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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

"No traction" for a Google product just means it's not the next Search or Gmail.

It doesn't mean that zero people use it. Thousands or millions of people used Hangouts, Google Reader, Google Code, or Picasa - they'd have been considered big YC successes.

If big YC companies all got shut down if they failed to turn into another letter in the FAANG acronym, maybe people would become reluctant to use services from YC companies.

I still use some Google services, but I check out my data on a regular basis, I'm not buying a Fitbit, and I'm not subscribing to Stadia because I want those things to last longer than I think Google will keep them around.

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>Thousands or millions of people used Hangouts, Google Reader, Google Code, or Picasa - they'd have been considered big YC successes.

Other than google reader I doubt any of these would have gotten traction at all without big g behind them.

They wouldn't have true but that isn't the point. The point here is that Google is willing to kill products that are successful by all other metrics and burn the users because it just isn't enough for them. They are acting like a startup but not putting in the dedication or caring enough about more modest gains that a start-up would do.

So if Google is going to launch something under the Google brand they either have to be happier with things that aren't making 10s of billions, or not make so many efforts and burning their users/customers/devs at every step. Why as someone downstream do I want to dedicate my time and money to their product when they've shown that unless it becomes a massive success it will be folded?

You don't.

Picasa was quite popular before Google bought them, as was Google voice (aka GrandCentral)

Picasa: Smug Mug/Flickr is rather highly valuated again today, now that they are free of the curse of Yahoo! Instagram and Snapchat are a part of this game now too.

Google Code: GitHub sold to Microsoft for a good chunk of change. GitLab, Bitbucket, Source Hut, all seem to be doing fine.

Hangouts: Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Portal, Matrix/Riot.im, iMessage, Skype is maybe back from the dead depending on who you ask (certainly not kids, though). It's almost easier to ask who isn't in the Messenger game right now. The fact that Google managed to fumble two huge market share leads between Google Talk and Hangouts is maybe only equaled by Microsoft's multiple, complicated fumbles of MSN Messenger and Skype.

Sad thing is how many of us still use Hangouts while we wait for its eventual death to push us to different platforms.

I'm not denying that the market exists. I'm denying that the product google launched in these cases was comparable to the competition. Google code, for instance, was SO inferior to github that comparing the two is actually kind of funny.

There were people that felt Google Code to be quite advanced for its time, with comparisons at the time more to SourceForge, Savannah, Trac, and some others that have past into the mists of time. It didn't keep up or maintain any of that "lead", but that just circles back around to the common aphorisms that Google loved big splashy launches and failed to incentivize steady maintenance or competition after a "product" launched.

I, for one, loved Google Wave. It was much better suited to write specs with my team, nested collapsing branches are way more comfortable to use than google docs comments.

But the team needs to be disciplined not to get wave overblown, that's true.

stop reminding me of the betrayal that was the death of google reader

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