> So much collateral damage with nothing to show for it.
Yes. I think if Google wants to keep its dominant position, they need to rethink how they do management.
What I said in the parent post about Google Talk could also apply to other product lines. They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards. As a consumer, I don't take most of their offerings seriously because they are so short-lived and confusing. Why shall I put my money on something that might be killed or phased out soon?
From what I've heard from some insiders, other Alphabet branches seem to have equivalent management issues. It's sad because they have a significant amount of resources and they could be delivering tons of value to the society.
I've mentioned this before, but I agree wholly. Google's product "strategy" gets shit on all the time (killedbygoogle.com), but the real issue is that the company is structured as if that's what they want to have happen. It's a loose association of warring VPs trying to establish big enough fiefdoms to be able to buy a third house. There's no real benefit to maintaining existing products for them. They just want to reorg things so they can amass more and more reports and justify their next enormous equity refresh. Killing old products to "make room" for new hotness is a pretty good way to do that.
It took them the failure to dominate the next two new markets and the fear of remaining rich but becoming marginal.
With the internet they had a success with IE but saw companies developing their services with new non Visual*/.Net languages and running them on Linux and MySQL.
> They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards.
And the latest: TensorFlow -> TensorFlow 2 -> JAX{Haiku, Flax}. This one is especially egregious because it's foundational for Google's own technology.
Yes. I think if Google wants to keep its dominant position, they need to rethink how they do management.
What I said in the parent post about Google Talk could also apply to other product lines. They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards. As a consumer, I don't take most of their offerings seriously because they are so short-lived and confusing. Why shall I put my money on something that might be killed or phased out soon?
From what I've heard from some insiders, other Alphabet branches seem to have equivalent management issues. It's sad because they have a significant amount of resources and they could be delivering tons of value to the society.