[JumpCrisscross]

> Half of this list is side projects which didn't work out, which is understandable to a certain degree

What happens to the people who bet on them? Do they even have a point of contact if e.g. an integration breaks? That’s the point. They’re half-baked products being put out and pulled with no care in the world. That’s the brand.

Which means when a Stadia comes out, a product that could have worked if people trusted it, nobody budges. Because half the crap Google ships are “side projects which didn’t work out,” a list which apparently now includes its cloud.

[londons_explore]

They really just need clear branding between "This is a side project, we might take it away with just a months notice" and "This is a product we will give you many years notice and a migration path if we decide to get rid of it".

I think they should label everything in the former category "experimental". Put the label right in the logo so it is really obvious.

[prepend]

They used to have “google labs” but stopped it (haha) with some stupid explanation that it wasn’t needed any more because everything is a lab, or something like that.

And of course gmail was in beta for many years.

[lolinder]

I honestly think that a lot of these side projects should be released under a different brand name. Kind of like how GM has different brands for their luxury cars, or Disney had Touchstone Pictures for their less-child-friendly movies. If a project is one employee's 20% time or one manager's promotion project, it should be released under a different brand name. It can always be rebranded if it becomes an actual business priority.

[ajsnigrutin]

They could just use some google name that clearly implies it's not a "main" (long-term) product, eg. "Google Labs", "Google Beta", etc. too, so you clearly know that it's a "toy" that might not exist anymore very soon. If they use eg. "Aviato" brand for some new product, people will expect more... and then get burned.. again.

[arcbyte]

They used to do public betas. I remember Gmail being labeled beta in the early days.

[amenghra]

Gmail was in beta for 5 years, from 2004 until 2009 — imho it didn’t make much sense to label something as beta when it is used by ~1B people.

[kmlx]

i think it's about expectations

[londons_explore]

Thing is... imagine they had announced "Thanks for being part of the gmail beta. We learnt a lot, but have now decided to close GMail. You have 3 days to download your emails and find a new email provider".

A lot of people would have been very pissed off, even though it said 'beta'.

[arcbyte]

As I remember, it would have been very odd for them to do that in 2008 or 2009 when it was so immensley popular. But that was 4 or 5 year into it's life, well beyond the typical lifetime of Googles products.

Them shutting it down in 2005 or 2006 would have been annoying or disappointing like the shutdown of Google Wave but understandable.

It's all about brand expectations. Google is synonymous with unreliability because they don't have another brand to shoulder that association. It used to be "Beta" but no longer.

[hn_throwaway_99]

The point is that their "release stage" marking was always fantasy land. Yes, I would be pissed if they had shut down GMail after 4 years, regardless of whether it was marked "Beta", because by that point it had a ton of users and clearly a ton of investment.

A big problem is that nobody believes their designations anyway. GMail was in beta for years when it was obviously a mature product, while "Of course we're investing a ton in Stadia..." only to shut it down a couple months later.

[cptaj]

I think its about copping out of any responsibility.

Sure, go ahead. But the market will take notice if you do that.

[amenghra]

It’s impossible to go back in time and tell, but I bet lots of companies were opting for Microsoft Exchange/Web Outlook around 2007-2008, because Gmail was advertised as beta.

If they had removed the beta label sooner, they might have attracted businesses to GSuite sooner?

It’s a fine line to walk: you want to iterate quickly on one hand but some users need stability on the other.

[kmlx]

right, that too. but i prefer the honesty of having the “beta” label than the lack of it.

[voytec]

Yeah, with unlimited storage for life. Acquiring userbase with empty promises is their M.O.

[wolrah]

When was Gmail ever sold as unlimited? When it came out the big deal was that it offered 1GB, which absolutely destroyed the 5-10MB most free providers were offering at the time.

I recall a time where they were raising the limit constantly and even advertised that fact, that for most users your available space was going to increase faster than you could use it, but there was always a limit somewhere.

[voytec]

Wasn't it marketed as unlimited during invite-only beta?

[lolinder]

No, 1GB was the starting point and was considered insane at the time. Then they eventually added a counter where the storage space grew all the time. They finally capped that out—maybe that's what you're thinking of?

[thfuran]

Wasn't it originally 1 GB? Then they doubled it on April fools one year and started increasing it from there.

[ssdspoimdsjvv]

It even had a counter that was continuously incrementing (at the end by an incredibly low rate, but still)

[ortusdux]

When Gmail finally left beta after 4+ years it had well over 100m users. Some argued that the beta label slowed early adoption, while others felt that it allowed more leniency with regards to problems and downtime. I could see members of the first group have a lingering desire to avoid new products getting stuck in beta.

[comte7092]

> "This is a product we will give you many years notice and a migration path if we decide to get rid of it".

Is that even the standard procedure at google though? There are plenty of projects where they’ve unceremoniously pulled the plug with little notice, stadia is a glaring example (though to googles credit, they did provide some refunds)

[bogwog]

Why would I invest in games/hardware for Stadia if Google themselves admit that it might get shutdown at anytime?

Lying to consumers is the safer (short term) bet.

[rvnx]

They did something nice, instead of leaving the users with a brick, they refunded all users who bought Stadia products through official channels.

(sadly, to get official distribution, you need to be part of the "worldwide deployment" of Google products, and it's often a lie that actually menas "we deployed in many large countries except yours")

[camdenreslink]

Stadia presumably would not have the experimental label because it was such a large investment.

[scarface74]

That won’t help. How is the general audience suppose to know the difference between “experimental” and “beta”?

Maybe it’s important that they act like a grown up company and have some focus instead of throwing random shit up against the wall like apes in a zoo on a crack.

[sanderjd]

Yeah but what will actually happen (has already happened) is just a lot fewer (to none) experimental projects.

That's a bit of a bummer, but probably fine. Just one of those things about working at a grown up company rather than a scrappy upstart.

[agentdrtran]

they did this alrady with Tables, they labeled it an area120 project. they really need to do this for more stuff

https://tables.area120.google.com/u/0/about

[jacquesm]

Google really messed up their roll outs of new products so often that it is almost a meme.

You'd be hard pressed to pick a 'worst', between Google Glass, Google Plus, Google Wave and so on the list is long and getting longer all the time. It would be a lot smarter if they launched these separately so that they do not impact the trust relationship people have with their main brand. I don't know any other company besides Yahoo that has managed this in such a terrible way.

[barry-cotter]

Clear worst has got to be whatever they rolled out that was worse than GChat. Just astonishing to go from best in class to unusable in one go.

[soylentcola]

Ironically, it's now actually called "Google Chat". I still use it with plenty of people since it allows me to chat via browser, iOS, or Android without any device/brand restrictions.

But in just about every way, it is the same or worse than their previous offerings (the older "Talk" and the later "Hangouts"). They ditched the option to do SMS fallback in the same app instead of improving on integration. Can't just hit the little camera icon in a group chat to instantly start a group video call anymore. Individual and group chats are in separate tabs. Photo and video handling are worse (but at least not downgraded as badly as MMS between Android and iOS).

Honestly I only use it because it sucks to message with iOS users if you can't use iMessage and I/some of my friends don't use Facebook products like FB or Whatsapp.

[shakna]

That might have been Google Buzz? Which automatically followed people it thought you knew. Like automatically linking someone to an abusive spouse they'd run from, and exposing all their chats to them.

[justinclift]

> ... so often that it is almost a meme.

It became a meme a long time ago.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> What happens to the people who bet on them?

I think that's the whole point though. A lot of the products, if they can even be called that, listed in this article are not even possible to "bet on". I mean, Code Jam?? I think it sucks they shut it down, but annual events and conferences come and go, it's not like people had a right to expect it would go on indefinitely.

I only think about half the items in this list are even possible to invest much time on as an outsider, either a customer or a partner: Stadia (obviously a ton has already been written about that), OnHub (classic "I bought an IoT device that isn't much better than a paperweight after they stopped support), and Google Currents (though that one is marginal - I don't know anyone who used it, also I don't know how seamless the transition to Spaces was).

I think the biggest issue with Google products is that nobody trusts them because they won't stand by any roadmaps. If they had clear, discrete classes of products that they actually stood behind (e.g. "these we'll only guarantee to support for the next 18 months" vs. "these are mature products we stand by"), I think folks would be more OK going into things with eyes wide open. But Google has time and again bullshitted ("Of course we're investing in Stadia..."), or even had things been in beta for years and years when they were obviously mature products, like GMail. And since it's clear Google only really cares about ad revenue, when shit hits the fan and they need to "streamline", like now, anything that doesn't directly support ads like Search, Android, GMail, Chrome, etc. feels like an afterthought.

[martius]

> What happens to the people who bet on them? Do they even have a point of contact if e.g. an integration breaks? That’s the point. They’re half-baked products being put out and pulled with no care in the world. That’s the brand.

So on one hand Google doesn't innovate anymore and is too shy to release anything new, and on the other hand Google can't just get things out and experiment because it would let down people who bet on these experiments.

There is probably an in-between.

> a list which apparently now includes its cloud.

Two years ago Google Cloud was 37k employees[1], which is about 20% of the company. Even if the 12k layoffs were on Cloud that would still be 10-12% of the company.

Calling it a side project and comparing it to a "smart tag embedded in clothing" or even Stadia is just FUD.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-26/google-fa...

[walls]

> So on one hand Google doesn't innovate anymore and is too shy to release anything new

From everything I've read here, the problem is that only innovation is rewarded with promotions. Once a product is released, the people in charge get promoted, and move on to another new project, leaving everything to die.

[martius]

It's something I've heard and read many times, inside and outside of the company, but it's something I haven't really witnessed in my 4 years here.

There are many ways to be promoted and launching something new is definitely not the easiest way.

I understand that it's common to see people leave a team or product once they shipped a promo project, but products don't just die because one or two senior people leave a team.

[bryanrasmussen]

wasn't there an HN thread a couple years ago where Google announced Cloud had a couple years to make money (but without specifying what would happen if it didn't) and now here we are? I'm worried I'm forgetting exactly the dates here since I never keep track of Google Cloud, but I remember a bunch of people announcing they weren't going to use Google cloud because obviously it would be shut down in a few years?

on edit: someone else down thread has a link to it https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

[martius]

From what I can remember, this is a rumor, not something Google "announced".

From the beginning of the article:

> The Google unit, (...) is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.

I'm sure that there are discussions about the strategy, the expected growth and revenue and what to do if these targets aren't met. It totally makes sense to reduce the rate of investments to mitigate risks if the results aren't what was expected, but this doesn't mean "shutting down" Cloud.

From the article:

> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely,

Seriously, Google could even decide to leave the Cloud business eventually, branching it off the rest of the company. But "shutting it down" wouldn't suddenly happen because a spreadsheet shows that Azure has more market shares than Google.

[jsnell]

No. That link is not Google announcing what you claim they did. It's some anonymous person - not Google - claiming they saw some confidential slides to that effect, which Google then denied.

[jabradoodle]

> Because half the crap Google ships are “side projects which didn’t work out,” a list which apparently now includes its cloud.

What do you mean by this? It seems GCP has around 10pc market share and growing.

[jacquesm]

Right up to the point where Google top management decides to pull the plug. Their messaging on this has been most unfortunate, if there is one thing that you can't do as a cloud services provider it is to threaten to pull the plug on the whole division if the numbers don't get into some arbitrary range for their definition of success. That pretty much guarantees that you won't make it that far.

[JumpCrisscross]

Google Cloud “is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding” [1].

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

[tweenagedream]

I work at Google so am perhaps biased, but that article is from 2019 and cloud is now a 20B/yr business and growing. Why does it keep coming up?

[p_l]

Because Google no longer knows how to do customer/developer engagement just as it goes into things that require it more?

It doesn't help that it allows others to push opinion pieces in media that build up memes against its products (I honestly believe it's non-trivial part of what killed Google+ - at some point someone believed at Google about it being "ghost town" and started making it more FB-like and pushing "new people to observe" at you, making it less and less usable).

The infamous "will kill your account on basis of unaccountable algorithm and you can't do anything about it" is another big issue when trying to get clients on GCP. I honestly find GCP to be the best cloud I can use when not going full hog on things like AWS-specific services, yet there's always the fear that Google will just kill the account, possibly shuttering the business.

[okeuro49]

> there's always the fear that Google will just kill the account, possibly shuttering the business.

I get that feeling sometimes about my Gmail account.

If I do get deleted by the algorithm, then I feel the only way I will get support is by posting it on hackernews.

[randomtask]

Presumably because the article linked above says that the rumoured deadline for gaining sufficient market share is this year? Also, yes revenues have been growing, but is GCP profitable after all this time? As you point out, it's been 4 years since that article was published.

[influx]

Is it profitable? Anyone can sell cloud services for 1$ and lose money on every dollar.

Keep doing that long enough, and still be behind AWS by 4x, and you’ll get your plug pulled.

[mehdix]

IIRC, because Google is the only major cloud provider that made such statement.

[jabradoodle]

They didn't though? The source is a single article claiming to have spoken to insiders, which was subsequently denied and never confirmed.

[Spooky23]

There’s a bias here for AWS because they were the early adopter product and have traction with startups.

I think Google is more creative on the business side with GCP and is doing well in the market in a lot of ways. AWS does the circa 1985 “Hi, we’re IBM, fuck you” thing.

Azure doesn’t get the grief GCP does because MS service growth is driven by really complicated deals. Few of the types of people who post here understand it.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Azure doesn’t get the grief GCP does because MS service growth is driven by really complicated deals

The kind crafted by competent sales teams in it for the long haul. Not the rotating cast of characters at Google.

[Spooky23]

Lol. Those account managers these days get purged pretty quickly. MS isn’t Oracle, but it isn’t 2003 either.

“It would be a shame if those O365 E5 went up 30%. How about you buy 50% of your spend on these credits that fell off the truck, and we can forget about that?”

[Yajirobe]

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