I think my parent comment gets pretty close to the heart of the issue. I don't think it deserves its downvotes. It is a problem of employee incentives.
There are multiple internal approaches to building things. Several of these approaches get funding and head count based on the amount of influence of the people who back them.
Decisions about which product to present to the public are made on technical merit with little consideration to consistency in user experience. The resulting chaos leaks to the end user.
Once a product has launched successfully, the best members (not just engineers) of the team that built it diffuses back into the main body of Google to work on other cool projects (they now have the required political momentum). Product enters stagnation phase.
In 2 - 4 years a technologically slightly better alternative is picked. No one thinks about how to make this switch seamless for their users. End users suffer even harder.
Plenty of people think about it, but the incentives are not set up to center these thoughts in the conversation about what to do. As with most publicly visible problems at any company, this is at its heart a failure of leadership. (Or a success of leadership, if it is indeed what the market and cost structure of the business rewards. I do not have sufficient insight into the financial side to know which. Just because a business makes a decision that is unpopular with its customers does not automatically mean that the decision is bad for the business.)
I agree, it is hard to say whether a decision that fucks over customers is actually bad for Google.
For example, the decision to start charging users for storage beyond 15GB. Even though I am not happy about it, I am paying and it looks unlikely that I will leave the Google ecosystem anytime soon.
The interesting thing about Google, though, is that they have so many products that they can actually run experiments over different approaches to product development.
Unfortunately, I doubt many people at Google would want to experiment with a product development approach by putting their career progression at risk.
> For example, the decision to start charging users for storage beyond 15GB.
If a company decides to stop giving customers free goods, it is not "fucking over customers." Doing something nice for a person for a time does not create any kind of moral or social obligation to keep doing that thing.
IMO it is at minimum grey area when company introduces “free unlimited/little limits” while having clear understanding that it is not sustainable and then start charging people after they have moved all their archives to gDrive.
> while having clear understanding that it is not sustainable
That hasn't been demonstrated. It could be that when the decision was made to offer free/unlimited storage, there were beliefs about the economics of that option -- particularly, the rate of change in durable storage pricing and performance -- that ended up not being borne out. (I am not privy to any special knowledge about this, but it is at least plausible based on how the storage business had been working for the years leading up to 2015.)
I agree in general that teaser rates -- as opposed to well documented free tiers -- are at best a gray area.
Haha, I agree with you in general, but I still see that particular decision as fucking over customers.
I was still at Google when the design doc for that particular decision leaked and was not convinced by the reasoning. These are the kind of decisions that don't affect the wealthy fuck over the poor.
Unfortunately, it is really difficult to measure the opportunity cost of lost data and lost users.
> Unfortunately, it is really difficult to measure the opportunity cost of lost data and lost users.
Additional data could be considered more of a liability than an asset, as it's more data to protect and store and more data that could potentially be exposed in a breach. Likewise, it may be good to lose users who aren't paying but are storing tons of data with us -- which as we've already established can be thought of as a liability. It's good to have a free tier to show the customer the value we can deliver, but if the customer doesn't get enough value from us to pay the (IMO very reasonable) prices for what we're offering, then maybe they would be better served with a different provider -- at least for bulk photo and video storage. This is not a bad thing, IMO.
I also worked at Google. Now I'm using Google's Flutter to build a mobile app. I worry that Flutter will stagnate and become unusable on mobile before I can afford native rewrites. Flutter's mobile support is already stagnating. Flutter Team has left many mobile features half-implemented: iOS widgets [0], dark mode [1], location [2], and camera [3]. They even hired an outside company to work on Flutter mobile extensions [4]. Flutter's engineers have moved on to web and desktop. Others have written [5] about this.
Beware depending on any Google tool for your business.
I see you're being downvoted, but I do wonder to what degree that might be true. Working on a team that maintains something old isn't terribly glorious. Rename the product, and now you have a "product launch" on your resume.
There are multiple internal approaches to building things. Several of these approaches get funding and head count based on the amount of influence of the people who back them.
Decisions about which product to present to the public are made on technical merit with little consideration to consistency in user experience. The resulting chaos leaks to the end user.
Once a product has launched successfully, the best members (not just engineers) of the team that built it diffuses back into the main body of Google to work on other cool projects (they now have the required political momentum). Product enters stagnation phase.
In 2 - 4 years a technologically slightly better alternative is picked. No one thinks about how to make this switch seamless for their users. End users suffer even harder.
Used to work at Google.