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.
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.
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.
With a 100,000 person company, the CEO cannot direct all products.
Startups can launch a product off 5 engineers. Let's say, hypothetically, Google is way less efficient and can launch a product off 50 engineers. You are looking at thousands of products. If the CEO spent literally every working hour just reviewing and approving products they get roughly an hour per product per year.
This means that these decisions must be delegated and therefore there will be decisions that seem boneheaded in retrospect. Its just a fact of being a massive company.
The problem seems more cultural than you're giving it credit to be - several ex-Googlers have stated or written articles pointing out that the way Google handles promotions heavily incentivizes people to launch new products over working to improve existing ones.
I'm a Googler and have been on promo committees. I've seen this material. I don't think it is entirely without merit, but I feel that it is fairly overblown. My org, for example, is much more focused on debt reduction and efficiency rather than launching products and we have historically had a higher promo rate than the norm.
Apple has more employees than Google and has very top-down direction of products. You're starting from the assumption that prioritizing launching as many products as possible is obviously the correct goal, but the whole criticism is that Google values product quantity over product quality too much.
It doesn't pay to be creative or engineer driven when you're a monopoly. The ones that make the big bucks are sales and marketing.
The other factor is cash reserves[1]. They can make 1000s of mistakes like this without any significant damage to their cash flow. Also assuming they are mistakes which we don't know, because we don't know their strategy.
Finally, if you think the leaders don't know about this trend and/or killedbygoogle you're kind of naive. Actually with the amount of data they have there is a pretty high chance they can easily learn everything about you way before you can learn everything about them.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
As google fi is mostly t-mo + sprint, and t-mo is now mostly t-mo + sprint, it would seem Google Fi's only selling point is it would be nearly impossible to have your phone number social engineered away, because Google support can't be reasoned with?
Fi has other compelling features. The biggest win for me is that it works worldwide for the same $10/gig I pay at home. I went to Cayman and Honduras last year, and it just worked; normally, I have to go buy a local SIM and prepay a few hundred dollars, but with Fi my total monthly bills were still only about $40.
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...
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.
I never claimed there wasn't any whatsoever, but that's very far from the huge list of 200 killed products on sites like Killed By Google that people wave around. Also, comparing Google Search Appliance to Fi or Stadia still sounds just as silly and unfitting.
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.
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 :(
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?
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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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
This should not be true and if it is, it’s just further indication of a problem.
I said 1 ten thousandth of cash on hand for 1.1 million years to drive home how much of a paradigm breaking amount of money they have.
They could make a blank rule that every app gets 20 years of maintenance and support and support 55,000 projects for 1/10000 of their budget.
Now realistically I feel your comment is still missing the point because it’s not even about saying they should maintain these apps anymore.
It’s about the fact that your hard earned dollar is a a drop in the bucket for them. Literally.
Imagine a bucket holding a bucket of water.
Imagine 1.5 million of these buckets back to back.
$1 of your money, is one drop in all 1.5 million of these jugs for Google.
Now pardon my visualizations here but I find it helps when you’re talking about such stupid amounts of money, to help put things into perspective.
They don’t care about services unless the returns are going to be astronomical in one dimension of another.
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Every service they make like a VC backed startup on their Series A... except they go and attach literally the biggest name in modern technology to it, which lulls people into a false sense of security and also expands the reach of these projects so that them shutting down affects many more people than an early stage product shutdown should.
The app never exited Beta. I would think Google realized there is no $ in being second social network in its category (after nextdoor) at Google Scale.
I do think it make sense for Google to shutdown the app. Spinning it off as a startup, I doubt it is a viable option considering how tied they would be with other Google internal resources.
The point here is that very few people are using Neighbourly to make it interesting to Google.
Btw, in these days I learned that Duo is still alive. I thought it was dismissed time ago. The page on Google Play says 1B+ installs and still I don't know anybody using it. I mean, nobody ever asked me to make a call using Duo. Everybody is using WhatsApp or Skype for that on mobile. So, to get to the point, very second (or probably, fourth, fifth, etc) in the rankings but not dismissed by Google. I think they value our as strategic. Neighbourly was not. They already have Maps.
> Btw, in these days I learned that Duo is still alive.
Duo is great actually, me and my family use it all the time. WhatsApp video calls are pretty bad imho, they tend to show a lot of artifacts and not be very fluent in general. Duos on the other hands looks pretty good, no matter if you're on WiFi or 4G.
The biggest benefit however is the fact, that the user interface is so incredibly simple. For apps like WhatsApp video calling is just an secundary feature, for Duos its the main focus. I never had to explain anything about Duos to my parents, but they still know how to use it with me and their friends.
However, I don't feel like Google is putting a lot of effort into bringing Duos forward, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'd shut it down as well.
(Also, the high install count is probably just because some devices come with Duos preinstalled, although I don't know when its counted as an install in the PlayStore)
The best feature of Duo is that it is cross-platform: you can make video calls between Androids and iPhones (which you can with WhatsApp also, of course, but WhatsApp's video call quality is not that great).
Tot cost of a more reasonable scenario- a single employee, total cost 500K per year. For 10 years this would be 5M. Which is indeed less than 1/ten thousand cash on hand.
Maintenance cost is not flat over time. What happens when a product is easy to maintain (one engineer) but suddenly critical infrastructure gets deprecated and now the transition is going to take five engineers? Do you allocate new resources to support products that already have so few users that they only justify maintenance mode?
I would also suggest that the people who like such a product (neighbourly.co.nz is popular with the Boomers) are not the people who like downloading apps that could be websites.
So yeah, it didn't get as popular as Google would like, but then, how hard did they try?
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
We have a same named social website in NZ, and it's doing well - but then, it's been advertised substantially. Do Google have a policy against advertising their own products or something?
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.