[causality0]

Bingo. They didn't even bother to include Stadia support in the latest Chromecast. To me that says nobody high up at Google cares about Stadia in a meaningful way. At this point I'm taking bets on how much Play Store credit Stadia subscribers are going to receive when the service shuts down and all their purchased games evaporate.

The saddest part is, the technology works well. Really well. If Stadia had launched as a Netflix for games it would be very successful. Paying full price for individual games that stop existing as soon as Google gets bored? That's a dangerous investment my friend.

[ljm]

Google basically sounds like a large scale startup incubator where every successful project is doomed to fail.

[causality0]

There's only two outcomes: Either Google gets bored and kills it because it doesn't generate ten billion dollars a year in profit or it becomes so ingrained in our society killing it might cause an angry mob to attack Google HQ with torches and pitchforks.

Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.

[aabhay]

The second one should read “or it becomes a large scale ad data gathering opportunity”. That’s the value of Maps and Gmail IMO.

[chipotle_coyote]

You're implicitly painting "become an unqualified mega-success" and "become a large scale data gathering opportunity" as if they were mutually exclusive, but they're not. It's because Maps and Mail are so wildly successful that they're great data gathering opportunities.

[StillBored]

Wasn't that sort of the point of alphabet? To put these into their own self sustaining "divisions" so they could be spun out easily or at a high level choose to fund them?

[ljm]

I'm sure Alphabet was really a restructuring to optimise tax returns

[alasdair_]

> Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.

They do sometimes. Niantic (Pokemon Go) used to be part of Google Maps (well, Geo) and they spun out completely.

[gonehome]

They do sometimes do that, Loon 'graduated' to become its own company that issued its own shares and has since died.

Waymo is another spin off company.

The structure of Alphabet exists for this purpose.

[im3w1l]

My guess would be that disentangling a project from all proprietary dependencies is very expensive.

[Traster]

It's actually a pretty interesting element of Google, their adherence to a centralized infrastructure must make spin offs and acquisitions incredibly difficult.

[arthurcolle]

Couldn't the spun out company just license the centralized compute infrastructure and subsequently migrate as needed?

Seems easy enough, unless I'm missing something here

[_ea1k]

> Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.

They would only do that if the spinoff made them a noticeable amount of money. I suspect that is rarely the case.

[tclancy]

Do you mean the Google TV? Because Chromecast Ultra has been how you use Stadia from the start. Google TV support is apparently coming this year but yeah, I am suspicious of the whole thing. Worst case, I am out $60 for the controller and not all my email or something.

[notatoad]

the latest chromecast is the "Chromecast with Google TV", also called the 3rd-gen chromecast. The Chromecast ultra is the previous generation.

https://store.google.com/ca/product/chromecast_google_tv

[the-dude]

That is one of the most obnoxious sales pages I have seen in a while. WTF is up with the scrolling?

[mikestew]

Meh, another HN complainer going on about<click>...OMG, what the hell is up with that web page?! That some truly nausea-inducing scroll behavior. Is there a RNG behind it somewhere?

[causality0]

I'm talking about the "Chromecast With Google TV", which is the official replacement for the Chromecast Ultra.