I wonder, how many people consider Google products for something and go with another provider because you can't count on the product to exist long term?
I bought a nest secure system for my parents home since the system was more advanced then ADT and we already had the nest thermostat. I didn’t think Google would stop their support for the system since it was a hardware product and believed they were aiming for a HomeKit ecosystem.
Hindsight, I was very wrong and I am now extremely disappointed. There is an obvious amount of opportunity here but I guess with all the monopoly talk, this doesn’t fit their product value and growth strategy.
You can’t count on google for expensive consumer products that do not fit within their core search product or have some affiliation to keeping you retained to their core search product.
They already killed one home automation system, Revolv, which was bought by Nest and then shut down. Bummer for the suckers who bought a $300 lifetime subscription. But yeah, I would have figured something they created under their own Google branding would have lasted longer.
Google refunded the devices for 2 years after they shut it down.
Also Revolv was more of an acquihire, they shut it down almost immediately after they acquired it in 2016. You could say that Revolv failed. If google didn't purchase it they might have closed anyway with no refunds plus a bunch of people unemployed.
It sucks that it happened but I don't think your comment qualifies well what really transpired.
To clarify, the $300 wasn't a lifetime subscription fee, that was the whole price of the device which was sold with "lifetime subscription" as a major selling point compared to competitors with monthly fees.
Another similar story, Wink hubs were sold as not needing a subscription, and then added one later. Announced with 1 week warning, date was pushed back, but went into effect earlier this year. If you don't subscribe, it mostly stops working.
I can't imagine buying a non-subscription smarthome device unless they can be managed locally with Home Assistant or similar.
At least when you buy a device advertised with a subscription you know they have a business model. Except for certain companies where that business model is "We love to discontinue all of our projects."
I’ve had a Wink hub since the firmware was pre v1.0 (about 7 years) and not only is it still physically working, Wink has maintained support for it. I’ve got another, newer hub, and have dabbled with some of their other hardware over the years.
The subscription announcement did seem very rushed, and oddly toned- kind of felt like “this is our last option and we’re probably going under without it”.
Here’s the thing, I believe they should’ve been charging it all along. Backend infrastructure isn’t free and hardware doesn’t usually have amazing margins (though maybe consumer IoT is better than some areas).
There’s a difference between Google and Wink though, Wink actually offers product support AND they’ve continued to upgrade their offering through the years instead of killing it off every 9-18 months.
Maybe Wink has changed (it’s been a long time since I interacted with anyone) but there was a time early on where I was on the phone with product support (who arranged for and called ME vs a 1-800 hold) with a pot (as in cooking) over my Wink Hub in the front yard with an extension cord trying to complete a firmware upgrade that had a very particular bug.
Later on, I was given an API key to create my own integration, just by asking for one.
I had gone years with them and all the money they ever had gotten from me was the $49-$99 (can’t recall) for the first Hub I purchased and all they did was continue offering a reliable service quietly.
I don’t ever recall them touting “forever free”, but I’m sure they mentioned no subscription somewhere in their advertising over the years.
I wonder this as well but outside the HN community. I don’t think many folks I know still attribute Google with the flakiness that this community does.
Yeah, but it matters disproportionately to early adopters. If a brand becomes toxic with early adopters it never gets in front of anyone else. Except through acquisition, I suppose.
Cloud compute is an even starker example: Google lost the second-mover cloud space to Microsoft and they lost it because the relevant decision-makers knew Google's reputation.
Microsoft beat Google to second in cloud because it already had a strangle hold on a sizable portion of the enterprise computing market, not because executives at important companies (large enterprises) knew Google has a reputation for killing obscure consumer products. Microsoft already had relationships with many large and medium businesses/organizations, often spanning multiple decades, a business software ecosystem, and an army of salespeople, account managers, and support people, making the transition to cloud a natural next step.
Google, on the other hand, has had to build these relationships from scratch with it’s only advantage being advanced software and infrastructure which reduce costs.
AWS doesn't have cheap Windows licenses, MSSQL, Office, and Active Directory. They're still beating Azure. Because they were first, of course -- but the point is that true competition is all about playing to your advantages and mitigating your disadvantages. Google had enormous advantages and squandered them. Maybe Microsoft's advantages were genuinely stronger, but from where I'm standing it looks like Google didn't even try.
I've seen the AWS vs Azure vs GCP drama play out a few times, once on a team with significant Microsoft legacy and twice without. In my judgement, the MS legacy, even at its most potent, was a smaller consideration than Google's unmitigated weakness, every manager's worst nightmare: the concrete risk that Google would cancel something and the manager would get blamed for not seeing it coming. Maybe I've just been blessed to work at non-dysfunctional companies where non-technical management asks the opinion of technical management on technical matters, but technical management is highly cognizant of this risk and has been for a decade.
My recommendation would have been to go on offense. Make AWS's constant over-promising and under-delivering a meme. Make Microsoft's we-have-altered-the-deal-pray-we-dont-alter-it-further enterprise pricing a meme (compare to: google and gmail are still free). Build counterveiling fears in that technical manager's mind, no lying required, because Amazon and MS earned those criticisms and they earned them hard.
>Google has a reputation for killing obscure consumer products
It has a reputation for killing cloud products like classic VPNs in GCP too, a significant part of our cloud infrastructure. Distrust is earned in this case.
I’d be interested in hearing your argument for that being the reason why Azure is beating GCP in marketshare. The conventional wisdom that Azure can do Windows for cheaper than everybody else and has an easier time getting enterprise customers they already have a relationship with onboard always made sense to me.
I just don't see the value in Stadia over buying a console. The only use case seems to be for someone too poor to afford a console, but that someone has enough money to buy a full price video game on Stadia.
Wow, I didn't realize that Stadia games are running on Debian and Vulcan. https://stadia.dev/about/ That is a hard sell that you have to (likely) port your game to a completely different OS and graphics API for a presumably small customer base.
There's a large number of games that use premade engines (eg. Unity, Unreal). As long as the engine supports Linux and Vulkan (I believe both Unity and Unreal do), there's no real issue in supporting that platform.
For the day to day user products I can see that not impacting sales much. But is their unwillingness to commit hurting GCP adoption? The people who would participate in adopting GCP (except in corporate environments) are people who might also frequent here.
Steve Yegge, a former Googler & GCP Customer begs to differ. From my experience GCP does deprecate a lot of libraries, SDKs, and APIs. None of which are covered in the SLA policy.
You might want to work somewhere else so you hear some differing opinions, pretty much nobody I know wants to implement on top of google products including GCP because of the perceived churn.
What were you using it for? I'll be upfront in saying that my experience with GCP was awful, but I can appreciate that others found it useful and would be curious to learn more.
That's because they haven't quite done this to any of their big consumer products or their core features.
Anecdotally I know some people who express irritation at the rotating plethora of messaging apps. I also know some mildly inconvenienced by the whole Google Play Music/Youtube Music nonsense, although I never got the impression that GPM was a market leader in the streaming space.
I was tempted to buy a Chromecast Ultra because my Roku does not support Peacock app.
BUT I stopped short of buying it because I have Google home mini which never seems to be able to register my preferred temperature unit (Celcius) regardless of how many times I have tried on its not-so-intuitive home app (plus can no longer connect to its Bluetooth for playing YouTube videos for example). That and reading a bunch of news/comments like this thread helps me make a fairly quick decision to not purchase Chromecast.
I sincerely hope Google CEO or someone who really cares about their org's reputation see people complaining about their product strategy. They should learn how to keep what's working and most importantly, to not venture into anything unless they can commit to it for at least 10 years. Of course, they have their cash cow, which is the advertising/search unit, so maybe they'll never care.
Not only that, Google has a reputation on spying on users. Why would you want any more Google devices in your home that are always on and always reporting to the mother-ship? Especially ones with cameras, microphones etc.
Well, I do, and I just advice the same to everyone that asks. I'm not very influential because I'm not a dev, but I do have business clients and I get asked sometimes.
I’ve heard it come up in an enterprise context, when there was a question about using a Google product - “they have a history of killing products, so let’s pick an alternate if possible”. This was a couple of years back, don’t remember what (could have been Google Glass).
I pre-ordered the new (lower end) Nest thermostat and will likely also get the Pixel 4a 5G. I am a bit worried about them getting Cancellanched but oh well, life is full of adventures.
