[george3d6]

You may not be the target audience though, the target audience are probably people that aren't yet "bough into" the google ecosystem. So they are unaware of this axing policy. Anyone logging into chromium, using gmail and google calendar and an android device is already "theirs".

What they want is to increase the share of people that are in the MS ecosystem (and presumably also OSX ecosystem, but that's mostly a status signaling thing, so the strategy there is probably different).

[addicted]

You will be surprised how many people are indeed aware of Google’s axing policy, if not even consciously.

The reality is that so many of them have been burnt by Google. Picasa was an extremely popular photo management platform used by many. Google Play Music was extremely popular. Google Plus was not exactly popular but touched nearly every Google user, was highly promoted, and then disappeared. And then you come to the massive list of chat and calling apps that Google has arbitrarily spun up, promoted, and then killed.

But even if we go with the idea that regular people are unaware of Google’s tendency, even subconsciously, there’s also the fact that the way most products become popular is through a smaller subset of influencers. And tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies.

[deaddodo]

> Google Play Music

This one irritates me most. GPM was mature and required...what? Minimal maintenance at this point?

But no, how about we completely rebuild a music service on top of YouTube, miss a bunch of minor simple features that every streaming service offers (you know, like save current playlist/radio as Playlist) and FORCE every user over to this far inferior service.

At least with transitions like MOG->Beats->Apple Music, it made since as the entire corporate entity changed. But Google just...literally can’t invest in anything that takes a small ounce of manpower to manage.

At this point, OP is correct. The Google “curse” is well known and few people trust their whim-products, no matter their investment/marketing budget.

[echelon]

> Google Play Music

The perfect music service and discovery engine. Axed for no cause.

I don't like Spotify or Pandora, and I'm filled with seething hatred for Youtube Music. I keep trying to use it, but it's horrible and doesn't play what I want to listen to. How can you design an app that's so bad that it actively does what you don't want?

YouTube Music plays meme videos [1, 2] in my alternative music stream. And anime music I listened to ten years ago in the middle of my EDM. Seriously what the fuck, Google? I never asked to mix my YouTube viewing experience with my music tastes.

For the first time in my life, I've stopped listening to music. I want to go back to managing my own highly curated playlists, but it's too much work to set up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxp8qPEwSXM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jofNR_WkoCE

[dTal]

>For the first time in my life, I've stopped listening to music. I want to go back to managing my own highly curated playlists, but it's too much work to set up.

I'm sorry, I'm sympathetic to your main point but this reads to me as... silly, to put it lightly. Google made you give up on music? You could do nothing but play CDs and still have absurdly more access to music than anyone in history. Music has literally never been more abundant, discoverable, and obtainable than it is today. The technology to replay it has never sounded better for a given price, and never been more ubiquitous. Neither has the tech to create it - there is an incredible Cambrian explosion of musical styles happening right now, as more people than ever before have access to studios and are using the internet to borrow and remix each other's work in interesting ways. This is an incredible golden age for music. And you can't be bothered because Google axed a product? Can't even be bothered to do it the old way?

[hobs]

This was the one digital service I was happy to pay google for and caused me a 100% ban on their consumer services going forward.

Google music hadnt changed in a few years, so of course we need to get a promotion by destroying it and replacing it with something that might grow faster but definitely wont.

[WorldMaker]

Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their endless rebrands, but its not like they rewrote Lync from scratch when they renamed it to Skype for Business. Google seems to have adopted a similar marketing-driven rebrand culture ("Google Play is a confusing brand and right now consumer confidence is in the YouTube brand, we should move our media streaming holdings to the YouTube brand") but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken.

[dragonwriter]

> but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken.

I think that inverts history. The YT Music implementation and brand existed long before the decision to replace GPM with it. The branding decision followed most of the reimplementation, it didn't provide an excuse for it.

Google has a strong tendency to have multiple parallel offerings in a field for a while before consolidating them (and, also, a history of botching the consolidation.)

[WorldMaker]

My impression from second and third hand sources was still that YT Music implementation and brand was after GPM was asked to "code freeze" and the team directed to other projects (including some to YTM). That the products stood side-by-side for so long is only further indictment on the rewrite-the-world approach that it took them so long to reach "feature parity" enough that they felt comfortable sunsetting GPM, well after the writing had been on the wall, the development ended, and the marketing decision to change brands had been handed down.

The multiple parallel offerings thing is of course its own problem that seems to often indicate communications issues up/down the decision chains, but specifically with reference to GPM/YTM I heard it was more a symptom of a rewrite than one of those communication breakdowns. Though again, that's only from impressions I got from scuttlebutt I heard second and third hand.

[int_19h]

Lync itself was a rebranding of Office Communicator, by the way.

[WorldMaker]

Yes, that factored in as another reason it was a good analogy.

[sellyme]

> But no, how about we completely rebuild a music service on top of YouTube, miss a bunch of minor simple features that every streaming service offers (you know, like save current playlist/radio as Playlist) and FORCE every user over to this far inferior service.

I still can't work out how I'm supposed to listen to an mp3 on my phone now. YT Music has a "Device Only" button which I thought was simple enough, but then it just refuses to actually play anything I select.

[ddingus]

Force...

Yeah, I am not going to use the new thing at all. Will go the same way the last new thing did.

Repeat this a few times and users are seeking. I am.

[ssully]

I was surprised when my Dad, someone completely detached from the tech world, brought up Google's tendency to cancel stuff. He was a Google Music subscriber and still uses Chromecast Audio. Last year he tried buying another Audio device to discover it was discontinued, and then over the summer got notifications related to Music being cancelled. He was super disappointed!

In January he started looking into getting some IoT cameras for his house (a doorbell and something for the backyard, nothing crazy). He was looking at Nest, but the moment I mentioned Nest is owned by Google, he stopped looking at their products.

Cancelling products and services that people use and rely on leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. I used to excuse it, but in the last 5-6 years Google has done away with about 4-5 services that I used daily. It's honestly too much and I won't put the time into using their products anymore.

[roywiggins]

My grandmother mourns Picasa and PicasaWeb to this day.

[ballenf]

My father was so proud of having uploaded all his music to Google Play. It was the single largest source of loyalty for him to Android over iPhone. With the iPhone's missing back button being second.

And since Hangout chat used to be integrated with gmail, many a gmail user saw deprecation notices for ages now. And terribly unhelpful deprecation notices at that. They basically said something like "I'm going to stop working soon. You should do something about that."

[deaddodo]

To be fair, the music he uploaded does transfer to YouTube Music; but that doesn’t help that it’s a far inferior streaming platform.

[harry8]

To be fair to the customer who lacks anything like the power of one of the world's largest corporations:

he is the victim of a bait-and-switch.

[harry8]

> tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies.

This is huge, bigger than most acknowledge. Most people don't understand the tech and why should they?

"none of my nerd friends use it" vs "all of my nerd friends are on it" is a massive, massive signal about whether something is good or incredibly dangerous, dishonest and a foul trap. There's plenty of the latter about so we're talking about degrees of badness for most. The thinking resembles:

"I'm not super happy with any of this tech and definitely not something that my niece the computer-hacker and cousin the IT guy aren't using. I'll definitely draw a line there."

vs

"Have you heard about signal? It's whatsapp but no facebook tracking." From a family member, friend or acquaintance who you know knows more than you about this stuff.

[abrookewood]

I honestly think that this attitude to shutting things down, plus their piss-poor customer service, is killing any chance that Google Cloud has of succeeding. I'm just not willing to invest any time into the Google ecosystem where there's a high chance that the service will be discontinued or I'll get locked out of my account.

[mjcohen]

We still use Picasa on Windows 7 & 10 and Mac OS X. It works easily on 10.13 (High Sierra) and with some annoyance on 10.14 (Mojave) (requires clicking 5 times on complaining popup when starting, then runs fine).

A good incentive not to upgrade.