I assume you’ve never had the delightful experience of relying on a product Google built or acquired then let decay or killed outright because it doesn’t contribute to ad revenue and the people who cared leveraged it in their promo packet to go elsewhere.
No business has the obligation to keep running what you find useful. If it was that useful, someone else will make it.
If no one is doing it or well, I see no reason to just complain and offer no solution. If there are other solutions and Google is going to hurt or destroy "competition", that's what should be discussed.
You’re allowed to just say I’m right. When Google puts enormous amounts of resources into something like Google Home, then acquires Nest, haphazardly merges the two ecosystems while co-opting the Nest brand for unrelated products, then effectively abandons it except for the occasional update that breaks prior functionality? Sure, no obligation. But I’m not being some sort of whiny brat by pointing out that your experience with Google is driven by what will eventually become forced updates meant to drive you away from a product so they can kill it, because the internal culture/incentives promote launching and not maintaining or improving.
Someone else won't make it because they already have this for free. Well for this particular case, I think having Google product might just be better than none. But for some more critical things like typhoon warning, when people actually make decision based on data from the system, relying on a product that might get killed 5, 10 years later is worse.
If your infra is critical enough, they should nationalized, publicly owned.
> Always curious why people comment like this when they have a choice to, you know, not do it
Not OP, but it's still an important consideration - one can be both glad Google is working on this, but also cautiously optimistic given Google's history. IMO it's right to be wary of private entities taking care of what should effectively be a public service.
Did you mean cautiously pessimistic? Or maybe that's my bias from reading HN threads where this is a reliable theme in Google product threads, as well as seeing the list of killed products, while not seeing a list of kept-alive products