To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted?
The criteria for promotion at Google, especially at the higher levels like SWE III -> Senior and especially at Senior -> Staff and above, explicitly talk about impact on the organization and the business. This has consequences for the kind of teams people try to join and kind of work they choose to do. Maintenance engineering is so not-rewarded that it's become an inside joke. Any team that isn't launching products starts bleeding staff, any project that isn't going to make a big splash is going to be neglected, and any design that doesn't "demonstrate technical complexity" will be either rejected or trumped up.
This is as important in the product management, people management, and general leadership roles as in engineering. The incentive throughout is to create a product, launch it, apply for promotion, and move on to bigger and better things as soon as possible. In my time at Google I saw organization after organization pay lip service to rewarding maintenance and "preferring landings over launches" and “improving product excellence” but (at least in my experience) nothing stuck.
Usually an organization starts with a top-down direction and the rest of the company is compensated for executing it. Not at Google. The "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach that developed from the early days of twenty percent time and total engineering independence has created a disorganized mess of a company. Multiply the individual incentives fifty thousand times and you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately.
Edit/Addendum:
This is also why GMail, YouTube, Search, GCP, Android, and others aren’t going anywhere. They’re making money, they’re core to the business, and there’s plenty of opportunity to work on them and get promoted. They all also share one thing in common: deep down they’re frontends for search or advertising (GCP and Apps are an exception because they make money on their own). Measuring and proving impact on search numbers is a well-known promo narrative at Google, so those products are a safe bet for employees and users. Streaming game services, not so much.
I totally understand this - but it doesn't mean I like it.
I could get through having two podcast apps on my Android (Google Podcasts, Google Play Music) that give me notifications for my podcasts, with no plans on phasing out one or the other.
I could get over having two different music apps - Google Play Music and YouTube Music - because it seemed like there might actually be a plan here - albeit we haven't heard anything in ages.
I could get over having two email apps - Inbox and Gmail - because I knew Inbox was just an experiment that was going to be a tease of cool features that may / may not be ported over...therefore I tried not to take the bait.
I could get over having a bunch of different messaging apps - I didn't like it, but 95% of my messages are SMS texts anyway, so it didn't impact me.
The FINAL straw was falling in love with a PixelBook that I bought during the Black Friday sales, as I moved into a role in an org that was 1) deeply invested in G Suite and 2) allowed me to do all my work from the browser - making the Chrome OS concept finally fit for me. THEN Google closes that part of their hardware division.
Now I just have angst over _any_ Google product / service that isn't the core that I use and "know" knock on wood won't go away (Search / Gmail / Chrome). Android wear? Google Home? Hell, I was seriously finally moving to a Pixel 3, as the tight integration with some Chrome OS features on my PixelBook would've been ideal - but I can't even trust that the Pixel phone line will last that much longer.
> you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately.
I would love if they followed this strategy. Instead, you have products like reader and inbox with many passionate users, which demonstrate some wall stickiness, and they're killed rather than monetized.
Monetize me. I recognize that the things I like cost money. Figure out how to make money off me! I would have accepted ads in reader or inbox. Hell, I would have paid dollars to make those ads go away even.
Yes. The game industry is very reluctant to use Improbable's Spatial OS, because, through a deal with Google, they force you to host your game, expensively, on Google's servers.[1] Nobody wants to spend $100 million developing an AAA title using that system, and then suddenly get an email that Google is discontinuing the product.
(Spatial OS is technically interesting, and, hopefully, someone else will do something like it, with reasonable licensing terms.)
It may be that GCP isn't going anywhere, but when our organization was choosing a cloud service, we chose Amazon over Google specifically because of Google's flakiness. Google could drop cloud services tomorrow, and it would not be out of character.
It is general true for any big organization. In my own firm, I could see the rush into machine learning direction as a door way to a promotion. Any engineer or PM who works on a ML related project and is able to ship it would have a higher chance of getting promoted. I could also say the same for the usage of AWS products. In the end, I often see projects resembling the messy mashup of AWS products to form a unnecessary complex ML solution to a mosquito problem. It’s a waste yes, but sure will make it looks challenging and boost people to promotions.
>This is also why GMail, YouTube, Search, GCP, Android, and others aren’t going anywhere. They’re making money, they’re core to the business, and there’s plenty of opportunity to work on them and get promoted. They all also share one thing in common: deep down they’re frontends for search or advertising (GCP and Apps are an exception because they make money on their own). Measuring and proving impact on search numbers is a well-known promo narrative at Google, so those products are a safe bet for employees and users. Streaming game services, not so much.
This, right here is the key, and what I think most people miss, including the original article. Hell, I missed it myself for a long time: Google is not a platform company as the original article asserts. They are an advertising company. That is Google's bread and butter, and has been since day one. The products and platforms that stick around do so because they are or become successful funnels or front ends for advertising.
As much as the tech culture of the Internet loves to bitch about advertising (myself included), unto itself, it is not a solely an evil thing. Oh, it absolutely can be turned to evil ends; see any of a myriad complaints about Facebook. However, I think the pairing of ads with search has been damn useful in a way that balances with the potential for evil. As an example, when I'm searching for specific lubricating grease for my bicycle's bearings, I very much appreciate seeing an ad for a vendor who's willing to sell me a single tube thereof, instead of having only the web search listings of vendors who require a minimum order size of 1 shipping pallet. Google did right paring advertising with search. To use a 'corporate bullshit' word, Search and ads synergize well.
The froth of Google's other products and platforms makes more sense when looked at in that light. A company that sits still will eventually get passed by someone else who correctly sensed changes in the market and business environment, and thus eventually die. So of course Google is going to be trying to come up with all manner of things that leverage the Internet and their massive infrastructure; one of those may well be the next big thing that funnels more money in to advertising. No small part of this is that Google employs a great many nerds like you and I, people who have no trouble inventing cool new things you can do on the Internet. But sadly, a great many of those cool things don't fit well with Google's advertising-based business model, as evidenced by the constant product froth.
Is this basically why things like Inbox, and the endless attempts at messaging, all come out as seperate products rather than enhancements to existing products, because that way you get to say you launched something new?
This went into my decision not to accept a Google offer. AMP is a product that should not exist in the first place. Everything AMP does could be done in other ways—having Google Search measure load time, improving load times, working on webpackages as step 1 instead of an afterthought, etc. But because AMP is a coherent, well-defined product, and Google rewards launching it over accomplishing the same goals in less-obvious ways, the person behind AMP was incentivized to go that route for the sake of his own career at Google, and ruined the internet for the rest of us.
I didn't want to be subject to those engineering standards.
I think Google doesn't care for most services as they do not depend on any of those. Sure Android, GMail, and YouTube will stay, because they serve their core business: ads. Everything else could be over at any time.
This is supported by their recent push for China. Suddenly employee voices aren't worth anything anymore (remember the drone story, that was over after employees pushed back).
Maybe they have realised by now that diversification isn't that bad after all and will continue to push GCP but I wouldn't want to bet on GCP's life-span.
> Usually an organization starts with a top-down direction and the rest of the company is compensated for executing it. Not at Google. The "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach that developed from the early days of twenty percent time and total engineering independence has created a disorganized mess of a company. Multiply the individual incentives fifty thousand times and you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately.
This is also why we had a botched rollout of Material Design across Google's apps following the release of Lollipop.
Apps rolled out Material redesigns whenever, often months and sometimes even years after Lollipop's launch. Apps used various different versions of the Material support library: the Drive Apps in particular had text and widget alignment issues that made them look very unlike the other Material apps. And for a while, I was tracking which apps exhibited correct behavior of the status bar and the hamburger menu, because there were multiple ways apps could implement each one, but only one correct way (ironically enough, I was doing so in a Google Doc) [0].
To me, this is an awful way to roll out your new company-wide branding initiative. You want a new brand to be consistent across all your products and rolled out simultaneously. In retrospect, it was the moment when I began to lose faith in Google as a company.
Some time after that, somebody explained to me why, and it was exactly as you said: engineering groups operate independently of each other with no top-down chain of command. There's nobody telling them "you have to roll out the new branding by this date", "you have to make sure you're following these company-wide standards", etc. Basically, I was told that at Google, "company-wide" isn't a thing that exists. And that's awful. And honestly, it makes me never want to work for Google. That kind of chaos is exactly the opposite of the kind of working environment I could thrive in.
[0] Correct behavior: status bar is a darker shade of the toolbar's color, the hamburger menu covers the screen from top to bottom with the status bar as a translucent overlay on top of the menu bar, and the hamburger icon doesn't animate at all while you drag the menu out. Following Lollipop, there were Material apps that broke every one of those rules, but in completely different combinations from app to app.
How common are career ambition incentives like this, among engineers (not middle management) right now? It sounds like, in Google's case, it's very intentional.
Other than the job-hopping that I started hearing about when dotcom IPOs started, engineers, from what I (perhaps naively) understood of my anecdotal experience, seemed to mostly just like to do engineering, and/or also had a sense of obligation to their project/team/duty.
About the worst I recall hearing about would be an engineer picking a language/tool because they wanted to learn it or add it to their resume, rather than because it made the most sense for corporate goals for the project.
Facebook operates similarly. They created a culture of working on things that interest you as long as it can show meaningful impact. If you can show maintenance of something impactful, then you can work on it.
It's really no different in the startup world. If your startup can't show growth in users or profits, then you shutdown.
Probably also explains why their messaging strategy is completely incomprehensible too. I still have no idea what apps do what, which ones provide video or audio or text or both.
I have a hangouts and voice app on my phone and they appear to have duplicate functionality. I’m not joking — I receive the same notifications on both.
Corporate political economy (ecology? anthropology?) is always pathological like this, one way or another. Seems inevitable, like factionalism and partisanship taking over parliamentary politics in every example we have.
That aside, it kind of makes sense that Google places this much emphasis on the revenue producing parts of the business.
On "what about new products and innovation" see the first point. While every corporate pathology is different (Google's flavour seems unique) a near-constant is doublespeak. There might be (or might have been) a logic behind it, it just gets communicated in corporate-speak because plain language is too harsh.
Ultimately, at Google's scale (like a VC) a meaningful innovation is >$1bn annual revenue or the equivalent of that. Not many projects have that kind of potential. Letting a thousand flowers bloom means letting 998.3 flowers die.
This mindset is commonplace in most of the jobs I've held in the last 10 years. Personal gain trumps morals, company values, and even company performance. It's what happens when you put a bunch of high-performers in a box and let them play the corporate ladder game.
GMail, YouTube, Search, GCP, Android, and others...deep down they’re frontends for search or advertising... Streaming game services, not so much.
Streaming games has tremendous potential synergy with advertising. Games are yet another form of media, after all. There is obvious tremendous potential synergy with YouTube. Also, if one can stream games, then why not stream other kinds of applications? There's tremendous opportunities for synergies there as well.
Any thoughts on whether Google Photos will stick around? I find it's far better than any alternatives I've come across, and the recent Inbox shutdown made me realize how "dependent" I am on it.
Stupid question: why are Google engineers so obsessed with promotion? I'm sure any entry-level engineer there makes more than I ever have in my life, and anyone who hasn't cashed in their billion-dollar startup lottery ticket by now is far too late to the party to ever do so.
What exactly is the benefit of promotion? Is a 6-figure salary and all the perqs in the world not enough? At all the places I've worked, from tiny startups to big stable companies, I haven't seen this phenomenon. Does Google's rapid rise simply attract the sorts of people who feel they deserve it?
I agree with most of what you’ve said, but I’m curious about whether or not YouTube actually makes money. I was under the impression that on a good day it just about breaks even, but has that changed?
> Multiply the individual incentives fifty thousand times and you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately.
It sucks for some users but isn't it good for Google as a business? The way you describe it, it sounds like Google is internally approximating a free market to allocate resources. I understand the risk of damaging the brand but for a lot of new Google products, the only competition comes from startups which equally are a risky bet.
> As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted?
> The criteria for promotion at Google, especially at the higher levels like SWE III -> Senior and especially at Senior -> Staff and above, explicitly talk about impact on the organization and the business.
Wow! Its exactly like my job at a my IT off-sourcing job. I am very surprised.
I totally agree that this is frustrating for erudite tech users, but I'd say calling Google a "disorganized mess of a company" is kinda stretching things. The last quarterly earnings for GOOG were up 21% year/year. That's pretty insane for a company of this size.
The way they operate is annoying when it's one of your favorite products that isn't pulling it's weight, but it's hard to argue that the strategy isn't sound.
Hmm, I’m thinking whether this is an example of Goodhart’s law (when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure - the measure being the number of product launches) or “tragedy of the commons” (i.e. some sucker will do the maintenance, I’m going for the promotion!).
Either way, it’s frustrating as a user. I will never forgive them killing Google Reader.
If so, why is YT (sampled randomly from your list) buggy as hell? Is it possible no-one at G noticed that (sampling randomly again) for example playlist shuffle does not work? How come this is not fixed?
Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for people with long-standing accounts is untenable. The kitchen-sink approach of gmail has created a website/app that wants to meet every need and honestly meets none.
In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly rolled up and ideal notifying Inbox back to the utterly uncontrollable insanity of Gmail. The "rollups" in Gmail don't work, the filtering is arcane and unchanged from the 2001-era, the "labels" are useless at intelligently combating spam/marketing, and my gmail inbox receives hundreds of emails a day, 0 of which I care about, and hundreds of which google desperately wants to mark important, put in my inbox, notify me about, and provide precisely 0 tools to intelligently control it.
My gmail is a nightmare of anxiety that no man could ever wrestle control over (while my Inbox is a delightful walk through an orderly park) and I am honestly just considering abandoning this gmail account.
Of course, this gmail account IS my google account, it IS my google existence.
If Google has broken email, their core app, my core account --- maybe it's time to leave.
I can't be the only one approaching Google this way. Sooner or later, they'll kill what you love about them, too.
Customers/users/developers don't care what the reasons are, only that it continues to happen. What is especially irksome to many is that they are shutting down products/services that found an audience... just not one large enough, fast enough to Google's taste. The more they shut down products, the longer many are going to wait before even considering using one of their new products/services especially if there's a cost associated with it. It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle: Google launches a new product, customers/users/developers wait to see if Google is really serious about it, Google shuts down product because it never attracts the critical mass it needs to see, customers/users/developers get even more jaded toward the next one... rinse and repeat.
Google also kills entire niches in the short term by doing this stuff. Almost nobody is going to try to compete with them head on so if they are in a niche with a product that eventually gets killed, all progress stops in that niche for potentially years.
I couldn't agree more here. If only they had a habit of keeping services in beta until they could earn a net profit, and then released them. Then, if for some reason they can't find the level of profits that Google wants for them, they could spin the product off as a separate company and forget about it instead of shutting it down.
My list of degooglifying actions (mostly from my older post [1])
* switch default search engine to DuckDuckGo (one can still use the !s bang when one wants to see what Google has)
* use tracking blockers (uBlock origin, BlockBear on iOS)
* use anonymous/private/porn mode browsing most of the time (except for sites I actually want to be logged in permanently)
* use Zoho as a replacement for shared Google docs
* use Youtube either in private window, and/or download content once with youtube-dl
* use Apple Maps or OpenStreetMaps instead of Google maps, though still revert to Google maps sometimes, lamentably. It's good. (I never log in, though.)
* long ago switched to different email for main email, and forwarded gmail account to it (and now, basically nobody emails to my old gmail address anymore). (In fact, I use a catch-all domain now (very easy to set up), and a fresh email for basically every account. Quite handy.)
* for contacts, photos, etc. I use Apple's built-in stuff. I do trust Apple a bit more (different business model; look at recent iPhone prices.)
* Signal, Wire, iMessage for messaging
All in all, I think a fairly degooglified life is eminently possible.
In response, people furthermore suggested:
* Firefox with Multi-Account Container function to separate browsing, or just a temporary session with `firefox -no-remote -profile $(mktemp -d)`
* Lineage OS for Android phones (though somewhat controversial)
I was never really a fan of Google+, but it's amazing how it went from MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER to being shutdown completely in such a short amount of time. I'm annoyed by all the other things they've ditched, but it scares me to think they did such an about face on Google+. I'll never use anything new from them, and I always tell anyone who asks to avoid using anything there. I'm kinda surprised anyone would run anything on GCP other than some test things. These shutdowns SHOULD damage their brand, and the shutdown of Google+ should send a very clear message to anyone using anything they've added recently.
It's one of the reasons I will never buy any games on google stadia when it launches, I expect it to be shut down in 2-3 years.
I have the network to use streaming so I'm not so worried about performance, ps now for instance is almost indistinguishable from playing locally on my ps3.
Google's two (maybe three) core Google-branded products to non-tech people are Search, Gmail and maybe Chrome. I don't think non-techies could even tell you what some of the other products are or did. I would also wager most people outside of tech don't realize YouTube is owned by Google.
Tech people pay a lot of attention to this stuff, but casual user's don't notice or don't care.
So essentially Google's constant stream of new products leads to older ones falling by the wayside unless they can make very large piles of cash.
It's also worth highlighting this:
> Google rarely does anything as a singular company. Instead, the industry giant is made up of autonomous product groups that develop and launch things on their own schedule.
My own "you'll never get another chance to do that to me again" was when I migrated an organisation from Microsoft Exchange to Google Mail and Apps. It was great with Outlook Connector for Gmail, then they killed it.
I will never take the risk of committing to a Google product in a professional setting ever again. It hurts the organisation, and it hurts me.
These shutdowns might hurt Google's brand among the tech-savvy community that uses edge products like Google+ or Chromecast Audio (never even heard of that before today).
But everyone I know still uses Google search and Chrome. Most use Gmail. Schools still give students Chromebooks and teach them Google Docs.
Google has morphed into a boring low-growth sustain-mode advertising company that happens to employ a lot of very bright, creative people who really have no business working there any more. Thus we see a ton of hobby side projects that don't last. At this point if Google invented a Level 5 self-driving car, I'd probably just yawn until a more dependable company reinvented it.
They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money (like Chromecast Audio), and they improve features that detract from the user experience and muddy the waters in terms of ads/monetization in their view (YouTube annotations). They run their company as a constant stream of trial-and-error product launches, some of which succeed wildly and make them billions, others fail and are killed off. Makes sense to me.
Perhaps someone is confusing them with a charity or an Internet do-gooder enthusiasts club. That's unwise. You can be sure that successful services used by a lot of people will continue indefinitely, perhaps tweaked to generate more revenue. Otherwise, come on, as an avid Google+ user you must have known that the writing is on the wall for you and the other 500 avid Google+ users. No charities here.
I was going to make a comment about how Google's approach to service deprecation contrasts with Microsoft's, but then I spot-checked my assumptions and realized that MS has discontinued over 50% of the Office ecosystem of apps over the years.
So I think I need to instead ask a question: Is Google's deprecation strategy actually unusual for a company with a wide ecosystem of offerings?
There isn't a single new Google product that I'm excited about. Even if there was, at this point I would be apprehensive at best given their track record of abandonment. It seems to be that they've forgotten how to innovate compared to their competitors. Facebook, despite their controversies, bought Instagram and managed to recapture the young market with new features and improvements. Amazon has been making strides with AWS and its Prime ecosystem. Google has been... Making more redundant messaging apps?
Hopefully Google will see this and better understand why Microsoft is beating them in cloud services.
When I moved about a TB of S3 data into their cloud storage (as a cross-vendor backup) one of their product evangelists called me just to say hello. I was floored. But I mentioned that their constant shut downs are making me wary of a larger Google Cloud commitment.
The Ars article misses the point that google is an ad company that uses it's dominance in search to keep the ad money machine going.
Everything else is just playtime to google. So they have no interest in doing the hard work to support any play time projects at all.
They are so horrific to deal with at an enterprise level.
All this stuff that google shovels out, makes a splash with, and then cancels is just stuff that doesn't further the ad hegemony. You can take or leave the free stuff, if it works for you that's great, but don't expect it to hang around any longer than it serves it's purpose.
They don't charge money for this stuff and keep it around once it stops being relevant for ads because the price tag to make a difference to them would be way too high for anyone to pay for it, especially at the consumer level.
My exposure at this point is basically just Gmail & Calendar. I'd be pretty bummed if Youtube got the axe though.
I once asked Diane Greene straight up, when she took over Google Cloud, "How can you possibly win enterprise customers when there are 12 deprecated APIS in Google Cloud right now, and you haven't even started to turn the thing around." She dodged and said there were no deprecations.... I literally had the deprecated services listings from their site up on my phone. I think this is one of the reasons she moved on: it's never going to stop, there. They'll always leave things and move on to the next thing, not worrying about the old customers.
Killing some products makes a lot of sense, or is at least has a plausible rationale. Now that video Chromecast devices can do audio casting, it may not make sense to make separate audio products.
Other things, like Google's utter botch of tablet software and hardware points toward senior management treating those businesses like hobbies. Hardware partners and customers are indeed victimized. Getting tablets right requires product management discipline across APIs (i.e. Fragment) app frameworks that have to use Fragment correctly, UI design that doesn't promote an "it's a big phone" approach to app designers, hardware specs, and the OS. Nothing that came after the Fragment API really handled tablet cases very well.
In their latest move in tablets Google seems to have surrendered to the Windows tablet idea of a hybrid laptop/tablet OS, except Samsung, who vastly outsell Google's hardware, is still making their variants on Google's old laptop OS. WTF? If I were at Samsung I'd be pissed as hell at Google for muddying up their only successful tablet hardware partner's technology position. One could hardly do worse.
[+] [-] jfasi|7 years ago|reply
To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted?
The criteria for promotion at Google, especially at the higher levels like SWE III -> Senior and especially at Senior -> Staff and above, explicitly talk about impact on the organization and the business. This has consequences for the kind of teams people try to join and kind of work they choose to do. Maintenance engineering is so not-rewarded that it's become an inside joke. Any team that isn't launching products starts bleeding staff, any project that isn't going to make a big splash is going to be neglected, and any design that doesn't "demonstrate technical complexity" will be either rejected or trumped up.
This is as important in the product management, people management, and general leadership roles as in engineering. The incentive throughout is to create a product, launch it, apply for promotion, and move on to bigger and better things as soon as possible. In my time at Google I saw organization after organization pay lip service to rewarding maintenance and "preferring landings over launches" and “improving product excellence” but (at least in my experience) nothing stuck.
Usually an organization starts with a top-down direction and the rest of the company is compensated for executing it. Not at Google. The "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach that developed from the early days of twenty percent time and total engineering independence has created a disorganized mess of a company. Multiply the individual incentives fifty thousand times and you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately.
Edit/Addendum:
This is also why GMail, YouTube, Search, GCP, Android, and others aren’t going anywhere. They’re making money, they’re core to the business, and there’s plenty of opportunity to work on them and get promoted. They all also share one thing in common: deep down they’re frontends for search or advertising (GCP and Apps are an exception because they make money on their own). Measuring and proving impact on search numbers is a well-known promo narrative at Google, so those products are a safe bet for employees and users. Streaming game services, not so much.
[+] [-] s3r3nity|7 years ago|reply
I could get through having two podcast apps on my Android (Google Podcasts, Google Play Music) that give me notifications for my podcasts, with no plans on phasing out one or the other.
I could get over having two different music apps - Google Play Music and YouTube Music - because it seemed like there might actually be a plan here - albeit we haven't heard anything in ages.
I could get over having two email apps - Inbox and Gmail - because I knew Inbox was just an experiment that was going to be a tease of cool features that may / may not be ported over...therefore I tried not to take the bait.
I could get over having a bunch of different messaging apps - I didn't like it, but 95% of my messages are SMS texts anyway, so it didn't impact me.
The FINAL straw was falling in love with a PixelBook that I bought during the Black Friday sales, as I moved into a role in an org that was 1) deeply invested in G Suite and 2) allowed me to do all my work from the browser - making the Chrome OS concept finally fit for me. THEN Google closes that part of their hardware division.
Now I just have angst over _any_ Google product / service that isn't the core that I use and "know" knock on wood won't go away (Search / Gmail / Chrome). Android wear? Google Home? Hell, I was seriously finally moving to a Pixel 3, as the tight integration with some Chrome OS features on my PixelBook would've been ideal - but I can't even trust that the Pixel phone line will last that much longer.
[+] [-] throw_away|7 years ago|reply
I would love if they followed this strategy. Instead, you have products like reader and inbox with many passionate users, which demonstrate some wall stickiness, and they're killed rather than monetized.
Monetize me. I recognize that the things I like cost money. Figure out how to make money off me! I would have accepted ads in reader or inbox. Hell, I would have paid dollars to make those ads go away even.
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
Yes. The game industry is very reluctant to use Improbable's Spatial OS, because, through a deal with Google, they force you to host your game, expensively, on Google's servers.[1] Nobody wants to spend $100 million developing an AAA title using that system, and then suddenly get an email that Google is discontinuing the product.
(Spatial OS is technically interesting, and, hopefully, someone else will do something like it, with reasonable licensing terms.)
[1] https://massivelyop.com/2018/01/12/chronicles-of-elyria-is-d...
[+] [-] PopePompus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrbonner|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] korethr|7 years ago|reply
This, right here is the key, and what I think most people miss, including the original article. Hell, I missed it myself for a long time: Google is not a platform company as the original article asserts. They are an advertising company. That is Google's bread and butter, and has been since day one. The products and platforms that stick around do so because they are or become successful funnels or front ends for advertising.
As much as the tech culture of the Internet loves to bitch about advertising (myself included), unto itself, it is not a solely an evil thing. Oh, it absolutely can be turned to evil ends; see any of a myriad complaints about Facebook. However, I think the pairing of ads with search has been damn useful in a way that balances with the potential for evil. As an example, when I'm searching for specific lubricating grease for my bicycle's bearings, I very much appreciate seeing an ad for a vendor who's willing to sell me a single tube thereof, instead of having only the web search listings of vendors who require a minimum order size of 1 shipping pallet. Google did right paring advertising with search. To use a 'corporate bullshit' word, Search and ads synergize well.
The froth of Google's other products and platforms makes more sense when looked at in that light. A company that sits still will eventually get passed by someone else who correctly sensed changes in the market and business environment, and thus eventually die. So of course Google is going to be trying to come up with all manner of things that leverage the Internet and their massive infrastructure; one of those may well be the next big thing that funnels more money in to advertising. No small part of this is that Google employs a great many nerds like you and I, people who have no trouble inventing cool new things you can do on the Internet. But sadly, a great many of those cool things don't fit well with Google's advertising-based business model, as evidenced by the constant product froth.
[+] [-] noneeeed|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geofft|7 years ago|reply
I didn't want to be subject to those engineering standards.
[+] [-] dna_polymerase|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amyjess|7 years ago|reply
This is also why we had a botched rollout of Material Design across Google's apps following the release of Lollipop.
Apps rolled out Material redesigns whenever, often months and sometimes even years after Lollipop's launch. Apps used various different versions of the Material support library: the Drive Apps in particular had text and widget alignment issues that made them look very unlike the other Material apps. And for a while, I was tracking which apps exhibited correct behavior of the status bar and the hamburger menu, because there were multiple ways apps could implement each one, but only one correct way (ironically enough, I was doing so in a Google Doc) [0].
To me, this is an awful way to roll out your new company-wide branding initiative. You want a new brand to be consistent across all your products and rolled out simultaneously. In retrospect, it was the moment when I began to lose faith in Google as a company.
Some time after that, somebody explained to me why, and it was exactly as you said: engineering groups operate independently of each other with no top-down chain of command. There's nobody telling them "you have to roll out the new branding by this date", "you have to make sure you're following these company-wide standards", etc. Basically, I was told that at Google, "company-wide" isn't a thing that exists. And that's awful. And honestly, it makes me never want to work for Google. That kind of chaos is exactly the opposite of the kind of working environment I could thrive in.
[0] Correct behavior: status bar is a darker shade of the toolbar's color, the hamburger menu covers the screen from top to bottom with the status bar as a translucent overlay on top of the menu bar, and the hamburger icon doesn't animate at all while you drag the menu out. Following Lollipop, there were Material apps that broke every one of those rules, but in completely different combinations from app to app.
[+] [-] neilv|7 years ago|reply
Other than the job-hopping that I started hearing about when dotcom IPOs started, engineers, from what I (perhaps naively) understood of my anecdotal experience, seemed to mostly just like to do engineering, and/or also had a sense of obligation to their project/team/duty.
About the worst I recall hearing about would be an engineer picking a language/tool because they wanted to learn it or add it to their resume, rather than because it made the most sense for corporate goals for the project.
[+] [-] jarjoura|7 years ago|reply
It's really no different in the startup world. If your startup can't show growth in users or profits, then you shutdown.
[+] [-] eeeeeeeeeeeee|7 years ago|reply
I have a hangouts and voice app on my phone and they appear to have duplicate functionality. I’m not joking — I receive the same notifications on both.
[+] [-] chibg10|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|7 years ago|reply
That aside, it kind of makes sense that Google places this much emphasis on the revenue producing parts of the business.
On "what about new products and innovation" see the first point. While every corporate pathology is different (Google's flavour seems unique) a near-constant is doublespeak. There might be (or might have been) a logic behind it, it just gets communicated in corporate-speak because plain language is too harsh.
Ultimately, at Google's scale (like a VC) a meaningful innovation is >$1bn annual revenue or the equivalent of that. Not many projects have that kind of potential. Letting a thousand flowers bloom means letting 998.3 flowers die.
[+] [-] president|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|7 years ago|reply
Streaming games has tremendous potential synergy with advertising. Games are yet another form of media, after all. There is obvious tremendous potential synergy with YouTube. Also, if one can stream games, then why not stream other kinds of applications? There's tremendous opportunities for synergies there as well.
[+] [-] bradstewart|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iagovar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ken|7 years ago|reply
What exactly is the benefit of promotion? Is a 6-figure salary and all the perqs in the world not enough? At all the places I've worked, from tiny startups to big stable companies, I haven't seen this phenomenon. Does Google's rapid rise simply attract the sorts of people who feel they deserve it?
[+] [-] gotocake|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olalonde|7 years ago|reply
It sucks for some users but isn't it good for Google as a business? The way you describe it, it sounds like Google is internally approximating a free market to allocate resources. I understand the risk of damaging the brand but for a lot of new Google products, the only competition comes from startups which equally are a risky bet.
[+] [-] unlimit|7 years ago|reply
> The criteria for promotion at Google, especially at the higher levels like SWE III -> Senior and especially at Senior -> Staff and above, explicitly talk about impact on the organization and the business.
Wow! Its exactly like my job at a my IT off-sourcing job. I am very surprised.
[+] [-] ryandvm|7 years ago|reply
The way they operate is annoying when it's one of your favorite products that isn't pulling it's weight, but it's hard to argue that the strategy isn't sound.
[+] [-] layoutIfNeeded|7 years ago|reply
Either way, it’s frustrating as a user. I will never forgive them killing Google Reader.
[+] [-] rifung|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avip|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criley2|7 years ago|reply
In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly rolled up and ideal notifying Inbox back to the utterly uncontrollable insanity of Gmail. The "rollups" in Gmail don't work, the filtering is arcane and unchanged from the 2001-era, the "labels" are useless at intelligently combating spam/marketing, and my gmail inbox receives hundreds of emails a day, 0 of which I care about, and hundreds of which google desperately wants to mark important, put in my inbox, notify me about, and provide precisely 0 tools to intelligently control it.
My gmail is a nightmare of anxiety that no man could ever wrestle control over (while my Inbox is a delightful walk through an orderly park) and I am honestly just considering abandoning this gmail account.
Of course, this gmail account IS my google account, it IS my google existence.
If Google has broken email, their core app, my core account --- maybe it's time to leave.
I can't be the only one approaching Google this way. Sooner or later, they'll kill what you love about them, too.
[+] [-] blihp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] griffordson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kian|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnWilcox|7 years ago|reply
It has become apparent to me, even if you ignore the rot that has pervaded throughout the organization, which is manifesting itself in Search results.
[+] [-] FabHK|7 years ago|reply
* switch default search engine to DuckDuckGo (one can still use the !s bang when one wants to see what Google has)
* use tracking blockers (uBlock origin, BlockBear on iOS)
* use anonymous/private/porn mode browsing most of the time (except for sites I actually want to be logged in permanently)
* use Zoho as a replacement for shared Google docs
* use Youtube either in private window, and/or download content once with youtube-dl
* use Apple Maps or OpenStreetMaps instead of Google maps, though still revert to Google maps sometimes, lamentably. It's good. (I never log in, though.)
* long ago switched to different email for main email, and forwarded gmail account to it (and now, basically nobody emails to my old gmail address anymore). (In fact, I use a catch-all domain now (very easy to set up), and a fresh email for basically every account. Quite handy.)
* for contacts, photos, etc. I use Apple's built-in stuff. I do trust Apple a bit more (different business model; look at recent iPhone prices.)
* Signal, Wire, iMessage for messaging
All in all, I think a fairly degooglified life is eminently possible.
In response, people furthermore suggested:
* Firefox with Multi-Account Container function to separate browsing, or just a temporary session with `firefox -no-remote -profile $(mktemp -d)`
* Lineage OS for Android phones (though somewhat controversial)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057709
[+] [-] blakesterz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyfon|7 years ago|reply
I have the network to use streaming so I'm not so worried about performance, ps now for instance is almost indistinguishable from playing locally on my ps3.
[+] [-] meddlepal|7 years ago|reply
Tech people pay a lot of attention to this stuff, but casual user's don't notice or don't care.
[+] [-] ChrisSD|7 years ago|reply
It's also worth highlighting this:
> Google rarely does anything as a singular company. Instead, the industry giant is made up of autonomous product groups that develop and launch things on their own schedule.
[+] [-] m0nty|7 years ago|reply
I will never take the risk of committing to a Google product in a professional setting ever again. It hurts the organisation, and it hurts me.
[+] [-] carrier_lost|7 years ago|reply
But everyone I know still uses Google search and Chrome. Most use Gmail. Schools still give students Chromebooks and teach them Google Docs.
I think Google will be fine.
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 99052882514569|7 years ago|reply
Perhaps someone is confusing them with a charity or an Internet do-gooder enthusiasts club. That's unwise. You can be sure that successful services used by a lot of people will continue indefinitely, perhaps tweaked to generate more revenue. Otherwise, come on, as an avid Google+ user you must have known that the writing is on the wall for you and the other 500 avid Google+ users. No charities here.
[+] [-] fixermark|7 years ago|reply
So I think I need to instead ask a question: Is Google's deprecation strategy actually unusual for a company with a wide ecosystem of offerings?
[+] [-] o10449366|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] holdenc|7 years ago|reply
When I moved about a TB of S3 data into their cloud storage (as a cross-vendor backup) one of their product evangelists called me just to say hello. I was floored. But I mentioned that their constant shut downs are making me wary of a larger Google Cloud commitment.
[+] [-] jaimex2|7 years ago|reply
I thought the whole point of Alphabet was to try and hide the Google brand so customers trust to use it.
[+] [-] ben7799|7 years ago|reply
Everything else is just playtime to google. So they have no interest in doing the hard work to support any play time projects at all.
They are so horrific to deal with at an enterprise level.
All this stuff that google shovels out, makes a splash with, and then cancels is just stuff that doesn't further the ad hegemony. You can take or leave the free stuff, if it works for you that's great, but don't expect it to hang around any longer than it serves it's purpose.
They don't charge money for this stuff and keep it around once it stops being relevant for ads because the price tag to make a difference to them would be way too high for anyone to pay for it, especially at the consumer level.
My exposure at this point is basically just Gmail & Calendar. I'd be pretty bummed if Youtube got the axe though.
[+] [-] VonGuard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|7 years ago|reply
Other things, like Google's utter botch of tablet software and hardware points toward senior management treating those businesses like hobbies. Hardware partners and customers are indeed victimized. Getting tablets right requires product management discipline across APIs (i.e. Fragment) app frameworks that have to use Fragment correctly, UI design that doesn't promote an "it's a big phone" approach to app designers, hardware specs, and the OS. Nothing that came after the Fragment API really handled tablet cases very well.
In their latest move in tablets Google seems to have surrendered to the Windows tablet idea of a hybrid laptop/tablet OS, except Samsung, who vastly outsell Google's hardware, is still making their variants on Google's old laptop OS. WTF? If I were at Samsung I'd be pissed as hell at Google for muddying up their only successful tablet hardware partner's technology position. One could hardly do worse.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|7 years ago|reply