
Google is shutting down Neighbourly - ykm
https://support.google.com/neighbourly/answer/9756228?ref_topic=9757368
======
alephnan
What I would like to see from Google's leaders:

First, put a halt to launching new products. Two, take a cold hard look at
existing products and prune them in one fell swoop, rather than this
distributed system where projects scale up and down independently, spread
across time. It seems individuals are incentivized to launch irregardless if
anyone actually cared about that product launching. It's really hard for the
orchestration node to say No to projects where there are so many other
projects launching that it would seem unfair.

Effectively, saying NO. Just my two cents.

~~~
TheAceOfHearts
Alphabet employed a total of 118,899 people in 2019 [0], out of which 114,096
were at Google [1]. I've never worked at such a large tech company, but I
imagine there's tons of challenges with coordination at their scale. I'd
conjecture that Google behaves like a distributed system because that's how it
actually operates internally. There probably isn't a single orchestration node
responsible for all project launches.

Heck, Google is so big that they're often in direct competition with their
other services and products. For example, they're currently developing three
different operating systems: Android, Chrome OS, and Fuschia.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google)

~~~
flarg
Totally. Accenture has more than 500k people and they have a mess of
duplicated service offerings started by the strategy and consulting teams and
the ones with most sales go on their website for as long as they survive.

------
slyall
I thought it was pretty popular in New Zealand. But the NZ company seems
unrelated to Google.

[https://www.neighbourly.co.nz/about-us](https://www.neighbourly.co.nz/about-
us)

------
RestlessMind
I have started viewing Google as a miniature SV - a handful of "yugely
successful" products, lots of wtf-inducing initiatives, talks about changing
the world with a straight face while showing utter lack of imagination...so it
is not really surprising that a lot of their initiatives fail, just like a lot
of SV startups.

~~~
Axsuul
Usually it's the most imaginative startups that are more likely to fail since
they are often ahead of their time. Google has plenty of moonshot initiatives
going for them that are full of imagination.

~~~
heavenlyblue
Being ahead of your time is not a sign of intelligence; it is a merely a sign
of inability to adapt.

The fact that being ahead of one’s time is often associated with misunderstood
geniuses has more to do that those geniuses had severe lack of skills outside
their brilliance

------
notRobot
[https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

[https://gcemetery.co/](https://gcemetery.co/)

~~~
Polylactic_acid
Why does that website list angularjs as killed since it has just been updated
with a slightly changed name. Might as well list old versions of android as
killed by google.

~~~
plorkyeran
Angular 2+ is an entirely different framework made by the same team which
reused the name of their previous project for marketing purposes. It's like if
Google released Fuchsia as Android 2.

~~~
elcomet
It's more like python 2 -> python3. It's very similar, but different enough to
make the transition painful.

------
wyxuan
Seems like it was too similar to the nextdoor business model to succeed, which
is a shame because nextdoor is just a green version of FB that lacks a lot of
the features

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drewcoo
Ironic timing. Keep your distance from those neighbors!

------
causality0
Frankly I think the only Google products that are safe from being Old Yeller'd
are ones so ingrained in our society their attempted cancellation would likely
result in an act of Congress. Have we started a deathwatch for Google Fi yet?

~~~
ehsankia
Your comment doesn't really make sense. They graduated from "Project Fi" to
"Google Fi" just a year ago; why would they go all out and bring it into
Google branding if it was on death watch?

Neighborly, just like 99% of the stuff on Killed By Google, was free product
that never left beta. It amazes me that people on HN still confuse paid
products like Stadia and Fi with huge infrastructure and userbase with these
small experimental Android apps...

~~~
ajayyy
They killed and deleted data from Google plus just recently. Tons of data gone
forever. Google plus used to be integrated into every part of Google.

~~~
jasonvorhe
After they kept it running for 8(!) years.

~~~
ehsankia
And while it was a large product in terms of user base, it still was a free
product. The paid G-Suite version on the other hand still exists and runs just
fine, although rebranded to Currents.

------
schappim
Google also canceled april fools day.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Thank you Google for hearing my plea!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22691443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22691443)

------
shaneprrlt
Never heard of Neighbourly, judging by the spelling, perhaps it wasn't
available in the US??? But I would suggest Nextdoor as an alternative if it's
available in your region. A ton of people are active on it (at least here in
Chicago and I assume most major metros), and it's been a great way to
coordinate community efforts. I've seen it used to warn people of crime
trends, and lately I've seen it used to coordinate efforts to help elderly
people get groceries. Most of all, the discourse is incredibly positive and
healthy compared to other social networks.

~~~
jbarberu
Granted, I have not been on facebook in the past few years but Nextdoor looked
pretty similar in level of rantiness and fearmongering/racism. Could be the
people in Central Florida though, don't know. Was shocked by the amount of
East Asian targeted racism on Twitter the other day, not surprised but shocked
:(

------
gundmc
Now's the part where we all act outraged and link the "Killed by Google"
website despite never hearing of let alone using this Beta app before.

~~~
BoorishBears
The app has over 10 million installs on Android alone.

Alphabet has 117 BILLION DOLLARS cash on hand.

Why is it worth screwing over how ever few people were using this?

Let's say a team to maintain an app like this cost 2 million dollars a year.

For 1 ten thousandth of their cash of hand, they could fund this app for 5
times longer than Homo sapiens have walked on earth. 1.1 million years.

Even if Google shuttering apps is just a meme, why is it even worth feeding
the meme when you have such mind bending amounts of money and revenue?

-

Of course the answer people will reply with is "they have better things to do
with the resources".

That's the mentality that makes people not trust Google.

When you have such mind bending amounts of money, something can be successful
by the standards of mere mortals and an embarrassment to Alphabet. No one
wants to rely on a company that sees your money as a joke and will gladly pull
the rug under you.

This app is a perfect example, what kind valuation do you think an app with 10
million installs for neighborhood engagement would see? We don't have DAUs,
but you could literally value a listing with 10 million users in the millions.

~~~
kovac
The problem with this reasoning is that the numbers will start to look a lot
less practical if we consider the total number of projects Google has shut
down. If we applied this reasoning each time, they'll be out of cash a lot
sooner than your estimate.

I'm all for abandoning projects that makes no sense to maintain. But if this
happens too often, then somewhere along the decision chain people are missing
the mark on what's worth building and supporting. In Google's case, they
should probably put a bit more thought into it before releasing something to
the public. This situation, to me, is a sign of overconfidence among Google
workers about their abilities. In humbler places, they do side projects too
but before they start them there's a lot of discussion about the purpose of
the project beyond the code and the value it brings. When I saw the list of
projects Google had killed, most of those projects looked plain boring to work
on and seemed like undergraduate projects. Then again, may be it's it's own
strategy to build as many stuff as you can quickly hoping some of them might
take off.

~~~
1024core
> _But if this happens too often, then somewhere along the decision chain
> people are missing the mark on what 's worth building and supporting. In
> Google's case, they should probably put a bit more thought into it before
> releasing something to the public. This situation, to me, is a sign of
> overconfidence among Google workers about their abilities._

From what I hear, it's the internal performance evaluation and promotion
processes at work here. People are rewarded for "launching" products. Once a
product launches, backs are slapped, promotions are had, and everyone moves
on. There are no clawbacks if the project fails; the fact that it launched is
all they care about. This is why there are so many little projects which
launch, flounder and then are turned off.

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GoOnThenDoTell
Add it to the list

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thasaleni
The only difference between Google and any other private company is that
Google publicizes it's "experiments" early, most companies have the same rate
of experiments being closed or even higher, they just keep them private. It
makes more sense when you look at Google as an R&D company, than a finished
product company

------
nevster
Site experiences a sudden influx of visits as people find out what they won't
be missing...

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aaron695
I'd guess it was failing soon to be ended.

Then Covid-19 hit and the data being shared on it was not great.

------
un_montagnard
Never heard of Neighbourly before

~~~
tcbasche
And still I'm sure the anti-Google brigade will be out in full-force on this
one

~~~
taeric
To be fair, many of us didn't get on this because we knew it had no chance of
living.

~~~
jacobush
... and they refuse to carry support for a dead-ish product just to prove they
can be trusted.

