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by ssambros 2061 days ago
> How is it that Google create/rebrand/close so many music and chat services over the years.

It's not a rebrand. It's a rewrite. People need them promos.

In many cases, however, rewrites are actually warranted. As underlying infra gets replaced it becomes very expensive to run and maintain legacy services.
1 comments
ehsankia 2061 days ago
Rewrites are warranted, but rebranded every time you rewrite is not. Being able to replace core components while keeping the same brand and feature set is what takes real effort. Throwing everything out and making a completely different app with is imo a bit lazy and bad for the user.

If you truly must change things, gradual piece by piece changes is far prefered than complete 100% replacements like GPM -> YTM.

If they had slowly migrated GPM behind the scene to use Youtube over the years, and then after 2-3 years, just changed the name, I'm sure users would've been far less alienated.

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runawaybottle 2061 days ago
I don’t think Google set up a predictable product iteration unveiling structure. One day I expect to see the PlayStation 6 for example, and one day I expect to see an update to the MacBook, and so on.

One day, do I expect to see an unveiling of a new Gmail UI? None of it is predictable because it feels like they do some serious a/b tests and just silently roll stuff out. They lack a structured presentation timeline. Currently users have no predictable expectations.

When that’s the case, just rename stuff, rebrand stuff, get rid of stuff, who the fuck cares. We didn’t promise the user updates, or even iterations, we simply promised them a one time product.

That’s the only thing that I can think of behind all of this. The simpler answer could just be their product team is not the best of the best for a company that works pretty hard at getting the best.

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ehsankia 2061 days ago
Your two examples at the top are both hardware, those work very differently. Websites used to do massive updates, but many have learned that it just leads to a lot of angry users. Slowly updating one component at a time works much better in my experience, and it's far less change for the user to adapt to at once.
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runawaybottle 2061 days ago
Then I should have used video games as an example. Take a look at our DLC are handled now days.
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