Google Pay replaced Google Wallet – now it's going away to make room for Wallet | Hacker News Reader

Google Pay replaced Google Wallet – now it's going away to make room for Wallet

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25 pointsTomte8 comments

Having worked at Google every single article about them confirms my experience with project management there. By the end of my time there whenever starting a new project my first question is "why did the previous attempt fail" because there always was a previous (and generally unmaintained) service that did pretty much the same thing. About half the time the new project would be "deprioritized" for the same reason as the previous one and half the time it would be a different reason.

Has this aggressive churning ever actually produced a successful product at google? From the outside it’s hard to see how incentivising it is of any benefit to the company?

I guess if you're someone always eager to try something new and quickly get bored when asked to finish whatever project you currently work on, Google is the place to be. A dream come true.

The thing is that Google is always making half-assed decisions to quickly roll out new products. That result in them failing and then couple years later being retired. If they had designed them better, they would be more likely to succeed. They also don't spend the effort to fix the problems.

For Google Pay, adding transfers made some sense. But they should have added it to existing Google Pay app instead of making new Google Pay, and renaming the old one Google Wallet.

Google needs much stronger SVP-level product leadership. Directors and VPs should not be fighting for product turf, and major user-facing products, such as an entire default Android app in this case, need to outlast the tenure of any individual VP-level patron.

I get that the upper management is playboy billionaires at this point and have checked out, but at this point it would be B_A_S_I_C management to look at this churn and not thing "why aren't we conserving the codebases" because really this is just branding and reskinning fundamentally.

From the outside google looks so chaotic in the last few years it's insane.

[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39473592

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