5 ms·

> Remains to be seen how well they will be able to productize and market The challenge is trust. Google is one of the leaders in AI and are home to incredibly

> Remains to be seen how well they will be able to productize and market The challenge is trust. Google is one of the leaders in AI and are home to incredibly talented developers. But they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products. It's hard to justify committing developers and money to a product when there's a good chance you'll just have to pivot again once they get bored. Say what you will about Microsoft, but at least I can rely on their obsession with supporting outdated products.

egeozcan 2y ago
> they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products Incredibly bad track record of supporting products that don't grow. I'm not saying this to defend Google, I'm still (perhaps unreasonably) angry because of Reader, it's just that there is a pattern and AI isn't likely to fit that for a long while.
- RandomThoughts3 2y ago
  I’m sad for reader but it was a somewhat niche product. Inbox I can’t forgive. It was insanely good and was killed because it was a threat to Gmail. My main issue with Google is that internal politic affects users all the time. See the debacle of anything built on top of Android and being treated as a second citizen. You can’t trust a company which can’t shield users from its internal politics. It means nothing is aligned correctly for users to be taken seriously.
  - kanzenryu2 2y ago
    Google reader was killed because there was only one guy who knew how to support it
    - troupo 2y ago
      And that is a problem for a company with 20k employees? No, Reader was killed because it: - was free - didn't contribute to revenue growth from ads
      - creesch 2y ago
        > And that is a problem for a company with 20k employees? It is for a company where the promotion culture rewards new initiatives and products and doesn't reward people maintaining products. Which was most certainly the company culture around the time reader was killed.
    - thibaut_barrere 2y ago
      If anything, this adds meat to the fact it can be understandable that people do not trust Google with products longevity. Bus factor et al. is literally CS 101.
  - FezzikTheGiant 2y ago
    would you be willing to pay for something that essentially is google inbox - but a separate web view client with more personalization/better search?
- mannycalavera42 2y ago
  not going to miss the opportunity to upvote on the grief of having lost Reader
- msabalau 2y ago
  Yeah, either AI is significant, in which case Google isn't going to kill it. Or AI is a bubble, in any of the alternatives one might pick can easily crash and die long before Google ends of life anything. This isn't some minor consumer play, like a random tablet or Stadia. Anyone who has paying attention would have noticed that AI has been an important, consistent, long term strategic interest of Google's for a very long time. They've been killing off the fail/minor products to invest in this.
- esafak 2y ago
  Why would they grow if they don't vocally support them? Launch and hope for the best does not work; it's not the wild west on the Internet any more.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  > products that don't grow. I think we all acknowledge this. The question is seldom "why" they kill it (I'd argue ultimately it doesn't matter), it's about how fast and what they offer as a migration path for those who boarded the train. That also means the minute Gemini stops looking like a growing product it's gone from this world, where Microsoft backed alternatives have a fighting chance to get some leeway to recover or pivot.
  - mnau 2y ago
    Yeah, MS Azure DevOps is still alive, though stagnant. I thought everyone would be moved to GitHub in few years after MS acquired GitHub. Yet here we are, 6 years later.
    - aryonoco 2y ago
      I can guarantee that DevOps will still be around and functional in 2030. It won't have new features but it will still be supported. Microsoft bought FoxBase in 1992. FoxPro never took the world by storm but it had a dedicated group of devs and ISVs who used it and it solved their needs. The last version was released in 2004, long after Microsoft had released.Net and C# and SQL Server. Microsoft officially ended support for it in 2015. Google? If the product doesn't become an instant #1 or #2 in its market and doesn't directly contribute to their bottom line in a way which can be itemised in their earnings call, it's gone in less than 3 years guaranteed.
- Teever 2y ago
  It's more nuanced than that. Like how many different instant messengers did they make at the same time only to abandon them all instead of just making one and supporting it?
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  > Incredibly bad track record of supporting products that don't grow. That's irrelevant to me as a user if I've already invested my time into the product. To an extent all companies do it. Google just does it much more, to a degree that I tend to ignore most Google's launches because of this uncertainty.
- nanna 2y ago
  Please can we just get over Reader. Please. Yes it was devastating for RSS, but the debacle took place eleven years ago. Enough.
  - egeozcan 2y ago
    You are not wrong, but my irrational mind is unlikely to take your advice. Try treating it as a meme, rather than anything belonging to a sane discussion. For me, I don't think I'll ever get over it. I'm sorry.
  - aryonoco 2y ago
    No we can't cause it was absolutely a turning point in Google's trajectory. After Reader, it was Currents, Google TV, Picasa, Google Now, Spaces, Chromecast Audio,Inbox, GCM, Nest, Fusion Tables, Google Cloud Print, Google Play Music, Google Bookmarks, Chrome Apps, G Suite.... Reader keeps coming up because after Reader, Google's motto turned into "Do be Evil"
- michaelt 2y ago
  > Incredibly bad track record of supporting products that don't grow. [...] AI isn't likely to fit that for a long while. Have you seen Google Bard anywhere recently? Me neither :)
  - egeozcan 2y ago
    As far as I know, they just renamed it to Gemini. Now I'm not sure if are you arguing that a name change is not supporting a product or that Gemini is a different product with a different feature set?
TIPSIO 2y ago
Yes. Imagine Google banning your entire Google account / Gmail because you violated their gray area AI terms ([1] or [2]). Or, one of your users did via an app you made using an API key and their models. With that being said, I am extremely bullish on Google AI for a long time. I imagine they land at being the best and cheapest for the foreseeable future. [1] https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai [2] https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai/use-policy https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai/use-policy
- estebarb 2y ago
  For me that is a reason for not touching anything from Google for building stuff. I can afford lossing my Amazon account, but Google's one would be too much. At least they should be clear in their terms that getting banned at cloud doesn't mean getting banned from Gmail/Docs/Photos...
  - bippihippi1 2y ago
    why not just make a business / project account?
    - rtsil 2y ago
      That won't help. Their TOS and policies are vague enough that they can terminate all accounts you own (under "Use of multiple accounts for abuse" for instance).
      - TIPSIO 2y ago
        To be fair, I believe this is reserved for things like fighting fraud.
        YetAnotherNick 2y ago
        Even if it is warranted on their part, the 1% false positive will be detrimental to those affected. And we all know there is no way to reach out to them in case the account is automatically flagged.
fluoridation 2y ago
>Say what you will about Microsoft, but at least I can rely on their obsession with supporting outdated products. Eh... I don't know about that. Their tech graveyard isn't as populous as Google's, but it's hardly empty. A few that come to mind: ATL, MFC, Silverlight, UWP.
- bri3d 2y ago
  Besides Silverlight (which was supported all the way until the end of 2021!), you can still not only run but _write new applications_ using all of the listed technologies.
  - fluoridation 2y ago
    That doesn't constitute support when it comes to development platforms. They've not received any updates in years or decades. What they've done is simply not remove the capability build capability from the toolchains. That is, not even the work that would be required to no longer support them in any way. Compare that to C#, which has evolved rapidly over the same time period.
    - Fidelix 2y ago
      That's different from "killing" the product / technology, which is what Google does.
      - fluoridation 2y ago
        Only because they operate different businesses. Google is primarily a service provider. They have few software products that are not designed to integrate with their servers. Many of Microsoft's businesses work fundamentally differently. There's nothing Microsoft could do to Windows to disable all MFC applications and only MFC applications, and if there was it would involve more work than simply not doing anything else with MFC.
        px1999 2y ago
dotancohen 2y ago
> Google is one of the leaders in AI and are home to incredibly talented developers. But they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products. This is why we've stayed with Anthropic. Every single person I work with on my current project is sore at Google for discontinuing one product or another - and not a single one of them mentioned Reader. We do run some non-customer facing assets in Google Cloud. But the website and API are on AWS.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Just to drive the point home. I made the parent comment five days ago. Today I searched Google for "google-cloud-skd vs google-cloud-cli", the top result was this page from two years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/wpq0eg/what_is_the_difference_googlecloudsdk_vs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/wpq0eg/what_is... The top comment in that page is: > CLI is the new name for the SDK.The reasoning and strategy was explained in great detail in this podcast: > https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5mZWVkYnVybmVyLmNvbS9HY3BQb2RjYXN0/episode/NTI5ZTM5ODAtYjYzOC00ODQxLWI3NDAtODJiMTQyMDMxNThj?ep=14 So I click that link, and I'm greeted with: > Google Podcasts is no longer available > Listen to podcasts and build your library in the YouTube Music app. This is why AWS and Anthropic are getting our money. We can not trust that Google projects will survive as long as our business needs.
bastardoperator 2y ago
Putting your trust in Google is a fools errand. I don't know anyone that doesn't have a story.
- meta_x_ai 2y ago
  Google has 4 Billion users. It's delusional to think that you don't know anyone or you live in an incredibly small bubble
  - owlninja 2y ago
    Yea the only stories I ever see are ones that bubble up to HN. Often they are very one-sided as well. Not saying it hasn't happened, but let's not pretend it's rampant.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> But they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products. I don't know about that: my wife built her first SME on Google Workspace / GSuite / Google Apps for domain (this thing changed names so many times I lost track). She's now running her second company on Google tools, again. All she needs is a browser. At one point I switched her from Windows to OS X. Then from OS X to Ubuntu. Now I just installed Debian GNU/Linux on her desktop: she fires up a browser and opens up Google's GMail / GSuite / spreadsheets and does everything from there. She's a happy paying customer of Google products since a great many years and there's actually phone support for paying customers. I honestly don't have many bad things to say. It works fine. 2FA is top notch. It's a much better experience than being stuck in the Windows "Updating... 35%" "here's an ad on your taskbar" "you're computer is now slow for no reason" world. I don't think they'l pull the plug on GSuite: it's powering millions and millions of paying SMEs around the world.
boringg 2y ago
Can I add they have a bad track record of supporting new products. Gmail, google, gsuite seem to be well supported.
RevertBusload 2y ago
Surface Duo would like to have a word

egeozcan 2y ago

> they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products Incredibly bad track record of supporting products that don't grow. I'm not saying this to defend Google, I'm still (perhaps unreasonably) angry because of Reader, it's just that there is a pattern and AI isn't likely to fit that for a long while.

RandomThoughts3 2y ago
I’m sad for reader but it was a somewhat niche product. Inbox I can’t forgive. It was insanely good and was killed because it was a threat to Gmail. My main issue with Google is that internal politic affects users all the time. See the debacle of anything built on top of Android and being treated as a second citizen. You can’t trust a company which can’t shield users from its internal politics. It means nothing is aligned correctly for users to be taken seriously.
- kanzenryu2 2y ago
  Google reader was killed because there was only one guy who knew how to support it
  - troupo 2y ago
    And that is a problem for a company with 20k employees? No, Reader was killed because it: - was free - didn't contribute to revenue growth from ads
    - creesch 2y ago
      > And that is a problem for a company with 20k employees? It is for a company where the promotion culture rewards new initiatives and products and doesn't reward people maintaining products. Which was most certainly the company culture around the time reader was killed.
  - thibaut_barrere 2y ago
    If anything, this adds meat to the fact it can be understandable that people do not trust Google with products longevity. Bus factor et al. is literally CS 101.
- FezzikTheGiant 2y ago
  would you be willing to pay for something that essentially is google inbox - but a separate web view client with more personalization/better search?
mannycalavera42 2y ago
not going to miss the opportunity to upvote on the grief of having lost Reader
msabalau 2y ago
Yeah, either AI is significant, in which case Google isn't going to kill it. Or AI is a bubble, in any of the alternatives one might pick can easily crash and die long before Google ends of life anything. This isn't some minor consumer play, like a random tablet or Stadia. Anyone who has paying attention would have noticed that AI has been an important, consistent, long term strategic interest of Google's for a very long time. They've been killing off the fail/minor products to invest in this.
esafak 2y ago
Why would they grow if they don't vocally support them? Launch and hope for the best does not work; it's not the wild west on the Internet any more.
makeitdouble 2y ago
> products that don't grow. I think we all acknowledge this. The question is seldom "why" they kill it (I'd argue ultimately it doesn't matter), it's about how fast and what they offer as a migration path for those who boarded the train. That also means the minute Gemini stops looking like a growing product it's gone from this world, where Microsoft backed alternatives have a fighting chance to get some leeway to recover or pivot.
- mnau 2y ago
  Yeah, MS Azure DevOps is still alive, though stagnant. I thought everyone would be moved to GitHub in few years after MS acquired GitHub. Yet here we are, 6 years later.
  - aryonoco 2y ago
    I can guarantee that DevOps will still be around and functional in 2030. It won't have new features but it will still be supported. Microsoft bought FoxBase in 1992. FoxPro never took the world by storm but it had a dedicated group of devs and ISVs who used it and it solved their needs. The last version was released in 2004, long after Microsoft had released.Net and C# and SQL Server. Microsoft officially ended support for it in 2015. Google? If the product doesn't become an instant #1 or #2 in its market and doesn't directly contribute to their bottom line in a way which can be itemised in their earnings call, it's gone in less than 3 years guaranteed.
Teever 2y ago
It's more nuanced than that. Like how many different instant messengers did they make at the same time only to abandon them all instead of just making one and supporting it?
The_Colonel 2y ago
> Incredibly bad track record of supporting products that don't grow. That's irrelevant to me as a user if I've already invested my time into the product. To an extent all companies do it. Google just does it much more, to a degree that I tend to ignore most Google's launches because of this uncertainty.
nanna 2y ago
Please can we just get over Reader. Please. Yes it was devastating for RSS, but the debacle took place eleven years ago. Enough.
- egeozcan 2y ago
  You are not wrong, but my irrational mind is unlikely to take your advice. Try treating it as a meme, rather than anything belonging to a sane discussion. For me, I don't think I'll ever get over it. I'm sorry.
- aryonoco 2y ago
  No we can't cause it was absolutely a turning point in Google's trajectory. After Reader, it was Currents, Google TV, Picasa, Google Now, Spaces, Chromecast Audio,Inbox, GCM, Nest, Fusion Tables, Google Cloud Print, Google Play Music, Google Bookmarks, Chrome Apps, G Suite.... Reader keeps coming up because after Reader, Google's motto turned into "Do be Evil"
michaelt 2y ago
> Incredibly bad track record of supporting products that don't grow. [...] AI isn't likely to fit that for a long while. Have you seen Google Bard anywhere recently? Me neither :)
- egeozcan 2y ago
  As far as I know, they just renamed it to Gemini. Now I'm not sure if are you arguing that a name change is not supporting a product or that Gemini is a different product with a different feature set?

TIPSIO 2y ago

Yes. Imagine Google banning your entire Google account / Gmail because you violated their gray area AI terms ([1] or [2]). Or, one of your users did via an app you made using an API key and their models. With that being said, I am extremely bullish on Google AI for a long time. I imagine they land at being the best and cheapest for the foreseeable future. [1] https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai [2] https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai/use-policy https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai/use-policy

estebarb 2y ago
For me that is a reason for not touching anything from Google for building stuff. I can afford lossing my Amazon account, but Google's one would be too much. At least they should be clear in their terms that getting banned at cloud doesn't mean getting banned from Gmail/Docs/Photos...
- bippihippi1 2y ago
  why not just make a business / project account?
  - rtsil 2y ago
    That won't help. Their TOS and policies are vague enough that they can terminate all accounts you own (under "Use of multiple accounts for abuse" for instance).
    - TIPSIO 2y ago
      To be fair, I believe this is reserved for things like fighting fraud.
      - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
        Even if it is warranted on their part, the 1% false positive will be detrimental to those affected. And we all know there is no way to reach out to them in case the account is automatically flagged.

fluoridation 2y ago

>Say what you will about Microsoft, but at least I can rely on their obsession with supporting outdated products. Eh... I don't know about that. Their tech graveyard isn't as populous as Google's, but it's hardly empty. A few that come to mind: ATL, MFC, Silverlight, UWP.

bri3d 2y ago
Besides Silverlight (which was supported all the way until the end of 2021!), you can still not only run but _write new applications_ using all of the listed technologies.
- fluoridation 2y ago
  That doesn't constitute support when it comes to development platforms. They've not received any updates in years or decades. What they've done is simply not remove the capability build capability from the toolchains. That is, not even the work that would be required to no longer support them in any way. Compare that to C#, which has evolved rapidly over the same time period.
  - Fidelix 2y ago
    That's different from "killing" the product / technology, which is what Google does.
    - fluoridation 2y ago
      Only because they operate different businesses. Google is primarily a service provider. They have few software products that are not designed to integrate with their servers. Many of Microsoft's businesses work fundamentally differently. There's nothing Microsoft could do to Windows to disable all MFC applications and only MFC applications, and if there was it would involve more work than simply not doing anything else with MFC.
      - px1999 2y ago

dotancohen 2y ago

> Google is one of the leaders in AI and are home to incredibly talented developers. But they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products. This is why we've stayed with Anthropic. Every single person I work with on my current project is sore at Google for discontinuing one product or another - and not a single one of them mentioned Reader. We do run some non-customer facing assets in Google Cloud. But the website and API are on AWS.

dotancohen 2y ago
Just to drive the point home. I made the parent comment five days ago. Today I searched Google for "google-cloud-skd vs google-cloud-cli", the top result was this page from two years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/wpq0eg/what_is_the_difference_googlecloudsdk_vs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/wpq0eg/what_is... The top comment in that page is: > CLI is the new name for the SDK.The reasoning and strategy was explained in great detail in this podcast: > https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5mZWVkYnVybmVyLmNvbS9HY3BQb2RjYXN0/episode/NTI5ZTM5ODAtYjYzOC00ODQxLWI3NDAtODJiMTQyMDMxNThj?ep=14 So I click that link, and I'm greeted with: > Google Podcasts is no longer available > Listen to podcasts and build your library in the YouTube Music app. This is why AWS and Anthropic are getting our money. We can not trust that Google projects will survive as long as our business needs.

bastardoperator 2y ago

Putting your trust in Google is a fools errand. I don't know anyone that doesn't have a story.

meta_x_ai 2y ago
Google has 4 Billion users. It's delusional to think that you don't know anyone or you live in an incredibly small bubble
- owlninja 2y ago
  Yea the only stories I ever see are ones that bubble up to HN. Often they are very one-sided as well. Not saying it hasn't happened, but let's not pretend it's rampant.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> But they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products. I don't know about that: my wife built her first SME on Google Workspace / GSuite / Google Apps for domain (this thing changed names so many times I lost track). She's now running her second company on Google tools, again. All she needs is a browser. At one point I switched her from Windows to OS X. Then from OS X to Ubuntu. Now I just installed Debian GNU/Linux on her desktop: she fires up a browser and opens up Google's GMail / GSuite / spreadsheets and does everything from there. She's a happy paying customer of Google products since a great many years and there's actually phone support for paying customers. I honestly don't have many bad things to say. It works fine. 2FA is top notch. It's a much better experience than being stuck in the Windows "Updating... 35%" "here's an ad on your taskbar" "you're computer is now slow for no reason" world. I don't think they'l pull the plug on GSuite: it's powering millions and millions of paying SMEs around the world.

boringg 2y ago

Can I add they have a bad track record of supporting new products. Gmail, google, gsuite seem to be well supported.

RevertBusload 2y ago

Surface Duo would like to have a word