fix kill it off, is there a reason to not to expect the community to fork and maintain it? Presumably they'd have to rebrand it without Google giving permission for the name, but that alone doesn't seem like enough to stop it from existing in some form.
    • clhodapp 2y ago
      The base ROI of Flutter to Google isn't all that clear because it's relatively complex to maintain. Worse, it requires maintaining Dart, which appears to be a dead-end language in terms of adoption. If Flutter and Dart were donated to the community, they would most likely slowly die because no one outside of Google gets enough benefit from them to justify maintaining an entire programming language.
      • nox101 2y ago
        It's worse. Flutter actually works against google's own interests. Webpages that render text in a canvas are not as easily indexable as webpages that emit html. It's funny too because the same is true for sites made with flutter. They aren't SEO friendly You could suggest using AI to OCR the canvas but even that would be subpar because most sites that use HTML provide multiple screens worth of info but sites that render to a canvas render only what's visible. The rest of the data is internal. You'd not only need the AI to successfully OCR the text, you'd need it to interact with the page get it to render what's not currently displayed.
        • timschmidt 2y ago
          Accessibility interfaces are ideal for this situation, allowing an LLM to interact with a GUI strictly through text. Unfortunately, they're often an afterthought in implementations.
• jiveturkey 2y ago
  mentioning the sunset of a google products, in general, in any thread about some specific google product, is a kind of godwin's law. because of ordering by vote, we can't see how quickly it happened in this case. in godwin's law the likelihood increases by length of discussion, implying a slow/linear kind of probability, but for google product sunset i would argue that the likelihood ramps up very aggressively from the start. i hereby dub this `jiveturkey's law`. like godwin's law, the subthread becomes a distraction. unlike godwin's law, the sunset distraction is always a legitimate point. it's just that it has become tired.
• grues-dinner 2y ago
  > fun side projects that a multibillion dollar corporation is doing out of the goodness of their hearts Back then it felt like it was actually just possible that they just were that cool. Noughties Google was really something compared to the staid, implacable incumbents. 15GB (with a G!) of email storage that would grow forever! Google Earth! YouTube! Live long enough to see yourself become the villain indeed.
  • ThrowawayR2 2y ago
    Google's leadership made their intentions clear with the purchase of the much reviled DoubleClick in 2007. They didn't become villains; it was always all about the money, just like everyone else.
    • grues-dinner 2y ago
      I think at least at first it was genuinely not villainous. The highly technical founders, I think, did mean it with "Don't Be Evil". PageRank wasn't designed from the start to be a universal panopticon. After all, the global crash hadn't happened, rates weren't zero yet, no one had smartphones, social media wasn't a word, mobile meant J2EE and Symbian, and the now-familiar all-pervasive Silicon Valley financialisation MBA cancer was yet to come. That said, the realisation that "all the data" wasn't just about search index data and book scans did clearly hit for them (or, if that was the plan since 1998, surface) by the mid 00s. DoubleClick was the year after Google Code. They had a good few years of being considered cool and, well, Not Evil. Google Earth was 2001, Gmail, Scholar and Books was 2004, Reader and Gtalk (RIP x 2) 2005, Patents in 2006 and dropping 1.65 billion plus (which sounds trivial now that everyone and their mum's are worth billions for whatever dog-walking app, but not then) on YouTube that year, even though it was only a year old. Mad times, you could barely sign up for a beta before another one landed. The search engine itself was of course revolutionary and peerless. And you could use it on your WAP phone until something called the "iPhone" happened. For those of us who were young and, yes, naive, and who weren't paying attention in the first dot com crash in those newspapers adults read while we played (8 year olds in the 90s rarely using IRC to get the lowdown on Silicon Valley), it seemed like it was possibly a new age. "Going public" in 2004 wasn't yet another obvious "oh here we go again" moments, because they were among the first in the generation, with the pervious generation mostly fizzling before pervasive internet access (Amazon made it, but it was a slower burn). Chrome and Android was 2008, and I remember first hearing around then the phrase "Google Mothership". Though I never stopped using Firefox (and Opera, I don't remember when I switched to Firefox), Chrome was undeniably a technical coup at the time. Being cool and shiny and actually good at being a browser, while kicking that evil Microsoft in the teeth helped too. It took time to burn though that goodwill. Even today, very many otherwise FOSSy people won't move from Chrome.
• iteratethis 2y ago
  As for real products, at Google's current size it has become near impossible to launch new ones worth their time. Google currently has a quarterly revenue of $70-80B. Imagine an internal team launches a new product to collect $100M in quarterly revenue. An earth-shattering success for any entrepreneur. For Google...it doesn't even move the needle. Does nothing for stock, it's not strategic, and may become a liability later on. You would need to launch a multi-billion new sub business for it to be of any interest to Google, which is impossibly hard.
  • nextos 2y ago
    This is why they should go full conglomerate and spin off companies all the time. Otherwise, with those expectations, it's impossible to build something good and impactful.
    • kelnos 2y ago
      I really thought this was what the plan would be when Alphabet was formed.
      • chadcatlett 2y ago
        Google X/X Development LLC is the Google incubator for possible spin-offs as far as I can tell.
    • nh2 2y ago
      What would be the benefit of doing it spun-off vs. in-house when it's still owned by the same company and making the same amount of money?
      • nextos 2y ago
        Less red tape, more freedom to operate. If done inside a conglomerate, it can be the best of both worlds. Access to Google tech and funding, but free from rigid corporate hierarchies, at least at the beginning.
      • 2y ago
• sixo 2y ago
  a simple heuristic: does it make Google a boatload of money? if yes, it's safe
  • rubinelli 2y ago
    Anything besides ads, GCP, and Apps in that bucket?
    • progmetaldev 2y ago
      I won't disagree with you, but can you put ads in the product, and have them be front and center? That also counts as ads.
    • sixo 2y ago
      photos and email, sources of personalization data and AI training data are also part of the ad supply chain
• paradox460 2y ago
  I don't even use search anymore. Kagi schools it
• shiroiushi 2y ago
  Google Maps isn't going anywhere. I'd even argue that it's more important than search; it's far more difficult to switch to a competitor. GMail isn't going anywhere either. YouTube is a bit less clear: it doesn't really have any competitors, and is extremely popular and widespread, but it surely costs a fortune to keep running. It'd be interesting to see the financials on these different business units to see which are the healthiest and which aren't.
  • askvictor 2y ago
    How is it difficult to switch to a maps competitor? Really depends on how much you use it, but most of my use involved looking up a location, then getting directions to it. There's no cost to switching, expect perhaps setting up my commonly used addresses, which are basically in my contacts anyway. I'm sure that there are cases that are harder to switch, but I'd guess that they don't apply to the majority of people. Gmail, on the other hand, like any email service, is much harder to switch. Until we get mandated email address portability, like was done with phone numbers some years back.
    • shiroiushi 2y ago
      >How is it difficult to switch to a maps competitor? >but most of my use involved looking up a location Right, and that's where most of Google Maps' value is: it's really a business directory combined with a navigation system. I'm not going to look up an address for some place, I want to just search for "<business name> near me" and find all the nearby locations and pick one and go there. Even better, Google Maps has reviews built-in so you can see if people hate a certain place. >but I'd guess that they don't apply to the majority of people. If you think the majority of people keep business names and addresses in a contacts list, you're really out of touch. Also, GMaps has features competing systems usually don't, depending on locality. Here in Tokyo, it's tied into the public transportation system so it'll tell you which train lines to ride, which platform to use, which car to ride in, which station exit to use, when a train is delayed, etc. It'll even tell you exactly how much each option costs, since different train lines have different costs. Then, inside many buildings, it'll show you level-by-level what business is on what floor.
• tracker1 2y ago
  I'm still dealing with the fallout of the domains selloff.