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Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. People always talk about how big companies fail because they're unwi

Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. People always talk about how big companies fail because they're unwilling to take risks and just recommit to their areas of strength, but this is what risk-taking looks like - you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that. How many DAUs would stadia or hangouts or even reader have today?

andrewxdiamond 5mo ago
I think the complaint about Google specifically is that they seem to do these things and commit to what seem to be whole lines of business without an actual business plan to make it viable. It’s one thing to take risks. It’s another thing to just guess without a plan.
wrs 5mo ago
This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product. Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object. Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support, and the reliability thereof, is measured in decades. The consumer product attitude is just a bad look, but things like the Railway incident are deal killers.
- antibios 5mo ago
  Reader was dropped in the run up to G+. I believe there was a strategic decision to try and get people to move to G+ and move both personal news and organisational news together.
  - dekhn 5mo ago
    The leadership was never completely honest about why Reader was shutdown, and the stated reasons didn't pass some basic sniff checks. But it was easy to read between the lines: the executives' attention was on other things, and Reader was a threat to their growth. But also it was a passion project that a company like Google would struggle to keep updating since it brought in little revenue (even though there were hordes of people volunteering to maintain it for free in their 20% time).
    - ghaff 5mo ago
      The decline of RSS among a certain audience was only peripherally related to the elimination of Reader; it's not like there aren't other RSS readers out there even if Google makes a convenient villain. But Google did whiff on social in general and certainly indexing the world's information became a very secondary goal especially after failing with some efforts on the copyright front.
- blondin 5mo ago
  Google+ couldn't handle spams. Inbox was an excellent execution. one needed the tech that made Gmail, and the other couldn't co-exist with Gmail? we will never truly know.
  - ghaff 5mo ago
    I would have said Knoll was the bigger fail on the spam front. You can't have unmoderated posting generally.
- ventana 5mo ago
  Well, actually, Google+ circa 2014 was the only social network that had enough of the interesting technical content for me, and I did use it in exactly the way how one would use a decent social network: I posted my content, got comments, and read what other people posted. Some formatting weirdness aside, it was not bad at all, and surely better and quieter, in a good sense, than Facebook back then, and especially than Facebook now. I still have the Takeout archive of my posts, might be a nice time machine experience to parse that huge JSON and read through it. So, yes, I do complain.
  - wrs 5mo ago
    I thought the “circles” idea made total sense and it could have been a good social network, if they had let it do that instead of forcing it into every other part of Google.
KerryJones 5mo ago
Most people would argue that Stadia would have many. Many people loved Google Reader. There are numerous examples of things that were great and were killed, because they hadn't monetized enough or "fast enough", and when you are chasing results on a quarterly basis, you can't always get things that will generate tremendous value with more time.
spicyusername 5mo ago
I don't disagree with your point. It's interesting to imagine if there's some kind of middle ground where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent? I suspect at least some of people's frustration is that X or Y was pitched as something serious, which then grates some when it gets canceled. But maybe you can't launch a product without pretending it's going to be real because it'll be dead on arrival?
- rkagerer 5mo ago
  ...where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent Yeah, it's what Google used to do by releasing everything as "Beta". Gmail was in Beta for 5 years with millions of users.
cyberax 5mo ago
Can you name a good new Google product then? I just can't remember anything recent. I can't even remember any good recent _improvements_ to their core products. If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.
- erwincoumans 5mo ago
  Gemini is pretty good.
  - bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    You're entitled to your opinion, but you're literally the first person I've ever heard say that. Even people who like LLMs seem to think that GPT and Claude are the good ones, with Gemini being B tier at best.
    - amazingamazing 5mo ago
      https://openrouter.ai/rankings https://openrouter.ai/rankings
      - cyberax 5mo ago
        Uhh... It's on the 13-th place in rankings. And way behind in most benchmarks?
        kaashif 5mo ago
        #6 in usage by tokens. It obviously has some use case. My experience is that Gemini is much more token efficient than other models. Measuring tokens is like measuring distance travelled by measuring fuel consumption. I mostly use Codex though, I can't be bothered to have more than one subscription.
    - erwincoumans 5mo ago
      Agreed Gemini maybe not the best, but it is still pretty good. And their research was the foundation of others (Attention is all you need paper).
csallen 5mo ago
I'm sure that Google internally is well aware of the negative press that comes with product shutdowns, and is doing them regardless as a deliberate strategic tradeoff where they believe the benefits outweigh the costs. But it's very difficult to measure the costs, bc the #1 cost is lost trust, and how do you measure that? Many people simply won't sign up for a Google product bc they don't trust it'll be around long enough to justify the investment. These people don't show up in any metrics that you can reason about, and they're the least likely to take any surveys you might send out. At best, Google can guess what the impact is, and they might be wildly underestimating. I think a different strategic decision they could've made (and still could make!) would be to the do the opposite, and prioritize the benefits of keep projects alive over the costs of ruthlessly sunsetting then. They could say, "You know what, we have considerable resources. When we release something new, we're going to dedicate ourselves to keeping it running indefinitely." They wouldn't have to market them, or advertise them, or connect them to every new part of the evolving Google ecosystem, or make them particularly easy to find, or even keep them open to new signups. But just keeping them running as-is, indefinitely, and having customers tell each other, "It's Google, you can trust it, it's not going away," would be such a great PR win.
- janalsncm 5mo ago
  It’s not just the price of keeping the servers humming. You have to pay people to maintain the software. So now you’re paying hundreds or thousands of people to maintain zombie software.
  - csallen 5mo ago
    Yeah, there are costs for sure. But this is "zombie software" with millions, probably tens of millions of users. And Google has ~80,000 engineers? And the company prints an incredible amount of money. I think the real cost/risk here is not financial, but strategic, i.e. preventing a loss of focus.
    - bonesss 5mo ago
      The common critique of Googles actions - the organization has profits, therefore there is no problem engaging in less profitable activities — strikes me as superficial. It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations). Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders. When revenue is directed back into the business the question simply isn’t if the whole business will make money, it’s if this investment is optimally profitable considering all the alternatives. If a support engineer on Google+ generates $X over 5 years, but that same resource would generate $3X working on Gemini then dictating eternal Google+ support is robbing future Google of revenue. Investments need to be individually justified, but also better than the alternatives to make fiscal sense. Even though that sucks for pleased consumers.
Aurornis 5mo ago
> People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that. Not true in the slightest. Google has had some quality hardware products where they killed the cloud service and rendered them useless. Products that were stable and working, but Google decided to pull the plug and make the hardware worthless. Quality of the product means nothing. You’re at the mercy of the whims of Google’s decision making. The thing you like may stop working in a couple months.
- dgoldstein0 5mo ago
  Unfortunately quality and earning money are only loosely correlated - especially for Google when they can pour money into making something good, but baby necessarily figure out how to make it earn. And it also seems if it's not a $100 m+ business they lose interest very quickly. So even good things that could run somewhat cheap of optimized end up with no long term place in the Google ecosystem when they fail to make it big. ... That all said Google kills perfectly good things because they have a few internal rules that encourage it: that there can only be one of a system (dunno if that's applies to product but they seem to always want to consolidate every few years) and that stuff cannot be unowned so reorgs => kill products that don't match the new org structure. That and they incentivize pumping out new products with their promotion process - whether or not they really needed yet another chat/vc/etc product, someone probably figured they could climb the career ladder by shipping another one.
light_hue_1 5mo ago
> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. ... you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't Except that Google kills the products we use! Google Reader had basically the entire community. No one cares when they kill something niche. I don't touch new Google products, they're toxic. And now with AI I can finally stop using their search too. All that will be left is email because it's too much of a commodity.
- soraminazuki 5mo ago
  If anything, email is the #1 priority for de-googling, lest they slop you with a ban. Losing access to your email is so disruptive that migrating to a more trustworthy provider with custom domain support is worth the time and effort of updating addresses.
ajross 5mo ago
> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints Exactly. I mean, you can argue forever about the stuff that got killed. But you know what didn't get killed? All the stuff they're turning into $4.6T of market cap. In particular, they didn't kill AI. They're the only pre-AI tech giant with a successful frontier LLM, everyone else failed (Meta) or missed the boat (Apple, Microsoft[1]). They're the only tech giant[2] to produce working in-house datacenter AI hardware. Making a lot of bets means that you make a lot of bad bets too. But Google has made a lot of good bets. [1] Though MS got near-exclusive access to OpenAI via a very expensive late investment, which sorta counts. [2] NVIDIA is giant now, they certainly weren't when these bets were being placed.
zrn900 5mo ago
> you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. They killed their chat app. Then had their pants on fire after Discord became the thing. The same can happen with any app they killed. So no, that's not 'taking risks'. Taking risks is shutting down perfectly working apps that can suddenly become 'the new thing'.
GCA10 5mo ago
I've come to believe that Big Tech's fondness for launch-and-kill approaches to new products is closely related to the career incentives for both PMs and finance chiefs. Both of them are acting rationally to advance their careers. In tandem, they create a horrifying cycle of death. Product managers win their chops by launching something and winning applause for getting fast adoption in the first few months. Once the boss says "Wow," it's on to a bigger new chance. It's habit-forming to outrun your failures in a system where personal incentives reward ephemeral success. Finance folks win their chops by identifying bits of the company that aren't pulling their (economic) weight. If you haven't delivered $$$ of efficiency savings, why are you even on the payroll? Pulling the plug on small/mid-sized products that have plateaued is the way you get recognition and promotions. CEOs, of course, could change this. But they're the ultimate plate-spinners in a big company, trying to keep up the appearance that they've got everything in control and making sure that neither shareholders nor employees mutiny. As long as they've got a new sizzle story to sell, no one (except users) is there to grieve about what's dying. And users of a product that's less than 1% of revenue can be safely ignored.

andrewxdiamond 5mo ago

I think the complaint about Google specifically is that they seem to do these things and commit to what seem to be whole lines of business without an actual business plan to make it viable. It’s one thing to take risks. It’s another thing to just guess without a plan.

wrs 5mo ago

This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product. Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object. Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support, and the reliability thereof, is measured in decades. The consumer product attitude is just a bad look, but things like the Railway incident are deal killers.

antibios 5mo ago
Reader was dropped in the run up to G+. I believe there was a strategic decision to try and get people to move to G+ and move both personal news and organisational news together.
- dekhn 5mo ago
  The leadership was never completely honest about why Reader was shutdown, and the stated reasons didn't pass some basic sniff checks. But it was easy to read between the lines: the executives' attention was on other things, and Reader was a threat to their growth. But also it was a passion project that a company like Google would struggle to keep updating since it brought in little revenue (even though there were hordes of people volunteering to maintain it for free in their 20% time).
  - ghaff 5mo ago
    The decline of RSS among a certain audience was only peripherally related to the elimination of Reader; it's not like there aren't other RSS readers out there even if Google makes a convenient villain. But Google did whiff on social in general and certainly indexing the world's information became a very secondary goal especially after failing with some efforts on the copyright front.
blondin 5mo ago
Google+ couldn't handle spams. Inbox was an excellent execution. one needed the tech that made Gmail, and the other couldn't co-exist with Gmail? we will never truly know.
- ghaff 5mo ago
  I would have said Knoll was the bigger fail on the spam front. You can't have unmoderated posting generally.
ventana 5mo ago
Well, actually, Google+ circa 2014 was the only social network that had enough of the interesting technical content for me, and I did use it in exactly the way how one would use a decent social network: I posted my content, got comments, and read what other people posted. Some formatting weirdness aside, it was not bad at all, and surely better and quieter, in a good sense, than Facebook back then, and especially than Facebook now. I still have the Takeout archive of my posts, might be a nice time machine experience to parse that huge JSON and read through it. So, yes, I do complain.
- wrs 5mo ago
  I thought the “circles” idea made total sense and it could have been a good social network, if they had let it do that instead of forcing it into every other part of Google.

KerryJones 5mo ago

Most people would argue that Stadia would have many. Many people loved Google Reader. There are numerous examples of things that were great and were killed, because they hadn't monetized enough or "fast enough", and when you are chasing results on a quarterly basis, you can't always get things that will generate tremendous value with more time.

spicyusername 5mo ago

I don't disagree with your point. It's interesting to imagine if there's some kind of middle ground where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent? I suspect at least some of people's frustration is that X or Y was pitched as something serious, which then grates some when it gets canceled. But maybe you can't launch a product without pretending it's going to be real because it'll be dead on arrival?

rkagerer 5mo ago
...where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent Yeah, it's what Google used to do by releasing everything as "Beta". Gmail was in Beta for 5 years with millions of users.

cyberax 5mo ago

Can you name a good new Google product then? I just can't remember anything recent. I can't even remember any good recent _improvements_ to their core products. If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.

erwincoumans 5mo ago
Gemini is pretty good.
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
  You're entitled to your opinion, but you're literally the first person I've ever heard say that. Even people who like LLMs seem to think that GPT and Claude are the good ones, with Gemini being B tier at best.
  - amazingamazing 5mo ago
    https://openrouter.ai/rankings https://openrouter.ai/rankings
    - cyberax 5mo ago
      Uhh... It's on the 13-th place in rankings. And way behind in most benchmarks?
      - kaashif 5mo ago
        #6 in usage by tokens. It obviously has some use case. My experience is that Gemini is much more token efficient than other models. Measuring tokens is like measuring distance travelled by measuring fuel consumption. I mostly use Codex though, I can't be bothered to have more than one subscription.
  - erwincoumans 5mo ago
    Agreed Gemini maybe not the best, but it is still pretty good. And their research was the foundation of others (Attention is all you need paper).

csallen 5mo ago

I'm sure that Google internally is well aware of the negative press that comes with product shutdowns, and is doing them regardless as a deliberate strategic tradeoff where they believe the benefits outweigh the costs. But it's very difficult to measure the costs, bc the #1 cost is lost trust, and how do you measure that? Many people simply won't sign up for a Google product bc they don't trust it'll be around long enough to justify the investment. These people don't show up in any metrics that you can reason about, and they're the least likely to take any surveys you might send out. At best, Google can guess what the impact is, and they might be wildly underestimating. I think a different strategic decision they could've made (and still could make!) would be to the do the opposite, and prioritize the benefits of keep projects alive over the costs of ruthlessly sunsetting then. They could say, "You know what, we have considerable resources. When we release something new, we're going to dedicate ourselves to keeping it running indefinitely." They wouldn't have to market them, or advertise them, or connect them to every new part of the evolving Google ecosystem, or make them particularly easy to find, or even keep them open to new signups. But just keeping them running as-is, indefinitely, and having customers tell each other, "It's Google, you can trust it, it's not going away," would be such a great PR win.

janalsncm 5mo ago
It’s not just the price of keeping the servers humming. You have to pay people to maintain the software. So now you’re paying hundreds or thousands of people to maintain zombie software.
- csallen 5mo ago
  Yeah, there are costs for sure. But this is "zombie software" with millions, probably tens of millions of users. And Google has ~80,000 engineers? And the company prints an incredible amount of money. I think the real cost/risk here is not financial, but strategic, i.e. preventing a loss of focus.
  - bonesss 5mo ago
    The common critique of Googles actions - the organization has profits, therefore there is no problem engaging in less profitable activities — strikes me as superficial. It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations). Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders. When revenue is directed back into the business the question simply isn’t if the whole business will make money, it’s if this investment is optimally profitable considering all the alternatives. If a support engineer on Google+ generates $X over 5 years, but that same resource would generate $3X working on Gemini then dictating eternal Google+ support is robbing future Google of revenue. Investments need to be individually justified, but also better than the alternatives to make fiscal sense. Even though that sucks for pleased consumers.

Aurornis 5mo ago

> People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that. Not true in the slightest. Google has had some quality hardware products where they killed the cloud service and rendered them useless. Products that were stable and working, but Google decided to pull the plug and make the hardware worthless. Quality of the product means nothing. You’re at the mercy of the whims of Google’s decision making. The thing you like may stop working in a couple months.

dgoldstein0 5mo ago
Unfortunately quality and earning money are only loosely correlated - especially for Google when they can pour money into making something good, but baby necessarily figure out how to make it earn. And it also seems if it's not a $100 m+ business they lose interest very quickly. So even good things that could run somewhat cheap of optimized end up with no long term place in the Google ecosystem when they fail to make it big. ... That all said Google kills perfectly good things because they have a few internal rules that encourage it: that there can only be one of a system (dunno if that's applies to product but they seem to always want to consolidate every few years) and that stuff cannot be unowned so reorgs => kill products that don't match the new org structure. That and they incentivize pumping out new products with their promotion process - whether or not they really needed yet another chat/vc/etc product, someone probably figured they could climb the career ladder by shipping another one.

light_hue_1 5mo ago

> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. ... you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't Except that Google kills the products we use! Google Reader had basically the entire community. No one cares when they kill something niche. I don't touch new Google products, they're toxic. And now with AI I can finally stop using their search too. All that will be left is email because it's too much of a commodity.

soraminazuki 5mo ago
If anything, email is the #1 priority for de-googling, lest they slop you with a ban. Losing access to your email is so disruptive that migrating to a more trustworthy provider with custom domain support is worth the time and effort of updating addresses.

ajross 5mo ago

> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints Exactly. I mean, you can argue forever about the stuff that got killed. But you know what didn't get killed? All the stuff they're turning into $4.6T of market cap. In particular, they didn't kill AI. They're the only pre-AI tech giant with a successful frontier LLM, everyone else failed (Meta) or missed the boat (Apple, Microsoft[1]). They're the only tech giant[2] to produce working in-house datacenter AI hardware. Making a lot of bets means that you make a lot of bad bets too. But Google has made a lot of good bets. [1] Though MS got near-exclusive access to OpenAI via a very expensive late investment, which sorta counts. [2] NVIDIA is giant now, they certainly weren't when these bets were being placed.

zrn900 5mo ago

> you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. They killed their chat app. Then had their pants on fire after Discord became the thing. The same can happen with any app they killed. So no, that's not 'taking risks'. Taking risks is shutting down perfectly working apps that can suddenly become 'the new thing'.

GCA10 5mo ago

I've come to believe that Big Tech's fondness for launch-and-kill approaches to new products is closely related to the career incentives for both PMs and finance chiefs. Both of them are acting rationally to advance their careers. In tandem, they create a horrifying cycle of death. Product managers win their chops by launching something and winning applause for getting fast adoption in the first few months. Once the boss says "Wow," it's on to a bigger new chance. It's habit-forming to outrun your failures in a system where personal incentives reward ephemeral success. Finance folks win their chops by identifying bits of the company that aren't pulling their (economic) weight. If you haven't delivered $$$ of efficiency savings, why are you even on the payroll? Pulling the plug on small/mid-sized products that have plateaued is the way you get recognition and promotions. CEOs, of course, could change this. But they're the ultimate plate-spinners in a big company, trying to keep up the appearance that they've got everything in control and making sure that neither shareholders nor employees mutiny. As long as they've got a new sizzle story to sell, no one (except users) is there to grieve about what's dying. And users of a product that's less than 1% of revenue can be safely ignored.