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by tivert
813 days ago
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> I doubt it has anything to do with the direct cost of maintenance. Google has a tendency to introduce multiple products that serve similar markets, as the article cited with Podcasts and YouTube Music. Besides both using audio files, Podcasts and Music are totally different markets, with different use cases, etc. Are spreadsheets and games in similar markets, because they both use graphics on video screens? Jamming them together because of some superficial similarity is a stupid simplification, even if many users already do things sub-optimally. Google really needs to get some cheap offshore teams that can do maintenance on the products they'd otherwise kill. They'd stop burning so much goodwill that way. |
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Slightly more realistic examples would be "spreadsheets and databases" or "spreadsheets and word processors". Plenty of people use a spreadsheet when data is represented in a tabular format, even when it isn't the most appropriate tool. (Tangentially, I've also heard of 4x games referred to as spreadsheet games. Though that's more of a description of play style than presentation!)
Don't get me wrong. I agree that podcasts shouldn't be jammed in with music. At least for myself. Yet when Google's numbers are saying that about a quarter of people access podcasts through YouTube, there are clearly a lot of people who do not agree!