
Predicting Google Product Shutdowns - kiba
http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns
======
rachelbythebay
I have some thoughts about the spikes on the death dates.

September: all of the interns go back to school. These people who exist on the
fringes of the system manage to get a lot of work done, possibly because they
are free of most of the overhead facing real employees. Once they leave, it's
up to the FTEs to own whatever was created, and that doesn't always work. I
wish I could have kept some of them and swapped them for some of the full-
timers.

March/April: Annual bonus time? That's what it used to be, at least, and I say
this as someone who quit in May, and that was no accident. Same thing: people
leave, and that dooms whatever they left.

~~~
obviouslygreen
_March/April: Annual bonus time?_

I'm not sure if it's good or bad that I somehow never managed to work for an
employer that offered any kind of bonus, ever. It granted a perspective of
"this is what you get, and no more, unless you fight for it," which...
again... can be good or bad depending on how you look at it.

I wonder how many 20- and 30-somethings are now or have recently been in a
position where bonuses are reasonably common, and how that correlates with the
size/type of company they're working for.

~~~
consz
Funny, I have the opposite opinion. Without a bonus, it just seems like "this
is the work you need to do, and no reason to make any effort to do more". With
bonuses that scale with your contribution, I have far more incentive to put in
effort above and beyond.

~~~
ry0ohki
I agree, but it's pretty rare to have individual performance based bonuses
unfortunately. It also makes people feel entitled, so they will never go above
and beyond without the bonus in the future.

~~~
nijk
Why should they go above and beyond for free?

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benaiah
> Gmail seems like a service for the ages; but once upon a time, so did
> Hotmail (even in 2012, 8 years after Gmail’s launch, still the #2 email
> service) - yet, RIP Hotmail (1996-2013).

That's silly. Hotmail didn't go away; it was rebranded. All the email and
accounts were transparently migrated - you could even use both front-ends at
the same time for a short period. The important part is, Microsoft still runs
email and nobody lost data. Comparing it to the Reader shutdown (or a shutdown
of Gmail in a similar fashion) is an apples-to-oranges comparison of the first
degree.

~~~
gameshot911
>The important part is, Microsoft still runs email and nobody lost data.

Unless you fail to log in at least once every 270 days, at which point your
entire account and everything in it is wiped.

~~~
jacquesm
That's probably a safety precaution but if it is like you describe it is also
a risk. It could be a safety precaution to make sure that accounts do not
eventually become compromised in the case of deceased person.

But if the account is deleted entirely that could indicate the address can be
re-used and in that case any password reset mails and other important email
might land in the new owner of the address' inbox.

------
molecule
For anyone else that is wondering which Google product lived for one day
("Days: Min: 1"):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_X>

~~~
bernardlunn
Great find. It must have been total chaos - good chaos - in those days.

------
bifrost
I think this actually fits with what I think about Google overall. Search is
great, everything else is just a mediocre tie in to search dollars.

Google is attracting more "nesters" and less "innovators" from what I see as
an outsider, which is likely good for long term products but bad for
everything else.

Glass is already a bad word (RE: glassholes), Plus is a wasteland, Voice is
only popular due to branding, as is Calendar and Docs.

I've seen announcements of products that appear to be more functional than
Voice/Cal/Docs on HN with better security and performance, but I think the
likelihood of those taking over is probably low until Google gets out of those
markets. The products are better, but the mindshare isn't there yet.

~~~
samuellevy
I don't know why people keep insisting that G+ is a waste land. If you
personally don't use it, or see a use for it, that's fine, but there are many
people in the world who are not you.

Personally, I get far more value from G+ than I do/ever have done from
twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or any of the many social networks over the years.
I have a use for it, which it fulfills better than any of the other services
out there, and so for me (and the thousand or so people who I'm connected to
at various levels through G+), it's far from a waste land.

G+ isn't for everyone, and that's fine. It is a product which is now highly
polished, and provides exactly what I and many other people have wanted from a
social network. The exact numbers of users who actually actively use it may
not be clear, but if it was a waste land, Google wouldn't be integrating all
their services so tightly into it.

Google is not a stupid company, and they're not about to "break" all of their
services to drive adoption of a service which can't stand on its own. G+ is a
good service, and is providing massive amounts of value to Google. Reader was
not creating new value for them; wave wasn't getting adopted; Google had
reasons why continuing to support those products was a losing bet.

They are integrating so many of their services into G+, that you can pretty
much guarantee that it's a winner (for them, at least).

</rant>

~~~
DigitalTurk
> G+ isn't for everyone, and that's fine. It is a product which is now highly
> polished, and provides exactly what I and many other people have wanted from
> a social network.

Is it possible yet to change the visibility of old posts? The absence of small
privacy features like this—features that FB does have—always was very off-
putting for me. When Google+ was launched they made a huge deal out of
Circles, but it strikes me that since then Google has pushed Google+ more as
an alternative to Twitter than as an alternative to Facebook (and I don't like
Twitter much).

Anyway, I used Google+ so little that I deleted my account in a petty rage
when they shut down Google Reader. It's actually nice to have one less social
network to worry about.

~~~
tsycho
> Is it possible yet to change the visibility of old posts? The absence of
> small privacy features like this—features that FB does have...

Are you sure you have thought this through? Allowing retro-active changes to
visibility (unless it's only in a more restrictive direction) can be a privacy
violation for the commenters, who may have commented based on the original
visibility list. And allowing visibility changes towards a more restrictive
set will confuse the people who could see the post till yesterday, might even
have commented on it, and suddenly can't see it anymore.

Privacy decisions are not as simple as they might appear on a cursory glance,
and overall I find that G+ takes privacy very seriously. Seen from the above
light, the current policy of not allowing visibility changes, but allowing the
author to delete the post, makes a lot more sense.

~~~
DigitalTurk
I disagree.

Allowing more people to see a post is already possible by adding people to the
circles that you shared the post with.

------
jere
I skipped ahead to the "10 most risky and likely to be shutdown products",
read it, then did a double take "wasn't I supposed to be reading about
Google?" Never heard of any of those.

Interesting poems. I was certain Ozymandias would show up though.

~~~
gwern
> Never heard of any of those.

Yes, and that'll be reflected in the hits data and be one reason they'll be
rated so risky...

I love 'Ozymandias', but unfortunately it's become so overused it's cliche. So
I picked poems that I was reasonably sure almost no reader would ever have
seen (the exceptions: the _Julius Caesar_ quote, which I parodied; and the
Basho haiku, which I gave my own rendering of) but were hopefully still good.

------
orbitur
Interesting post, but oh my god, the styling on this site is hurting my brain.

~~~
gwern
I know I designed the styling mostly to appeal to myself, but serious
question: what's wrong with black text on white background? That's basically
how books have been printed for hundreds of years.

~~~
molecule
Great article and analysis.

One answer to your question, "what's wrong with black text on white
background?":

<http://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/>

~~~
jsnell
That answer would be a more convincing if the page itself wasn't a great
demonstration of the opposite. I'm sure #554 with a spindly font looks great
on a retina MacBook, but it's just not all that readable on most systems,
especially for people with less than perfect vision.

I just don't get what issue designers have with contrast. You'd kind of think
that the point of text is for it to be readable, not for it to look soothing.

------
ComputerGuru
We just launched our Google FeedBurner replacement in anticipation of its
upcoming doom: <http://feedsnap.com> (release info
[http://neosmart.net/blog/2013/worried-google-will-kill-
your-...](http://neosmart.net/blog/2013/worried-google-will-kill-your-
feedburner-introducing-feedsnap/) )

We're planning on "launching it" on Monday.

------
robk
Picasa seems unnaturally safe in this model. It's also stopped iterating
generally and Google's acquired a totally separate mobile app for photos
(Snapseed). And Google really doesn't make any material amount of money off
Picasa either.

~~~
buro9
And Linux support (which was only through Wine) was officially dropped.

Even before the recent spate of services being shut-down, shortly after the
Linux support was dropped, I moved Picasa to a kill list and started migrating
what I was using it for to something else (Dropbox for storage and sharing).

I presume it's going to be killed, to me that's what the product state
signals.

~~~
jcastro
Dropbox also has photos now, when you log in on the bottom left there was an
opt-in for the beta testing. It's really nice compared to Picasa/G+'s "2
different photo services but not really" design.

------
EdiX
Am I the only one who sees Google Groups at risk? It could be seen as a
competitor to Google Plus the update it's getting is awful and looks like
something designed in 2009, the updated before that happened a decade ago,
it's not very popular with the general public... it sounds a lot like Google
Reader to me.

~~~
gwern
You'd think so, but the comparison to Google+ doesn't seem very apt - it
shouldn't be a threat any more than Gmail is (but something to be leveraged).

------
The_Sponge
I don't think that Google Voice will get shutdown. Google needs a unified
communication product, tying Google Talk, Voice, and Hangouts together.

~~~
w1ntermute
This is said to be coming in "Babel."

~~~
jonemo
This is the first time I heard about changes to Voice and I really really hope
they just leave Voice alone. This is the one Google product that is deeply
integrated into my life and I rely on it continuing to work (it's also the
only Google product I pay for). Sure it _could_ become better, but lately when
Google makes things better they usually get worse (at first, or forever).

~~~
Terretta
I fat fingered a down vote for you on my iPad, sorry. I hope two passers by
give you up votes to make up for it.

Google Voice is quietly used by a high percentage of colleagues as a "Line 2"
to keep work comms under control and out of their personal SMS and VM, and by
others as a way to have a truly portable personal number.

The only downside is occasional but serious VOIP quality issues even when
landline to landline (routed through a GV number). If Google fixed that, sure
seems to me GV could become a defacto identity endpoint for the mobile device
generation.

------
k3n
Regardless of the actual subject, it looks like an excellent analysis. I
haven't verified the maths, but I like that he includes every possible
calculation, source code, and external reference that was used. A very
academic and data-driven approach.

------
jensenbox
If anyone is interested in helping out, I have created a timeline for browsing
such services: <http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/>

~~~
gwern
That's a nice start. (It's a good idea - I was actually trying to do a similar
'stacked lines' plot to show the lifespans of all entries in my dataset, but I
gave up at the time because it looked too hard and grotty to do in R.)

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klapinat0r
It's been a few years since my 3 stats courses, so pardon if I'm wrong, but
aren't his p-values for the logistic regression kind of... important?

Intercept and log(hits) sure, but the rest have rather high p values
indicating that it's likely to be present even if it has no effect (lower
p-value, more robust, < 0.05 => < 5% chance of incorrectly stating it has an
effect (when it does not)).

Or am I missing something basic here?

------
mountaineer
Definitely agree with Feedburner and Alerts being likely targets based on how
well (or not well) they're supported currently.

------
timmm
You do realize that the 30% that Google takes from Android Developers from App
sales doesn't go to Google right?

~~~
throwaway2048
where does it go?

~~~
timmm
To the respective mobile carriers.

~~~
dudus
What makes you think that?

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chris_wot
Ah, a study based on something Charles Arthur said?

I once had an email conversation with Charles Arthur, it didn't go well...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ta_bu_shi_da_yu/Charles_Ar...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ta_bu_shi_da_yu/Charles_Arthur)

~~~
gwern
More like, 'a study prompted by noting serious flaws in an Arthur column and
deciding to do better, while borrowing perhaps <1/10th of the final dataset
from Arthur's data' (he had ~30, I wound up with 350).

------
newnewnew
When will blogger be killed and rolled into Google plus?

~~~
gwern
If you believe the model, roughly 'when hell freezes over'. I find it a little
hard, but I guess we'll know who to believe during the next 5 years if Blogger
is indeed killed.

------
cremnob
Google Finance is definitely not being maintained and I wouldn't be surprised
if it's killed.

