Comments
Riptide360 t1_j5ew9s4 wrote
Google needs to build a better incubator so many dead products that could have worked. https://killedbygoogle.com
victim_of_technology t1_j5f2woq wrote
At this point they are so bad at that they would be better off just buying companies to get new ideas and then trying a little harder not to ruin it.
crash41301 t1_j5f8z5d wrote
I'm convinced it's their culture. It never grew to match the size of their company and it seems to be what holds them back
GodlessPerson t1_j5fc300 wrote
But how will they make yet another messaging app?
tmp04567 t1_j5ffw7i wrote
Yeah that is why you don't fire your employees to pocket their wages. 'cause nothing gets done otherwise and you won't have an income.
Short term profits kill 10'000x the long term profits.
Why do people used to INVEST in infrastructure, companies, employees instead of dismantling it all for scrap remind me.
thruster_fuel69 t1_j5fhk4h wrote
Innovation is usually the first to go, but for Google it's a surprising move.
bigkoi t1_j5fivv9 wrote
I believe the decision on area 120 was more about it's efficacy. Google has plenty of innovation departments.
coporate t1_j5fkbd2 wrote
I’ve heard stories that a lot people get promoted or move off products based on their launch, but that often leads to products stagnating or being mismanaged without key members.
Last-Caterpillar-112 OP t1_j5fl379 wrote
In Google’s culture, innovation means the latest shiny thing that caught the engineer’s short attention span. Most of these products are completely useless with no perceptible use case, even though they may be “super exciting”. Once it is partly built, customer response is underwhelming, and the engineer moves on to the next gimmick.
thruster_fuel69 t1_j5flaqi wrote
That is the way, yes. I once imagined starting a business around one of their experiments, very glad I didn't.
londons_explorer t1_j5fsznh wrote
It is their culture, yes. But they are a huge behemoth with lots of revenue and money in the bank, so I think it'll be at least 20 years till they collapse.
crash41301 t1_j5fvw9s wrote
I think it largely depends what happens with the unquestable cash cow, search. If something occurs to topple that it may send them into a spiral given their Inability to focus
radiks32 t1_j5fwj3m wrote
Google Gchat for workspaces
IlIlIlIlIllIlIll t1_j5g1gna wrote
Not surprising. If you need to make cutbacks, frivolous early r&d projects will be the first to go.
yaosio t1_j5g2lhg wrote
It's interesting how different Google and Microsoft do things. Google kills off popular software and hardware for no apparent reason very fast. Microsoft keeps unpopular software and hardware running until the last person to use it turns into fossil fuel for the next intelligent species. I bet somewhere deep in the underdark there's a greybeard updating DOS, just hoping to get the call that they need it.
crash41301 t1_j5g35am wrote
Too funny, and not wrong!
One is hyper focused on business software and the enterprise, which likely drives that keep it forever mentality. Businesses like stability and like not having to redo things for no benefit.
Google.. I'm not sure. Makes tons of money on a few wildly successful products and seems to let the organization decide on its own otherwise with incentives for new products far outstripping incentives to be a maintainer.
Qwerty678910 t1_j5g40u8 wrote
What this does is ultimately affects is current and perspective future employees trust. One thing people are gonna do is not forget. The top tech companies letting people go in an attempt to regain power. These companies are arguably the wealthiest on the planet. Taking tax deductions to the point the tax payer is on the hook.
IMO when a company starts taking in government money. The people (Tax payers) should now have a say into operations.
ALargeRubberDuck t1_j5g9t12 wrote
They killed google surveys? That was pretty popular when I was in school. I figure they don’t make money on it though.
[deleted] t1_j5h17q3 wrote
[removed]
[deleted] t1_j5h2cag wrote
[deleted]
drawkbox t1_j5h4tc3 wrote
Basically Google's Bell Labs, this will be a long term mistake.
Though, it is a typical McKinsey style consultcult HBS MBA-itis and Chicago thinking style though, gut R&D, the value creation center of your company in favor of value extraction only.
Sadly Google CEO Sundar Pichai went to Wharton and worked at McKinsey. Two massive HBS MBA-itis red flags. He does have some history on the good products at Google but something has happened and systems he thrived in for innovation are now being closed off.
Probably pushed the bureaucracy that is slowing productivity.
Bring back 20% time, where most good Google products were made. Simplicity is less management and less "sprints".
Agile was supposed to give developers/creatives more time, but it turned into an excessively shallow micromanagement consultcult tool with too much weight around it, so now everyone is in the critical path emergency all the time, closed mode over open mode all the time. The new form of "agile" is "a-gee-lay" like the misunderstanding that the Dad in Christmas Story had when he saw "fragile" and thought it was "fra-gee-lay". Micromanagement is how to kill innovation in one easy step, even better if you tell them the system of micromanagement is to "help" them "simplify". This new "agile" is EDD, Emergency Driven Development all day and night. Why even try to do things if you have so much weight to move and so many layers of approval? Remember, the creator of Agile said "Agile is dead" in 2015, but long live agility. Agility is what the McKinsey "agile" (a cult) has killed. Get out of the way management and let the people play in their labs. That is where innovation comes from and always has. AT&T labs back in the day even knew this. Early internet and app/game dev knew this. It was in control/power by the creators/developers and then value was created. The value extractors want to try to extract value before value is created.
Never ever trust those from Wharton... Trumps, Musks, Milner, John Sculley that nearly broke Apple, Warren Buffett, CEOs of many sketch companies like Comcast etc.
The finance/business has all the power over creatives/product/developers now. Until that changes they will be listing.
Google is in their John Sculley and Steve Ballmer moment.
GetOffMyLawn1729 t1_j5h6o2q wrote
"winded down"? When ChatGPT starts writing their press releases, I expect the grammar will be impeccable.
Lumiafan t1_j5h7xe6 wrote
Let's see...
Windows Phone, Zune, Groove Music (formerly Zune), Kinect, Silverlight, Microsoft Band
These are just some of the big things Microsoft nixed in the last decade.
The old enterprise software they keep alive for years and years is generally only alive because enterprises are paying Microsoft hefty fees to do so. There's a reason why support Windows 3.1 for embedded systems ended in 2008.
enjoytheshow t1_j5h8y89 wrote
They’ve done this for like two decades. Most of their most popular products are acquisitions. Search and gmail are the only two exceptions I can think of.
noobgolang t1_j5hgbl8 wrote
By running ads blaming Apple
Meta_My_Data t1_j5hma60 wrote
To be fair, that stuff was totally rejected by the market and essentially dead. Even Microsoft has some shame.
Lumiafan t1_j5hryxa wrote
Absolutely, but the point I'm trying to make is that both Google and Microsoft cut product lines that have no viable path to profitability.
meknoid333 t1_j5hsjuj wrote
Yay - because companies need to focus on building their core business capabilities and competitive advantages and less money in funding moonshots - because era of cheap money is over
atx_californian t1_j5ht6av wrote
This website doesn't have the most accurate take. Google also has a history of rolling tech they deprecate into existing products. They might "kill" a lot of products, but the tech behind them is often alive and well many years after the product is dead.
Switchy_Goofball t1_j5hu4nf wrote
Well google search has been getting worse and worse recently, so unless they can right the ship it’s only a matter of time
YouDontExistt t1_j5hvim8 wrote
Because tech is some severely bloated stuff
claimTheVictory t1_j5hyn14 wrote
Throw it over the wall and provide no real marketing or product development, that's one way to churn through billions of dollars.
Inquisitive_idiot t1_j5hzstu wrote
That doesn’t make the repeated sunsetting of so many consumer-facing services any less painful.
That they sunset popular beta services isn’t unique to them but at this point it’s very hard to commit to their consumer facing services for fam/friend comms.
I’m coming off as an old man here 😅 but there needs to be a modicum of predictably to comms and they keep turning over the table. 😓
existentialstix t1_j5i2auq wrote
If I may ask what was their experiment?
thruster_fuel69 t1_j5i2maw wrote
I forget the name now, years ago, but it was a browser api that could detect nearby iot devices. It was super cool, probably about to be too spammy or whatever. They never really announced it though, just let it starve until a few developers did their own thing.
existentialstix t1_j5i2vfj wrote
Ah good old IoT experiments back in the day
thruster_fuel69 t1_j5i2zu1 wrote
I had my phone going through DC collecting pings off everyone's android devices. Maybe I killed it who knows 🤷♂️
Loovian t1_j5iftwj wrote
Google is an advertising company first and foremost
[deleted] t1_j5iiz2e wrote
[deleted]
RoboNyaa t1_j5ij2jp wrote
Tell that to Valve.
RoboNyaa t1_j5ijbuq wrote
I'd argue that cutting R&D is a sign of impending demise. Google is big, but they are not invincible.
What's even more strange is at least two of those projects involved A.I. Why sack those people if the big bad threat to your monopoly is OpenAI?
chalbersma t1_j5j8chz wrote
YouTube Enterprise Chat coming soon.
CooksAndLives t1_j5j9sfd wrote
Now it's area51.
Meta_My_Data t1_j5jbqio wrote
Yes, that’s true. I think the difference is that Google tried a lot more things and really made experimentation a part of their overall culture. MS is generally more traditional in making bigger bets on a smaller product portfolio that is more “top down” driven.
signed7 t1_j5jcz4l wrote
Chrome/Maps/Docs?
nowaijosr t1_j5jelp9 wrote
Like Stadia… oh
Google Glass…
Google Now
… Google Cloud?
wait… what have they actually made in house that wasnt a failure?
nowaijosr t1_j5jep1u wrote
That’s not engineers making that decision, its D/C level throwing it at PMs.
ZeikCallaway t1_j5jj9vu wrote
>Bring back 20% time, where most good Google products were made.
As I understand it, this is hardly a thing anymore. Kinda sad really.
ericneo3 t1_j5jpqla wrote
> Microsoft keeps unpopular software and hardware running
It's too bad Microsoft cannot get the basics of what people want in a cellphone or a portable x86 laptop/tablet.
I cannot count the number of times they bungled the surface line by continually refusing to put a 5G modem in the thing. Now Lenovo and Dell have their business and consumer customers locked down.
zerolimits0 t1_j5jzgg9 wrote
And that's only part of the list of failures.
wildcat12321 t1_j5k3he5 wrote
when interest rates are high, the cost of capital is high. When the cost of capital is high, non-revenue producing experiments become increasingly expensive. And when markets are challenged, spending lots of equity to buy dozens of $500k per year engineers who don't produce revenue is not wise.
400921FB54442D18 t1_j5kcbw2 wrote
Their search engine?
Revolutionary_Lie539 t1_j5ocxi3 wrote
GCoin and GooglePay 2.0 coming up next
bigkoi t1_j5evpmb wrote
I imagine Area 120 must have been expensive to maintain with few projects with an actual pipeline.