The sheer size of Google’s list vs Apple’s is why I’ve decided to never again use a Google service. There is no reliability there, nor is there any consistency - they kill products for no apparent reason - popular beloved products. The latest decision to turf anyone on Legacy Google Appa for your Domain accounts was the final straw. They are a truly reprehensible company.
Apple's list is utterly incomplete. The thing is, Apple won't necessarily discontinue named services because they don't really like to name their services.
They've killed things like their book printing from iPhoto/Photos, but it never had a marketable name, so a list like that is kind of dumb to use with Apple.
Ok that’s a fair comment. I think with Apple one can at least recognize that when they cancel something it is due to a lack of popularity. With Google, they kill services constantly that are popular, or they randomly change the rules (for example, suddenly users need a gmail account but NOT a Google Workspace account to log into Nest Cams).
Dealing with Google is like being in a relationship with a schizophrenic.
Apparent reason is losing hope to monetize the product. They literally do not care how popular or beloved it is. In the end it is the business and not a charity foundation.
Right, but if you have a popular product and can’t monetize it, particularly with Google’s business model of inserting ads, then you aren’t very good at business. What’s the difference between someone logging into Gmail and paying for it via ads in Gmail vs someone logging into a legacy Google Apps for your Domain email account and paying for it via ads shown exactly like Gmail?
Honestly, it feels like the company is filled with warring factions and the users are collateral damage.
The big difference being many of those things are still usable for users. Just fire up the binary and be happy. Google on the other hand do SaaS to spy, at their core.
I thought about expanding the "Killed by" concept to other companies and doing precisely that "Awesome"-style project, but it takes a lot of time between researching and verifying old, mostly broken internet links to compile that data.
So many Google products that I only discovered existed after they've been cancelled. I wonder if there's a marketing problem here.
As a side note I genuinely couldn't tell you what the name of the current chat app they're promoting (Hangouts, Meet, Duo, Allo), or what they're currently calling their smart speaker this week. Sorry but "Nest" is a thermostat and always will be to me.
I guess they are trying their chances with RCS (Rich Communication Services) which is a standard rather than a service.
And now let me just get this out of me: Google is really bad at naming things. "Hangouts" is too casual, "Meet" is too confusing (it's sounded more like an outdoor activity planer), and I don't even know what Duo or Allo means (I'm not even interested to look it up).
Just call it "Chat" or "Chat service", Google, and then sit on it really REALLY steady.
I remember that every time I bought a new Android phone, there was a new chat app that was - obviously - not backwards-compatible with the previous one. Some of the contacts were usually there, some random ones from my Gmail account appeared too. All chat history was gone.
Some of my friends used Hangouts a few times - it was working reasonably well, and Gmail integration didn't hurt either. Granted after a few "iterations" of Google messaging apps, no one I know uses them, ever.
Mostly the products are nice and you can see how it will fit in, but they are making them complex and hard to use. And by that, people will not use it.
Considering it's supposed to live on as a white label service, and partners such as Ubisoft were adding games as recently as a few months ago (Far Cry 6), it's highly unlikely the service will be completely shut down soon. Keeping it for now without much investment into improvements is more probable.
Disclaimer: I've been using Stadia for more than a year now, on the Stadia Pro tier, and have probably around a hundred games ( of which I've bought ~10). I'm quite happy with it, Red Dead Redemption 2 was marvelous to play on it.
I used it at the start for Destiny 2 and had a lot of fun with it.
Then I tried streaming D2 from my home PC to my work PC across town, and my latency was definitely better than Stadia's. After all their talk about how much work they put into lowering latency, I was very disappointed... And I discovered that I could stream better and cheaper with Parsec and Steam/Epic/Uplay/etc that with Stadia.
For a while, I thought the free monthly games were going to save them, but then those went downhill.
Since they never implemented any of the amazing features they advertised, like continuing from where a streamer was playing, it's hard to support Stadia unless you're in very particular situations.
Although the death of Google Reader hurts me to this day, it's impressive how much experimentation Google is able to do.
Also, some products were not killed but rebranded (E.g. Tez, which is now Google Pay in India)
Incredible how no competitor could ever totally fill the empty space left by Google Reader. Some of them play recommendations, others are perhaps too simple, or not as linear ux-wise.
Sometimes I feel somebody should just copy Google Reader as closely as possible.
This doesn't indicate "bad practice". At their scale they can run these experiments for no other reason than to let people feel ownership of a project and gain experience. If even only succeeds, that's a bonus.
You are failing to account for the cost on user trust. Each time a user buys into an app or device Google shuts down, that user trusts Google products a little less. Do it once or twice, no big deal. Do it dozens of times and they're never going to try your new products again.
After the second time of having some Google product be cancelled, I vowed never to use any of their services ( apart from search ) in a commercial setup. My first question for any AWS/Azure service being considered in my organization is "When is it going to be EOL'ed?".
Shows that Google is willing to innovate and invest. Lots of new adventures, if it doesn't work - fail fast. I know I grew attached to some of these services, but guess what! I survived and found alternatives. I am also pretty sure that some of these deaths has improved other services.
FeedBurner is one that I expected them to have killed years ago, but it's still alive. They even went to the effort of moving it to "more stable, modern infrastructure" last year rather than killing it. Someone at Google must care about it enough to fight for it.
With the decline of Google search quality, it feels like they might have made themselves incredibly vulnerable to an attack against their golden goose.
I think it'll take a complete revolution to debunk Google. It's unlikely to be another keyword-based search tool. It'll be something entirely different. It might have already showed up, bought and killed by Google, though...
Flutter got a lot of traction in the last couple years.
Although that’s not a requisite for Google not kill it, I don’t see it happening unless some VP wakes up on the wrong side of bed some day or the key people leave to start a woodworking YouTube channel.
Killed by Mozilla: https://killedbymozilla.com/
Killed by Microsoft: https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ (curiously DuckDuckGo which apparently takes search results from Bing didn't show me this)
Killed by Apple: https://killedbyapple.nl/
There's also one for Facebook, but it doesn't seem to be filled out: https://killedbyfacebook.nl/
Actually, why don't we have something like https://awesomeopensource.com/ but for projects that have been retired, to remember them more easily or view which company has created what? Maybe even just a GitHub repo, like https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted ? Anyone know of other good links like that, perhaps?