Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN.
It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes.
> Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN.
Yes, but we're not the people making the product decisions.
Stadia's shutdown was inevitable in part because we had already established this distrust, and also because leadership handled every aspect of it incredibly poorly. It was technically impressive, but the economics relied on the addressable market actually being willing to go all-in on the service.
Sure, you can blame part of it on the promo culture encouraging people to move to new and shiny projects, and part of it on the fact that we release a lot more experimental stuff than you see at more established companies, but there's also plenty of cases where there was exactly one person who understood the codebase and was keeping the product running, and said person is no longer at the company for one reason or another.
In my opinion, Bard should never have been released in its current state, but, that's leadership for you.
>Stadia's shutdown was inevitable in part because we had already established this distrust, and also because leadership handled every aspect of it incredibly poorly. It was technically impressive, but the economics relied on the addressable market actually being willing to go all-in on the service.
This is what I don’t understand. Is leadership really this dumb or are we missing large pieces of context?
The prevailing sentiment is google is flakey. Don’t rely on their stuff.
Now removing redundant services is one thing. But from the outside it looks like they don’t care about regaining confidence. And they don’t care about creating new stable products that I want.
Did they really think Stadia would be an instant success with their shit reputation in a market that has been already carved up by the incumbents? A naïve observer would say it would take years and a ton of money.
Why would management care? Ads, the entire point of google as a business, will continue making gobs of money no matter what. The point of these toy side projects is to entertain developers in between "track users more" and "Show users more ads" tickets.
Remember how Microsoft was flailing for what seemed like forever under Ballmer, and now in what still feels to me like a relatively short period of time under Nadella, they seem to be thriving again? Yeah... leadership actually matters a lot...
Bard should have been released as an upgrade to Google Assistant imo. Imagine how much better a voice assistant would be if you could actually hold a decent back and forth conversation with it without having to know the exact phrasing needed to accomplish something.
Google Assistant still feels so stunted and lifeless when I know Google can produce more realistic generated speech audio, interpret requests in plain English and respond in a helpful manner.
IIRC google has purposely kept assistant stunted and lifeless. Remember how originally it was the inhuman "Okay Google" key phrase? They did explicitly to keep people from humanizing it. Also its the only assistant with no name, its just called "assistant"
It wasn't until Alexa and Siri gained traction that they let "Hey google" slip in.
I don't think it would be an upgrade at this point yet. Bard / LLM lacks precision in ways that are pretty important when carrying out the user's wishes.
The hardware is a big up-front cost. If you want a gaming PC, that can potentially set you back $1000 or more, and there's ongoing maintenance cost as you have to keep upgrading your graphics card if you want to keep playing the latest titles. Stadia Pro at $10/month was the equivalent of building a $600 PC every 5 years, plus with a bunch of free games thrown in over that time. Buying the latest console can set you back hundreds of dollars in one go, and now you also have vendor lock-in (which means you have to commit to one platform, or buy multiple consoles each generation).
The marketing was... not executed well. Most people didn't realize that you could actually just buy games on the platform and play them without paying the monthly subscription for Pro. The backbone of the business model was supposed to be driven by that 30% cut of game sales revenue that most gaming platforms / stores take.
The infrastructure was supposed to be further subsidized by selling off-peak compute as a cloud service. That never materialized.
The exclusives were lackluster compared to other platforms (Breath of the Wild? Halo Infinite? God of War Ragnarok?), and leadership shuttered the in-house game studios before they were able to release much of anything.
Beyond all that -- there were plenty of features that owning your own hardware simply could not compete with. Just to list a few:
- Not having to wait for video game downloads was an incredibly underrated feature -- being able to start playing a game within seconds meant you could play a game immediately after an impulse purchase, rather than having to wait half an hour (100GB download at 500Mbps) first.
- Family sharing meant that you could play Cyberpunk 2077 (which, by the way, launched with serious performance issues across most platforms... but played smoothly on Stadia), while the kids next to you on the couch played, I dunno, Paw Patrol, all on hardware you already owned, e.g. your laptop, or phone, or the Chromecast that came with the founder's edition (also 100% optional).
- You could seamlessly continue a game across multiple devices -- play a game at home on your TV, then continue at a friend's house on your phone.
I don't really care if Google is unable, unwilling, or uninterested in supporting anything that isn't G-Suite, search, or ads. Their track record is more than enough for me to dismiss using Google Cloud Platform, or even saving anything of any importance to Google Drive. I'm occasionally involved some of those types of vendor decisions, and I imagine others in similar positions feel the same way, so I can't imagine this is all theoretical fake losses they've suffered from this MO. I don't know how you'd even begin to measure the amount of revenue opportunities lost in this way, but I will say this: I'm really glad I'm not a part of Google's marketing department.
Even G-Suite isn't really getting that much support, it's on life support at best. There's so many missing features and bugs and just painfully unergonomic workflows that have been ignored for 10+ years at this point; the long overdue and minimal UI facelift recently didn't really solve any pain points.
As far as I can tell, Google, culturally, just hates maintenance. Or practically anything that's not a product launch. Ask anyone who's done much development on Android—eternal bugs (I've seen people provide patches and beg to get them applied on bugs years and years old, and be ignored), half-assed implementations of all kinds of things, poor docs often with outdated info, mediocre architectural direction—and that's on a major product!
I think it's some combo of an organizational/internal-incentives failure, and a cultural thing where all these "geniuses" they hire can't be bothered to do any boring shit, to include, sometimes, properly finishing features they start developing.
It is not compatible with a lot of stuff. Can't subscribe to youtube premium family. Can't use android automotive. Can't use this that etc. I switched to my old basic google account for google services and probably move my domains away from gsuite at this point.
I still have the weird issue where I have a google domain with email and stuff, and the same email address is somehow also a separate google account of the personal variety.
No idea how it somehow kinda works and when it’ll finally explode in my face.
Get your domain hosted by another service, pronto. You're risking losing everything if Google decides to brick your account(s) by decision or accident.
I have a backup of my email, and my domain DNS/registrar is not Google, so the real worst I'll be hit with is a loss of email for a bit as the DNS updates.
oh no, I hate crossing registrar and other providers, even using (say) godaddy for DNS and registrar weirds me out; too many chances something goes horribly wrong (and then you can't transfer the domain).
You would think this, but one wrong move and its all gone. In the process of migrating away from GSuite for my personal domain/email hosting, my had-already-existed-prior-to-GSuite google account was closed., unrecoverably as far as I can tell. I lost a literal lifetimes worth of school and personal work that I had naively assumed was safe, and of course there is no actual support available to a one man closed GSuite account.
Just got a new car with Android Automotive and this is incredibly aggravating. Maybe it's for the best that I use a dummy gmail account with the service but it just shows I'm paying Google to be a lesser class citizen and maybe it's time to migrate the whole thing.
Nothing you've said here has prevented the last 4 companies I've worked for from using it, though. One of those companies is a very large, public company. It seems like people are still buying it.
It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes.
I think the 'problem' is that reputation damage doesn't really impact Google's revenue. They get the overwhelming majority of their money from publishing adverts, with a significant amount on their own properties (search and YouTube). It really doesn't matter if a bunch of gamers decide Stadia screwed them over, or if some devs decide to avoid GCP because they killed Reader. Google still makes a staggering amount of money no matter what.
The only way Google killing products will ever impact the company is either if people have an alternative to Google Search (very unlikely) or if people stop wanting to work for Google because they see it as a dead end working on things that only last a few years (also unlikely because $$$ talks).
Google will continue to launch, run, and then kill products forever. I suspect that if you're at Google and you're not working on ads or something that displays ads then you're being paid to build something frivolous that won't go anywhere mainly so you don't go and work at a different company that could impact one of Google's cash cows. I'm a bit envious if I'm honest. That sounds fun.
> if people have an alternative to Google Search (very unlikely)
I started using Bing ~2 years ago. At the start, I used Google to get alternate results for about 1/4 of searches. Today? I drop to Google a couple of times a month, at most, usually when searching for something very ambiguous. I don't even live in the US.
It definitely does have an important impact. They need to find their next big revenue stream, and reputational damage makes that harder. But so does maintaining unprofitable products! This is just a super difficult position for them. They need to try new things, but anything they try needs to work well at scale out of the gate and also be maintained indefinitely in order to avoid any reputational damage.
But it's not a unique problem. I think their peers in the giant mature technology company business tend to take fewer shots and put more investment in the ones they do take.
But they also still kill products eventually. I can't load music on the iPod shuffle I still have in a drawer. My windows 95 disks aren't very useful. The Amazon store I did Christmas shopping at a couple years ago is some kind of boutique clothing store now.
But I do think Google's decisions always seem to feel more sudden, that once they give up on a product, they pull the band-aid off way more quickly. And I do think they seem to take more shots that don't work out.
I'm just trying to emphasize that most people only care about results. I think it minimizes Google's problems to think it is some technical stack problem. The problem is that Google has a disconnect with some quanity of users on what good search results look like. If Google and the users can't agree on the correct search results... Who is wrong the person doing the searching or google?
I can't even figure out what I'm looking at when searching google. I get completely overwhelmed. I remember when I use to be able to craft google searches and get one result.
I keep seeing this – it's a meme at this point – and I don't get it. Answering questions truthfully from a broad set of data while citing sources seems to be ChatGPT's major weakness. It routinely "hallucinates," even with better prompting. It's much better at helping generate prose based on the prompt.
I don't even buy the idea that "exponential growth" will improve things. One of the few things OpenAI is still open about is that they will keep adding more parameters at any cost. Techniques to reinforce truthful responses or even provide confidence based on whether the response involves out-of-sample & out-of-prompt guessing (i.e. BSing) seem not to be a priority.
GPT4 is also much more expensive to use, even at the probably-running-at-a-loss pricing. Accuracy per dollar and/or joule doesn't seem to be increasing too much.
Sure, if we’re changing the complaint from “accuracy won’t get better” to “efficiency won’t get better.”
But I don’t believe that either. Hardware design and manufacturing cycles are long and we’re just now starting to see transformer-optimized HW. Accuracy per dollar and per joule will improve by at least an order of magnitude, maybe two.
But then we can move on to percent of human tasks LLMs are suitable replacements for, or the ethics of increasing automation.
I was critiquing accuracy of ChatGPT, which has a certain cost. "Just use GPT4, 5, ..." was the solution proposed in response, but that ain't free. In fact, it's one to two orders of magnitude more expensive.[0] I'm also pessimistic on custom hardware being that much of a help. I read about Cerberus's giant wafer chip in 2019[1] and even saw it at a conference in early 2020 pre-pandemic, and I have yet to see that make orders of magnitude worth of improvement. The attention mechanism simply requires huge amounts of multiply-adds, especially at GPT-scale. That costs energy and cash no matter how much custom hardware you throw at it.
I bet OpenAI is losing money on every prompt interaction you do. Estimates of the computational power required and the number of users, are that if was not for Microsoft cash injection it would be bankrupt by now.
Sure, but it puts Google in a lose-lose situation. If people come to expect the features of ChatGPT, Google will have to add them in and greatly decrease the profitability of search. On top of that, it will cost them 10 times more since they have 10 times the market. They could also ignore ChatGPT, but a portion of their users will migrate to other search engines also costing them money. For Microsoft, search is one of a dozen business lines they are in, what do they care about destroying the profitability of search if it hurts their competitors more?
There are already lightweight models that are in the ballpark of GPT3.5 that run on (admittedly high end) consumer level hardware. This is with only a few months of development too.
It could be. I don't think Google are likely to just roll over and let OpenAI/MSFT take that market though. Obviously Google will try to compete. Maybe they'll fail, maybe they won't. If nothing else, as a user of these tools, it's going to be exciting to see some innovation in search UIs for the first time in decades.
They were saying on the all-in podcast that Google is under lots of political pressure from all sides and that makes it difficult for them to launch controversial tech like LLMs. Bard feels very hobbled and, for example, refuses to answer any medical questions.
I've never worked at Google so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Everything I've heard (mostly on HN) about working there is that there are simply too many perverse incentives to abandon products. People get promoted for creating exciting new products and then leave those products behind at their new position.
Up-and-comers are also incentivized to do the same thing. There seems to be no appetite whatsoever for hiring "steady hand on the tiller" type people. The whole company DNA is built around hiring elite graduates fresh out of school.
It's the classic "too many chefs in the kitchen" problem.
This comes up literally every google thread. At this point it feels like a meme which originated on HN at some point. People keep repeating because it sounds plausible.
The promo system has changed in the last year. So to some extent this info is outdated.
And while obviously culture and incentives play a role I think the statement that this is the major reason for Google killing products is largely false.
New grads aren't making any big decisions about products.
And Google has many steady seniors because of the high tenure rate. In fact the one of the major complaints is that it is too steady , too bureaucratic and too slow.
The OP we're all discussing is about six products Google cancelled in 2023! If Google has decided to change course on this issue then their efforts have yet to bear fruit. The ball is completely in their court. We're all sitting here waiting to see when Google will decide to place some emphasis on trust and long-term stewardship.
Of course, you can't build a reputation for those things overnight, so it will take a while. But there is no sign whatsoever that they have actually changed course.
My point is that the promo process being the root cause of this comes up often but doesn't really have any evidence to back it up except a long chain of repetitions.
Put in concrete terms, do you want to be one of the two engineers exiled to maintaining Reader because you pissed someone off to keep the geeks off Google’s back?
From what I've heard even their performance reviews heavily focus on bringing new products to market or working on exciting projects, so even if Google needs it there's a chance you're at the top of the list for layoffs anyway.
They need to create a subsidiary of Alphabet called Google Maintenance or something and explicitly it only does boring maintenance and promotes on a mechanized schedule.
Not everyone wants to chase the new shiny. There are many folks out there who enjoy the challenge of working in a legacy database. Blue sky folks see a rats nest of wires, maintenance engineers see cable porn in potentia.
Those projects have real difficulties to retain enough developers even to keep lights on. And even higher-ups want, they can’t force allocate developers (in Google’s current power structure) other than providing some incentives including promotion.
The end result is a doom loop that if the team can’t retain enough staffing, developers will be overwhelmed by the boring maintenance work, which leads to more team transfers. They do use contractors to mitigate the issue but IMO it doesn’t work in every case.
For the kind of money that's on offer? I would imagine it would suit a lot of people. Fix a few bugs, add some diagnostics, see what the customers think should be changed? Why wouldn't you, it seems like the sort of thing you could get someone to do.
Because at most companies it’s probably a recipe to not get bonuses, RSUs, promotions, good reviews, and other teams may not want to touch you—out of sight out of mind.
And guess who is high on the list if cuts are to be made?
Plenty of people would take a steady non-exciting maintenance job, especially if it paid remotely close to what Google pays. Many would even prefer it to a more exciting job.
There are thousands of companies that manage to maintain much more boring apps with salaries much lower than Google's.
>Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN.
Surely the people on Hackrnews understand that no one outside of tech enthusiasts even knows about this, right? I have to imagine so... they're smart people and surely sometimes interact with regular people in real life?!
But on a more serious note: none of these projects have ever had any traction. That's why they're killed!
Try asking anyone who's not in tech but does play videogames what Stadia is. You'll soon find out why it's axed.
GOOG went wrong when they stopped using XMPP, CALDAV and forked Webkit. Those actions broke cross platform development and re-ignited the browser wars. I see those moves as totally motivated by privacy invasion of the users.
Never trust a free product with advertising.
Do you think anyone beside who are vocal (HN/tech crowd esp) care about this 'killed by google' and refrain from using their main source of revenue such as Search, Gmail, Android, Youtube, Map, Photos? Zilch.
GCP/Gsuite's money pouring clients are enterprise customers (not HN crowd), who for the large majority won't bother much about that either. So they clearly know their act doesn't actually make a dent in their revenue stream, but in fact that spring cleaning is a win for them.
It happens one "maybe we should use [alternative] until Google gets its act together" at a meeting at a time. Microsoft was still a behemoth when no one still took it seriously outside people who were on a first name basis with a licensing auditor, and it's struggling to gain trust and respect back. Same with IBM, though they seem unconcerned with image. Collapses are never quick or complete at this scale.
It starts with a loss of cultural cachet among the people who influence spending. It looks like hip startups with rows of desks with Apple machines where Windows was the default for a decade or two before.
of course people do. anytime you have to buy into a google product that could be killed off anytime. It was the primary reason stadia never took off - you had to buy stadia only game licenses that no one was confident would still exist later.
Google has already lost the GPT race, so I assume Bard won’t make it past three years from now. Of course, I’d like to eat my words on this in 2026. But much more innovation in GPTs and LLMs is coming from GitHub randoms than Google.
I don’t think Google can innovate anymore. They did a lot of great work as a startup and when they were much smaller (<10k headcount). Now most of what they do fails.
Something I never understood is why not create new products under a different brand name (something not Google associated), try the idea out, and they end up working move them under the Google brand. I feel that would allow the company to continue to experiment with product ideas without damaging their main brand image. Or is that just a naïve take from somewhere who knows nothing about branding and marketing?
Why would Bard get axed? Or do you mean Bard in its current form? Last I heard they mentioned about rolling out higher-scale models, since apparently current models were 'efficient' ones, to see if the demand can be met, according to them.
>It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes.
I guess this means a "reputation" doesn't influence their profits. Some companies aren't in impression-making business, or even pretending-to-be-trying-to-make-their-customers-happy business.
Reputation may not affect Google's ad based revenue, but it absolutely affects their ability to profit in lines of business outside of ads.
Google might have made more inroads with enterprises with G suite and GCP if they didn't have that reputation. The gaming industry is a 200 billion/year market that Google could've captured a decent size of if potential customers trusted that they wouldn't quickly give up. All of that represents billions of dollars in lost opportunities.
It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes.
Anyone wanna bet on if/when Bard gets axed?