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Comment by Gatsky | Hacker News Reader

There is always so much vitriol on HN about these kinds of announcements.

I've never understood why. Google presumably has lots of data and feedback from people using Inbox, and determined that it wasn't useful enough or widespread enough to justify ongoing investment. Why is this surprising or shocking? This happens all the time in commercial and open source software.

The internet is great, but unfortunately has the ability to agglomerate individual moments of otherwise transient irritation into a pyroclastic flow of outrage.

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In the case of open source project,

* if the maintainer is no longer able to take the project further, the code is still there an can be used as is, maybe with a few bugfixes. (ala, thunderbird). The code does not disappear overnight. r.

* All the associated data is still yours and available. So no information is lost.

* If it is very critical, you can develop it yourself further

I am not an user of Inbox, but I can understand the outrage. When a service is offered for free by such a mammoth of a company, it gives a false sense of security and permanence. It crushes most competition and development of open source alternatives. Then one fine day, the rug is pulled from under your feet and there is no recourse.

The most ironic aspect is you no longer have access to your pinned emails, bundles and such. Yet, somewhere in google's distributed data storage, it will continue to reside for a long long time. The information asymmetry is outrageous.

The 'bundles' and pinned emails are not lost - they are all just 'labels' under the hood, and they can be found back in gmail as well (except for a couple, I think travel doesn't carry over)

You bring up a good point, it seems as though the answer is to invest more into open source mail clients that can offer more since there truly is value in an improved mail UI.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but inbox shared your same content as Gmail, right? If that's the case, nothing was lost.

Aside from the pin and bundle meta-data, which doesn't transfer over automatically AFAIK.

People didn't use Inbox for unique content over Gmail. Both always had just their mails.

It's the UI interactions (plus some metadata), and those are gone.

> ...It crushes most competition and development of open source alternatives....

This is the aspect, above all the others, that bothers me. Apple is guilty of this too. As soon as a project or tool is released free or as part of the OS or whatever, it drives any competing version out of business. Does it matter if the implementation is shitty? No, because it will still be "good enough" for enough users to make that competition unviable. Does it matter if the implementation stops being developed and eventually gets pulled? No, because the competition has already been driven out.

If somehow the big company that pulls this (Google, Apple, etc) were to seriously commit to maintaining the project, hm, ok, fine I guess. But of course they've repeatedly shown that they won't do that.

>The most ironic aspect is you no longer have access to your pinned emails, bundles and such.

Luckily, GDPR and it's predecessor allows you to download that data... Getting it into another program is a bigger challenge, of course.

Hi (ex-googler here, although i wasn't on this project). Product usage isn't a one-way street. It requires coordination from marketing, customer support, and ongoing product development. Inbox was yet another product that Google spent years on internally, launched with a bang, and then basically forgot about while the PMs got their promo and moved on to new projects, and so on.

To make a bad analogy (sorry) in response to your "lots of data and feedback", what Google repeatedly does is the equivalent of walking out into a crowd and yelling "HEY FREE HOT DOGS AT 1600 AMPHITHEATER PARKWAY" only one single time, and then concluding a week later that, even though initially the people who heard about the free hot dogs came by last week, since nobody is coming by for hot dogs anymore that people don't want free hot dogs. Remember Duo? Allo? Even Hangouts Chat from earlier this year is probably unknown to most people because google's stopped yelling in crowds about it.

That sounds to me like Google knows how to do projects, not products.

It seems like the incentives for employees at Google are the problem here. People are rewarded for successfully completing projects, not for maintaining existing ones, so rational employees will maximize their compensation by moving on from a project after it launches and trying to launch a new one.

There seems to be nobody at the top enforcing a consistent product vision.

This is how Android ended up having several text messaging apps at the same time a few years ago. Apple certainly would not have done that, and I doubt even Microsoft would have allowed that state of affairs to exist.

Microsoft however used to pay developers per lines of code... Not sure what is better in this case :-)

Oh boy, this literally encourages bloat

I thought it was Bill Gates that said that paying developers by lines of code is like paying aircraft engineers by the ton.

> This is how Android ended up having several text messaging apps at the same time

And in the same time, they had (open for a couple of years) a bug about Android default app sometimes randomly send SMS to wrong recipient.

Did you put Google and customer support in the same sentence?

That's part of my point

> The internet is great, but unfortunately has the ability to agglomerate individual moments of otherwise transient irritation into a pyroclastic flow of outrage.

I must admit I love the way that you phrased this.

Google seems more willing than most to shut down their offerings. While there's nothing wrong with that, it does give users less of a reason to use one of their services, because you never know when it might just go away.

If they're not making profits off something assume it can and will shut down.

They had the opportunity to monetize google reader. What's more important than eyeballs. You made a wrapper around other people's website. They could have done _something_. But, no. The just shuttered it.

Do it too often and you won't have any users because many people are not prepared to take the risk and instead buy the service from another company.

> This happens all the time in commercial and open source software.

I think it's not the same for Google, or other large companies. Products going away are something that happens a lot - you're right. But in many cases, it's a startup folding because their idea wasn't profitable / worth continuing. In case of a single service, the company will often fight to keep it alive, will try to improve and maybe increase the prices.

It's different for the huge enterprises. They just decide at some point to kill the product - it could be because they're not profitable (but is Gmail profitable?), it could be because of staffing assignment, it could be due to management shift, it could be because of internal conflicts.

It's easier to take "we tried and just can't succeed with this" than "management decision, deal with it".

I think you will be surprised how decisions are made in Big Tech, especially Google. If they are truly metric driven, it will be really hard to explain why they would end up with so many different messengers, and continuously discontinue some and churn out new ones and repeat. Even if they claimed to be, I am afraid they way they read the data is very different than we understand the data, after all, data is just a way to win the argument, the decision need to be made by human.

> I've never understood why

Because if I got positive emotions from using inbox what is so unexpected about getting negative emotions when google kills it? Fuck them.

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