HN loves to point fingers when company stands still. Heck, we made a teaching moment out of Kodak and others who failed to innovate and relied too much on their cashcows.
On the other hand, we proclaim nice-sounding ideas such as being aware of sunk cost fallacy and how everybody should say no more. We talk about being data-driven and dont go by what gut says. Beware of the vocal minority. Dont be afraid to pivot or let go. We tell others dont wait for your products to be perfect to launch. Get it out there, test the market and iterate.
HN has their biases (I can build that in a weekend!) but the recent discourse of "OMG! they are going to desecrate it" is very silly.
>I'm sorry but this joke is getting really old. HN loves to point fingers when company stands still.
Joke? There's no need for the false dichotomy.
Google in particular has the organizational attention span of a goldfish on meth, and many of us have been burned one, two, or three times by their recurrent habits of setting something awesome up and then killing it off a short time later with no sane alternatives in place.
This reputation is entirely earned[1]. The safe thing to do if you don't want to sign up for a sudden migration headache in the future is assume that any new Google product is another symptom of their "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" mentality, and that it won't last for more than a year or two.
All of this would be resolved if Google called these projects experimental.
This is a significant distinction. It's also a massive deterrent. Who builds on experimental? Google isn't incentivized to do this. So, everything new Google puts out is hence, experimental.
It's not an old joke. You're just getting tired of it.
You're basically invalidating all of these engineers who believe in a thing called "trust," and undervaluing it with a statement like this.
Google's promotion and incentive structure is built around launching products. This will launch, putter along for a couple of years and then get shuttered unless it's a surprise success.
> This will launch, putter along for a couple of years and then get shuttered unless it's a surprise success.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but isn't that effectively how Silicon Valley as a whole operates? Most startups putter along for a few years before running out of money and getting shuttered. A couple become surprise successes and take off.
Google is effectively just a single corporation acting like a hive of startups.
Sure, though technology or ideas from products that aren't successful is often incorporated in future projects.
Honestly there's a really good blog post/article waiting to be written grouping and classifying shuttered google projects into groups based on purposes, because for a lot of them, they aren't created to be successes or make money, but for other business reasons, legal precedents, creating competition or disrupting a particular business segment, etc.
Whether the motivation for their behavior is because of a promotion-based incentive structure or some sort of deep 3d chess corporate strategy, neither makes me excited to use their products when released. Fool me once...
Without knowing any details (and too lazy too look it up) it might be just the case that this was built on some old framework/technology that now has been deprecated and the effort to bring it up to date was not worth it.
Because if your connectivity and their servers are able to handle the load, this reduces the need for a gaming PC for a lot of people which in turn makes Android and ChromeOS very attractive. Or, promising the ability to play it within Chrome the browser regardless of platform, this would be the dream of games being truly cross platform. Pay for it on PC, play it on an Android device? Awesome. Release Chrome for PS4 and/or Xbox One and that same game works there? Very, very nice.
Admittedly, there are other people in this space, but I figure they'd find a way to make the incentives pretty hard to pass up.
HN loves to point fingers when company stands still. Heck, we made a teaching moment out of Kodak and others who failed to innovate and relied too much on their cashcows.
On the other hand, we proclaim nice-sounding ideas such as being aware of sunk cost fallacy and how everybody should say no more. We talk about being data-driven and dont go by what gut says. Beware of the vocal minority. Dont be afraid to pivot or let go. We tell others dont wait for your products to be perfect to launch. Get it out there, test the market and iterate.
HN has their biases (I can build that in a weekend!) but the recent discourse of "OMG! they are going to desecrate it" is very silly.