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Comment by ChrisSD | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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