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by dispose13432 3481 days ago
They don't seem to play free market. They seem to play "new guy takes all".

For example, Google Voice was put in maintenance mode and Hangouts took off. Then Allo, then ... ?

They very rarely actively push two products with the same purpose.
2 comments
vkou 3481 days ago
No, it's not a free market. They also don't try to poach other teams' employees with higher salary offers, push bad press about the other team, try to be ramen-profitable, etc.

But you can get some of the benefits of a free market by having teams work on multiple solutions to one problem. You can also squander them by making the wrong high-level decisions.

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Animats 3481 days ago
Google Voice, previously Grand Central, was in maintenance mode from when it was first acquired. Google never improved it much.
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jrochkind1 3481 days ago
Pretty much _every_ google product is in maintenance mode from when it is first released, and never improved much.

This may be part of the strategy, those that somehow turn into 'profit' are the ones that actually have full-time engineering assigned to them, and get improved? I couldn't say.

For example that I ran into recently, Google Custom Search/Site Search theoretically _has_ an API for creating/modifying custom searches... but it's completely inaccessible, because the only auth method it supports is one that no longer exists. I suspect it is still running on a server somewhere with zero traffic though. If you Google around, you can see for at least a year, _some_ people (prob those with the paying 'Site Search', not the free 'Custom Search') have managed to get answers from this from google support -- the answer is "There is an internal feature request ticket to add OAuth 2 support to this API, but I can't give you an ETA".

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