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Comment by shrewduser | Hacker News Reader

Google has been a complete imbecile when it comes to these things.

It's simple game theory, If i've been burnt by google shutting down something i've made part of my workflow or rely on (I'm sure most people at hacker news have been in this situation) I'm far less likely to adopt their next big idea.

They could have a division which puts these projects on life support or hell sells them to another company or even open source some of their products and let the community support them!

I'm still salty about google reader and their original podcast app on android among other things it would have been so easy to do right by their users.

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I don't think you emphasized enough the "far less likely to adopt their next big idea" bit. It's massive. Developers used to simply assume whatever Google puts out is going to be huge, and the sooner they get onto it, the better off they'll be. Now, anything that Google puts out, it's far more sensible to take a "wait and see if other people use it" approach. If enough people do that, no one uses it!

I think Google are generally smart enough to factor this type of thing into their decision-making around "should we shut down X" but their approach to shutting things down does make me wonder how they value it.

Reminds me of how they decided to shutdown Google Wave before it really found it's feet. Sounds like it's down to needing to be in the mass user adoption, rather than niche product.

Yeah, Google are fortunate enough with their existing products & services that what might be a pretty exciting opportunity to other companies might be a sunset candidate for them.

>Google has been a complete imbecile when it comes to these things.

Why? A company the size of Google needs to prune these kinds of side-branches of their business so they don't become bloated and unwieldy.

>They could have a division which puts these projects on life support or hell sells them to another company or even open source some of their products and let the community support them!

There may be reasons you can't open source it. We wrote a AS3/Flex to JS/HTML compiler. I looked at open-sourcing it because it's cool, but right now it's totally tied to our build-chain and tailored for our specific purpose. It would take a lot of effort to properly put it out there, and if you don't do that work, people get pissed and complain.

>If i've been burnt by google shutting down something i've made part of my workflow or rely on

Yeah, but it isn't just google. What's the alternative? A scrappy start-up that will shut-down when acquired? Everything is a risk now.

We use fogbugz extensively. Will it be here next year? Probably, but who knows. Maybe it'll be acquired by Atlassian and shut-down tomorrow.

I downvoted this comment because its style heavily encourages low value combative tit-for-tat replies, half of it is quotations from the parent comment, and the remainder is posing questions in favour of adding thoughtful commentary

(parent comment was edited since this was posted)

You don't have to explain yourself. Down-votes are there for you to use.

Having said that, after scanning through your comment history, I'd say "Practice what you preach".

>(parent comment was edited since this was posted)

I did add a little blurb about the AS3/Flex compiler stuff. I don't know if it changes the comment substantially.

> We wrote a AS3/Flex to JS/HTML compiler. I looked at open-sourcing it because it's cool

I'd be prepared to chip in to a crowdfunding campaign to get that released.

Check OpenFL.

Looks good, but it's Haxe+3rd party frameworks, rather than AS3+Flex - which would mean a whole bunch of porting, I'm afraid.

True. I was suggesting because, in my experience, porting was quite simple, just several rounds of search replace (and some unexpected surprise here or there). That was some time ago, I'm not sure about how much things might have changed.

It's easy to sit here and say "open source it!", but do you realize how much work that could entail?

This was most likely written to take advantage of the google ecosystem. Written to work on Google hardware, with a Google database, using Google's internal messaging, using Google's custom source control, by Google employees, it probably tightly integrates with several proprietary Google services, etc...

I'd be willing to be good money that even if it was open sourced (or sold) it would be almost entirely useless. And that's ignoring the fact that open sourcing (or selling) it might not be possible because there is a good chance it can contain trade secrets.

I do agree with you that it's a problem when users are losing confidence in some products, but personally I feel that it would be better solved with better communication.

Get some kind of messaging together that will let users know when their products are "core google" and when they are more "auxiliary".

if google has properly weighed up all the options (including open sourcing, selling, putting it on life-support, creating a team to manage EOL services or whatever other method you can think of) and decided that it makes the most sense to just kill it thereby hurting their users and in the process making their new services and ideas less likely to succeed then i'm totally fine with that decision.

I guess my point is that i don't believe they've considered the fact that they're making their future endeavours harder for themselves.

If they had looked at all those options, I would expect them to mention it in the sunset announcement. Wouldn't that help to avoid the sunset of one product negatively impacting other current & future products?

To the point on open sourcing, while valid for other ventures, Google Compare is largely not novel. They mostly partnered with existing vendors in the independent agent comparative rating space where this sort of technology is both common and mature.

Since they relied so heavily on partnerships and from what I could tell of Compare, I'd strongly doubt they could open much more than the interview process (which has next to no value).

They could have released it still, including the documentation that says how to connect it to an external database, etcetera.

Also hard to "open source" free top/center ad placement of the widget :) Perhaps the most relevant feature vs other existing financial services comparison websites.

You're not alone on that: http://didgoogleshutdown.com

It's missing Chrome, weirdly.

They are also missing the service I use most from Google (besides search): Maps.

For gmail it has an outlook of "sketchy" -- claiming that people are being moved over to inbox on mobile. I think this is a bit disingenuous and makes me wary of the other claims on what google projects might get the axe next. Gmail is google's mail service. It is just as, if not more, critical to their business than search. How else would they get such juicy detailed information about users? Changing from an app named "gmail" to an app named "inbox" for accessing gmail on a cell phone has no bearing on the health of gmail as a service.

Considering how sketchy google has been on services in the past this web site is a great website, but I think they need to fix the "health of gmail" status.

>or hell sells them to another company

I don't think anyone at Google has ever (OK, in this millennium) considered an option to sell something. I guess it's a kind of superstition among top management, a sign of weakness perhaps.

Correct me if I'm wrong and Google has actually sold anything.

I suspect it's strategic more than lack of intelligence. When you sell a company, you generally have to sell the people associated with the product. (A code base isn't worth anything on it's own without people who know it, and people selling it)

There was Motorola, which was sold to lenovo

Forgot about it, thank you. But it wasn't Google's product.

The first thing that comes to mind is the sale of a part of Motorola. That's probably not what you were aiming for since that was not a "product" and Motorola was already bought with splitting the company in mind.

SketchUp is probably the only software product they've sold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SketchUp

> Correct me if I'm wrong and Google has actually sold anything.

You're wrong, Google sold SketchUp[1] in 2012. SketchUp most likely wasn't hardwired into Google infrastructure (as a desktop app), and had been an acquisition.

1. http://investor.trimble.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=6676...

...or they could manage expectations by releasing it as an experimental service that could close at any time. Labs worked really well for that.

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