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OK the pendulum in the tech world is swinging too far towards the "ruthless focus is the way to success" school of thought. I get where it comes from and there'
by easyfrag 14y ago
OK the pendulum in the tech world is swinging too far towards the "ruthless focus is the way to success" school of thought. I get where it comes from and there's certainly some truth to it, but at some point regularly creating products that consumers use and then killing those same products a few years later is also going to do some serious damage to a company and its brand.
Oh look, Google has a product called Currents, maybe I should use this infrastructure to build a workflow or even a business on? But wait a minute this is Google, a company who regularly sacrifices products, even ones with millions of users, on the alter of "Focus". Will this Google product be around a few Springs from now? Then why should I even take the risk of learning to use it and maybe depending on it?
- mmahemoff 14y ago"creating products that consumers use and then killing those same products a few years later" You're right, but this is a product that ran for eight years. It was free, showed all signs of being killed for several years now, and can be migrated to another service. I think Google's brand can survive dropping a few products like this after 8 years if they're not going anywhere...assuming of course they continue to innovate elsewhere.
- ijk 14y agoI am not betting for or against that assumption. I will note that they have nothing as big as search (except maybe YouTube) and Microsoft and Amazon have been competing and rendering ad-supported search irrelevant, respectively.
- saraid216 14y agoI remember when people started saying this about Apps. Why the hell haven't people learned yet?
- mkr-hn 14y agoI'm still not sure what Google Currents is. From what I can tell it's a smartphone/tablet news thing, but I have no way to try it.