Google's seemingly endless new array of products with just as many being discontinued at any one time is an internet meme at this point. Often in threads when Google announced their latest hotness, potential customers are sarcastically guessing at how long until it is killed (some of those guesses ultimately turning out correct).
I've never worked at Google, but it looks like shambles from the outside. Kind of reminds me of a younger Microsoft back when three teams would create three competitive solutions to the same problem (although to Microsoft's credit they still support most of those to this day).
Google really needs to decide what it wants to be, what direction they're going in, and work together. I'm guessing there's some perverse incentives at play for some of this (e.g. promotions/bonuses for new stuff, nothing for updates to existing products, or other "boring" work).
If you take a step back, Google's launch & deprecate cycle for new products actually kind-of makes sense.
Internally, Google is not so different from an ecosystem of VC-funded startups. They try a lot of things. Some ideas work and others don't.
The alternative is to never ship new products out of fear of failure. Or, to indefinitely support everything, regardless of how tiny. Or, to wait so long to derisk a new product that they possibly miss out on a new market (I'm looking at you, HomePod).
At the end of the day, this strategy has worked out well for them, so why stop? For every failure like G+ or Allo, there's a success like Google Photos or Duo.
From a business perspective, Google's way to work with products makes totally sense, as you described. But - and that's that problem I have with Google - from a user perspective, their way to work is unprofessional.
Why did this become an internet meme? Because all the projects they launch are launched with a lot of loud tam tam, they advertise them and for new users it clearly feels like this new product is here to stay - only to find out two years later that the product will be cut off. People start to use this new fancy app which is marketed to be the "next big thing". And then later some product manager thinks that it may be not worth to continue working on it.
IMO if Google really wants to try out new things, they should make these things invite-only to find out if they are working and how users interact with it, or clearly mark them as 'beta' or something like that. Google has a huge fan base and the internet is full of people excited to try out new things. But if users clearly see "hey, this is kind of a beta product, I am just testing this out" there would be way less disappointment if the product shuts down after a while.
This is almost saying uber makes all of its money from ride hailing, almost all these years.
Reality: after 2008, economy boomed, and advertising also did. Advertising, once you have the means, is easier to scale, and high margin. Google stopped relying on just owned and operated properties, and diversified into 3p properties to achieve even more scale
Most other businesses or business attempts require massive operations which google lacks
Even you ramp up non advertising revenue to a billion dollar, advertising will grow more just because it is already big.
This is a strange comparison. As far as I know, Uber doesn't actually make any money. They've operated at losses on a few billion in revenue for as long as I can remember by aggressively expanding their core business. They have maybe one or two side hustles which compliment their core competency. I don't see any comparison that can be made to the way Google operates.
Google Photos is definitely not a success from my POV, sure it’s a nice product but they killed Panoramio because of it and most importantly most of the data behind Panoramio is now lost. I personally don’t know what Duo is, I guess I’ll google it.
So why did Google decide to delete all those Panoramio photos, then? And user numbers don’t mean anything to Google if they decide to kill a product, look at Google+.
Except for every one deprecated product you can name, there's probably more like 10-20 new product. The issue is that Google has gotten so big and has so many different projects, that the number of deprecation is just bigger, even if percentage wise they're probably lower than most other companies.
Try looking at https://gcemetery.co/ and naming how many of those you even recognize and can describe without looking it up. Everyone just loves mentioning Reader, but except the new batch of G+ and Inbox, there hasn't been any significant product killed in a while.
News and weather is basically just merging with another app, reply moved into Android (I beta tested reply, and despite the app being gone I still have the features), Tez still exists as a part of pay, showtimes got rolled into normal search, tango was experimental and became arcore, google x very much is still around, glass never left beta as a consumer product and is still relevant as an enterprise product. Chrome frame has no reason to still exist, Quickoffice merged with Google docs, the Nexus line became pixel, noop was a 20% project, not an official google product.
When you remove the garbage, you end up with a company that deprecates a few things each year, most of which you've never heard of anyway.
chromecast audio is replicated trivially by chromecast + hdmi to audio converter(that you can buy for 5 bucks). i think the real problem is that the solution is confusing and people aren't linking up old audio systems. they're upgrading.
chromecast's ux was always waaaaay to complicated to understand for non-tech people and audio is it's first casualty.
That site is missing a lot since I thought of a couple right off the bat it didn’t have. Disco, QuickOffice, Songza, Slide, Bump. There have been some other google music/YouTube related shutterings too that I can’t give names too.
I recognized and could explain more than half listed, but only cared about a couple (didn’t care about Reader).
I've never worked at Google, but it looks like shambles from the outside. Kind of reminds me of a younger Microsoft back when three teams would create three competitive solutions to the same problem (although to Microsoft's credit they still support most of those to this day).
Google really needs to decide what it wants to be, what direction they're going in, and work together. I'm guessing there's some perverse incentives at play for some of this (e.g. promotions/bonuses for new stuff, nothing for updates to existing products, or other "boring" work).