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BlueTankEngine | 3 years ago
1. Google does not have a solid track record of killing things. IF you actually go through the list of all the "products" Google has "killed", you find that 95% of them are just consolidated into other areas of the Google product stack. Stadia was a herculean undertaking that involved a capital deployment that, at the time, was unprecedented in the gaming space. Stadia wasn't killed because it didn't grow quickly, it was killed because it didn't grow at all and was losing money, not to mention failing to acquire market share. Would you prefer the product be destroyed to put it on indefinite life support like Amazon has done with Twitch?
2. Google is an absolute giant in corporate communications via G-Suite. Just because their video chat didn't win out doesn't mean they have no competency in the space.
3. Google now does have a strategy for comms tools. Workplace text chat is part of the Gmail end of G-Suite, all video chat is under Meet. This would slip right into their new Meet ecosystem. Unfortunately many of the people who parrot your talking points also were the ones criticizing google for attempting to reign in their comms ecosystem because it was "killing" products, when in reality they were just being re-bundled
4. Google delivers legendary levels of hardware support for their Pixel devices, the absolute best in the Android ecosystem. Not to mention they run the single most compatible smart home ecosystem and have supported Chromecast for a decade.
Can you even name a division that Google could just spinoff in your world? Stadia couldn't sustain itself without the Google Cloud backing it. Really tired of all the HNers essentially making up this narrative about Google when it rally doesn't exist.
FridgeSeal|3 years ago
Public opinion still stands, they now garner a reputation of “won’t support for long, might kill” on new products they launch. You can’t even trust their owns comma - a month out of Stadia being axed they were talking about how they were going to continue supporting it.
> Google is an absolute giant in corporate communications via G-Suite.
Email and stuff, sure. Video conferencing, less so.
> Google delivers legendary levels of hardware support for their Pixel devices, the absolute best in the Android ecosystem
Is this a joke? Their hardware support is lacking, and the fact that it’s the “best of the Android ecosystem” says a lot about the quality of that sector. Basically every time this topic comes up on the pixel and Android subreddits, users who have those phones bemoan googles lacking and inconsistent support.
hedora|3 years ago
2. G-Suite did well because it was free and had a good collaboration model. It has stagnated, and things like search and folder navigation are hilariously bad. Quip has innovated much more in this space in recent years.
3. If they rolled old chat into new chat, it put my buddy list somewhere, and didn't just delete it without prompting, right? Google voice still exists with the old feature set? Can I have my auto deleted vanity number back? Presumably Meet is always e2e encrypted, like zoom, and its predecessor from Google, right? No? No to all these questions? Wow. Maybe they don't provide feature continuity after all.
4. I am typing this on a pixel 6 pro. Meh.
The following divisions would be better off as spinoffs, IMO:
Stadia (small companies lapped it), Waymo (small companies lapped it), their MVNO, android (then it could stop being a privacy tire fire), chrome (the Mozilla model works, and this would let Microsoft and Brave upstream more easily), g-suite+gmail (no tie in to search or ads), search, double click, AdWords, YouTube.
pb7|3 years ago
No company of any size has lapped Waymo. Waymo is the industry leader by a long shot.