
Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand - vanburen
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/googles-constant-product-shutdowns-are-damaging-its-brand/
======
jfasi
Warning: Personal opinion ahead

To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and
engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are
_obsessed_ with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system
design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question:
will working on this get me promoted?

The criteria for promotion at Google, especially at the higher levels like SWE
III -> Senior and especially at Senior -> Staff and above, explicitly talk
about impact on the organization and the business. This has consequences for
the kind of teams people try to join and kind of work they choose to do.
Maintenance engineering is so not-rewarded that it's become an inside joke.
Any team that isn't launching products starts bleeding staff, any project that
isn't going to make a big splash is going to be neglected, and any design that
doesn't "demonstrate technical complexity" will be either rejected or trumped
up.

This is as important in the product management, people management, and general
leadership roles as in engineering. The incentive throughout is to create a
product, launch it, apply for promotion, and move on to bigger and better
things as soon as possible. In my time at Google I saw organization after
organization pay lip service to rewarding maintenance and "preferring landings
over launches" and “improving product excellence” but (at least in my
experience) nothing stuck.

Usually an organization starts with a top-down direction and the rest of the
company is compensated for executing it. Not at Google. The "let a thousand
flowers bloom" approach that developed from the early days of twenty percent
time and total engineering independence has created a disorganized mess of a
company. Multiply the individual incentives fifty thousand times and you get a
company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't
kills it immediately.

Edit/Addendum:

This is also why GMail, YouTube, Search, GCP, Android, and others aren’t going
anywhere. They’re making money, they’re core to the business, and there’s
plenty of opportunity to work on them and get promoted. They all also share
one thing in common: deep down they’re frontends for search or advertising
(GCP and Apps are an exception because they make money on their own).
Measuring and proving impact on search numbers is a well-known promo narrative
at Google, so those products are a safe bet for employees and users. Streaming
game services, not so much.

~~~
TheTruth1234
Thanks, but to you and any other GOOGLE EMPLOYEES

Are you not internally aware of this?

Do you just carry on regardless?

What happens when you voice this issue internally?

As an ex-Google fan boy, the title of this article has been true for years and
it's what poisoned me (and no doubt many others) against you. So you must be
aware of it.

What's your take?

I'm super curious as to why you gave up tech (brand) leadership so seemingly
nonchalantly.

~~~
steven2012
Google as a company is worth almost $1T. It's hard to argue that's the wrong
approach when they are so ridiculously successful.

~~~
scarface74
How well is GCP doing compared to AWS and Azure?

How well is GSuite doing compared to MS Office?

How well is Android doing as far as revenue and profit compared to iOS?
According to information that came out during the Oracle trial, Android has
made Google less over 10 years than iOS makes Apple during a down quarter.

How well is G+ doing against FB?

Google hasn’t had but one successful revenue generating product - ads.

------
criley2
Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using
Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for
people with long-standing accounts is untenable. The kitchen-sink approach of
gmail has created a website/app that wants to meet every need and honestly
meets none.

In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly
rolled up and ideal notifying Inbox back to the utterly uncontrollable
insanity of Gmail. The "rollups" in Gmail don't work, the filtering is arcane
and unchanged from the 2001-era, the "labels" are useless at intelligently
combating spam/marketing, and my gmail inbox receives hundreds of emails a
day, 0 of which I care about, and hundreds of which google desperately wants
to mark important, put in my inbox, notify me about, and provide precisely 0
tools to intelligently control it.

My gmail is a nightmare of anxiety that no man could ever wrestle control over
(while my Inbox is a delightful walk through an orderly park) and I am
honestly just considering abandoning this gmail account.

Of course, this gmail account IS my google account, it IS my google existence.

If Google has broken email, their core app, my core account --- maybe it's
time to leave.

I can't be the only one approaching Google this way. Sooner or later, they'll
kill what you love about them, too.

~~~
tikkabhuna
I completely agree. Gmail doesn't seem to have that much customisation. I
don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in
without being able to customise them.

The Inbox bundles seem to be slightly renamed categories that Gmail has, but
with the ability that they're always on the main page and being able to create
your own. Why couldn't this be easily ported back over to Gmail and tweaked
with user config?

In Inbox I had a "Mailing List" bundle that had all my techy subscriptions and
when I had free time I could see them. I could easily mark the entire bundle
as read.

I'm tempted to start using one of my domains as my email address and point it
at a different provider, but I'll see how Gmail fares over the next few
months.

~~~
radarsat1
> I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked
> in without being able to customise them.

Isn't this because it's a categorization they do using global information,
like spam filtering? If so they would only be able to support the specific
categories they are trained for across all users, so they couldn't support
custom categories.

~~~
FreakyT
Inbox’s custom categories were created using simple filter rules. You can
technically do that in GMail also, but only for folders, which are independent
of the social/promotions/etc tabs. It seems to me that the ability to create
custom tabs via filters would not be a particularly unreasonable feature.

~~~
radarsat1
That sounds a lot like what I do using 'labels'. Other than the position on
the screen, what's the difference?

~~~
criley2
Inbox rollup: Set it up once, magically works forever

Gmail label: Create a filter for a label. It works only for that. New emails
need to go in. Manually and annoyingly update the filter. Works only for that.
New emails need to go in. Manually and annoyingly update...

You get the point. If I went and bought something from a new store and got it
shipped, the receipt automatically appear in "purchases" in inbox. I didn't
have to manually update a filter for this one new address. It just worked.
Back on gmail, gmail treats that new email as if it has no idea what it is. So
into the main box it goes until I manually create rules for this one specific
case.

I shouldn't have to manually create a rule for every single email address that
ever sends me an email. It's an astronomical amount of work. And now that we
know that Google/Inbox was 100% capable of auto-filtering, the idea that we
are being transported to the stone age of email is insanity.

~~~
radarsat1
Sorry, I was responding to,

> create custom tabs via filters

which as you say, labels are created by filters.

I have no idea how "Inbox rollups" work if they are different than that and
than the tabs in gmail, since I haven't used it.

------
blihp
Customers/users/developers don't care what the reasons are, only that it
continues to happen. What is especially irksome to many is that they are
shutting down products/services that found an audience... just not one large
enough, fast enough to Google's taste. The more they shut down products, the
longer many are going to wait before even considering using one of their new
products/services especially if there's a cost associated with it. It becomes
a self-reinforcing cycle: Google launches a new product,
customers/users/developers wait to see if Google is really serious about it,
Google shuts down product because it never attracts the critical mass it needs
to see, customers/users/developers get even more jaded toward the next one...
rinse and repeat.

~~~
kian
I couldn't agree more here. If only they had a habit of keeping services in
beta until they could earn a net profit, and then released them. Then, if for
some reason they can't find the level of profits that Google wants for them,
they could spin the product off as a separate company and forget about it
instead of shutting it down.

~~~
mvexel
That reminds me of the early days of Flickr, which was very visibly in beta
for years (it was on the logo). That gave me an appropriate level of anxiety
about the longevity of the service. (Well, that and the fact that all the page
urls still had a .gne extension, suggesting that Flickr was perhaps not their
end game.) Then they went into 'gamma'!? for another couple of years before it
finally became just Flickr.

~~~
Twirrim
> and the fact that all the page urls still had a .gne extension

What's significant about .gne as an extension? Not sure I've consciously come
across that one before.

~~~
mz00
It’s an allusion to Game Neverending, which eventually led to development of
Flickr

------
FabHK
My list of degooglifying actions (mostly from my older post [1])

* switch default search engine to DuckDuckGo (one can still use the !s bang when one wants to see what Google has)

* use tracking blockers (uBlock origin, BlockBear on iOS)

* use anonymous/private/porn mode browsing most of the time (except for sites I actually want to be logged in permanently)

* use Zoho as a replacement for shared Google docs

* use Youtube either in private window, and/or download content once with youtube-dl

* use Apple Maps or OpenStreetMaps instead of Google maps, though still revert to Google maps sometimes, lamentably. It's good. (I never log in, though.)

* long ago switched to different email for main email, and forwarded gmail account to it (and now, basically nobody emails to my old gmail address anymore). (In fact, I use a catch-all domain now (very easy to set up), and a fresh email for basically every account. Quite handy.)

* for contacts, photos, etc. I use Apple's built-in stuff. I do trust Apple a bit more (different business model; look at recent iPhone prices.)

* Signal, Wire, iMessage for messaging

All in all, I think a fairly degooglified life is eminently possible.

In response, people furthermore suggested:

* Firefox with Multi-Account Container function to separate browsing, or just a temporary session with `firefox -no-remote -profile $(mktemp -d)`

* Lineage OS for Android phones (though somewhat controversial)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057709)

~~~
thefranke
I can also recommend Invidious [1] as a Youtube replacement. It's effectively
a proxy in front of Youtube, only loading the source data (i.e. the video) in
its own container. You can subscribe to channels via the builtin RSS
functionality just like on Youtube. I use a redirector extension [2] in
Firefox to automatically redirect any Youtube links to Invidious, since the
signature for loading videos is identical.

[1] [https://www.invidio.us](https://www.invidio.us) (many other instances run
on different addresses)

[2] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/redirector/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/redirector/) (Pattern:
[https://www.youtube.com/**](https://www.youtube.com/**), Redirect to:
[https://invidio.us/$2](https://invidio.us/$2))

~~~
jerf
"It's effectively a proxy in front of Youtube,"

Then it will be killed when it gets popular, and is not a long-term
replacement, because that's only dubiously legal at best (and I'm being
generous there, I'd go with "not legal"), and the blocking-it arms race is
going to be advantage Google.

There isn't really a replacement for YouTube, because it's not a service, it's
content.

~~~
thefranke
True, this has happened with other similar sites before. The difference as I
see it with Invidious is that it is an open-source project [1] that anyone can
host. If the main page [2] goes down, you can divert immediately to an
alternative host (take [3] as one example). All my RSS subscriptions are one
search-and-replace away in my OPML file.

[1]
[https://github.com/omarroth/invidious](https://github.com/omarroth/invidious)

[2] [https://www.invidio.us](https://www.invidio.us)

[3] [https://www.invidiou.sh](https://www.invidiou.sh)

------
blakesterz
I was never really a fan of Google+, but it's amazing how it went from MOST
IMPORTANT THING EVER to being shutdown completely in such a short amount of
time. I'm annoyed by all the other things they've ditched, but it scares me to
think they did such an about face on Google+. I'll never use anything new from
them, and I always tell anyone who asks to avoid using anything there. I'm
kinda surprised anyone would run anything on GCP other than some test things.
These shutdowns SHOULD damage their brand, and the shutdown of Google+ should
send a very clear message to anyone using anything they've added recently.

~~~
gnur
As far as I am aware, Google hasn't shut anything down that you actually pay
for. So fear mongering about GCP is just begin irrational.

~~~
hellcow
The whole Nexus brand springs to mind. The best mid-tier phone available was
killed and replaced with nearly the exact same specs at the highest price
possible.

Sent begrudgingly from a Pixel.

~~~
m-p-3
The exact reason why I transitioned from a Nexus to an Android One. The Pixel
price-point is too damn high.

~~~
breakingcups
The Nexus line did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was meant to push an
idealistic vision of what Android phones were supposed to be onto the market
at a (too) competitive price point to force other Android manufacturers to
follow suit.

A few years down the line, consumers have flocked to Android in large numbers,
so now it's time to appease other phone manufacturers and guard the bottom
line by discontinuing the Nexus line which ran at a loss.

~~~
frosted-flakes
Wasn't that the same idea with Microsoft's Surface device line-up? Windows
hardware used to be hot garbage when compared to Apple hardware, but
manufacturers have since stepped up their game. But instead of killing the
Surface line, Microsoft have doubled down on it.

~~~
dvtrn
Hopefully they triple-down and release a SP with USB-C.

------
tyfon
It's one of the reasons I will never buy any games on google stadia when it
launches, I expect it to be shut down in 2-3 years.

I have the network to use streaming so I'm not so worried about performance,
ps now for instance is almost indistinguishable from playing locally on my
ps3.

~~~
ineedasername
Yeah, it looks like games will actually need to be _built_ on stadia. It
doesn't look like it just spins up an instance of vanilla install of the game.
So there will need to be a deliberate choice by developers to support a new
platform. Add that to the fact that many gamers already have a library of
purchased games (like in steam) and aren't going to be thrilled at either
buying them again or paying a subscription to play games they already own, and
I really don't see how Stadia is going to work from a financial model
standpoint.

This makes me think that Stadia might be a "build now, monetize later"
experiment that will quickly be shut down if/when people don't buy/subscribe
and no other revenue stream is easily found.

I might pay for Stadia if it was something like PaperSpace, where I can
basically spin up a VPS optimized for game streaming, install steam, and play
whatever games I have. Absent that, Stadia would need to provide offline
copies of the games for backup should their service either go down or be
cancelled.

~~~
tyfon
Afaik it's built to a ubuntu + vulkan setup, but I suspect the rendering will
go directly to a proprietary encoders framebuffer and that it uses custom
input mapping and not libinput.

What would be nice if they released offline linux + vulkan versions in
addition to the streaming version but that probably goes against their MO of
tracking and monetising. It would make me much more inclined to buy on their
service though.

------
meddlepal
Google's two (maybe three) core Google-branded products to non-tech people are
Search, Gmail and maybe Chrome. I don't think non-techies could even tell you
what some of the other products are or did. I would also wager most people
outside of tech don't realize YouTube is owned by Google.

Tech people pay a lot of attention to this stuff, but casual user's don't
notice or don't care.

~~~
o10449366
I disagree. I know a lot of "non-techies" that switched to using iPhones just
for iMessage because Google's messaging ecosystem is confusing and seems to
change every 12 months. I also know a lot of non-techies that use Google Play
Music to upload and manage their own music libraries. It's rumored that Play
Music is going to be killed in the next few months as Google pushes YouTube
music subscriptions instead. The problem is, just like with Inbox and Gmail,
Google rarely ever makes good on promises to port features from old products
to new ones. I highly doubt the Play Music users that specifically use it
because they can upload 50,000 of their own songs are going to opt into a
worse version of Spotify when it's killed off.

~~~
apexalpha
Does anyone even use Google's messaging apps? I've literally not seen one
being used once in the past 4 or 5 years.

It's been Whatsapp for as long as I can remember.

~~~
o10449366
Non-technical people on Android definitely do because they either come
preinstalled on the phone or they're heavily promoted/advertised. Even in my
relatively small city I saw huge billboards and posters advertising Allo and
Duo when they were released.

------
ChrisSD
So essentially Google's constant stream of new products leads to older ones
falling by the wayside unless they can make very large piles of cash.

It's also worth highlighting this:

> Google rarely does anything as a singular company. Instead, the industry
> giant is made up of autonomous product groups that develop and launch things
> on their own schedule.

~~~
blakesterz
That's an interesting quote, makes more sense now. I guess they're running
things more like a university than a business? All the internal drama and
products make perfect sense now.

~~~
chii
> more like a university than a business

which is wrong for google to behave this way, as the focus of university is to
produce _new_ research, and a business's focus is to produce sustainable
service for profit. Google should have a graduation mechanism for a product
they launch, where they publicly announce that a product is out of beta, and
can be depended on to exist.

And if the product isn't ready to be supported, they should continue to have
the 'beta' moniker attached to the product name.

~~~
ryandvm
I'd say they run it like a marketplace. If a product isn't generating revenue,
it gets axed. Which, given the size of Google is probably about the only way
to run things. Hierarchies don't scale indefinitely. How many companies have
we seen collapse due to an inability to react to ever changing market demands?
Besides having an oracle for a CEO, I'd say running your company as a bunch of
autonomous business units is probably the only solution.

~~~
HALtheWise
Having worked at Google, this really isn't the case, at minimum because a
large number of their business units are not and are never expected to be
profitable. It is a bit difficult to describe what system is used to
coordinate between business units, but it doesn't really resemble an economic
marketplace.

~~~
semperdark
> It is a bit difficult to describe what system is used to coordinate between
> business units

Well, now I'm interested. Could you try elaborating?

------
m0nty
My own "you'll never get another chance to do that to me again" was when I
migrated an organisation from Microsoft Exchange to Google Mail and Apps. It
was great with Outlook Connector for Gmail, then they killed it.

I will never take the risk of committing to a Google product in a professional
setting ever again. It hurts the organisation, and it hurts me.

------
carrier_lost
These shutdowns might hurt Google's brand among the tech-savvy community that
uses edge products like Google+ or Chromecast Audio (never even heard of that
before today).

But everyone I know still uses Google search and Chrome. Most use Gmail.
Schools still give students Chromebooks and teach them Google Docs.

I think Google will be fine.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I see the "this news only impacts tech people" argument from time to time, but
remember that all the non-tech people ask the tech people they know what to
use. And tech people are who set up their family's computers, deploy software
widely on business networks, etc.

The tech-savvy community was on Google years before the general public, and
them leaving Google should set your expectations for what happens with
everyone else a few years after that.

~~~
carrier_lost
"remember that all the non-tech people ask the tech people they know what to
use. And tech people are who set up their family's computers, deploy software
widely on business networks, etc."

As a techie who has set up and/or fixed many non-techie family & friends'
computers and devices, I hear ya. 110%, loud and clear. :-)

However... I wonder how long this will remain true. More and more devices are
ready to go out of the box and kids are being taught to use Google products in
school.

It's not hard to buy a phone or Chromebook online, log into your Google
account and be ready to go.

It's not like the old days when you would have to go to your grandma's house
and install a better web browser, antivirus, etc. Most things just work now,
for most people.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Another aspect to consider is platform support. Look at Google's newest
successful platform, Google Assistant. If developers weren't excitedly writing
integrations for it, wouldn't it be dead already, with Alexa in the room?
Since many new tech services are built as platforms, developer interest and
support also becomes a key requirement.

------
dreamcompiler
Google has morphed into a boring low-growth sustain-mode advertising company
that happens to employ a lot of very bright, creative people who really have
no business working there any more. Thus we see a ton of hobby side projects
that don't last. At this point if Google invented a Level 5 self-driving car,
I'd probably just yawn until a more dependable company reinvented it.

------
99052882514569
They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money (like
Chromecast Audio), and they improve features that detract from the user
experience and muddy the waters in terms of ads/monetization in their view
(YouTube annotations). They run their company as a constant stream of trial-
and-error product launches, some of which succeed wildly and make them
billions, others fail and are killed off. Makes sense to me.

Perhaps someone is confusing them with a charity or an Internet do-gooder
enthusiasts club. That's unwise. You _can_ be sure that successful services
used by a lot of people will continue indefinitely, perhaps tweaked to
generate more revenue. Otherwise, come on, as an avid Google+ user you must
have known that the writing is on the wall for you and the other 500 avid
Google+ users. No charities here.

~~~
josteink
> They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money (like
> Chromecast Audio)

I got the Chromecast audio and think it is great.

That this was discontinued was news to me. When did that happen? Do you have
any links to the announcement?

~~~
IshKebab
I don't know why they didn't just add an audio jack to the normal Chromecast.
Other than that aren't they identical?

~~~
erik_seaberg
Chromecast Audio was cheap and had multi-room sync. The latest Chromecast can
also sync, but sends the audio over HDMI.

------
fixermark
I was going to make a comment about how Google's approach to service
deprecation contrasts with Microsoft's, but then I spot-checked my assumptions
and realized that MS has discontinued over 50% of the Office ecosystem of apps
over the years.

So I think I need to instead ask a question: Is Google's deprecation strategy
actually unusual for a company with a wide ecosystem of offerings?

~~~
Jorge1o1
Disagree about the MS point a bit.

Yes, nominally, MS has killed some programs in the Office Suite, but the core
products of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook are still there. Even the
weird, obscure products like Publisher and Access are still around.

So maybe they killed Clippy, but ____that guy

~~~
fixermark
Google has killed some of its offerings, but the core products of search, ads,
drive, and mail are still there.

(... Inbox being only a UI on top of the mailbox and not the mailbox itself,
not unlike Microsoft Schedule+ went away but the underlying Outlook
functionality remained).

------
o10449366
There isn't a single new Google product that I'm excited about. Even if there
was, at this point I would be apprehensive at best given their track record of
abandonment. It seems to be that they've forgotten how to innovate compared to
their competitors. Facebook, despite their controversies, bought Instagram and
managed to recapture the young market with new features and improvements.
Amazon has been making strides with AWS and its Prime ecosystem. Google has
been... Making more redundant messaging apps?

~~~
jtloong
I mean Facebook buying Instagram isn't really innovation. In terms of business
strategy and feature enhancements, for sure its been great. But that's not
really what I'd call innovation.

~~~
o10449366
I used Instagram as an example because I think Facebook has done a lot more
with it than, say, Google has with their YouTube acquisition. YT has been
largely stagnant in the face of competition from Twitch, Netflix, Spotify,
etc. and I see fewer and fewer content creators using it, whereas Instagram
continues to grow.

~~~
michaelt
You could argue that youtube's _rate_ of innovation is low. But when it was
launched it was Flash-based sub-10-minute low-resolution prerecorded videos
that paid creators nothing, and so on.

Now it supports long videos, 4k, streaming, html5¹, pays content creators
enough there are a bunch of them doing it full time², has an ad-free premium
option, it isn't at war with music labels, and it hasn't been bankrupted by
bandwidth costs.

Seems a fairly good track record to me.

¹ Arguably Youtube was one of the big forces getting decently working video
out of flash and into browsers. Along with Apple refusing to ship Flash on
iOS, that is!

² Admittedly at the whim of fickle algorithms, so not the best financial
security there

------
holdenc
Hopefully Google will see this and better understand why Microsoft is beating
them in cloud services.

When I moved about a TB of S3 data into their cloud storage (as a cross-vendor
backup) one of their product evangelists called me just to say hello. I was
floored. But I mentioned that their constant shut downs are making me wary of
a larger Google Cloud commitment.

~~~
jaimex2
Its too late for them. No one would trust their business to a company with a
reputation of closing down services for no reason or worse yet entire business
accounts with no ability appeal.

~~~
holtalanm
this is another concern I would have. The complete inability to get ahold of a
real person when dealing with google support is just silly.

------
jaimex2
Damaging? Its very clear the damage is done.

I thought the whole point of Alphabet was to try and hide the Google brand so
customers trust to use it.

~~~
johannes1234321
> Damaging? Its very clear the damage is done.

In the HN community certainly, but also for consumers?

~~~
jacquesm
If you lose your early adopters you lose everything in the longer run. Every
new product needs early adopters.

~~~
RPLong
That is such a wise and important point. I am no fan of Apple, but the one
thing they have going for them is that they have never forgotten how to please
their core fan base.

I was such big Google fan that they actually featured me on their blog over a
decade ago. They have destroyed everything that I ever liked about them,
piece-by-piece and replaced it with _advertising_ , the scourge of humanity.

~~~
TremendousJudge
>I am no fan of Apple, but the one thing they have going for them is that they
have never forgotten how to please their core fan base.

I'm no fan either, but their fanbase here HN has been criticizing the new macs
for years now

------
ben7799
The Ars article misses the point that google is an ad company that uses it's
dominance in search to keep the ad money machine going.

Everything else is just playtime to google. So they have no interest in doing
the hard work to support any play time projects at all.

They are so horrific to deal with at an enterprise level.

All this stuff that google shovels out, makes a splash with, and then cancels
is just stuff that doesn't further the ad hegemony. You can take or leave the
free stuff, if it works for you that's great, but don't expect it to hang
around any longer than it serves it's purpose.

They don't charge money for this stuff and keep it around once it stops being
relevant for ads because the price tag to make a difference to them would be
way too high for anyone to pay for it, especially at the consumer level.

My exposure at this point is basically just Gmail & Calendar. I'd be pretty
bummed if Youtube got the axe though.

------
VonGuard
I once asked Diane Greene straight up, when she took over Google Cloud, "How
can you possibly win enterprise customers when there are 12 deprecated APIS in
Google Cloud right now, and you haven't even started to turn the thing
around." She dodged and said there were no deprecations.... I literally had
the deprecated services listings from their site up on my phone. I think this
is one of the reasons she moved on: it's never going to stop, there. They'll
always leave things and move on to the next thing, not worrying about the old
customers.

------
Zigurd
Killing some products makes a lot of sense, or is at least has a plausible
rationale. Now that video Chromecast devices can do audio casting, it may not
make sense to make separate audio products.

Other things, like Google's utter botch of tablet software and hardware points
toward senior management treating those businesses like hobbies. Hardware
partners and customers are indeed victimized. Getting tablets right requires
product management discipline across APIs (i.e. Fragment) app frameworks that
have to use Fragment correctly, UI design that doesn't promote an "it's a big
phone" approach to app designers, hardware specs, and the OS. Nothing that
came after the Fragment API really handled tablet cases very well.

In their latest move in tablets Google seems to have surrendered to the
Windows tablet idea of a hybrid laptop/tablet OS, except Samsung, who vastly
outsell Google's hardware, is still making their variants on Google's old
laptop OS. WTF? If I were at Samsung I'd be pissed as hell at Google for
muddying up their only successful tablet hardware partner's technology
position. One could hardly do worse.

------
bryanrasmussen
Well in that case losing Google Reader was all worth it.

~~~
nerdjon
I am still upset about that. That single service being shut down is what
started me to distance myself from all google services except search when
possible (including making the decision to actually pay for services when
necessary)

~~~
m-p-3
I pay for an Inoreader supporter account. It's cheap, it works, I don't have
to maintain it, and it ensure some revenue to the developers to keep it going.

I'm keeping my gmail.com because it's my main personal online identity,
despite hating the UI.

If I could pay to retain access to Google Inbox if I could like I'm already
paying for Google One to hopefully gain some resemblance of support if shit
hits the fan.

~~~
nerdjon
I use Feedly pro and the Reeder app on my iPhone for RSS now. Only because
Feedly made migrating away from Google Reader super easy when that whole thing
was happening.

I stick with iCloud for my email, cloud stage, documents, and etc (with the
2TB plan)

The last thing I am mulling over is moving my "professional" email away from
Google Apps (or whatever its called now) to Amazon email or something... but
the fact that I can't decouple that google account from the email has stopped
me so far (Thanks to bad past decisions and single sign on).

------
mark_l_watson
Well, I think it is wrong to rely on any company’s products and always have
plan B options. I just switched to using G Suite for maintaining my collection
of research material, emails, online storage, and most importantly using cloud
search to find things quickly. This is convenient but I could adapt in a day
if they shut down all these services. I use my own domain, keep google Takeout
backups, and could get by nicely using spotlight on a Mac to search all my old
research PDFs and notes.

Compute platforms are a different story: if we as developers keep our cloud
based systems ‘portable’ we miss value of specific AWS/GCP/Azure services and
APIs. So, I would argue that it is very important for Google to provide better
support and stability for GCP and everything else really is much less
important.

EDIT: I forgot to add: I have purchased about $300 in google play movies and
books, so I would be annoyed if for some reason those stopped being available.

------
theshrike79
Isn't this purely about their internal incentives? No one gets promoted or
advances their career by doing boring upkeep tasks on an existing product.

The only way to really advance your career inside Google is to launch a new
product. (And then let it slowly rot as you and your team are promoted and
moved to launch a new product)

------
heavymark
Ever since Google shut down reader, always associated Google with a company
that could shut down any of their products at anytime so in general to look
else where for most everything other than Gmail. Use Docs and Drive which seem
to be here to stay at least as well.

Other companies like Apple shut down Ping and such but very rarely and most
are things that were DOA unlike Google. The problem is Google tries everything
but doesn't give it enough love to fix the issues and make successful, unless
a product is successful. Which is a bit of a catch 22. People know a lot of
these smaller initiatives may go away and/or have missing features/bugs so
people don't heavily invest in them, and thus Google kills them since not
enough interest. Also now people associate Google with privacy issues even
though they do some incredible things with that data.

------
arendtio
Maybe it is time Google thinks about decentralized products again. I mean, yes
they are one of the biggest players in the cloud business, but decentralized
doesn't mean you can't be a big cloud provider within an open ecosystem.

And if you build open systems, you can abandon those without letting anybody
down (unless you didn't even release the complete reference implementation as
it happen with Wave).

For example, with Stadia they could have opened up their platform for gaming
marketplaces like Steam, GOG, etc. and let people play the games they already
own via the Stadia streaming service. That way, nobody would have to be afraid
of not being able to play their games when Stadia shuts down in 3 years.

------
yuribit
I didn't realize how many projects have been killed during the years until I
opened the google graveyard:
[https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com)

------
rhizome
What "brand?" They sought to dilute it by creating Alphabet, then continued a
habit of unreliability in _everything_ that could be said to support their
"brand."

If you look at Google/Alphabet, they are a search engine, gmail/gdocs, and
somewhat of a device maker. Everything else might be killed off today. Or not.
Who knows? Certainly none of us. Regardless, they survive as long as they do
as the gadgets that they started as during somebody's 20% time or pre-
acquisition ramen-startup era. Might as well be toys.

------
jillesvangurp
It's not the shutdowns that are the problem but the lack of vision with which
these products are launched and abandoned almost right away.

Inbox is a good example of a product that was launched and almost immediately
stopped evolving with big question marks about transitioning from gmail to
inbox, which ultimately a lot of users did not want to do, and more users who
couldn't because some features just weren't there.

The writing was on the wall when a year in there had been no meaningful
updates to Inbox (i.e. somebody shut down that team almost right away) and
then slowly gmail started getting new features. Inbox barely evolved and there
never was a clear vision for transitioning from Gmail to Inbox. Unless of
course the vision was to have two competing products with more or less the
same goals out there.

Same with chat. Google seems to suffer from a chronic internal not invented
here syndrome. Where teams are competing with each other instead of working
with each other. Google has a gazillion chat solutions, two consumer operating
systems for laptops, tablets, and phones with lots of overlap. A bunch more
for watches, misc IOT stuff, etc. And another OS in the works. Which of those
three will be killed? Which won't be. It doesn't even matter. What matter is
that we don't know and I suspect Google leadership doesn't know either. It's
not acting like a company that actually knows which of those teams are going
to get some bad news pretty soon.

------
srndh
This is true. Google cannot be relied upon.

The axing of Google Talk & Reader is still fresh.

Even the other day, a friend mentioned that instead of waiting for Gmail to be
killed, its better to move email to your own domain.

Even I moved off keep. I am confident that it is going to be axed soon.

The thing that bugs me the most of why Google doesn't just opensource the
code. Open-sourcing Google reader was the decent thing to do. Like netscape
open-sourcing its code to Mozilla before it sank. I still treasure the
Netscape CD I got with from my ISP in the late 1990s.

------
jacknews
I'm not so sure.

In the eyes of users of those products, perhaps, but if those products are not
succeeding, ie not becoming widely popular/turning a profit, I guess google
are calculating limited collateral damage from shutting them down.

I think the brand is tarnishing for more abstract reasons;
privacy/surveillance, complicity in chinese censorship, being a (the?) prime
example of tech-leveraged inequality (stories about founders' private jet
parties probably don't help), and so on.

~~~
chopin
The problem is that the damage is cumulative. Each step may have little
collateral damage but each is a step in the same direction where your
reputation becomes bad.

------
Boulth
I think the biggest unforseen effect of these shutdowns is the consumers
perception of Google's _new_ products. Google announced gaming service? So
what, it will be gone in 2 years tops. Google announced a new product? I don't
want to be a beta tester for life.

Edit: Just found this comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553601)

------
petercooper
I think this is most damaging to Google Cloud Platform as Amazon and Microsoft
have demonstrated just how valuable such a platform is and it's often the
developers who steer companies in choosing such platforms. But can we trust
that any service on such a mission critical platform will last as long as our
apps? Amazon and Microsoft have earnt our trust on this despite any other
faults they may have.

------
teddyh
Who now can trust Google Stadia?

[http://bonkersworld.net/look-this-way](http://bonkersworld.net/look-this-way)

------
iamgopal
There are many many googlers from top are also here at hacker news, reading
these very criticisms often, why nothing has changed in years and years ?

~~~
beckler
Google doesn't reward those who make things better, they reward those who
launch new products.

------
mkstowegnv
With all the shutdowns, Google is also foolishly throwing away what will be an
increasingly important asset - distinguishing between real human identities
and bots. False bot negatives waste Google computing resources, while false
bot positives waste users' time.

I would happily opt in to having Google use AI on each of their services to
see if I behave like a real human and then combine that information across
services to give my identity a low-bot-risk rating. As it is I am constantly
asked to Captcha prove myself (probably because I perform a large number of
unusual complex search queries).

Black hat AI will make bots harder and harder to detect and cybercrime (and
disinformation dissemination) easier and easier. Detecting fake identities
will soon become crucial and yet almost impossible - and Google could be best
positioned to provide that information.

But instead they will let MBA twit bean counters ruin the company. My advice
to all corporations - keep MBAs in dungeons, bring them out occasionally for
advice and never allow them to make decisions.

------
blablabla123
I was really disappointed when they were shutting down Wave. It seemed so
innovative and even today there is no powerful Wiki-Messenger-Docs that is
even close to it. I virtually stopped using Google because of privacy concerns
but Wave was so unique, I might not have never considered to leave, who
knows...

About Inbox I don't really care but obviously the UX was amazingly intuitive.

------
lgleason
The majority of Googles profit/revenue still comes from search/advertising. It
has generated wads of cash for them, but if they just sat on the cash it would
not make Wall Street happy so they've thrown a bunch of money at different
efforts to make it look like they have more than just search and advertising
to boost the stock price. Because of that there has been no incentive to see
these other products to fruition, but at the same time they could afford to
throw money at it as it helped to boost the stock price. Now however there is
the new threat of regulation in both the US and Europe with the later also
starting to impose fines. This makes me wonder if part of the motivation is to
retrench with investment because of some potentially significant headwinds.

My guess is that what people have observed inside of the company is a
manifestation of that.

------
martindale
Just this past weekend, I set out to finish a project [0] I'd started several
years back using the Google+ API, hoping to wrap things up before they shut it
down forever. Much to my chagrin, I found that they'd shuttered the API months
in advance, effectively ruining any hopes I had of finishing.

After a swath of other shutdowns, this was the last straw for me.

[0]: project was "confluence", a stream aggregator designed for personal use.
I'd accumulated > 40,000 followers on Google by writing long-form commentary
on news, events, and technology, and wanted to merge all of that content into
a self-hosted site that included my Twitter, Facebook, and other content:
[https://github.com/martindale/confluence](https://github.com/martindale/confluence)

------
sytelus
This is an issue that is dear to my heart. I think it is possible to almost
always avoid killing a product. When a company doesn't want to invest further
they can do combinations of the following:

* Just open source it.

* If code has external IP, isolate them behind interfaces.

* If product is service and uses internal infrastructure, you can still isolate those interfaces (assume someone else would build necessary infrastructure)

* If core devs have left or aren't interested, hire offshore or freelancers to do this work

* Call for maintainers/fans who are invested in the product to participate

* Instill culture in the company so every new project is architected with eventual open sourcing in future due to reasons such as shutdown

* Put product up for sell to potential companies who are in same space and ask them to take on work for making sure IP and dependencies are abstracted

~~~
makecheck
My observation at companies has been that there is rarely the required
foresight to be able to prune something off into a separate open-source
project. Google uses a mono-repo I believe, which already makes it extremely
unlikely that they’ll be able to even _build_ a thing outside the company,
much less let it thrive. And “cancellation time” is not when new resources
will be diverted to fixing broken-only-outside-the-company behavior.

I’ve only seen this work a couple different ways. One: if the company spins
off something very large (like an entire division) that was already self-
sufficient so it is pretty clear how to keep it all functional from the
outside. Or, two: if, _from the very beginning_ , the person pitching a
project insists on an open-source/flexible model and takes lots of steps to
ensure that it is constantly working in that way.

------
tim333
I can understand why Google don't want to support a large number of small
services but you'd think they could spin them off rather than closing them -
maybe retain 60% ownership and option the rest to a team of enthusiasts?

They'd have less annoyed customers and maybe make money out of it.

~~~
Zarel
They did that for Wave. Reader was too integrated with Google's internal APIs
for that to be feasible, though. I assume Inbox is the same.

------
La-ang
I disagree with the idea that shutting down products damages the brand. It's
quite the opposite. Google+ has always been a joke, and migrating and merging
products sounds just as wise as creating new ones that work. On a side note,
I'm happy Google+ will be buried for good.

~~~
ArtDev
Their history killing successful products makes everyone wary of using any new
Google products: [https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com)

------
fabricexpert
Just switched from inbox to gmail today after the notifications stopped
working

There are ads inside gmail that look just like emails, which I keep
accidentally opening.

This is just ridiculous why would I use an email provider that does this. What
are they going to do next? Start adding ads to my email signature?

~~~
dragonwriter
> What are they going to do next? Start adding ads to my email signature?

That's crazy, who would ever do that?

~ sent from my iPhone [0]

[0] not really, but...

------
prolepunk
I'm sad to see Inbox go, I really got used to it, at this point I'm going down
the path of de-googlification.

I've been gradually moving away from Gmail to using my own configuration with
Postfix/Courier/Spamassassin/rbl/letsencrypt certs everywhere etc...

This has been my on-and-off side project for the past couple of months or so.

I find how well filters based on from/subject work. Tunderbird has really good
desktop experience, on android K9 Mail works but is a little bit annoying.

The next thing I'm trying to automate my mail is to set up server-side mail
filtering with courier/maildrop, because I haven't found a good way of
synchronizing Thunderbird filters and I'm not willing to have a Thunderbird
session just running all the time on a computer.

------
abvdasker
For the last 6 years or so I -- foolishly it turns out -- chose to make Play
Music my primary music platform. I was uncomfortable with subscribing to a
music service and wanted to be able to keep my own library since the
collection of music I own is a form of self expression for me. Google Play
Music let me put my library in the cloud and listen to it on any device.

Now it's looking like I will probably lose a big chunk of it when Google Play
Music gets replaced with YouTube Music since Google doesn't really let you
download everything you've uploaded. I'm upset enough by this I am motivated
to find a way to move away from other Google products to the extent that it is
practical to do so.

------
MayeulC
I would even risk saying that what Google has been saying is damaging the
trust in the industry, especially online services (if there ever was one).

I reflected on my gut aversion to stadia, and realized I had the same to most
walled-garden online services. To be fair, Google is far from the only one
shutting services down (and users out of it).

My solution is to use open source software, with a preference for federated or
distributed solutions.

Discord/Skype/MSN/Hangouts/etc -> Matrix/Mumble

Twitter -> Mastodon

YouTube -> PeerTube

Etc. Those are the most recent ones I used. I still have some work to do
before hosting a collabora online instance to offer to my family as an
alternative to Google docs.

------
johnnycab
This is a common practice for Google i.e. deprecating under-performing
services borne out of _20% time policy_.

[https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/the-
my...](https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/the-myth-of-
google-s-20-time)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services)

------
markstos
I would rather Google keep trying and failing than quit trying.

If you don't keep the start-up spirit to keep trying new things, then some
start-up will find a way to disrupt you.

~~~
purple_ducks
Google aren't inventing.They aren't even re-inventing.

They're just re-implementing.

------
robben1234
As a consumer, and Reader and Inbox user, I'd never buy a Google product
(Pixel, Home, Fi, etc) I need to rely on in everyday life or use their cloud
for hosting anything important. At this point I see all of their products as
mayflies. They may be interesting and useful today, but tomorrow they'll be
gone.

And even if they change their internal policies, I'm not sure I could be able
to change my opinion on them.

------
ggggtez
I'll be honest, the products listed that they think is "damaging" the Google
brand is a mix between "I've literally never heard of that" and "I literally
don't care about that". Of course, with Fiber being the "I've both heard, and
care, but we all knew it was inevitable years ago".

------
amelius
Their hunger for data is also damaging their brand.

It's disappointing to see that there seems to be no force whatsoever from the
inside of Google to change from ad-based monetization (disrespecting a user's
privacy) to a paid-for product.

But I get it, having _real_ customers is a pain, and most Google employees are
happy without them.

------
linsomniac
Do we have any idea yet why Google made the d __k move of increasing Maps cost
14x? I understand that things change, but it sure is hard to give Google the
benefit of the doubt with the information that has been made available thus
far. As it is, it feels like a two-word goodbye.

------
tosh
I wrote about this (the danger’s of brand extension) when Stripe launched
Stripe Atlas

[https://medium.com/@__tosh/stripe-atlas-and-the-trap-of-
bran...](https://medium.com/@__tosh/stripe-atlas-and-the-trap-of-brand-
extension-4eb158569a37)

------
taormina
Who else is here is using Firebase? What are the odds of the whole thing
getting canned with 2 years? For all of the "we promise GCP isn't going
anywhere" comments from the Googlers in this thread, I'm seeing nothing about,
well, GCP's equivalent of Inbox.

------
Finnucane
More than a few times over the past few years the first time I've heard about
some new Google product is the announcement that it is being killed off.
That's not the sort of marketing push that encourages one to look out for new
Google products.

------
machiste77
I want to try using Google Hire to recruit talent at my company but
unfortunately I feel as if I've been conditioned to believe that there is a
higher probability of the product being killed compared to its alternatives.

------
djabatt
I totally agree. Hence I haven't used their cloud services as much as AWS.

------
elchief
Damaging? It's been damaged for years around here

------
xmly
Actually, it becomes Google's brand already....

------
jamesgagan
Shameless self-promotion, but I've recently built a replacement for goo.gl url
shortener with an API: [https://plip.io](https://plip.io)

------
anticensor
Google+ has shut down as of 10:00PT/18:00CET.

------
jrochkind1
Wait Chromecast audio is discontinued? dammit!

------
Yajirobe
What is people's opinion on Tensorflow?

------
ergo14
Who... would... have.... thought... that?

------
apexalpha
This only exists in our engineering bubble. No average user has ever heard of
all the products listed.

This does explain their lack of enterprise customers though.

------
acdc4life
How long until stadia bites the dust?

------
fs2
The statements by Ars are overrated. Yes, it's annoying but without trying to
create new and risky applications Google cannot exist.

------
carapace
Google Labs.

------
stcredzero
Back in the 90's and 00's, I read some quips about how intra-company politics
was starting to run counter to the welfare of Microsoft's user base.

In 2019, it seems like Google has succumb to the same pathologies, but
unfortunately amplified by certain societal currents. (No matter how
idealistic and noble the goals, activism entails grabbing power, and power
attracts sociopaths.)

------
hello_friendos
Still sad about Google reader closing I've been hesitant to put my faith in
any new Google product since.

~~~
forgotAgain
Given the push back against social media these days, Google could get a lot of
good karma by resurrecting Reader.

~~~
adolph
Who'd trust them to keep a service running at this point?

------
mbesto
That's because Google is built like an accelerator. Look you can argue that
Google's brand is being damaged but you know what's worse than a few dents in
your brand? Destruction to your brand. Look at a company like Kodak who missed
the boat on digital cameras (despite having created the first one). Google
makes 100 bets a year so that it doesn't miss the next digital camera, or
phone, and so on...

------
burtonator
I'm a developer of an app on Firebase.

I really like the current iteration of Firebase but it's definitely
languishing compared to what's happening at AWS.

Firebase is great for our use case as it handles auth easily and has sort of a
JSON-put API as well as support for blobs via cloud storage.

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

... if you're interested.

Anyway. This keeps me up at night.

Google has a history of just flat out ignoring products and then killing them.
They're not TOO bad in cloud but they're really getting their ass handed to
them across the board.

Microsoft is taking their lead in cloud and Amazon is at least 5 years ahead
of Google.

I think we're going to look back at 201 and realize that this is the year
Google started dying.

They're failing on Youtube with advertisers angry at them. Android developers
are pissed on the constant platform changes and abuse from lack of customer
support.

Just last week I spent about half a day trying to implement chrome extension
inline installation on my site only to find out that they killed that feature
six months ago but didn't update their documentation.

The chrome extension store developer console is a joke.

Right now I'm asking for "all permissions" for our extension as I need to
inject a header in an HTTP response for CORS.

So we're under auditing for every update.

This includes ASSETS! So if we update an image in our chrome extension we have
to wait a WEEK for them to re-audit our app even though the binary didn't
change.

Something is seriously wrong at Google and they need to fix it ...

~~~
ArtDev
Firebase is an example of something that I would use except that I know Google
is "behind it".

------
v7p1Qbt1im
This again. Not a week goes by without someone mentioning this. When a product
is used by 0.001% of your user base you have to think about putting
engineering resources towards that service. It just so happens that non-core
products are often used by a vocal early adopter tech crowd like people on HN.
Also 0.001% of Googles User base might still be 20,000 people.

The other thing is Google's business practices. I always think of Google as
hundreds or thousands of startups. Small agile team builds up a new service.
Where are we within 3 to 5 years. Over a billion users yet? No? Ok scrap or
integrate it somehow.

One big problem of big slow boring corporate entities is that they always miss
the next big thing that's gonna disrupt them. Google did it to many
incumbents. So it makes sense that they might be worried to be next to be
disrupted.

Also I think it's important to differentiate between consumer and commercial
offerings with SLA's. There is no difference between the service
discontinuation policies in GCP vs AWS and Azure. And also, gaming is way to
important to abandon. Plus they have first mover advantage now as opposed to
G+.

