It's interesting that Amazon's approach of building products and killing them off if they don't improve the bottom line earns praise, while Google's similar one endlessly pisses people off.
It's probably because by and large Amazon kills physical products and Google kills services.
If someone buys a Fire Phone and it gets discontinued - well, products getting discontinued is part of life and it doesn't (usually) affect the usage of the one you have.
If Google builds a web service, then that service has the chance to grow to 50m / 100m users before deciding that it is not worth supporting. Law of large numbers says of those 50/100m a non-trivial proportion will invest substantial time in it and get pissed off when they have to make alternative plans.
If Amazon killed Prime Video or Audible, I bet you’d see a pretty huge outcry.
I wonder about the lifetimes and user engagement between examples from Amazon and Google. It's interesting that my off-the-cuff impression is that Google gets into hot water here by letting its experiments 1) run for a long time, 2) acquire a lot of users because "hey, it's free" and 3) sometimes suck the air out of a product segment because #2 (see: Google Reader). Likewise, my impression of Amazon's similar experiments are that they're cut short at a much younger age, with lesser engagement. Now I'm very curious: does the data actually back up those impressions?
Maybe I'm wrong but I think the difference is Amazon always/mostly charges the primary users money. Googles business seems to be 'hey it's free' for primary customers, charge secondary customers $$$. Problem with that is much later when it becomes obvious there isn't enough money to be made by spying on the now quite large user base. Google then just tosses the thing over the side.
Mostly because people don't really use any of the products Amazon releases at scale. There's a reason why it's called Google scale and not Amazon scale.
Also because as humans, we're generally more inclined to dogpile onto the Goliath and root for the David. Underdogs almost always get treated more leniently.
Maybe to clarify better, it's the bunches of ancillary products and services I'm talking about. Core items like AWS and Google Cloud are of course by definition going to require an inherent scalability to be meaningful.
AWS is not a single service but a large collection of separate services that interconnect. Some of which are quiet old and not exactly cutting edge. Yet they don't get deprecated.
You could say the exact same thing about Google Cloud. What I'm more talking about is stuff like Google Keep, Docs, Slides, Sheets, Kubernetes, Istio, etc. etc.
Google doesn't really have much of a retail division though, and is almost entirely services-based. When services disappear, the time and effort you've invested into them disappear.
When a shop stops selling a product, you can still keep using the product you have. They don't take it away from you.
Amazon's are probably almost not used at all, whereas Google kills off products that still have plenty of users, even if not by the standards of Search or Gmail.
> while Google's similar one endlessly pisses people off.
Maybe it's because we know Google is profiting off of our private information, and we don't make a stink about that because they're giving us free stuff. But why shouldn't we be upset when they stop giving us the free stuff we like? They're still profiting off of our private information aren't they?
I never said they were wrong to deprecate unprofitable services, I'm just saying that it's not like the outrage is coming from nowhere, or has no justification.
I'm not sure. Wave has been out (and discontinued) for a LONG time. It was even transfered to Apache under an open source license. And it's never taken off. No one has ever picked it up. No one has seriously tried to replicate it. If there was a business there, if there was a use case there, someone (anyone) had plenty of opportunity to take it and run.
The fact that not only the idea but also the implementation and the hype and the marketing were all available completely for free and no one ever turned it into a real product tells me that it wasn't a real product.
Wave needs a critical mass of users to be useful so that created difficulty with no existing (public) service after Google shut their instance down.
Google completely botched the roll-out. Wave is essentially useless without others to use it with (no value above Google Docs to use it solo, or standard email/IM to chat with others). I had 10 invites, I sent most of them out. Only two people of the 7 or 8 I invited received their invites. It was completely useless to me because one of the two was someone who just wanted an invite (but I didn't interact with much), and the other was an fellow tabletop gamer and the rest of our group couldn't get in.
When Google finally opened it (looked up dates, I remembered it was short but didn't recall it being this short) to the general public it was May 2010. They announced that they were going to stop developing it (switch to sustainment with plans to shut it down) in August 2010. They gave the service 3 months, and said it didn't have sufficient interest.
No shit, it was three-damned-months!
As best I can tell, someone at Google had intended to shut it down from the start. The fact that their attempt to launch it failed doesn't mean that the system (or its concept) had no potential. But killing it did kill the potential, because you needed that critical mass to gain any value from it.
It had federation which would've been useful, but with no public instance there was little reason for a small group to run their own instance. There was no one to talk to.
I agree and disagree. The fact that a giant company tried it and failed, and the fact that Apache Wave just sits there unused both suggest that there likely isn't a business there, but there have been many occasions where a company markets more or less exactly what has been tried unsuccessfully before a tad differently and it suddenly takes off like wildfire.
I would not at all be surprised if something Wave-ish became a huge deal someday, not would I be surprised if a dozen companies tried it and failed before someone makes it work.
If someone buys a Fire Phone and it gets discontinued - well, products getting discontinued is part of life and it doesn't (usually) affect the usage of the one you have.
If Google builds a web service, then that service has the chance to grow to 50m / 100m users before deciding that it is not worth supporting. Law of large numbers says of those 50/100m a non-trivial proportion will invest substantial time in it and get pissed off when they have to make alternative plans.
If Amazon killed Prime Video or Audible, I bet you’d see a pretty huge outcry.