[carrier_lost]

These shutdowns might hurt Google's brand among the tech-savvy community that uses edge products like Google+ or Chromecast Audio (never even heard of that before today).

But everyone I know still uses Google search and Chrome. Most use Gmail. Schools still give students Chromebooks and teach them Google Docs.

I think Google will be fine.

[AJ007]

Yes, Google will be fine because they have an insanely favorable business model. However, if you can’t get the early adopters to use your products the late adopters never will. Why? Because the tech savvy early adopters are the ones who figure out new user interfaces and use cases, and transfer that knowledge to the less capable. They show them examples of why to use something and help when they run in to problems. I’m still helping people use Google search and Gmail.

There is nothing wrong with a company testing and shutting down new products. There is a problem when you say this is Google _______ or Facebook _______ and your customers think it is on the same level as your first tier apps. Amazon does it all the time and most users never know it was an Amazon product. Most users don’t even know Instagram is owned by Facebook.

Consider the exhaustive work Microsoft has done for decades to make things backwards compatible, often at the cost of their current product. No one would expect that from Google. They expect things to be killed off arbitrarily when the product isn’t popular enough.

There are options:

Sell the product to another company

Publish the source code with an open license

Or never stamp your name on the product in the first place

[ocdtrekkie]

I see the "this news only impacts tech people" argument from time to time, but remember that all the non-tech people ask the tech people they know what to use. And tech people are who set up their family's computers, deploy software widely on business networks, etc.

The tech-savvy community was on Google years before the general public, and them leaving Google should set your expectations for what happens with everyone else a few years after that.

[carrier_lost]

"remember that all the non-tech people ask the tech people they know what to use. And tech people are who set up their family's computers, deploy software widely on business networks, etc."

As a techie who has set up and/or fixed many non-techie family & friends' computers and devices, I hear ya. 110%, loud and clear. :-)

However... I wonder how long this will remain true. More and more devices are ready to go out of the box and kids are being taught to use Google products in school.

It's not hard to buy a phone or Chromebook online, log into your Google account and be ready to go.

It's not like the old days when you would have to go to your grandma's house and install a better web browser, antivirus, etc. Most things just work now, for most people.

[ocdtrekkie]

Another aspect to consider is platform support. Look at Google's newest successful platform, Google Assistant. If developers weren't excitedly writing integrations for it, wouldn't it be dead already, with Alexa in the room? Since many new tech services are built as platforms, developer interest and support also becomes a key requirement.

[toast0]

> However... I wonder how long this will remain true. More and more devices are ready to go out of the box and kids are being taught to use Google products in school.

If the Google products change too much, the curriculum will become so wrong as to be unusable. My school taught me Microsoft Word with outdated versions on outdated computers; but that was OK because the book matched the computers; when you eventually run into a more recent Word, you have to dig around to find where they moved the menus and controls, but the core concepts still work. With Google's tendency to move stuff around willy-nilly, I expect the curriculum to become unusably stale --- once you have the core concepts, you can search them out; but if you're still learning, it's really hard when step a of every step in the process is find where they moved the things you're being taught.

[mywittyname]

Google will be "fine," but I've stopped investing in Google products and I'm sure a lot of the tech-savvy community feel the same way. This will make it more difficult for them to get new products off the ground in the future.

They make excellent products, but they just don't want to invest in them long enough to gain widespread appeal. Inbox was a killer app. Now that I've experienced what brilliant email looks like, I'm going to keep a look out for a competing clone and will likely switch.

It's a vicious cycle. Fewer people will invest in new products until they know it will be around in the future, but then Google will shut down product that don't gain enough users. This is a cancer that slowly eats away at the company bottom line.

[fixermark]

From my point of view, if it's a choice between an ecosystem of tools that Google could kill at their whim and an ecosystem of tools floated and maintained by startup companies that could dry up and die at any time, it's a bit of an illusory choice.

[Kaiyou]

Go for open source tools then. If they are good enough for people to get use out of, they usually stay around. At least I can't think of an example where one disappeared for good.

[fixermark]

That's down an axis of "strictly worse than the alternatives." With an open-source ecosystem, I have to set it up and maintain it myself, when it breaks I have to service it by myself (often without a useful community to assist, because my problems are often unique to my special-snowflake configuration), and if I get attacked I'm 100% responsible for digging out of the assault with no recourse or assistance.

None of these are concerns with either Google's online offerings or the offerings of most startups.

[wetpaws]

This is, arguably, a slippery slope. A lot of companies thought of themselves as too big to fail just to be ditched by customers very quickly. The side effect of being complacent is that things work for you until they don't - aol, myspace and yahoo died, microsoft barely dodged the bullet and apple with google are starting to venture into the danger zone.

[iagovar]

Yeah, good luck next time a tech-savvy has to recommend a Google product or something else.