Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand | Hacker News Reader

Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

arstechnica.com

788 pointsvanburen413 comments

Warning: Personal opinion ahead

To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted?

The criteria for promotion at Google, especially at the higher levels like SWE III -> Senior and especially at Senior -> Staff and above, explicitly talk about impact on the organization and the business. This has consequences for the kind of teams people try to join and kind of work they choose to do. Maintenance engineering is so not-rewarded that it's become an inside joke. Any team that isn't launching products starts bleeding staff, any project that isn't going to make a big splash is going to be neglected, and any design that doesn't "demonstrate technical complexity" will be either rejected or trumped up.

This is as important in the product management, people management, and general leadership roles as in engineering. The incentive throughout is to create a product, launch it, apply for promotion, and move on to bigger and better things as soon as possible. In my time at Google I saw organization after organization pay lip service to rewarding maintenance and "preferring landings over launches" and “improving product excellence” but (at least in my experience) nothing stuck.

Usually an organization starts with a top-down direction and the rest of the company is compensated for executing it. Not at Google. The "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach that developed from the early days of twenty percent time and total engineering independence has created a disorganized mess of a company. Multiply the individual incentives fifty thousand times and you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately.

Edit/Addendum:

This is also why GMail, YouTube, Search, GCP, Android, and others aren’t going anywhere. They’re making money, they’re core to the business, and there’s plenty of opportunity to work on them and get promoted. They all also share one thing in common: deep down they’re frontends for search or advertising (GCP and Apps are an exception because they make money on their own). Measuring and proving impact on search numbers is a well-known promo narrative at Google, so those products are a safe bet for employees and users. Streaming game services, not so much.

It is general true for any big organization. In my own firm, I could see the rush into machine learning direction as a door way to a promotion. Any engineer or PM who works on a ML related project and is able to ship it would have a higher chance of getting promoted. I could also say the same for the usage of AWS products. In the end, I often see projects resembling the messy mashup of AWS products to form a unnecessary complex ML solution to a mosquito problem. It’s a waste yes, but sure will make it looks challenging and boost people to promotions.

I increasingly see this as the next level of alienation from work-product.

Carpenter makes and sells chairs to people who need chairs, farmer grows and sells apples to people who want apples.

Then there's the line worker making just chair legs for people they'll never meet, and the farmer selling their entire apple crop to a big company that'll do who-knows-what with them—sell them, turn them into apple sauce, use them as input to some process that turns out a "natural ingredient" that's some pure, extracted chemical contained in the apples.

Then there's the sort of crap we're talking about here. Projects that obviously never should have existed in the first place, and/or that would have been better if done in a simpler, faster, cheaper way, but a ton of make-work was thrown in due to agency problems and perverse incentives.

How much of the benefit of computers is being eaten by this kind of thing? The most effective things we do with them may provide 1000x the economic output of that apple farmer, or more, but then we spend a bunch of time doing useless or negative-value stuff, without even getting into a lot of the actually-lucrative work having large negative externalities—spyware-enabled advertising, say, or even just advertising, full stop. What does it do to someone's psyche to spend 90+% of their time doing harmful or useless stuff? Hell some people end up doing nothing of actual value for years on end. What are we doing?

I totally agree that this is frustrating for erudite tech users, but I'd say calling Google a "disorganized mess of a company" is kinda stretching things. The last quarterly earnings for GOOG were up 21% year/year. That's pretty insane for a company of this size.

The way they operate is annoying when it's one of your favorite products that isn't pulling it's weight, but it's hard to argue that the strategy isn't sound.

To play devil's advocate, we don't know how sucessful they would be if they followed a more orderly model.

Not saying they wouldn't be, but it's entirely possible that they are successfull in spite of, not because of how they operate in much of the business. Given that the vast majority of their revenue comes from just one place, advertising, which seems to be run in a much more cautious manner, there is an argument that this might be the case.

They keep showing more and more (or bigger and bigger) ads. At some point, they'll hit the law of diminishing returns.

I'm disappointed I had to go this far down into the comments to read an actual sensible rebuttal. I stand by my calling it a disorganized mess, but you'll notice I never actually say this strategy isn't paying off for the company...

Agree that "disorganized mess" is a stretch. But pointing to a company's success doesn't make them immune to criticism either. My project often gets compared to a competing offering from Amazon. When discussing this with coworkers, I will point out the drawbacks and trade-offs of their design and why that's a WAY bigger deal for my company's customers than it is for the typical AWS user. "But they made $X last year". Yes. And we're less vulnerable to data loss. Thank you. Next.

> you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately.

I would love if they followed this strategy. Instead, you have products like reader and inbox with many passionate users, which demonstrate some wall stickiness, and they're killed rather than monetized.

Monetize me. I recognize that the things I like cost money. Figure out how to make money off me! I would have accepted ads in reader or inbox. Hell, I would have paid dollars to make those ads go away even.

Google reader is the one that kills me. Not only do they not monetize it / promote it, but it's Google subsidized free existence killed the market for alternatives. Then Google+ and their failed social efforts killed Reader and RSS feeds have now disappeared from the landscape leaving us with only proprietary options.

> it's Google subsidized free existence killed the market for alternatives

Did it? IIRC, there were at least six decent alternatives available when Reader closed. More if you count desktop and mobile applications.

I tested a few that appeared from the ashes. Ended up not liking most of them but eventually found bazqux and pay them money.

I switched to Feedly the day they announced the shutdown because it could import from Reader, looked like Reader, and used a lot of the same shortcuts. Is bazqux better?

Haven't used Feedly, but I was a hardcore Google Reader user, and I _love_ BazQux Reader. It does exactly what I need - shows RSS, has APIs that allow mobile apps to hook in, is fast, and it _just works_. Totally worth the $20/yr, and I'm amazed more folks don't talk about it.

I found the way Feedly handles scrolling to be aggravating to the point where I couldn't use it.

The Old Reader is great, but it doesn't have a mobile app. For a while, I ended up having accounts with both The Old Reader and Feedly, so I could use The Old Reader on desktop and GReader (a Feedly client) on mobile.

The Old Reader is compatible with a number of 3rd party clients, including GReader.

Ah thanks. It's been a while since I've used RSS, though... I eventually gave up after a while.

The metric you need to keep in mind here is revenue per employee. Keeping one product up and running necessarily means withholding engineers from another. As an extreme example, ads engineers make Google many times their salary, benefits, and ephemeral costs, and even non-revenue-generating services like Photos and Assistant indirectly drive traffic to the money makers.

Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only a couple million users, mostly pointy-headed techie types, that doesn’t drive business to any money-making effort, with no alignment with any stategic effort, that could be reimplemented by a particularly talented and hardworking high school senior, staffed by about a dozen engineers. That product will be the first on the chopping block, if only to encourage those engineering resources to find more profitable employment.

This comment makes it sound as if you don't think generating massive amounts of goodwill among your most passionate customer base "drives business." Google Reader was the loss leader that drove me deeply into Google's whole suite of applications and made me a paying customer of theirs.

I feel this is a sort of corporate Dutch Disease. Highly profitable sectors drive out investment in the rest.

I get this, but then why even launch if there's no vision at all beyond cancel it in a couple years since they're not willing to even try to drive new revenue with these? No profits, burnt goodwill—cynically, I wonder, is it just make-work to keep restless engineers happy and out of the arms of potential upstarts and competitors?

Cool cool, if that's what you must do. Google can go on making piles of cash with their money engines and on the side, going through an elaborate game of charades as if they were making real products so they can figure out who gets get a promotion for best pretending to create anything of actual value.

But, I'm going to ignore all Google product launches and treat them as the mistimed april fools jokes they are.

For people (like me) who hadn't heard of Dutch Disease:

"In economics, the Dutch disease is the apparent causal relationship between the increase in the economic development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture)."

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

> Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only a couple million users, mostly pointy-headed techie types, that doesn’t drive business to any money-making effort,

And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled.

But what those direct metrics do not show is the long term trust which is destroyed by such short-term behavior.

Google has proved again and again that they are not a reliable company and because of this I will never ever spend any money on any of their products (apart from a cheap android phone every 3 years).

Why should I pay for Google Drive? Why should I pay for Youtube Red (or whatever its called nowadays)? Why should I buy a Chromebook? If I start rely on them they will be canceled after a year.

They might have saved a few million dollar by axing Google Reader but they lost _me_ as a customer forever.

> And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled.

Microsoft doesn't consider a product unless it can generate more than $100M a year.

It's a general mode of operation for big companies, not limited to Google.

How much money do you think AWS loses still supporting old deprecated services like running EC2 instances outside of a VPC and SimpleDB?

I’m not aware of a single feature on AWS that has ever been abandoned.

I don't know of any service that was dropped on either of AWS or GCP. Features are dropped though, they can't be ordered from new accounts then they disappear eventually.

I don't think that you can order older instances, or run instances outside of a VPC, not sure if non-HVM AMI are still supported.

AWS has a strategy of leaving offerings to rot and making a new thing that you have to migrate to yourself. For example, the 3 different types of reserved instances or ELB vs ALB. It has its pros and cons. Google has less products that are more capable and feature complete.

They are both rather new and creating new products instead of removing products, it will take one more decade to see how they handle depreciation of core products, when any actually gets retired.

You can't run EC2 instances outside of a VPC if you have a new account. If you have a very old account you still can and every now and then they announce a new feature that works with them.

I don't think they lose any money at all. They pass the entirety of those costs onto customers.

That's why, for example, newer EC2 instance types cost less than older ones: whenever they decide to cut their margins to increase volume, they essentially do it across-the-board first, and then they back up and increase the costs for the legacy instances to reflect their increasing support burden. (It just happens to look like the legacy instances hovering at a static pricing while the modern instances get cheaper.)

Also keep in mind that when you're selling B2B SaaS, legacy services are mostly kept around because there are big enterprise accounts that pay to keep them around. If there are only three customers left on non-VPC deployments, but one of those customers is IBM, you're not going to pull the plug.

I don't think they lose any money at all. They pass the entirety of those costs onto customers.

If that’s the case, that’s a business model I’m all for. Charge people enough money to make your product sustainable instead of just trying to gain a lot of users and hope you will figure it out later. Of course even then you have to have enough scale to cover the fix costs and offer it a price to make it affordable, but don’t start off thinking the answer to everything is advertising.

Uh, but Microsoft is more conservative in both launching and canceling products. If MSFT said "Access can now do all the things that spreadsheets were used for so we're dropping Excel" the streets would be aflame with the protests of millions.

I also think this is a place where MSFT's application first (not app) development strategy shines. There are still folks out there running Excel98 and you can feel free to try and pry it out of their cold uncaring hands, they will fight you for it.

Don't launch and offer BS you're not going to support!

Yet, for some reason Microsoft keeps updating calculator and notepad in Windows.

Really? I'm on windows 10 and I couldn't tell you what they've changed in notepad - did they fix legacy mac EOL support (i.e. `\r`)?

Yes, they did fix the line-endings for both Mac and Unix files.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563704/microsoft-window...

Oh, well that's nice and helpful. Good for them!

It probably adds almost no value to the product they're selling (nobody is buying windows for notepad, and anyone with serious notepadding to do gets a real editor) but it's a nice thing to do.

How much direct revenue does WSL generate? Or VSCode?

> staffed by about a dozen engineers

That's part of the problem. You should be able to leave Reader unstaffed for as long as it isn't strategic (it's not as if borg has trouble keeping the tasks up), but in practice it will randomly fail because somebody in infra went for promo, so every project faces a choice: staff this indefinitely or kill it now.

I disagree.

Google killing Reader was very shortsighted because they’ve hurt the open web in an effort to promote Google+. And it was all an effort to promote Google+, nothing more.

Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained. Don’t tell me that Google couldn’t spare an intern for the occasional fix.

And I don’t have any numbers however I’m willing to bet that Reader was, as a social network, far more popular and active than Google+ ever was.

Also such metrics don’t count the brand damage. I will never forgive Google for killing Reader and as a result I have rejected again and again Google’s products. Even at work I just convinced everyone that we must not depend on Google’s Firebase because we can’t trust Google.

> Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained.

Google products like Reader tend to use internal APIs for storage, authentication, request routing, deployment, logging, builds/tests, etc. It can be a lot of work just to keep up with those internal changes.

It was actually worse than that - Google+ used Reader as a backend. A lot of the stream-merging and ingestion features of Google+ were built on top of the Reader codebase. That meant that when Google+ product needs changed and they needed to alter the backend, they couldn't really do so without branching & disentangling or shutting down the external-facing Reader product. The latter was a much easier course for a time-constrained engineering organization, particularly since Reader as a project had been de-staffed and the engineers (that didn't leave the company) transferred to the Google+ org.

FANG interns aren't coffee-runners; you can't give them work you wouldn't give to a real junior engineer. First: doing so undermines your efforts to recruit the intern. Second: doing so undermines your efforts to evaluate the intern. Third: doing so wastes a valuable eng resource you could deploy on something worth launching!

The real problem for Reader was that it wasn't worth any engineering effort (because it only had a couple of million daily active users).

If I were an intern at Google and it was my job to maintain Reader I would be ecstatic. Hell, I'd happily do it now as a senior engineer. Why would I rather do a bunch of bullshit on a product nobody cares about when I can work on something I know people deeply love? Can you think of something that would have a larger impact than maintaining Reader?

This mentality is entirely the reason why large corporations can never do anything apart from their core business, and why they always spend billions acquiring startups (which usually fail to integrate into their business). They just fundamentally are incapable of creating anything new, and when they somehow do it the incentives are so misaligned they shut it down and the only thing they get for their efforts is making the public rightfully hate them.

I used Google Reader and Google Notebook. Since they discontinued both, I avoid committing to any new Google products - I don't want to rely on a company I consider unreliable. I even stopped using Firebase after they were acquired by Google. I wonder if they have any metric for that - can they measure how much business they lose because of the trust damage?

What if they tried the novel concept of charging users for stuff? How many people liked Reader enough to pay for it if they had started charging?

Google is in a unique position there: I often will avoid adding a new small service that I might like because I don't want to add another small payment I have to manage. With Google, I'm already paying them for storage and Youtube. I wouldn't think nearly as hard about adding a new Google service as I do others.

Is this basically why things like Inbox, and the endless attempts at messaging, all come out as seperate products rather than enhancements to existing products, because that way you get to say you launched something new?

To be perfectly honest I don’t know the answer to the chat app case in particular. That’s possible, and if one were to investigate and find each app was made by a team rolling up into a different director then I’d say that’s what happened. However it’s entirely possible that it was caused by an overly complex market segmentation strategy.

WhatsApp had the advantage of growing slowly and segmenting their users with time to experiment and tweak things. The Google chat apps came out at once, and it’s possible there were so many because they tried to come up with a working segmentation for all addressable users from day one instead of growing organically and grabbing each segment one at a time.

IMO yes: the promotion culture (technical complexity, impact) push people to come up with Big Ideas.

The thing with Big Ideas, is that they're often iterations of existing ideas, but just different enough that you can make a case for a fresh start. (And who doesn't want a greenfield project) Plus, the cost of experimentation is far less while you're not supporting a massive userbase.

That's consistent with my own experience at Google. It's not that working on improving a thing isn't rewarded, but it's just much easier to demonstrate impact when you can use the word "launched" in your self-assessment Launching is in itself an accomplishment, while optimizing requires you to also collect data, do analysis on the data, and show a positive impact. "Impact" here is one of the buzzword categories that goes into an assessment of your performance as an employee.

It may be that GCP isn't going anywhere, but when our organization was choosing a cloud service, we chose Amazon over Google specifically because of Google's flakiness. Google could drop cloud services tomorrow, and it would not be out of character.

We are in the same boat. My boss came to me last week saying he had lunch with a friend that just moved their services all to GCP and got big savings. But we just recently were impacted by the sudden, unexpected Maps 14x price increase.

Similar drastic changes happened to AppEngine, where Google let it rot for something like a year with increasing, extremely bad, latencies and then a sudden very large pricing model shift that made it much more expensive. I was an early adopter of AppEngine, and just can't imagine ever screwing around with Google cloud technology ever again.

We got stuck there too, moving away everything to alternatives. Just analytics left to remove now.

I can’t share with you how much GCP is making in revenue, but I can assure you it’s enough that it won’t get dropped, ever. I’ll put my money where my mouth is: I’m now preparing to expand my own team’s operations into GCP and away from AWS because of how good their ML offerings are.

Maybe the core product won't go away, but you could still see the damage from this approach in features or services you depend on within GCP. Not to mention Google's love for mixing around interfaces every five seconds (with poor documentation of course).

Consistency and reliability matter more than flashy new tech. I wish the culture at Google would understand that.

People were saying this about Google+ for years. "It's a 'bet the company' level of commitment."

Yet here we are.

Maybe from the outside it seemed that way, but from the inside just about everyone except Vic Gundotra and his org, no one considered it a serious contender. Just about everyone I know knew Google+ was misguided and orthogonal to the business, meanwhile the consensus internally is that GCP is an obvious extension of the infrastructure work that is going to get done anyway.

When you "bet the company", you are committing to making it your business. It's a plan to pivot to that being the most important thing you do.

So what you're saying is that when an organization is considering using a Google product, it needs to track down some Google employees and speak with them privately, to see if the company is really serious about supporting it?

> No one expects an instant success. But even if this week’s launch evokes snark or yawns, Google will keep at it. Google+ is not a product like Buzz or Wave where the company’s leaders can chalk off a failure to laudable ambition and then move on. “We’re in this for the long run,” says Ben-Yair. “This isn’t like an experiment. We’re betting on this, so if obstacles arise, we’ll adapt.”

> “I don’t really see what Google’s alternative is,” says Smarr. “People are going to be a fundamental layer of the internet. There’s no going back.”

From Inside Google+, published in Wired Magazine in 2011. As the article mentions, Google started dismantling Google+ in 2014. Three years appears to be the upper limit of their patience for "the long run". https://www.wired.com/2011/06/inside-google-plus-social/

Just about everyone I know knew Google+ was misguided and orthogonal to the business

I agree with that, but even so, the company leadership bought into Google+ in a big way, for a long time. It's incorrect to say it didn't have a huge effect on the company's direction and (perhaps indirectly) on just about every developer working there.

the consensus internally is that GCP is an obvious extension of the infrastructure work that is going to get done anyway.

Why then is it so far behind AWS in feature set and market share? Google's data centers and internal infrastructure were way ahead of the competition for years, but they were slow and reluctant to open them up.

FYI, GCP can't be dropped tomorrow because of legal/toc. Even dropping/changing non-beta features requires a looooong notification period (think 1+ year). Enterprise customers really like to secure their bases.

Source: Xoogler

Thanks, but to you and any other GOOGLE EMPLOYEES

Are you not internally aware of this?

Do you just carry on regardless?

What happens when you voice this issue internally?

As an ex-Google fan boy, the title of this article has been true for years and it's what poisoned me (and no doubt many others) against you. So you must be aware of it.

What's your take?

I'm super curious as to why you gave up tech (brand) leadership so seemingly nonchalantly.

Google employees in an individual-contributor role have limited power to change this if they want to remain Google employees. They're subject to performance reviews on this system, and the expected value of any individual advocating for a change is so tiny, compared to the expected value of playing along with the system and getting their salary and bonus check. If you want this culture to change, you need the people signing the checks to feel compelled to change it.

The practical effect is likely to be people leaving Google because they can get rewarded for maintaining existing products elsewhere.

Google as a company is worth almost $1T. It's hard to argue that's the wrong approach when they are so ridiculously successful.

Amazon and Apple have similar market caps and yet don't have this product discombobulation

How well is GCP doing compared to AWS and Azure?

How well is GSuite doing compared to MS Office?

How well is Android doing as far as revenue and profit compared to iOS? According to information that came out during the Oracle trial, Android has made Google less over 10 years than iOS makes Apple during a down quarter.

How well is G+ doing against FB?

Google hasn’t had but one successful revenue generating product - ads.

This comment is not without merit, and it's a good point. Everyone here is complaining about this, yet it's true: Google is still highly profitable. Would they be more profitable if they had a more seemingly-sensible management and weren't pissing people off with this behavior? It's impossible to say I think. Perhaps it eventually will bite them in the ass though, because it doesn't really seem like a good way to run a company long-term. But for now, it's definitely making the executives a lot of money, as well as many engineers.

I think all this does show how dysfunctional many human organizations are where chasing the new shiny is rewarded much more than keeping things stable and running correctly. Can you imagine if airplane manufacturers were run this way?

>Thanks, but to you and any other GOOGLE EMPLOYEES

> Are you not internally aware of this?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his [exceptionally generous] salary [and RSUs, bonuses] depends upon his not understanding it!"

- Upton Sinclair (approximately)

Strangely, I would say many if not most Googlers understand this situation, and that it is bad. The rank and file are mostly unhappy with it.

But the rank and file can't change it.

It's bad for the company. It's bad for the industry. And it's a much more straightforward advancement model for the individual if they know how to exploit it. That's a very particular kind of "unhappy".

Getting promoted at Google requires serious gaming of the system, especially once you go for L5. Very few people in the system at L5 or below think it is easy to exploit, even if it is supposedly "straightforward".

Decision making is opaque, even if the process is technically well-documented. One committee isn't bound by what the previous committee decided and on and on.

And yes, I think quite a few of the rank and file are unhappy about it.

Xoogler here. Individual contributors are aware of it, but have very little to no power to change it. I left when I realized I would never make career progress due in large part to this incredibly restrictive advancement model. My partner, also an Xoogler, left for the same reason.

Google is big enough, and appealing enough as an employer, that it appears to be comfortable accepting this turnover as part of how it does business. Anyone who wants to change things leaves, or is "encouraged" to leave, and only those who buy wholly into the model stick around to get promoted. Then, since that method of promotion worked for them, they entrench and encourage it, and the cycle continues.

While this issue is not unique to Google, IMHO their hiring process exacerbates it further. From day -1 you're primed to game the interview racket; once you're in, why would your mentality suddenly change wrt to climbing the promotion ladder? Your incentives haven't changed.

Oh everyone is aware of it. They have been making some changes to the promotion process to try to address it. But it's still a huge issue.

I'm not so sure about what the alternative is, though. The promotion process at other places I've worked was pretty much "does your boss like you? If so, they'll promote you." Which has a whole host of other issues. For instance you can get promoted for doing a mediocre job at maintenance work but being very friendly and likable.

On the other hand, you could be promoted for just doing a great job and being a fit for the new position without any hassle.

I feel people are underestimating the benefits of this simple structure.

Nobody would want to promote someone that will consistently make them look bad.

Complete outsider to that, but it's easy enough to figure - you would have to be promoted like 3-7 times under the current system before anyone would start to care about your opinion on things like that. Good luck ever finding someone who can be enough of a creature of the current system to be promoted that many times within it, yet still maintain the firm idea that it needs to be changed.

I totally understand this - but it doesn't mean I like it.

I could get through having two podcast apps on my Android (Google Podcasts, Google Play Music) that give me notifications for my podcasts, with no plans on phasing out one or the other.

I could get over having two different music apps - Google Play Music and YouTube Music - because it seemed like there might actually be a plan here - albeit we haven't heard anything in ages.

I could get over having two email apps - Inbox and Gmail - because I knew Inbox was just an experiment that was going to be a tease of cool features that may / may not be ported over...therefore I tried not to take the bait.

I could get over having a bunch of different messaging apps - I didn't like it, but 95% of my messages are SMS texts anyway, so it didn't impact me.

The FINAL straw was falling in love with a PixelBook that I bought during the Black Friday sales, as I moved into a role in an org that was 1) deeply invested in G Suite and 2) allowed me to do all my work from the browser - making the Chrome OS concept finally fit for me. THEN Google closes that part of their hardware division.

Now I just have angst over _any_ Google product / service that isn't the core that I use and "know" knock on wood won't go away (Search / Gmail / Chrome). Android wear? Google Home? Hell, I was seriously finally moving to a Pixel 3, as the tight integration with some Chrome OS features on my PixelBook would've been ideal - but I can't even trust that the Pixel phone line will last that much longer.

> The FINAL straw was falling in love with a PixelBook that I bought during the Black Friday sales, as I moved into a role in an org that was 1) deeply invested in G Suite and 2) allowed me to do all my work from the browser - making the Chrome OS concept finally fit for me. THEN Google closes that part of their hardware division.

The PixelBook isn't going to stop getting security updates any time soon, so if it was a good machine before the division was closed, why is it a less good machine now?

What do you think the half life of most electronics is? Why do you think so many people get anxious about Apple "abandoning" the Mac? A trickle of security updates does not make a well supported and thriving product line.

You should be purchasing hardware based on whether the current model looks good, not what model may be next in that product line. The latter is pointless and largely impossible.

Chrome OS itself isn't going anywhere.

Not entirely. If the ship is sinking (no future development) it's highly likely things like warranties, support, maintenance, etc -- are also sun setting or degrading in quality -- in a sense that most of the brightest and keen individuals in those departments have routed or been reassigned, leaving lack lustre or not as motivated people behind.

I kind of speak from both sides of this, I had some audio hardware I bought but one day they went radio silent (404 site so presumably belly up), so future support was dead along with all their support drivers. Another was an internship I did at a hardware company where there was just maintenance patches being applied to the product, and it was depressing.

How the product looks is a very superficial criterion.

As developers we understand the value of the ecosystem and we want to invest in products that last longer that one or two years.

Also I own Apple and Thinkpad laptops that are between 1 and 7 years old and all of them are still working fine. Laptops last longer than smartphones so you want to ensure the platform will be supported for the next 10 years.

Can you honestly say that Google will support Chrome OS for the next 10 years? Personally I doubt it.

> Can you honestly say that Google will support Chrome OS for the next 10 years? Personally I doubt it.

I work for Chrome OS, opinions are my own.

I think yes it will be supported because Google is trying very hard to diversify its revenue streams and Chrome OS actually makes money and is still growing quickly.

Note that Chrome OS is an entirely separate PA (product area) from Hardware.

How does Chrome OS make money? Are there licensing fees involved?

I am not really qualified to answer that question but I believe it's the combination of licensing fees and support

I think there's a super important distinction here between hardware and platforms/software. The GP was annoyed that they bought a PixelBook before Google killed their hardware division. If I bought a Dell XPS laptop to run Windows, and Dell announced the next day they were discontinuing their XPS line, I wouldn't regret my purchase. Dell's decision doesn't change either the utility of my current hardware or the overall Windows ecosystem.

Regardless of whether or not Chrome OS is here to stay—I very much think it is, personally—Google closing their hardware division doesn't tell us much about Chrome OS's future. Only a tiny fraction of Chrome OS hardware comes from Google itself.

> You should be purchasing hardware based on whether the current model looks good, not what model may be next in that product line.

I couldn't disagree more. When I buy a laptop, I want to know that all the time I invest in learning that ecosystem and customizing won't be wasted time. Or any other hardware. Especially if I have to buy apps for it. I want to know that when I get the next piece of hardware, it will support all the software I already know and love (and paid for!)

I'm reluctant to buy into an ecosystem that might be on the decline, because it means a higher chance of that stuff not working anymore.

I always buy the product that's in front of me, in the state it's in, and expect nothing more. This is why I bought a Jaguar I-PACE instead of a Tesla Model 3. A big part of the differentiating Model 3 value seems to be in vague promises for full self-driving capability and in an increasingly robust charging network in the future. Looking at the features the two cars actually have now, as well as where I can get with the charging networks that already exist or are actively under construction, in my book the I-PACE made more sense.

The iPhone 5s from 2013 can run the latest OS.

The latest version of MacOS supports computers back to 2012.

But while the Mac is not a huge percentage of Apple’s revenue, by itself, it makes enough money to be a Fortune 100 company.

Yes, you can run latest iOS. But it is dog slow. Try to use it with at least 3 apps. For a typical user with > 10 apps it is useless.

Not according to reviews. According to reviews, IOS 12 is very performant for 5s. I know it works well on the 6s series.

The number of applications installed doesn't matter. iOS will purge apps if they are running in the background and take up too much CPU or memory. You're not going to have > 10 apps running in the background. More than likely, you won't have any third party apps using CPU time in the background besides playing music or VOIP.

EDIT:

Just realized that you may be referring to macOS. In that case, that would be RAM and/or disk dependent (SSD vs spinning hard drives).

I ran it on an iPhone 6 and it was fine. Your comment about "at least 3 apps" makes very little sense to me; iOS is notoriously aggressive with memory management, and apps must be designed to expect being killed at any time without warning, with only a few specific background tasks allowed to run (and generally for limited times with explicitly defined purposes). I'm sure my phone had upwards of a hundred apps on it, but generally speaking, only one or two were running at any given time because that's true of any iOS device.

What if the machine gets lost or damaged?

You've invested in a platform that you now don't have the same kind of access to anymore.

I just checked eBay and found about 150 Pixelbooks, 17 of which are in "Open Box" (a.k.a., pretty much new) condition. I also found 12 refurbished 120GB Zunes. My brother still drives a perfectly functional Pontiac G8, and he has no trouble finding parts for it when he needs to.

You either can either move on to the current-generation technology or buy an old working gadget from someone else. You're never without good options.

You're basing that on pure speculation so be careful what conclusions you're drawing from it. Chromebooks have historically gotten very good support, even though they tended to be relatively underpowered - the pixelbook isn't so I wouldn't expect support to stop anytime soon.

I don't know if it counts as speculation when a number of outlets are reporting on 'roadmap cutbacks,' including asking employees in the Pixel group to look for other roles. [1]

Is it 100% confirmed? No, but that's part of the brand trust referenced in the original post: where there's smoke, there is probably fire, and it would be beneficial to brand trust if Google provided a longer-term roadmap for these products.

Before someone comments "Why doesn't Apple need that type of roadmap?": because Apple has the hardware brand trust that, say, the iPhone isn't going to go away next year simply because the engineers working on it wanted to create an iMessage competitor.

[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/03/13/google-h...

The entire point of the original article is that Google's constant killing of products makes everyone fear what will be next, bc even seemingly popular products get killed off for little to no reason. The entire point of this article is that Google's own actions are fanning the flames of this speculation.

FWIW Chrome OS is a separate PA (product area) than Hardware so Hardware closing whatever division likely has very little impact on the support for your Pixelbook.

I am also sad about that though as I really like the Pixelbook =[

This went into my decision not to accept a Google offer. AMP is a product that should not exist in the first place. Everything AMP does could be done in other ways—having Google Search measure load time, improving load times, working on webpackages as step 1 instead of an afterthought, etc. But because AMP is a coherent, well-defined product, and Google rewards launching it over accomplishing the same goals in less-obvious ways, the person behind AMP was incentivized to go that route for the sake of his own career at Google, and ruined the internet for the rest of us.

I didn't want to be subject to those engineering standards.

Ehh, I disagree with your assessment, and to illustrate why I think you need to focus on asblockers.

AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disincentivizes crappy, JS-heavy websites on search results and as a result makes people less likely to install adblockers. Google is terrified of adblockers going mainstream, to the point where they’re willing to risk anticompetitive suits by creating their own. AMP is a part of the effort to prevent that from happening.

That's an interesting viewpoint and makes a lot of sense, but still - why couldn't Google have accomplished this goal through web search policies? Have the crawler say that if it sees JavaScript with certain behavior it will be de-prioritized compared to a similar website with less annoying JavaScript. Which, to some extent, you get just by focusing on load time: if the crawler emulates a normal browser and measures the time until everything has rendered, it'd be able to penalize annoying JS ads that block loading. Or if it emulates a normal browser and indexes text rendered on the screen, it'd be able to penalize sites that display a pop-over ad that you have to interact with.

(Would that have been more prone to an antitrust lawsuit than AMP?)

I don’t want to speculate too much on the legals of the situation, so I won’t talk about anticompetitive matters.

As for why not do this in indexing, of course they’re doing that. They’ve been doing that for a very long time, but that approach can only go so far. There’s a constant cat and mouse game between websites and search providers, and AMP is a way to end it once and for all.

It’s important to stress that the motivation here is largely user-focused. People tend to ascribe to Google these shady Oracle-like motivations around screwing users and developers, but the truth is that moves like this are largely motivated by a desire to improve the experience. Not out of any sort of altruism, mind you, but because what’s good for the user is generally good for Google.

I'm not ascribing Google a motivation of wanting to screw over users and developers. I'm ascribing Google-as-a-whole the motivation of wanting to improve the experience because that's good for Google's bottom line, and Google-as-individual-employees the motivation of wanting to do that by shipping new products instead of shipping improvements because that's good for their personal bottom line. Neither of these are shady. They are both individually rational decisions. You don't become Google because you altruistically want to help people without profit; you don't work for Google for that reason, either. You work for Google because you want to do interesting work while being paid well.

I think Google made lots of mistakes with AMP that will be long-term harmful for the web, but I don't think they were malicious in doing so—they made genuine mistakes that it just so happens they wouldn't have been incentivized to make if there were no individual pressure to ship products.

I'm just saying that this pressure exists, and that I personally don't want to be subject to it.

Google's only obligation is to its shareholders. AMP serves its interests. So does building covert search engines to help root out chinese dissidents.

That 'cat and mouse' game is the natural order of things. There is no stopping that other than making things anti-competitive which is what Alphabet clearly wants to do.

Google has become evil and we should expect nothing less from a multibillion dollar conglomerate like Alphabet. This isnt the Google we grew up with. This is the publically traded company Alphabet which will do anything to increase their bottom line whether its ruining the internet with things like AMP or selling search services used to imprison chinese citizens.

Google should be ashamed of itself. Would never take a job at a company like Alphabet. It conflicts with my sense of ethics and morality.

What is a "company like Alphabet"? Can any company of the size and scale of Alphabet, or aiming to be such one day, avoid these pressures? Why isn't this the Google we grew up with, given that this is what Google was growing up to be all along?

A serious question is whether a young company in roughly the state Google was in the early '00s can reasonably commit to never becoming a multibillion-dollar conglomerate.

Probably not. I think going public ruins the ability of such a company to maintain a moral compass. It certainly vanquished any idea of maintaining their 'don't be evil' motto.

They simply could have committed not to becoming a publicly traded company. I know every YC investor looks at going public as the end all be all for every company on earth but I think the pursuit of the public market at all costs mindset typically espoused by communities like this one is morally devoid and obviously has long term consequences in the tech community at large.

Go public at all costs is the mindset here and in most VC communities. Make money at all costs is really what they mean to say. Get rid of that mindset.

Google used to have a moral compass. That was the Google I grew up with. Before all the pressures of being a publicly traded multibillion-dollar conglomerate got to them and now they are basically no better than ATT.

If every YC investor looks at going public and only one has ever gone public, they were looking in the wrong direction. Most VC funded companies either get acquired or go bust.

I think you're being too generous. The usability of AMP sites on an iPhone is utter garbage with their extra address bar and broken scrolling. It's not necessary to break scrolling in order to create fast loading websites, in fact, quite the opposite. It's clear that users were a very low priority here.

Measuring load times and ranking sites that way produces a relative ordering of fast and relevant sites. (Slow sites can still do well if they're faster than other sites.) Making sites implement AMP absolutely ensures that the site is fast.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on any AMP related stuff.

> AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disincentivizes crappy, JS-heavy websites on search results and as a result makes people less likely to install adblockers.

The slowest, most resource-intensive web sites I visit are, in order: Slack, GMail, and Google Play Music. If Google wants others to take web performance seriously, they should start with their own internal stuff.

Are Slack, GMail, Google Play Music websites or web applications? AMP is not applicable to sites/applications that remain open in your tabs all the time. I think it's more applicable to pages you open, consume the information and close the tab in couple of minutes.

Disc: Googler but nowhere close to AMP.

Let's say Google Maps then. It will show up in search results, artificially at the top because of close integration, but performs incredibly poorly. I can't take their claims about AMP being about performance seriously when they do not seem to make any attempt at optimizing the stuff that they put on top.

Sorry missed this. I don't consider Google Maps a website as well. Specially not a static website that AMP is targetting. You move around in maps, give it input and it gives you a different output.

This is not the only example. I never ceases to amaze me that Google dropped XMPP because of non-mobile-friendliness and it was proven wrong by a single developer (see: Conversations.im).

It seems in a lot of cases Google just want to go on an easy route of creating fake "standards" (AMP) instead of long way of working with broader community for common good.

Maybe that's just me but the Google I remember back when Android was announced and the company it has become now it's like two totally different entities.

I think Google doesn't care for most services as they do not depend on any of those. Sure Android, GMail, and YouTube will stay, because they serve their core business: ads. Everything else could be over at any time. This is supported by their recent push for China. Suddenly employee voices aren't worth anything anymore (remember the drone story, that was over after employees pushed back). Maybe they have realised by now that diversification isn't that bad after all and will continue to push GCP but I wouldn't want to bet on GCP's life-span.

I am willing to bet on GCP's life-span - it will be around for 10 more years at least. What would you like to bet for?

GCP in its current form, though?

In 10 years, will you have to choose between the deprecated version and the version that doesn't work yet?

Well said, you always get what you optimize for.

In my experience at a different FANG, the same culture exists here. If I had to guess, I would say it probably applies to the others as well.

Oh just go ahead an name Facebook.

The irony, is that this pattern at FB and and Big G isn’t indicative of a good engineering culture. It’s pathological engineering.

It definitely doesn't apply to Netflix. You can get good raises and promotions by optimizing an existing process. If you can show improvement in internal metrics, such as improving latency or lowering cost, that's a huge win. Even if you increase costs you can get a raise and promotion if you show that it increased code quality, such as creating the Chaos Monkey/Gorilla/Kong.

I guess it helps that Netflix essentially has one product.

Yes that probably helps a lot. Also they don’t hire fresh college grads, so you generally have less of the “wow this was clearly written by a junior engineer” type of maintenance. The low hanging fruit is mostly picked when it comes to architecture and optimization.

I work at Amazon and I don't believe that applies here. There certainly is an expectation that you can coordinate increasingly broad efforts as you rise through the ranks, but the focus isn't on launching new products (in my experience). Impact can be anything that is positive and measurable. At the end of the day if you make the company $1million then it doesn't really matter where you do it.

Cool for them, but that hurts my wallet. I never felt safe using google products, and the only one I paid for (adwords) decreased in quality, so...

> Usually an organization starts with a top-down direction and the rest of the company is compensated for executing it. Not at Google. The "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach that developed from the early days of twenty percent time and total engineering independence has created a disorganized mess of a company. Multiply the individual incentives fifty thousand times and you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately.

This is also why we had a botched rollout of Material Design across Google's apps following the release of Lollipop.

Apps rolled out Material redesigns whenever, often months and sometimes even years after Lollipop's launch. Apps used various different versions of the Material support library: the Drive Apps in particular had text and widget alignment issues that made them look very unlike the other Material apps. And for a while, I was tracking which apps exhibited correct behavior of the status bar and the hamburger menu, because there were multiple ways apps could implement each one, but only one correct way (ironically enough, I was doing so in a Google Doc) [0].

To me, this is an awful way to roll out your new company-wide branding initiative. You want a new brand to be consistent across all your products and rolled out simultaneously. In retrospect, it was the moment when I began to lose faith in Google as a company.

Some time after that, somebody explained to me why, and it was exactly as you said: engineering groups operate independently of each other with no top-down chain of command. There's nobody telling them "you have to roll out the new branding by this date", "you have to make sure you're following these company-wide standards", etc. Basically, I was told that at Google, "company-wide" isn't a thing that exists. And that's awful. And honestly, it makes me never want to work for Google. That kind of chaos is exactly the opposite of the kind of working environment I could thrive in.

[0] Correct behavior: status bar is a darker shade of the toolbar's color, the hamburger menu covers the screen from top to bottom with the status bar as a translucent overlay on top of the menu bar, and the hamburger icon doesn't animate at all while you drag the menu out. Following Lollipop, there were Material apps that broke every one of those rules, but in completely different combinations from app to app.

Corporate political economy (ecology? anthropology?) is always pathological like this, one way or another. Seems inevitable, like factionalism and partisanship taking over parliamentary politics in every example we have.

That aside, it kind of makes sense that Google places this much emphasis on the revenue producing parts of the business.

On "what about new products and innovation" see the first point. While every corporate pathology is different (Google's flavour seems unique) a near-constant is doublespeak. There might be (or might have been) a logic behind it, it just gets communicated in corporate-speak because plain language is too harsh.

Ultimately, at Google's scale (like a VC) a meaningful innovation is >$1bn annual revenue or the equivalent of that. Not many projects have that kind of potential. Letting a thousand flowers bloom means letting 998.3 flowers die.

> Multiply the individual incentives fifty thousand times and you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately.

It sucks for some users but isn't it good for Google as a business? The way you describe it, it sounds like Google is internally approximating a free market to allocate resources. I understand the risk of damaging the brand but for a lot of new Google products, the only competition comes from startups which equally are a risky bet.

I agree with most of what you’ve said, but I’m curious about whether or not YouTube actually makes money. I was under the impression that on a good day it just about breaks even, but has that changed?

Facebook operates similarly. They created a culture of working on things that interest you as long as it can show meaningful impact. If you can show maintenance of something impactful, then you can work on it.

It's really no different in the startup world. If your startup can't show growth in users or profits, then you shutdown.

Any thoughts on whether Google Photos will stick around? I find it's far better than any alternatives I've come across, and the recent Inbox shutdown made me realize how "dependent" I am on it.

That’s gonna be an interesting one to watch.

Hosting the worlds photos costs many billions of dollars each year!

That said it’s a key driver to sell android phones (“infinite storage”)...so for the time being you will be good.

But then again according to information that came out during the Oracle lawsuit, they only made $36Billion from Android during its entire existence.

Just googled around and I'm guessing the terms allow google to use the photos and associated metadata which sounds to me like it would be hugely valuable. For ML research, search, advertising, etc. If Google knows where my photos were taken, what products are in the photo, what car, etc.

Yeah, people keep saying that...IMO its huge and risky bet to hope for some future way to leverage the meta data for ML

This mindset is commonplace in most of the jobs I've held in the last 10 years. Personal gain trumps morals, company values, and even company performance. It's what happens when you put a bunch of high-performers in a box and let them play the corporate ladder game.

It's better than the situation at most companies I have been at: It's basically the personal gain trumps all, but without the actual results. You just have a bunch of populists that talk up a good game, but when it comes time to execute or actually launch something, they are the last person you really want at the helm, but because they have built up a reputation with the higher ups, they are impossible to displace.

From my perspective, this appears to be the situation of most "Health IT" corps and VP of Engineering and above. I've since "sold out" and moved to a digital marketing firm, but in many ways the work here is much more honest than what happened at places I worked at in the name of "health"

I think that's a bit of an unfair way to characterize what's going on here. In fact, it's Google's values (as expressed through internal incentives) that govern this process. If the company wanted people to, say, make X better rather than killing it and launching a completely new X, all it would have to do is reward that rather than setting up a system that punishes it through reduced career growth.

> Maintenance engineering is so not-rewarded that it's become an inside joke

highlighted

Streaming game services, not so much.

Yes. The game industry is very reluctant to use Improbable's Spatial OS, because, through a deal with Google, they force you to host your game, expensively, on Google's servers.[1] Nobody wants to spend $100 million developing an AAA title using that system, and then suddenly get an email that Google is discontinuing the product.

(Spatial OS is technically interesting, and, hopefully, someone else will do something like it, with reasonable licensing terms.)

[1] https://massivelyop.com/2018/01/12/chronicles-of-elyria-is-d...

> then suddenly get an email that Google is discontinuing the product.

Google is unlikely to discontinue GCP

The list of discontinued things that people said that about is getting longer by the day. That's kind of the point here.

Game servers typically don't last more than a few years, even for an AAA game. They pretty much never last a whole decade outside of major MMORPG.

It's a bit surprising that the game industry would be scared of GCP going bust, given the short release cycle of the industry.

Didn't know SpatialOS was attached specifically to Google Cloud. This seems like a risky business move, people should've learned from the fine example of companies built exclusively on the Facebook platform by now.

https://www.hadean.com/ is presumably a direct competitor to SpatialOS then, I take it? And it's tied to Azure, I believe.

Hadean looks interesting. But there's no documentation available, just hype. Their demo was big, but very simple - it's a FPS in space. They demoed Hadean on Azure, but it's not clear that it's tied to Azure.

The problem is basically distributed cache coherence. You have many small data objects shared between a large number of machines. Often, one needs access to an object on another machine. How do you do that efficiently.

Spatial OS seems to work kind of like a multiprocessor cache.[1] Two machines can have read-only copies of an object. If one copy is changed, the other has to be updated. Performance is better if you don't have to do that too much. They use the fact that they're representing a 3D world to advantage. If something is geographically nearby, they try to keep it on the same machine. To load balance, they will cut up overloaded regions into smaller regions and apply more machines to them, or combine underutilized regions to free up compute resources. This is a rough understanding from reading the documents.

No idea how Hadean does it. The site doesn't say much. It's one of those "onboarding funnel" sites - no info for you until the marketing people have all your info.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_coherence#Coherence_mech...

I was having a hard time finding the statement that SpatialOS can't run apart from Google Cloud, but they do not allow self-hosting, meaning you are tied to wherever they put their servers which is Google according to the parent's source.

I suspect Hadean is similar, they've listed Microsoft as a partner, and presumably it's a cloud service that they are offering, so wherever they host it is where you get it, you're never directly dealing with the cloud provider or it's billing.

It's plausible, arguably, that both could shift to alternate cloud providers if they wanted, but I get them impression their customers have no choice in the matter.

Also, they do get a little further into the weeds, but it's hidden behind a hamburger menu: https://www.hadean.com/developer/how-to-get-started-with-aet... though a code example without access to the library or cloud service isn't a whole lot of use for testing out!

I was having a hard time finding the statement that SpatialOS can't run apart from Google Cloud

Search with keywords "improbable google deal". First result [1]: "Improbable is also announcing a strategic partnership with Google, the first part of which will see Google providing its Google Cloud Platform as the backend powering the service."

https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/improbable-teams-with-goog...

I'm pretty sure the hope is that this will lead to the development of a parallel track of game developers who make games that would otherwise be too difficult or expensive to make on old platforms.

It makes sense on paper: latency isn't an issue because Google's network is excellent. The browser is a widespread and powerful distribution network which gives you access to both desktop and mobile. The cost of development should be lower because you don't need to buy expensive development kits and licenses/certifications.

My personal view is that this isn't a technical problem but rather a bizdev problem, and Google's approach to solving things tends to be "throw out some tech and hope people use it," which is straight up not going to work with investment-heavy industries like games.

GMail, YouTube, Search, GCP, Android, and others...deep down they’re frontends for search or advertising... Streaming game services, not so much.

Streaming games has tremendous potential synergy with advertising. Games are yet another form of media, after all. There is obvious tremendous potential synergy with YouTube. Also, if one can stream games, then why not stream other kinds of applications? There's tremendous opportunities for synergies there as well.

Basically identical to youtube. Forget putting AAA games on it, imagine a massively improved version of the flash games that were popular a decade ago.

Forget putting AAA games on it, imagine a massively improved version of the flash games that were popular a decade ago.

I wouldn't be so confident about AAA games being a barrier. I guess AAA games emphasizing "realism" might always have a high-end PC niche, since the genre could always ramp up graphics to the point of un-streamability. I could also totally imagine, let's say, Nintendo, going whole-hog into streaming games with cartoony graphics, emphasizing multiplayer with friends. I don't see any reason why the industry couldn't target and achieve something like 30 ms round trip latency. So long as the gameplay is good, the potential audience for 1080P gaming with even last generation level graphics is huge.

To think they would be limited to the level of flash games is hugely naive.

I guess I was thinking more in terms of what's going to happen when you can literally play a game with the click of a button in a browser like you could in flash. My thought is there will be massive amounts of games flooding the market in much the same ways there are on mobile devices and the price will trend towards zero with microtransactions in the same fashion.

Ever seen Roblox?

> why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion.

For people outside the San Francisco and Silicon Valley bubble which are confused by this, it may be worth noting that promotion here does not need mean getting a new job. Everyone are not constantly getting new jobs.

“Promotion” here means internal, magic Google-points and seem to work much like Chinese social credit.

Source: answer by Googler here on HN when I was confused about this very same thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18575875

Promotion means you get promoted to a higher level within Google[1]. This typically means you get more money[2], better opportunities, and more visibility.

People often do change jobs within Google/Alphabet after getting promoted. It's a signal that you're doing a good job, as verified by a promotion committee, and hiring managers will often look at a recent promotion as a signal that someone is a high-performer. But there are lots of folks who don't change jobs after a promotion (especially if you're happy with what you're doing) - it's an opportunity to keep doing what you're doing, just more of the same, with official recognition that you've been doing a good job.

1. Level 3 = SWE I - New Grad (Bachelors/Masters). Level 4 = SWE II (Newly minted PhDs start here). Level 5 = Senior SWE. Level 6 = Staff SWE. Level 7 = Senior Staff SWE. Level 8 = Principal SWE / Director.

2. This is not strictly true; a high-performer at Level N may make just as much as a low- or average-performer at Level N+1. But in practice you start to hit salary caps, and sustaining very high performance at Level N may be more difficult than sustaining average performance at Level N+1.

Indeed that is also what I thought when reading the very relevant article from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19541475

How common are career ambition incentives like this, among engineers (not middle management) right now? It sounds like, in Google's case, it's very intentional.

Other than the job-hopping that I started hearing about when dotcom IPOs started, engineers, from what I (perhaps naively) understood of my anecdotal experience, seemed to mostly just like to do engineering, and/or also had a sense of obligation to their project/team/duty.

About the worst I recall hearing about would be an engineer picking a language/tool because they wanted to learn it or add it to their resume, rather than because it made the most sense for corporate goals for the project.

Not necessarily common, but the ambitious engineers are the ones who get promoted and they're the ones who get to set the technical direction. So the incentives on offer to (over-)ambitious people are very important.

>This is also why GMail, YouTube, Search, GCP, Android, and others aren’t going anywhere. They’re making money, they’re core to the business, and there’s plenty of opportunity to work on them and get promoted. They all also share one thing in common: deep down they’re frontends for search or advertising (GCP and Apps are an exception because they make money on their own). Measuring and proving impact on search numbers is a well-known promo narrative at Google, so those products are a safe bet for employees and users. Streaming game services, not so much.

This, right here is the key, and what I think most people miss, including the original article. Hell, I missed it myself for a long time: Google is not a platform company as the original article asserts. They are an advertising company. That is Google's bread and butter, and has been since day one. The products and platforms that stick around do so because they are or become successful funnels or front ends for advertising.

As much as the tech culture of the Internet loves to bitch about advertising (myself included), unto itself, it is not a solely an evil thing. Oh, it absolutely can be turned to evil ends; see any of a myriad complaints about Facebook. However, I think the pairing of ads with search has been damn useful in a way that balances with the potential for evil. As an example, when I'm searching for specific lubricating grease for my bicycle's bearings, I very much appreciate seeing an ad for a vendor who's willing to sell me a single tube thereof, instead of having only the web search listings of vendors who require a minimum order size of 1 shipping pallet. Google did right paring advertising with search. To use a 'corporate bullshit' word, Search and ads synergize well.

The froth of Google's other products and platforms makes more sense when looked at in that light. A company that sits still will eventually get passed by someone else who correctly sensed changes in the market and business environment, and thus eventually die. So of course Google is going to be trying to come up with all manner of things that leverage the Internet and their massive infrastructure; one of those may well be the next big thing that funnels more money in to advertising. No small part of this is that Google employs a great many nerds like you and I, people who have no trouble inventing cool new things you can do on the Internet. But sadly, a great many of those cool things don't fit well with Google's advertising-based business model, as evidenced by the constant product froth.

Advertising is not evil, but I prefer business models that involve me giving companies my money and them giving me stuff.

Probably also explains why their messaging strategy is completely incomprehensible too. I still have no idea what apps do what, which ones provide video or audio or text or both.

I have a hangouts and voice app on my phone and they appear to have duplicate functionality. I’m not joking — I receive the same notifications on both.

I was super pleased the other day when I needed to fall back on a personal device to join a meeting via GSuite and realized that because it was a meetup my hangouts app didn't work for it.

I also enjoy that calendar is also a separate and distinct thing so it's possible for me to get three notifications for a single meeting.

Now that's what I call usability and a solid product! If only they could improve this experience by raising the price of their business suite by 20% then I'd be really tickled!

I have Google Assistant app but to change settings I must use Google app but some settings like volume, room etc. could be controlled via Google Home app.

If so, why is YT (sampled randomly from your list) buggy as hell? Is it possible no-one at G noticed that (sampling randomly again) for example playlist shuffle does not work? How come this is not fixed?

Following OPs argument (I have no idea either way)

Someone got promoted for introducing playlist shuffle

Nobody gets promoted for fixing it

> As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted?

> The criteria for promotion at Google, especially at the higher levels like SWE III -> Senior and especially at Senior -> Staff and above, explicitly talk about impact on the organization and the business.

Wow! Its exactly like my job at a my IT off-sourcing job. I am very surprised.

Hmm, I’m thinking whether this is an example of Goodhart’s law (when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure - the measure being the number of product launches) or “tragedy of the commons” (i.e. some sucker will do the maintenance, I’m going for the promotion!).

Either way, it’s frustrating as a user. I will never forgive them killing Google Reader.

Note that whilst GMail, YouTube and Search might not be going anywhere they also are not being improved or developed upon. Just being kept running which is the same symptom

Stupid question: why are Google engineers so obsessed with promotion? I'm sure any entry-level engineer there makes more than I ever have in my life, and anyone who hasn't cashed in their billion-dollar startup lottery ticket by now is far too late to the party to ever do so.

What exactly is the benefit of promotion? Is a 6-figure salary and all the perqs in the world not enough? At all the places I've worked, from tiny startups to big stable companies, I haven't seen this phenomenon. Does Google's rapid rise simply attract the sorts of people who feel they deserve it?

I’m not sure I understand this perspective. If I’m making 100k, and I could be making 150k by being promoted, while working on interesting new things at the same time (regardless of success), then that is what I would be doing.

Little point in sticking at 100k my whole career for some misplaced sense of honor.

You could go from making $200k/yr to $400k/yr with one to two promotions.

It's a big jump and for people who live in an area where homes are regularly $2-4m (they're not even nice homes), you have to make big money in order to afford one.

Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for people with long-standing accounts is untenable. The kitchen-sink approach of gmail has created a website/app that wants to meet every need and honestly meets none.

In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly rolled up and ideal notifying Inbox back to the utterly uncontrollable insanity of Gmail. The "rollups" in Gmail don't work, the filtering is arcane and unchanged from the 2001-era, the "labels" are useless at intelligently combating spam/marketing, and my gmail inbox receives hundreds of emails a day, 0 of which I care about, and hundreds of which google desperately wants to mark important, put in my inbox, notify me about, and provide precisely 0 tools to intelligently control it.

My gmail is a nightmare of anxiety that no man could ever wrestle control over (while my Inbox is a delightful walk through an orderly park) and I am honestly just considering abandoning this gmail account.

Of course, this gmail account IS my google account, it IS my google existence.

If Google has broken email, their core app, my core account --- maybe it's time to leave.

I can't be the only one approaching Google this way. Sooner or later, they'll kill what you love about them, too.

I completely agree. Gmail doesn't seem to have that much customisation. I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them.

The Inbox bundles seem to be slightly renamed categories that Gmail has, but with the ability that they're always on the main page and being able to create your own. Why couldn't this be easily ported back over to Gmail and tweaked with user config?

In Inbox I had a "Mailing List" bundle that had all my techy subscriptions and when I had free time I could see them. I could easily mark the entire bundle as read.

I'm tempted to start using one of my domains as my email address and point it at a different provider, but I'll see how Gmail fares over the next few months.

> I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them.

Isn't this because it's a categorization they do using global information, like spam filtering? If so they would only be able to support the specific categories they are trained for across all users, so they couldn't support custom categories.

I don't really see how the four categories would help with training spam filters. "Social" is half spam, half maybe not. "Promotions" is mostly spam, though Google would rather see it as ham. "Updates" and "Forums" are mostly not spam.

I believe the parent poster meant that the classifiers that train into the baked-in categories are trained like a spam filter and use cross-account global knowledge. In other words, it's a model that works if there's a small number of buckets and a huge dataset to train the bucket-targeting against and breaks down if every individual user has their own buckets with their own conflicting understanding of what those buckets should contain.

Ironically, the Inbox rollups worked absolutely beautifully and the gmail filters are really, really rough and don't work well. "Updates" are so incredibly nebulous that it's really a 50/50 crapshoot on whether or not google knows what should go in there. "Updates" and "Social" are commonly mixed up, and finance/purchases have zero place to go. Are they 'Updates' like when I get a 'Our ToS has been updated' email? Etc. The categories are too general to be useful.

Inbox’s custom categories were created using simple filter rules. You can technically do that in GMail also, but only for folders, which are independent of the social/promotions/etc tabs. It seems to me that the ability to create custom tabs via filters would not be a particularly unreasonable feature.

Ideally, you should move more towards folders rather than these custom tabs anyways: The custom tabs don't work with other email clients, which just see one big inbox.

When I was on Gmail, third party client use led me to replace the tabs with custom rules to sort my social notifications, for instance, into proper standards-compliant actual folders.

That sounds a lot like what I do using 'labels'. Other than the position on the screen, what's the difference?

Inbox rollup: Set it up once, magically works forever

Gmail label: Create a filter for a label. It works only for that. New emails need to go in. Manually and annoyingly update the filter. Works only for that. New emails need to go in. Manually and annoyingly update...

You get the point. If I went and bought something from a new store and got it shipped, the receipt automatically appear in "purchases" in inbox. I didn't have to manually update a filter for this one new address. It just worked. Back on gmail, gmail treats that new email as if it has no idea what it is. So into the main box it goes until I manually create rules for this one specific case.

I shouldn't have to manually create a rule for every single email address that ever sends me an email. It's an astronomical amount of work. And now that we know that Google/Inbox was 100% capable of auto-filtering, the idea that we are being transported to the stone age of email is insanity.

Sorry, I was responding to,

> create custom tabs via filters

which as you say, labels are created by filters.

I have no idea how "Inbox rollups" work if they are different than that and than the tabs in gmail, since I haven't used it.

Difference is, Inbox made filters automatically, and in gmail, you're stuck every single day modifying your filters to manually add yet-another-email address, and quite frankly, now that we know Google is perfectly capable of auto-maintaining filters, being forced to do it manually is insanely frustrating.

When combined with the fact that your address is being bought and sold like free candy, and the number of new addresses per week is over 10, it stops being a "you can do this" and starts being a "you must do these chores weekly to maintain any semblance of a useable gmail", I just call it broken. Gmail is broken.

All of those labels can describe social media notifications. The chance you agree with someone else on what they are is under 50%. Promotions should probably just be 'spam' in any email client that works for you. This approach of positivist classification is simply boneheaded.

Oh God, the "updates" tab has eaten so many important emails. It won't trigger push notifications, and I don't always remember to check it when I open the page. I still don't understand what the category was supposed to be, but it's main purpose seemed to be to hide important (but automated) emails. I took the plunge and switched to protonmail w/ a custom domain. It's not perfect, and I'm looking at other options, but it's still far better than Gmail. I also moved from gsuite back to MS Office, since I have more faith in the continued stability and it isn't 100% reliant on cloud. Keeping a windows VM around is a definite annoyance, but switching away from Gmail was actually surprisingly easy. The old Gmail address is set to forward all, since I'm still updating accounts as I go, but 3 months in and no real problems. Plus, with email tied to my domain it's far easier to switch providers at this point, if I felt really ambitious I could even run it myself. Definitely worth the time invested.

Thanks for sharing. Good to see other people considering alternatives. I’ll start looking at the options.

I venture that customization isn't important for 98% of users, especially less technically minded users. That's why Google consumer products are pretty simple. Moreover, at scale, every customization opportunity needs lots of work to support on every client and backend.

I think it's combination of:

* The person who pushed for the Inbox project got the promotion/raise they desired and move onto other new projects for further advancement.

* Inbox was too good at quickly managing email, and Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads than getting this done efficiently.

Call me cynical but that's where I'm at with Google at this point.

"Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads [...]".

What ads?

Gmail now contains ads within each of the "category" tabs. Ad blockers seem to mostly block them, so that's most likely why you haven't seen anything.

Gmail app on Android has ads in the mailbox.

And even more ridiculous, since they now have ads on the gmail app I get ads in my G suite account on android. They also constantly try to "unify" my email accounts so that they mix personal g suite email with my work exchange email and I have to click the top right to switch accounts.

I'm quite close to removing the whole damn app too and go for K9-mail or something again (does that still get updated?)

Also the web interface for gmail is absolute trash when you are using firefox, so is youtube creator studio beta. Even the "feedback" button is broken so I can't tell them it doesn't work.

I have no idea if K9-mail gets updated but we are talking about mail, what is there to update? It still works for me.

some ads are also disguised as emails, thankfully AdBlocks picked this up.

> Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads

Do you see ads in Gmail?

I don't anymore and it feels it has been like since a very long time.

(and my AdBlock os turned off on Gmail)

I've started seeing ads disguised as emails (similar to promotional reddit "posts") in the "new" Gmail app I've switched to after being forced off Inbox. I think the ads only show up on free accounts. I have another Google account through my employer (for work email) and I don't see ads there.

My Gmail is free, too...

On GSuite (non-free version of Gmail) I don't see the ads either and it is supposed to be like that (after all, it's paid)

The Inbox shutdown made me finally make the switch from Inbox/Gmail back to a mail program (Mailspring, but anything else could work), which is definitely good for me on the long term, as it means that switching to another provider will be completely seamless. I wonder if Google will ever learn that it can't teach users to like something they don't.

The reason I don't want a mail program is because 99.9% of my email is utter garbage, so the idea that I need to take up bandwidth and diskspace and processor time on my machine to basically download gigabytes of unwanted advertising, scams, phishing attempts, etc, is ridiculous.

My experience with Gmail is the complete opposite. It is far better at filtering spam/phishing - mails than all the other free mail services.

When you've had a gmail account for ~15 years, every advertiser, info reseller, marketer, phisher and spammer alive has my email at the top of their list.

Is what it is, but with Inbox I had 0 issue controlling all of it, and with gmail, all of this garbage is dropped directly into my HIGHLY IMPORTANT >> INBOX with zero filtering or analysis (even though I have, no kidding, over a hundred manual filters containing THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of email addresses all of them "Mark as promotion / Never mark important / Skip the inbox / Never star / Archive immediately" and yet, every week, dozens more appear, so I add yet-another filter to the piles of hundreds, yet another dozen email addresses into the piles of thousands.

And yet with all of this work, I know my inbox will be a useless disaster by next week.

I have had mine for arouns 15 years and I do not recognize this. I really loved Inbox but for this aspect Gmail is not worse; I have not had to worry about spam, false positives or actual spam, at all for the past 8 years at least. I sometimes check my spam and it contains nothing I should have seen. Important contains what I want to see etc. It works perfectly; and I have been getting 1000s of mails per day, mostly spam for more than 10 years on many ancient email addresses that I still need to maintain.

It used to be the case, but apparently they can't sustain it without tightening the filters. In the past few months, the false positive rate went through the roof, and I don't trust their filters anymore.

Inbox was a dream come true for the zero-inbox mentality. Sadly, I've yet to found a replacement for this tool.

I agree, but you can archive emails in gmail and it does the same thing as setting an email to done in inbox. You can still search for them in the search box or browse the all mail category.

Going back to Gmail, it is pretty baffling the features it is missing from inbox. Lacking bundles is bad, but having no equivalent to archive/mark all as read is terrible. I used to do a quick scroll through my junk to verify I didn't actually need anything, then click "archive all". Now I have to individually select each individual email to do a group archive/delete.

Heck, not just zero-inbox, but zero-todos. By being able to set reminders, I had a single point for all my own todos, and the ones sent to me by others (aka emails). Now they advice you to add a separate pane with Google Keep or Tasks, which means you're managing them separately. I also have no idea what will happen with the reminders I've set for later than today.

Even more so since my Google Keep reminders would show up in Inbox! Gmail doesn't do this afaik and it's frustrating.

To my mind, Gmail has always been broken because it utterly fails at being able to delete messages when acting as an IMAP backend.

On iOS, this problem has generally been solved, but on the Mac, it remains a clusterfuck. I have no hope it will ever be fixed.

While my primary account is still there, I moved my personal domain address to Fastmail.

I actually discovered recently Gmail has a setting for configuring this behavior over IMAP. But yes, countless times I discovered emails I had deleted on my Windows Phone just got archived silently. I wish their default was to behave like IMAP is supposed to, but my guess is they wanted to err on the side of not deleting data.

The settings exist, but at least on the Desktop (e.g, in a web browser), I have no confidence that the application will honor those selections.

The disappointing part of all this is I specifically remember when they fixed this in iOS 3 with one 'Archive' toggle switch that in combination with Google settings actually did what I wanted.

I'd be curious to know how G employees handle email inside the mothership given these constraints - do they fix it server side?

Outlook for iOS is a pretty good app with most of the good from Inbox if you maintain near-zero inbox. I find myself using that almost all the time now because Gmail is so slow compared to it. I'd rather deal with a mobile keyboard than Gmail.

Yeah I also was sad about Inbox, it really solved all my problems. I loved it.

Now back in gmail and it sucks, it's just a cluster of emails with no way to filter thru without a lot of effort.

Specially the reminders and the automatic message bundling is terrible missing, the travel bundle feature were great as well.

What drives me crazy about it is that it is an awesome product, that I would probably pay a couple bucks if asked to but nothing can be done to save it.

I am at loss at how to migrate and where too.

If you spend a week or so clicking the "unsubscribe" links in all of the unwanted emails you receive, you might be surprised with how manageable things become. I'd estimate that 99% of my unwanted emails respect the unsubscribe and don't send any more mail.

I highly recommend doing this. I got fed up at one point and started clicking unsubscribe in every non-personal or un-important email and, without all that much effort, my inbox became infinitely more manageable pretty quickly.

It is anecdata, but in my reasonably large group of acquaintances and fellow professionals (hundreds), I haven't heard this complaint in ages!

In any case, if you are having spam delivered to your inbox in GMail, it is very easy to train it to detect spam. Mark as many such as you can, and report them as spam. GMail learns very quickly.

The problem is the big gray zone between spam and letters from Mom. All those mailing lists you get on because you signed into their website or thought something looked interesting once, and they're more or less behaving themselves but still more noise than you're willing to deal with most days.

Inbox dealt with that category of mail, which is at least 90% of what I get, in a simply beautiful way that I can't replace. Gmail has clunky tabs with 90s style pagination and ads at the top.

I understand.

1. Does any other provider have better spam filtering than GMail, though? Curious.

2. You can configure inbox to show all the messages in Primary. Then, the tabs don't appear.

3. I don't see any ads. Probably because I pay for storage?

I’m with you. I’m putting off switching away from Inbox until they kick me off.

I host my email on my server for years. This is how email was designed. But unfortunately, most people tend to follow monopolistic, centralized services..

Customers/users/developers don't care what the reasons are, only that it continues to happen. What is especially irksome to many is that they are shutting down products/services that found an audience... just not one large enough, fast enough to Google's taste. The more they shut down products, the longer many are going to wait before even considering using one of their new products/services especially if there's a cost associated with it. It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle: Google launches a new product, customers/users/developers wait to see if Google is really serious about it, Google shuts down product because it never attracts the critical mass it needs to see, customers/users/developers get even more jaded toward the next one... rinse and repeat.

It’s odd that Google/Alphabet doesn’t understand this basic negative feedback loop.

It has become apparent to me, even if you ignore the rot that has pervaded throughout the organization, which is manifesting itself in Search results.

I'm sure individuals within the company understand it. Maybe even most individuals.

Get people in large groups though and throw career advancement in the mix for highly career-driven Googlers and all of a sudden what everyone knows to be good for the group ceases up be relevant.

I couldn't agree more here. If only they had a habit of keeping services in beta until they could earn a net profit, and then released them. Then, if for some reason they can't find the level of profits that Google wants for them, they could spin the product off as a separate company and forget about it instead of shutting it down.

That reminds me of the early days of Flickr, which was very visibly in beta for years (it was on the logo). That gave me an appropriate level of anxiety about the longevity of the service. (Well, that and the fact that all the page urls still had a .gne extension, suggesting that Flickr was perhaps not their end game.) Then they went into 'gamma'!? for another couple of years before it finally became just Flickr.

> and the fact that all the page urls still had a .gne extension

What's significant about .gne as an extension? Not sure I've consciously come across that one before.

It’s an allusion to Game Neverending, which eventually led to development of Flickr

Google also kills entire niches in the short term by doing this stuff. Almost nobody is going to try to compete with them head on so if they are in a niche with a product that eventually gets killed, all progress stops in that niche for potentially years.

My list of degooglifying actions (mostly from my older post [1])

* switch default search engine to DuckDuckGo (one can still use the !s bang when one wants to see what Google has)

* use tracking blockers (uBlock origin, BlockBear on iOS)

* use anonymous/private/porn mode browsing most of the time (except for sites I actually want to be logged in permanently)

* use Zoho as a replacement for shared Google docs

* use Youtube either in private window, and/or download content once with youtube-dl

* use Apple Maps or OpenStreetMaps instead of Google maps, though still revert to Google maps sometimes, lamentably. It's good. (I never log in, though.)

* long ago switched to different email for main email, and forwarded gmail account to it (and now, basically nobody emails to my old gmail address anymore). (In fact, I use a catch-all domain now (very easy to set up), and a fresh email for basically every account. Quite handy.)

* for contacts, photos, etc. I use Apple's built-in stuff. I do trust Apple a bit more (different business model; look at recent iPhone prices.)

* Signal, Wire, iMessage for messaging

All in all, I think a fairly degooglified life is eminently possible.

In response, people furthermore suggested:

* Firefox with Multi-Account Container function to separate browsing, or just a temporary session with `firefox -no-remote -profile $(mktemp -d)`

* Lineage OS for Android phones (though somewhat controversial)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057709

I can also recommend Invidious [1] as a Youtube replacement. It's effectively a proxy in front of Youtube, only loading the source data (i.e. the video) in its own container. You can subscribe to channels via the builtin RSS functionality just like on Youtube. I use a redirector extension [2] in Firefox to automatically redirect any Youtube links to Invidious, since the signature for loading videos is identical.

[1] https://www.invidio.us (many other instances run on different addresses)

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ (Pattern: https://www.youtube.com/**, Redirect to: https://invidio.us/$2)

"It's effectively a proxy in front of Youtube,"

Then it will be killed when it gets popular, and is not a long-term replacement, because that's only dubiously legal at best (and I'm being generous there, I'd go with "not legal"), and the blocking-it arms race is going to be advantage Google.

There isn't really a replacement for YouTube, because it's not a service, it's content.

True, this has happened with other similar sites before. The difference as I see it with Invidious is that it is an open-source project [1] that anyone can host. If the main page [2] goes down, you can divert immediately to an alternative host (take [3] as one example). All my RSS subscriptions are one search-and-replace away in my OPML file.

[1] https://github.com/omarroth/invidious

[2] https://www.invidio.us

[3] https://www.invidiou.sh

>> * switch default search engine to DuckDuckGo (one can still use the !s bang when one wants to see what Google has)

I switched to Bing Search last year to earn Microsoft rewards, and I was surprised to find that I only need to go to Google for supplementary searches less than 10% of the time. I thought switching to Bing was going to be much worse.

I was on Bing for rewards for a time, but became uncomfortable with their decision to allow ad targeting based on LinkedIn profiles with no option to opt out. DDG user now.

Did you disable Google's Widevine plugin in Firefox? I just did on mine to see how many videos I won't be able to play anymore.

Have you tried temporary containers Firefox plugin -- it's basically automated private mode for everything.

Article about it -- https://spin.atomicobject.com/2018/10/29/virtual-browsers-fi...

Extension -- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

As an alternative to YouTube I use NewPipe and I'm quite happy with it.

I was never really a fan of Google+, but it's amazing how it went from MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER to being shutdown completely in such a short amount of time. I'm annoyed by all the other things they've ditched, but it scares me to think they did such an about face on Google+. I'll never use anything new from them, and I always tell anyone who asks to avoid using anything there. I'm kinda surprised anyone would run anything on GCP other than some test things. These shutdowns SHOULD damage their brand, and the shutdown of Google+ should send a very clear message to anyone using anything they've added recently.

As far as I am aware, Google hasn't shut anything down that you actually pay for. So fear mongering about GCP is just begin irrational.

Maybe not shutdown, but the Maps API 10x price increase has definitely made me gun shy about using GCP.

The whole Nexus brand springs to mind. The best mid-tier phone available was killed and replaced with nearly the exact same specs at the highest price possible.

Sent begrudgingly from a Pixel.

The exact reason why I transitioned from a Nexus to an Android One. The Pixel price-point is too damn high.

The Nexus line did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was meant to push an idealistic vision of what Android phones were supposed to be onto the market at a (too) competitive price point to force other Android manufacturers to follow suit.

A few years down the line, consumers have flocked to Android in large numbers, so now it's time to appease other phone manufacturers and guard the bottom line by discontinuing the Nexus line which ran at a loss.

Wasn't that the same idea with Microsoft's Surface device line-up? Windows hardware used to be hot garbage when compared to Apple hardware, but manufacturers have since stepped up their game. But instead of killing the Surface line, Microsoft have doubled down on it.

Hopefully they triple-down and release a SP with USB-C.

I'm very salty about that. I really wish they'd just release a range of perhaps 2 phones, one solid mid-range and one top-spec, that get guarenteed fast updates to Android.

I used to have a Nexus 5, and getting the latest android soon after release was a big feature. I've got a Moto Z2 Play now and there is still no sign of updating to the latest.

The Nexus 6p was around the same price as the iPhone when it came out, think it was $500 vs $550.

Right, they just let it wither. If you have a google apps domain, you run months to years behind getting new features compared to their free offerings.

Then there's Google glass...when was the last update for that?

Paid has not meant any kind 9f safety net from Google's mercurial attitudes.

I have a personal google apps domain and don’t mind this.

Being on a slow, stable update release track means I have the better version of the product IMO. I don’t need the latest flashy updates pushed immediately to my gmail as long as the battle-tested version gets there eventually.

Also, it’s ultimately an enterprise product and rapid changes aren’t appropriate for that space anyway.

But they also refuse to consider charging for popular products that users would be happy to pay for, like Reader and Inbox. So there's more in play here than narrow bean-counting.

Google+ was dying slowly to be sure, but the reason it was killed off is because they tried to cover up a data leak affecting over 500,000 users. [0] They've definitely killed off/abandoned their fair share of flagship products without warning (Hangouts, anyone?), but Google+ was shut down to minimize media controversy.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/google-exposed-n...

jesus. I didn't need another reason to hate Google. But there it is...

It's one of the reasons I will never buy any games on google stadia when it launches, I expect it to be shut down in 2-3 years.

I have the network to use streaming so I'm not so worried about performance, ps now for instance is almost indistinguishable from playing locally on my ps3.

Yeah, it looks like games will actually need to be built on stadia. It doesn't look like it just spins up an instance of vanilla install of the game. So there will need to be a deliberate choice by developers to support a new platform. Add that to the fact that many gamers already have a library of purchased games (like in steam) and aren't going to be thrilled at either buying them again or paying a subscription to play games they already own, and I really don't see how Stadia is going to work from a financial model standpoint.

This makes me think that Stadia might be a "build now, monetize later" experiment that will quickly be shut down if/when people don't buy/subscribe and no other revenue stream is easily found.

I might pay for Stadia if it was something like PaperSpace, where I can basically spin up a VPS optimized for game streaming, install steam, and play whatever games I have. Absent that, Stadia would need to provide offline copies of the games for backup should their service either go down or be cancelled.

Afaik it's built to a ubuntu + vulkan setup, but I suspect the rendering will go directly to a proprietary encoders framebuffer and that it uses custom input mapping and not libinput.

What would be nice if they released offline linux + vulkan versions in addition to the streaming version but that probably goes against their MO of tracking and monetising. It would make me much more inclined to buy on their service though.

Google's two (maybe three) core Google-branded products to non-tech people are Search, Gmail and maybe Chrome. I don't think non-techies could even tell you what some of the other products are or did. I would also wager most people outside of tech don't realize YouTube is owned by Google.

Tech people pay a lot of attention to this stuff, but casual user's don't notice or don't care.

Probably Google Drive as well.

Good point. Funny enough, the Google Drive desktop application was killed and replaced with Drive File Stream which broke the offline usefulness of Google Drive.

The file stream app still does the old drive behavior if you enable it.

Luckily, there's open-source tools for Google Drive, such as "grive".

The Drive File Stream app lets you pin files for offline use.

Disclaimer: I work on it.

Last I checked, YouTube was/is kind of a big deal.

Rumors are that it is still barely above break even if that.

Perhaps, but finances aside, there's no questioning their outsize influence compared to just about every other video site, most of which have withered and died.

Meerkat, anyone?

I disagree. I know a lot of "non-techies" that switched to using iPhones just for iMessage because Google's messaging ecosystem is confusing and seems to change every 12 months. I also know a lot of non-techies that use Google Play Music to upload and manage their own music libraries. It's rumored that Play Music is going to be killed in the next few months as Google pushes YouTube music subscriptions instead. The problem is, just like with Inbox and Gmail, Google rarely ever makes good on promises to port features from old products to new ones. I highly doubt the Play Music users that specifically use it because they can upload 50,000 of their own songs are going to opt into a worse version of Spotify when it's killed off.

> Google's messaging ecosystem is confusing and seems to change every 12 months

Don't worry, they'll launch a new messaging platform that will definitely sort this out for real this time!

I know you're joking. That said, they're planning to use RCS, a successor of SMS. I guess the users will be expected to pay for each message or to buy a package. I also don't expect to be able to send from a web site, unless my phone is active and the message can be sent through it.

Just no. I'd rather use even WhatsApp than that.

Does anyone even use Google's messaging apps? I've literally not seen one being used once in the past 4 or 5 years.

It's been Whatsapp for as long as I can remember.

Your country and social group determine this.

Hangouts and Gchat before it certainly have been used by a lot of people. In my experience, it has gotten less popular since the Gchat days but I’ve never chatted to anyone on WhatsApp...

Non-technical people on Android definitely do because they either come preinstalled on the phone or they're heavily promoted/advertised. Even in my relatively small city I saw huge billboards and posters advertising Allo and Duo when they were released.

I'm dying to know more information about Google Music. I'm one of the people who uploaded their entire library up there, and while it vaguely exists as a backup of a 20XX version on a hard drive somewhere, losing access to it would be pretty crippling to my every-day listening.

I'm absolutely not interested in a Spotify-like subscription to a revolving library that I don't control; Google no longer letting me listen to music I upload will probably mean that I'm going to have to switch to something otherwise god-awful that prioritizes syncing my own library.

Can't wait to enjoy the iTunes experience of manually syncing music, except from someone even worse than Apple at writing that sort of software. Anyone got any recommendations?

I'm working on a self-hosted alternative to google music. The server part stable and the mobile apps are being actively worked on. Check it out here:

https://mstream.io/

Thanks, I'll look into it!

It's very expensive but check out Roon.

I don't think this is what I'm looking for.

> In the transition from physical to digital media, something has been lost. We have more convenience than ever, but no feeling of excitement or engagement.

> What you get is a searchable, surfable magazine about your music.

I don't want excitement or engagement, or a magazine. I want to listen to music on my phone.

You forgot probably their only actually good product: maps

Good at being a pathfinding and point-by-point navigation tool, not as an actual map. Their completely broken treatment of street and POI labels makes the product very annoying when trying to preplan a journey, get yourself oriented in a place you don't know, or evaluate alternative routes.

Especially when driving. Super thin, low contrast lines with hardly any labels at a weird angle make trying to read the map while driving super frustrating.

I have a Garmin unit mounted on my car windshield that comes on with the ignition, and the user experience is just so much better. The route lines don't blend in with the background and it has large labels that are actually readable. The low angle of the 3D map actually lines up with the view through the windshield, which compresses a decent amount of roads into a small space. Even the spoken directions are better (I've used British English Daniel for years, and I rarely notice when someone speaks in a British accent).

I don't often set a route, so it mostly functions as an always-present map, which it does exceptionally well. I especially like the banner at the bottom that shows the road I'm currently driving on and the banner across the top that shows the next cross street.

Any particular Garmin device you recommend?

Honestly, any of them. They're all good. The one I have is three or four years old, and it still works as well as it did when it was new, except for the battery (but it stays plugged in so that doesn't matter). I could easily keep using it for 3–4 more years if it keeps getting map updates. Every few months I plug it into my computer and leave it to update for a few hours (it's a one-click process), but I think some of the newer ones have Wi-Fi so they can auto-update.

It really depends on what features you want. I've found the voice commands to be quite handy. It has a hard time understanding some addresses, but for stuff like "go home", "turn down the brightness", "navigate to the nearest Tim Hortons", it's great. I wish mine had a built-in dashcam like the newer ones, but they're not cheap. Mine has Bluetooth as well, so it can get more frequent traffic updates from my phone (instead of through the FM receiver), as well as take speakerphone calls.

It's pretty much a single function device, which is perfect. I never have to mess with it, it's always there, and it leaves my phone free for audiobooks or for me to use if I'm in the passenger seat.

Yep! It's gotten worse and worse to browse as a map over the years. The earliest AJAXy versions were probably the best for that. I think they intend Earth for that purpose (they moved the great geo photo feature from Maps to there, for instance) but it's really heavy for that purpose, and the interface is clunkier.

It seems like another victim of Google's optimizing their products for one common use case and neglecting others. See also: search.

It gets worse every year. Like every 8 mos they add an extra thing you have to touch/click past to actually see the map. But maybe that's just the mobile app...

yea, now when i open it, half the screen is ads and off topic stuff that i have to close on mobile. frustrating.

ive found bing's maps to very good and user friendly, ive been switching over.

Maps the data is pretty useful, Maps the app is the worst app I regularly use

Google Photos seems to be a core for non-tech people too. ...and actually, is one of my favorite products that they've released in recent years.

agreed, i know a good number of non-tech people that use Google Photos.

I think you're overlooking android, play, photos, docs, and drive.

So essentially Google's constant stream of new products leads to older ones falling by the wayside unless they can make very large piles of cash.

It's also worth highlighting this:

> Google rarely does anything as a singular company. Instead, the industry giant is made up of autonomous product groups that develop and launch things on their own schedule.

That's an interesting quote, makes more sense now. I guess they're running things more like a university than a business? All the internal drama and products make perfect sense now.

> more like a university than a business

which is wrong for google to behave this way, as the focus of university is to produce _new_ research, and a business's focus is to produce sustainable service for profit. Google should have a graduation mechanism for a product they launch, where they publicly announce that a product is out of beta, and can be depended on to exist.

And if the product isn't ready to be supported, they should continue to have the 'beta' moniker attached to the product name.

I'd say they run it like a marketplace. If a product isn't generating revenue, it gets axed. Which, given the size of Google is probably about the only way to run things. Hierarchies don't scale indefinitely. How many companies have we seen collapse due to an inability to react to ever changing market demands? Besides having an oracle for a CEO, I'd say running your company as a bunch of autonomous business units is probably the only solution.

Having worked at Google, this really isn't the case, at minimum because a large number of their business units are not and are never expected to be profitable. It is a bit difficult to describe what system is used to coordinate between business units, but it doesn't really resemble an economic marketplace.

> It is a bit difficult to describe what system is used to coordinate between business units

Well, now I'm interested. Could you try elaborating?

> Google should have a graduation mechanism for a product they launch, where they publicly announce that a product is out of beta, and can be depended on to exist. And if the product isn't ready to be supported, they should continue to have the 'beta' moniker attached to the product name.

They do this, at least for their cloud offerings. A number of their products here are explicitly listed as beta:

https://cloud.google.com/products/

And here's an example of an announcement of something going out of beta:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/python-37-for...

I can't find a reference from some quick searches, but I remember reading that part of GA is a guarantee that if they do decide to discontinue the service, they're required to give quite a bit of notice and support.

> which is wrong for google to behave this way, as the focus of university is to produce _new_ research, and a business's focus is to produce sustainable service for profit. Google should have a graduation mechanism for a product they launch, where they publicly announce that a product is out of beta, and can be depended on to exist.

This is a surprising claim, that a business "should" be any particular thing, particularly when the business under discussion is one of the most successful of all time.

It would be like criticizing the skeletal design of a lion. It's a lion, who are you to say what it should look like?

It's like Microsoft used to be.

My own "you'll never get another chance to do that to me again" was when I migrated an organisation from Microsoft Exchange to Google Mail and Apps. It was great with Outlook Connector for Gmail, then they killed it.

I will never take the risk of committing to a Google product in a professional setting ever again. It hurts the organisation, and it hurts me.

These shutdowns might hurt Google's brand among the tech-savvy community that uses edge products like Google+ or Chromecast Audio (never even heard of that before today).

But everyone I know still uses Google search and Chrome. Most use Gmail. Schools still give students Chromebooks and teach them Google Docs.

I think Google will be fine.

This is, arguably, a slippery slope. A lot of companies thought of themselves as too big to fail just to be ditched by customers very quickly. The side effect of being complacent is that things work for you until they don't - aol, myspace and yahoo died, microsoft barely dodged the bullet and apple with google are starting to venture into the danger zone.

Google will be "fine," but I've stopped investing in Google products and I'm sure a lot of the tech-savvy community feel the same way. This will make it more difficult for them to get new products off the ground in the future.

They make excellent products, but they just don't want to invest in them long enough to gain widespread appeal. Inbox was a killer app. Now that I've experienced what brilliant email looks like, I'm going to keep a look out for a competing clone and will likely switch.

It's a vicious cycle. Fewer people will invest in new products until they know it will be around in the future, but then Google will shut down product that don't gain enough users. This is a cancer that slowly eats away at the company bottom line.

From my point of view, if it's a choice between an ecosystem of tools that Google could kill at their whim and an ecosystem of tools floated and maintained by startup companies that could dry up and die at any time, it's a bit of an illusory choice.

Go for open source tools then. If they are good enough for people to get use out of, they usually stay around. At least I can't think of an example where one disappeared for good.

That's down an axis of "strictly worse than the alternatives." With an open-source ecosystem, I have to set it up and maintain it myself, when it breaks I have to service it by myself (often without a useful community to assist, because my problems are often unique to my special-snowflake configuration), and if I get attacked I'm 100% responsible for digging out of the assault with no recourse or assistance.

None of these are concerns with either Google's online offerings or the offerings of most startups.

I see the "this news only impacts tech people" argument from time to time, but remember that all the non-tech people ask the tech people they know what to use. And tech people are who set up their family's computers, deploy software widely on business networks, etc.

The tech-savvy community was on Google years before the general public, and them leaving Google should set your expectations for what happens with everyone else a few years after that.

"remember that all the non-tech people ask the tech people they know what to use. And tech people are who set up their family's computers, deploy software widely on business networks, etc."

As a techie who has set up and/or fixed many non-techie family & friends' computers and devices, I hear ya. 110%, loud and clear. :-)

However... I wonder how long this will remain true. More and more devices are ready to go out of the box and kids are being taught to use Google products in school.

It's not hard to buy a phone or Chromebook online, log into your Google account and be ready to go.

It's not like the old days when you would have to go to your grandma's house and install a better web browser, antivirus, etc. Most things just work now, for most people.

Another aspect to consider is platform support. Look at Google's newest successful platform, Google Assistant. If developers weren't excitedly writing integrations for it, wouldn't it be dead already, with Alexa in the room? Since many new tech services are built as platforms, developer interest and support also becomes a key requirement.

> However... I wonder how long this will remain true. More and more devices are ready to go out of the box and kids are being taught to use Google products in school.

If the Google products change too much, the curriculum will become so wrong as to be unusable. My school taught me Microsoft Word with outdated versions on outdated computers; but that was OK because the book matched the computers; when you eventually run into a more recent Word, you have to dig around to find where they moved the menus and controls, but the core concepts still work. With Google's tendency to move stuff around willy-nilly, I expect the curriculum to become unusably stale --- once you have the core concepts, you can search them out; but if you're still learning, it's really hard when step a of every step in the process is find where they moved the things you're being taught.

Yes, Google will be fine because they have an insanely favorable business model. However, if you can’t get the early adopters to use your products the late adopters never will. Why? Because the tech savvy early adopters are the ones who figure out new user interfaces and use cases, and transfer that knowledge to the less capable. They show them examples of why to use something and help when they run in to problems. I’m still helping people use Google search and Gmail.

There is nothing wrong with a company testing and shutting down new products. There is a problem when you say this is Google _______ or Facebook _______ and your customers think it is on the same level as your first tier apps. Amazon does it all the time and most users never know it was an Amazon product. Most users don’t even know Instagram is owned by Facebook.

Consider the exhaustive work Microsoft has done for decades to make things backwards compatible, often at the cost of their current product. No one would expect that from Google. They expect things to be killed off arbitrarily when the product isn’t popular enough.

There are options:

Sell the product to another company

Publish the source code with an open license

Or never stamp your name on the product in the first place

Yeah, good luck next time a tech-savvy has to recommend a Google product or something else.

Google has morphed into a boring low-growth sustain-mode advertising company that happens to employ a lot of very bright, creative people who really have no business working there any more. Thus we see a ton of hobby side projects that don't last. At this point if Google invented a Level 5 self-driving car, I'd probably just yawn until a more dependable company reinvented it.

They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money (like Chromecast Audio), and they improve features that detract from the user experience and muddy the waters in terms of ads/monetization in their view (YouTube annotations). They run their company as a constant stream of trial-and-error product launches, some of which succeed wildly and make them billions, others fail and are killed off. Makes sense to me.

Perhaps someone is confusing them with a charity or an Internet do-gooder enthusiasts club. That's unwise. You can be sure that successful services used by a lot of people will continue indefinitely, perhaps tweaked to generate more revenue. Otherwise, come on, as an avid Google+ user you must have known that the writing is on the wall for you and the other 500 avid Google+ users. No charities here.

> They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money (like Chromecast Audio)

I got the Chromecast audio and think it is great.

That this was discontinued was news to me. When did that happen? Do you have any links to the announcement?

You can just, um, Google it :-)

I also got the Chromecast audio and I also think it's great. Historically, lots of great products have been discontinued because they didn't pan out, in business terms.

I went to buy one last week. Apparently discontinued Jan 2019. I just missed the boat, and I am sad.

I don't know why they didn't just add an audio jack to the normal Chromecast. Other than that aren't they identical?

Chromecast Audio was cheap and had multi-room sync. The latest Chromecast can also sync, but sends the audio over HDMI.

> They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money

It seems they also discontinue products that make them money and continue products that lose them money. Their exchanges with the SEC [1] seem to suggest that YouTube loses money (otherwise why wouldn't they publish the numbers?), and if that becomes known public info, it may open them up to a host of legal and political problems.

Regardless, if you discontinue products your customers are using, don't be surprised if your customers stop relying on your products.

1. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/28/sec_google_youtube/

> (otherwise why wouldn't they publish the numbers?)

To prevent competitors, providers or customers from learning how profitable this particular business is. (Probably not the case here, but it’s an actual reason for companies to disclose as little as possible about their operations.)

The issue is that publicly traded companies have a duty to shareholders to disclose this data and all companies have to follow antitrust laws. Which is why the SEC is trying to get this data. It’s pretty shady, but you’re right, it is a competitive advantage (breaking antitrust laws or disclosure laws is often advantageous... hence why the laws were written).

They discontinue stuff even if it makes money because it's a blip compared to ad revenue.

Someone looks at a product like Chromecast Audio and decides it's not really helping ads so there's no point in spending money on maintenance for it, especially with the previously mentioned stuff that Google's corporate culture does not reward sustaining/maintenance/support work.

If a money-losing product is have a positive effect on ads somehow it probably gets to live.

> Perhaps someone is confusing them with a charity or an Internet do-gooder enthusiasts club.

The amount of products that get launched and then closed is to me sign that Google is a company unable to manage product after launch (and probably even more before, for the business part). More than that it gives that message that you shouldn't use a Google product until it reaches a critical mass, or you risk to have it axed one day. As more people think this way it will be more difficult for any google product to reach that mass of users.

I was going to make a comment about how Google's approach to service deprecation contrasts with Microsoft's, but then I spot-checked my assumptions and realized that MS has discontinued over 50% of the Office ecosystem of apps over the years.

So I think I need to instead ask a question: Is Google's deprecation strategy actually unusual for a company with a wide ecosystem of offerings?

Disagree about the MS point a bit.

Yes, nominally, MS has killed some programs in the Office Suite, but the core products of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook are still there. Even the weird, obscure products like Publisher and Access are still around.

So maybe they killed Clippy, but that guy

Google has killed some of its offerings, but the core products of search, ads, drive, and mail are still there.

(... Inbox being only a UI on top of the mailbox and not the mailbox itself, not unlike Microsoft Schedule+ went away but the underlying Outlook functionality remained).

Desktop software is different from cloud services. If I have a Windows XP and Office 2003 disc then I can still run Frontpage if I so wish (ideally in a VM not connected to the network). There is no way that I can run Google Notebook anymore (shut down in 2012).

Groove Music Pass and Microsoft Band stand out as good parallels, too. As does Windows 10 Mobile. The Microsoft Health service that went with Band & Mobile is shutting down soon. And they announced today that they'll no longer sell books in the Microsoft Store app.

It's getting hard to trust both companies.

There isn't a single new Google product that I'm excited about. Even if there was, at this point I would be apprehensive at best given their track record of abandonment. It seems to be that they've forgotten how to innovate compared to their competitors. Facebook, despite their controversies, bought Instagram and managed to recapture the young market with new features and improvements. Amazon has been making strides with AWS and its Prime ecosystem. Google has been... Making more redundant messaging apps?

I mean Facebook buying Instagram isn't really innovation. In terms of business strategy and feature enhancements, for sure its been great. But that's not really what I'd call innovation.

I used Instagram as an example because I think Facebook has done a lot more with it than, say, Google has with their YouTube acquisition. YT has been largely stagnant in the face of competition from Twitch, Netflix, Spotify, etc. and I see fewer and fewer content creators using it, whereas Instagram continues to grow.

You could argue that youtube's rate of innovation is low. But when it was launched it was Flash-based sub-10-minute low-resolution prerecorded videos that paid creators nothing, and so on.

Now it supports long videos, 4k, streaming, html5¹, pays content creators enough there are a bunch of them doing it full time², has an ad-free premium option, it isn't at war with music labels, and it hasn't been bankrupted by bandwidth costs.

Seems a fairly good track record to me.

¹ Arguably Youtube was one of the big forces getting decently working video out of flash and into browsers. Along with Apple refusing to ship Flash on iOS, that is!

² Admittedly at the whim of fickle algorithms, so not the best financial security there

Hopefully Google will see this and better understand why Microsoft is beating them in cloud services.

When I moved about a TB of S3 data into their cloud storage (as a cross-vendor backup) one of their product evangelists called me just to say hello. I was floored. But I mentioned that their constant shut downs are making me wary of a larger Google Cloud commitment.

Its too late for them. No one would trust their business to a company with a reputation of closing down services for no reason or worse yet entire business accounts with no ability appeal.

this is another concern I would have. The complete inability to get ahold of a real person when dealing with google support is just silly.

“one of their product evangelists called me just to say hello. ”

They are good at that but if you need actual support they are much less eager to talk to you.

Well, that's still better than Google, which is stopping short of launching short range missiles are everyone daring to call customer support in terms of support friendliness.

Damaging? Its very clear the damage is done.

I thought the whole point of Alphabet was to try and hide the Google brand so customers trust to use it.

> Damaging? Its very clear the damage is done.

In the HN community certainly, but also for consumers?

If you lose your early adopters you lose everything in the longer run. Every new product needs early adopters.

That is such a wise and important point. I am no fan of Apple, but the one thing they have going for them is that they have never forgotten how to please their core fan base.

I was such big Google fan that they actually featured me on their blog over a decade ago. They have destroyed everything that I ever liked about them, piece-by-piece and replaced it with advertising, the scourge of humanity.

>I am no fan of Apple, but the one thing they have going for them is that they have never forgotten how to please their core fan base.

I'm no fan either, but their fanbase here HN has been criticizing the new macs for years now

The Ars article misses the point that google is an ad company that uses it's dominance in search to keep the ad money machine going.

Everything else is just playtime to google. So they have no interest in doing the hard work to support any play time projects at all.

They are so horrific to deal with at an enterprise level.

All this stuff that google shovels out, makes a splash with, and then cancels is just stuff that doesn't further the ad hegemony. You can take or leave the free stuff, if it works for you that's great, but don't expect it to hang around any longer than it serves it's purpose.

They don't charge money for this stuff and keep it around once it stops being relevant for ads because the price tag to make a difference to them would be way too high for anyone to pay for it, especially at the consumer level.

My exposure at this point is basically just Gmail & Calendar. I'd be pretty bummed if Youtube got the axe though.

I once asked Diane Greene straight up, when she took over Google Cloud, "How can you possibly win enterprise customers when there are 12 deprecated APIS in Google Cloud right now, and you haven't even started to turn the thing around." She dodged and said there were no deprecations.... I literally had the deprecated services listings from their site up on my phone. I think this is one of the reasons she moved on: it's never going to stop, there. They'll always leave things and move on to the next thing, not worrying about the old customers.

Killing some products makes a lot of sense, or is at least has a plausible rationale. Now that video Chromecast devices can do audio casting, it may not make sense to make separate audio products.

Other things, like Google's utter botch of tablet software and hardware points toward senior management treating those businesses like hobbies. Hardware partners and customers are indeed victimized. Getting tablets right requires product management discipline across APIs (i.e. Fragment) app frameworks that have to use Fragment correctly, UI design that doesn't promote an "it's a big phone" approach to app designers, hardware specs, and the OS. Nothing that came after the Fragment API really handled tablet cases very well.

In their latest move in tablets Google seems to have surrendered to the Windows tablet idea of a hybrid laptop/tablet OS, except Samsung, who vastly outsell Google's hardware, is still making their variants on Google's old laptop OS. WTF? If I were at Samsung I'd be pissed as hell at Google for muddying up their only successful tablet hardware partner's technology position. One could hardly do worse.

Well in that case losing Google Reader was all worth it.

I am still upset about that. That single service being shut down is what started me to distance myself from all google services except search when possible (including making the decision to actually pay for services when necessary)

I pay for an Inoreader supporter account. It's cheap, it works, I don't have to maintain it, and it ensure some revenue to the developers to keep it going.

I'm keeping my gmail.com because it's my main personal online identity, despite hating the UI.

If I could pay to retain access to Google Inbox if I could like I'm already paying for Google One to hopefully gain some resemblance of support if shit hits the fan.

I use Feedly pro and the Reeder app on my iPhone for RSS now. Only because Feedly made migrating away from Google Reader super easy when that whole thing was happening.

I stick with iCloud for my email, cloud stage, documents, and etc (with the 2TB plan)

The last thing I am mulling over is moving my "professional" email away from Google Apps (or whatever its called now) to Amazon email or something... but the fact that I can't decouple that google account from the email has stopped me so far (Thanks to bad past decisions and single sign on).

I used inoreader. I'm happy with free, but you're right I should start paying as I keep moving off RSS readers that get shut down.

You don't want to use anything Google except search? That was about the easiest one to step away from (using duckduckgo now).

I want to love and use duckduckgo as my primary search engine.... But every time I try I am disappointed by the results. Unfortunately I realize that is mostly because of the profile they have already built on me.

Well, I think it is wrong to rely on any company’s products and always have plan B options. I just switched to using G Suite for maintaining my collection of research material, emails, online storage, and most importantly using cloud search to find things quickly. This is convenient but I could adapt in a day if they shut down all these services. I use my own domain, keep google Takeout backups, and could get by nicely using spotlight on a Mac to search all my old research PDFs and notes.

Compute platforms are a different story: if we as developers keep our cloud based systems ‘portable’ we miss value of specific AWS/GCP/Azure services and APIs. So, I would argue that it is very important for Google to provide better support and stability for GCP and everything else really is much less important.

EDIT: I forgot to add: I have purchased about $300 in google play movies and books, so I would be annoyed if for some reason those stopped being available.

Ever since Google shut down reader, always associated Google with a company that could shut down any of their products at anytime so in general to look else where for most everything other than Gmail. Use Docs and Drive which seem to be here to stay at least as well.

Other companies like Apple shut down Ping and such but very rarely and most are things that were DOA unlike Google. The problem is Google tries everything but doesn't give it enough love to fix the issues and make successful, unless a product is successful. Which is a bit of a catch 22. People know a lot of these smaller initiatives may go away and/or have missing features/bugs so people don't heavily invest in them, and thus Google kills them since not enough interest. Also now people associate Google with privacy issues even though they do some incredible things with that data.

Isn't this purely about their internal incentives? No one gets promoted or advances their career by doing boring upkeep tasks on an existing product.

The only way to really advance your career inside Google is to launch a new product. (And then let it slowly rot as you and your team are promoted and moved to launch a new product)

Maybe it is time Google thinks about decentralized products again. I mean, yes they are one of the biggest players in the cloud business, but decentralized doesn't mean you can't be a big cloud provider within an open ecosystem.

And if you build open systems, you can abandon those without letting anybody down (unless you didn't even release the complete reference implementation as it happen with Wave).

For example, with Stadia they could have opened up their platform for gaming marketplaces like Steam, GOG, etc. and let people play the games they already own via the Stadia streaming service. That way, nobody would have to be afraid of not being able to play their games when Stadia shuts down in 3 years.

I didn't realize how many projects have been killed during the years until I opened the google graveyard: https://killedbygoogle.com

What "brand?" They sought to dilute it by creating Alphabet, then continued a habit of unreliability in everything that could be said to support their "brand."

If you look at Google/Alphabet, they are a search engine, gmail/gdocs, and somewhat of a device maker. Everything else might be killed off today. Or not. Who knows? Certainly none of us. Regardless, they survive as long as they do as the gadgets that they started as during somebody's 20% time or pre-acquisition ramen-startup era. Might as well be toys.

It's not the shutdowns that are the problem but the lack of vision with which these products are launched and abandoned almost right away.

Inbox is a good example of a product that was launched and almost immediately stopped evolving with big question marks about transitioning from gmail to inbox, which ultimately a lot of users did not want to do, and more users who couldn't because some features just weren't there.

The writing was on the wall when a year in there had been no meaningful updates to Inbox (i.e. somebody shut down that team almost right away) and then slowly gmail started getting new features. Inbox barely evolved and there never was a clear vision for transitioning from Gmail to Inbox. Unless of course the vision was to have two competing products with more or less the same goals out there.

Same with chat. Google seems to suffer from a chronic internal not invented here syndrome. Where teams are competing with each other instead of working with each other. Google has a gazillion chat solutions, two consumer operating systems for laptops, tablets, and phones with lots of overlap. A bunch more for watches, misc IOT stuff, etc. And another OS in the works. Which of those three will be killed? Which won't be. It doesn't even matter. What matter is that we don't know and I suspect Google leadership doesn't know either. It's not acting like a company that actually knows which of those teams are going to get some bad news pretty soon.

This is true. Google cannot be relied upon.

The axing of Google Talk & Reader is still fresh.

Even the other day, a friend mentioned that instead of waiting for Gmail to be killed, its better to move email to your own domain.

Even I moved off keep. I am confident that it is going to be axed soon.

The thing that bugs me the most of why Google doesn't just opensource the code. Open-sourcing Google reader was the decent thing to do. Like netscape open-sourcing its code to Mozilla before it sank. I still treasure the Netscape CD I got with from my ISP in the late 1990s.

I'm not so sure.

In the eyes of users of those products, perhaps, but if those products are not succeeding, ie not becoming widely popular/turning a profit, I guess google are calculating limited collateral damage from shutting them down.

I think the brand is tarnishing for more abstract reasons; privacy/surveillance, complicity in chinese censorship, being a (the?) prime example of tech-leveraged inequality (stories about founders' private jet parties probably don't help), and so on.

The problem is that the damage is cumulative. Each step may have little collateral damage but each is a step in the same direction where your reputation becomes bad.

I think the biggest unforseen effect of these shutdowns is the consumers perception of Google's new products. Google announced gaming service? So what, it will be gone in 2 years tops. Google announced a new product? I don't want to be a beta tester for life.

Edit: Just found this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553601

I think this is most damaging to Google Cloud Platform as Amazon and Microsoft have demonstrated just how valuable such a platform is and it's often the developers who steer companies in choosing such platforms. But can we trust that any service on such a mission critical platform will last as long as our apps? Amazon and Microsoft have earnt our trust on this despite any other faults they may have.

Who now can trust Google Stadia?

http://bonkersworld.net/look-this-way

There are many many googlers from top are also here at hacker news, reading these very criticisms often, why nothing has changed in years and years ?

Google doesn't reward those who make things better, they reward those who launch new products.

With all the shutdowns, Google is also foolishly throwing away what will be an increasingly important asset - distinguishing between real human identities and bots. False bot negatives waste Google computing resources, while false bot positives waste users' time.

I would happily opt in to having Google use AI on each of their services to see if I behave like a real human and then combine that information across services to give my identity a low-bot-risk rating. As it is I am constantly asked to Captcha prove myself (probably because I perform a large number of unusual complex search queries).

Black hat AI will make bots harder and harder to detect and cybercrime (and disinformation dissemination) easier and easier. Detecting fake identities will soon become crucial and yet almost impossible - and Google could be best positioned to provide that information.

But instead they will let MBA twit bean counters ruin the company. My advice to all corporations - keep MBAs in dungeons, bring them out occasionally for advice and never allow them to make decisions.

I was really disappointed when they were shutting down Wave. It seemed so innovative and even today there is no powerful Wiki-Messenger-Docs that is even close to it. I virtually stopped using Google because of privacy concerns but Wave was so unique, I might not have never considered to leave, who knows...

About Inbox I don't really care but obviously the UX was amazingly intuitive.

The majority of Googles profit/revenue still comes from search/advertising. It has generated wads of cash for them, but if they just sat on the cash it would not make Wall Street happy so they've thrown a bunch of money at different efforts to make it look like they have more than just search and advertising to boost the stock price. Because of that there has been no incentive to see these other products to fruition, but at the same time they could afford to throw money at it as it helped to boost the stock price. Now however there is the new threat of regulation in both the US and Europe with the later also starting to impose fines. This makes me wonder if part of the motivation is to retrench with investment because of some potentially significant headwinds.

My guess is that what people have observed inside of the company is a manifestation of that.

Just this past weekend, I set out to finish a project [0] I'd started several years back using the Google+ API, hoping to wrap things up before they shut it down forever. Much to my chagrin, I found that they'd shuttered the API months in advance, effectively ruining any hopes I had of finishing.

After a swath of other shutdowns, this was the last straw for me.

[0]: project was "confluence", a stream aggregator designed for personal use. I'd accumulated > 40,000 followers on Google by writing long-form commentary on news, events, and technology, and wanted to merge all of that content into a self-hosted site that included my Twitter, Facebook, and other content: https://github.com/martindale/confluence

This is an issue that is dear to my heart. I think it is possible to almost always avoid killing a product. When a company doesn't want to invest further they can do combinations of the following:

* Just open source it.

* If code has external IP, isolate them behind interfaces.

* If product is service and uses internal infrastructure, you can still isolate those interfaces (assume someone else would build necessary infrastructure)

* If core devs have left or aren't interested, hire offshore or freelancers to do this work

* Call for maintainers/fans who are invested in the product to participate

* Instill culture in the company so every new project is architected with eventual open sourcing in future due to reasons such as shutdown

* Put product up for sell to potential companies who are in same space and ask them to take on work for making sure IP and dependencies are abstracted

My observation at companies has been that there is rarely the required foresight to be able to prune something off into a separate open-source project. Google uses a mono-repo I believe, which already makes it extremely unlikely that they’ll be able to even build a thing outside the company, much less let it thrive. And “cancellation time” is not when new resources will be diverted to fixing broken-only-outside-the-company behavior.

I’ve only seen this work a couple different ways. One: if the company spins off something very large (like an entire division) that was already self-sufficient so it is pretty clear how to keep it all functional from the outside. Or, two: if, from the very beginning, the person pitching a project insists on an open-source/flexible model and takes lots of steps to ensure that it is constantly working in that way.

I can understand why Google don't want to support a large number of small services but you'd think they could spin them off rather than closing them - maybe retain 60% ownership and option the rest to a team of enthusiasts?

They'd have less annoyed customers and maybe make money out of it.

They did that for Wave. Reader was too integrated with Google's internal APIs for that to be feasible, though. I assume Inbox is the same.

I disagree with the idea that shutting down products damages the brand. It's quite the opposite. Google+ has always been a joke, and migrating and merging products sounds just as wise as creating new ones that work. On a side note, I'm happy Google+ will be buried for good.

Their history killing successful products makes everyone wary of using any new Google products: https://killedbygoogle.com

Just switched from inbox to gmail today after the notifications stopped working

There are ads inside gmail that look just like emails, which I keep accidentally opening.

This is just ridiculous why would I use an email provider that does this. What are they going to do next? Start adding ads to my email signature?

> What are they going to do next? Start adding ads to my email signature?

That's crazy, who would ever do that?

~ sent from my iPhone [0]

[0] not really, but...

I'm sad to see Inbox go, I really got used to it, at this point I'm going down the path of de-googlification.

I've been gradually moving away from Gmail to using my own configuration with Postfix/Courier/Spamassassin/rbl/letsencrypt certs everywhere etc...

This has been my on-and-off side project for the past couple of months or so.

I find how well filters based on from/subject work. Tunderbird has really good desktop experience, on android K9 Mail works but is a little bit annoying.

The next thing I'm trying to automate my mail is to set up server-side mail filtering with courier/maildrop, because I haven't found a good way of synchronizing Thunderbird filters and I'm not willing to have a Thunderbird session just running all the time on a computer.

For the last 6 years or so I -- foolishly it turns out -- chose to make Play Music my primary music platform. I was uncomfortable with subscribing to a music service and wanted to be able to keep my own library since the collection of music I own is a form of self expression for me. Google Play Music let me put my library in the cloud and listen to it on any device.

Now it's looking like I will probably lose a big chunk of it when Google Play Music gets replaced with YouTube Music since Google doesn't really let you download everything you've uploaded. I'm upset enough by this I am motivated to find a way to move away from other Google products to the extent that it is practical to do so.

I would even risk saying that what Google has been saying is damaging the trust in the industry, especially online services (if there ever was one).

I reflected on my gut aversion to stadia, and realized I had the same to most walled-garden online services. To be fair, Google is far from the only one shutting services down (and users out of it).

My solution is to use open source software, with a preference for federated or distributed solutions.

Discord/Skype/MSN/Hangouts/etc -> Matrix/Mumble

Twitter -> Mastodon

YouTube -> PeerTube

Etc. Those are the most recent ones I used. I still have some work to do before hosting a collabora online instance to offer to my family as an alternative to Google docs.

This is a common practice for Google i.e. deprecating under-performing services borne out of 20% time policy.

https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/the-my...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...

I would rather Google keep trying and failing than quit trying.

If you don't keep the start-up spirit to keep trying new things, then some start-up will find a way to disrupt you.

Google aren't inventing.They aren't even re-inventing.

They're just re-implementing.

As a consumer, and Reader and Inbox user, I'd never buy a Google product (Pixel, Home, Fi, etc) I need to rely on in everyday life or use their cloud for hosting anything important. At this point I see all of their products as mayflies. They may be interesting and useful today, but tomorrow they'll be gone.

And even if they change their internal policies, I'm not sure I could be able to change my opinion on them.

I'll be honest, the products listed that they think is "damaging" the Google brand is a mix between "I've literally never heard of that" and "I literally don't care about that". Of course, with Fiber being the "I've both heard, and care, but we all knew it was inevitable years ago".

Their hunger for data is also damaging their brand.

It's disappointing to see that there seems to be no force whatsoever from the inside of Google to change from ad-based monetization (disrespecting a user's privacy) to a paid-for product.

But I get it, having real customers is a pain, and most Google employees are happy without them.

Do we have any idea yet why Google made the dk move of increasing Maps cost 14x? I understand that things change, but it sure is hard to give Google the benefit of the doubt with the information that has been made available thus far. As it is, it feels like a two-word goodbye.

I wrote about this (the danger’s of brand extension) when Stripe launched Stripe Atlas

https://medium.com/@__tosh/stripe-atlas-and-the-trap-of-bran...

Who else is here is using Firebase? What are the odds of the whole thing getting canned with 2 years? For all of the "we promise GCP isn't going anywhere" comments from the Googlers in this thread, I'm seeing nothing about, well, GCP's equivalent of Inbox.

More than a few times over the past few years the first time I've heard about some new Google product is the announcement that it is being killed off. That's not the sort of marketing push that encourages one to look out for new Google products.

I want to try using Google Hire to recruit talent at my company but unfortunately I feel as if I've been conditioned to believe that there is a higher probability of the product being killed compared to its alternatives.

I totally agree. Hence I haven't used their cloud services as much as AWS.

Damaging? It's been damaged for years around here

Actually, it becomes Google's brand already....

Shameless self-promotion, but I've recently built a replacement for goo.gl url shortener with an API: https://plip.io

Google+ has shut down as of 10:00PT/18:00CET.

Wait Chromecast audio is discontinued? dammit!

What is people's opinion on Tensorflow?

Who... would... have.... thought... that?

This only exists in our engineering bubble. No average user has ever heard of all the products listed.

This does explain their lack of enterprise customers though.

How long until stadia bites the dust?

The statements by Ars are overrated. Yes, it's annoying but without trying to create new and risky applications Google cannot exist.

Google Labs.

Back in the 90's and 00's, I read some quips about how intra-company politics was starting to run counter to the welfare of Microsoft's user base.

In 2019, it seems like Google has succumb to the same pathologies, but unfortunately amplified by certain societal currents. (No matter how idealistic and noble the goals, activism entails grabbing power, and power attracts sociopaths.)

Still sad about Google reader closing I've been hesitant to put my faith in any new Google product since.

Given the push back against social media these days, Google could get a lot of good karma by resurrecting Reader.

Who'd trust them to keep a service running at this point?

Google Reader was great while it lasted - I had grown to really like it.

That's because Google is built like an accelerator. Look you can argue that Google's brand is being damaged but you know what's worse than a few dents in your brand? Destruction to your brand. Look at a company like Kodak who missed the boat on digital cameras (despite having created the first one). Google makes 100 bets a year so that it doesn't miss the next digital camera, or phone, and so on...

I'm a developer of an app on Firebase.

I really like the current iteration of Firebase but it's definitely languishing compared to what's happening at AWS.

Firebase is great for our use case as it handles auth easily and has sort of a JSON-put API as well as support for blobs via cloud storage.

https://getpolarized.io/

... if you're interested.

Anyway. This keeps me up at night.

Google has a history of just flat out ignoring products and then killing them. They're not TOO bad in cloud but they're really getting their ass handed to them across the board.

Microsoft is taking their lead in cloud and Amazon is at least 5 years ahead of Google.

I think we're going to look back at 201 and realize that this is the year Google started dying.

They're failing on Youtube with advertisers angry at them. Android developers are pissed on the constant platform changes and abuse from lack of customer support.

Just last week I spent about half a day trying to implement chrome extension inline installation on my site only to find out that they killed that feature six months ago but didn't update their documentation.

The chrome extension store developer console is a joke.

Right now I'm asking for "all permissions" for our extension as I need to inject a header in an HTTP response for CORS.

So we're under auditing for every update.

This includes ASSETS! So if we update an image in our chrome extension we have to wait a WEEK for them to re-audit our app even though the binary didn't change.

Something is seriously wrong at Google and they need to fix it ...

Firebase is an example of something that I would use except that I know Google is "behind it".

This again. Not a week goes by without someone mentioning this. When a product is used by 0.001% of your user base you have to think about putting engineering resources towards that service. It just so happens that non-core products are often used by a vocal early adopter tech crowd like people on HN. Also 0.001% of Googles User base might still be 20,000 people.

The other thing is Google's business practices. I always think of Google as hundreds or thousands of startups. Small agile team builds up a new service. Where are we within 3 to 5 years. Over a billion users yet? No? Ok scrap or integrate it somehow.

One big problem of big slow boring corporate entities is that they always miss the next big thing that's gonna disrupt them. Google did it to many incumbents. So it makes sense that they might be worried to be next to be disrupted.

Also I think it's important to differentiate between consumer and commercial offerings with SLA's. There is no difference between the service discontinuation policies in GCP vs AWS and Azure. And also, gaming is way to important to abandon. Plus they have first mover advantage now as opposed to G+.

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