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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

"ditches" definitely not the word that should describe this (this is towards the article and not the HN submitter since it's the article's title); it could lead those who don't click to think it's another project Google has shut down.

> “We are transferring our Station operations in South Africa to Think WiFi who will now carry out the project independently,” a spokesperson told Business Insider SA.

> “We'll work with Think Wifi on a plan to transition the service to them, and continue to support them until the end of 2020. We remain committed to looking for ways to make the internet more accessible to users around the world.”

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In all likelihood the “transfer” is just a way for Google to save face and avoid yet another “Google kills project” news cycle. Good on the editors for not falling for it.

Another possibility is that the legal landscape was more hostile than Google anticipated and they essentially got squeezed out.

Isn't "this didn't go the way we thought it would and we're not willing to fight for it" the reason why all their products die?

No, it seems their products die because there's more prestige in launching a product than maintaining one.

"This went poorly because we care far more about launch than execution" is really the same spirit as the gp's paraphrase.

Many products from Google die because is a bottom up company: many ideas that make it into products come from Engineering directly, (guys who wants o solve challenging problems), to later find out that the business analysis was poor...and an internal performance system that advocates for launches

So, extremely poor governance?

Definitely, specially in Cloud where Enterprise don't like cool projects or experiments, they need solid roadmap and commitment from product companies

silicon valley: “fail fast”

also silicon valley: “google shuts down too many things”

public: not interested in adopting a product that likely will disappear when I start to depend on it

same public: not paying for wifi in some area for a year, on somebody else's dime, but still getting upset at whoever provided it when the glory days are over.

Even if you pay for it, it’s highly likely to disappear when it comes to Google.

public: This would have been such a lovely product, now it will never happen :(

If I hand my child over to someone else to raise forever, I'm ditching them. :p

A 3 month old at that

wtf?

But if you sell a car to a new owner, you aren't ditching it in the woods.

If you owned it for 3 months, I'd think you were nuts.

Notice that you had to add "in the woods" to make it clear that ditching is negative here.

bad analogy. There's no parent/child relationship between this service and google. As long as the service is continued, there's no issue as to who is owning and operating it.

Using children makes it seem like google is providing essential operational expertise to keep the child alive, and the child would die if stopped.

Nah, my analogy between a kid or a car is that if you get thing that is meant to be decently long term, car at least a year or a kid at least 18 years, you wouldn't give up in 3 months. There's not many things a person would own or have that giving up in 3 months wouldn't see like ditching it. Even giving up a cell phone in 3 months is pretty daft

> Using children makes it seem like google is providing essential operational expertise to keep the child alive, and the child would die if stopped.

In the same way that when a child is adopted, it instantly dies?

When you are Google, you have millions in funding, almost unlimited engineering ressources, political connections and many good reasons why a project would be successful (journalists, audience, users, accounts, etc)

Once you transfer the responsibilities; all of the support that kept the project stay afloat disappears. It's not sustainable anymore, there is much limited growth, all the business model for exploiting data for advertising cannot exist anymore, etc.

Well, it's dead you know.

Products often die when transferred to another organisation. They never say that they will die in the announcement.

See https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

It's entirely reasonable for people to assume this is basically Google shutting down the free WiFi service but with extra steps.

Depends if the project continues to use google branding or has a “built by google” tagged on to it in order to mislead customers that it is still somehow maintained by them.

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