Are we being too hard on Google, or did the company change?
When it comes to launching new products, whether innovative or not, they seem to have launched some of the most used products out there: Gmail, Google Calender, Analytics Google Play, Chrome etc.
They also did their fair share of copying: Galaxy, Cloud etc.
Software wise they've launched Go, Angular, Kubernetes, probably some more.
They've succesfully launched more products than any other corp out there. Even though nothing rivals their search revenue.
Although of lately they've been getting a bad rep with killing projects. Startups we often push to move fast and break things, but from Google we seem to expect more.
Regarding Stadia they handled it nicely, got a full refund after using it for almost a year (except for the subscription which is fair)
Let's say 3B unique people use 100 Google products. Their biggest apps get largest amount of users, but there are disjoint number of users using other products, e.g. 100M using Google Reader, 10M using Stadia and so on.
For Google, independently it might feel like "only 10M users" will be impacted by deprecation, but in total 500M people might get impacted by deprecating 50 smaller products. Google might think, it is less than 1% of our user base, but in reality they impacted 16% of their user base.
1 out 6 people will know that new google product will be killed in 3-4 years. They tell about it to others, eventually it becomes a meme.
We want company's and individuals to be innovative?
But then give them shit for their failures, even if fairly handled. After failure startups leave customers & employees empty handed, Google refunds and pays all.
Even though they've killed many, their successes are really impressive.
Most are small project, or large project that found continuation some other way. (angular, fitbit etc, who cares about hangout?).
Innovation wise Google is still the most diverse out there. FB, Apple etc. are not creating a very diverse list of products.
And yeah and a lot of products fail, but for most large projects they've handled it nicely.
FB also discontinued a lot of products and became a meme. In the end I would rather they keep trying to create something useful instead of just milking their search revenue till the end of time.
I am not arguing about Google's innovation. They innovate, but their definition of "failure" internally is hurting real users and people are losing trust.
People can't give Google a chance all the time, especially when it comes to their livelihood and businesses. I know people who built product on top of Google product, which got deprecated later and hurt their product. Do you think next time they will choose Google immediately again?
> who cares about hangout?
Remember Google Talk? it was awesome, far ahead of its time. If they kept investing to Google Talk, probably WhatsApp, Telegram and other alternatives will be struggling to get users and momentum. Now Google has how many chat apps? 8-9 or 18?
I mean with Nest you might argue the success was already there but with tools as anlytics, maps etc. it was really Google's quality and push that made it.
When it comes to launching new products, whether innovative or not, they seem to have launched some of the most used products out there: Gmail, Google Calender, Analytics Google Play, Chrome etc.
They also did their fair share of copying: Galaxy, Cloud etc.
Software wise they've launched Go, Angular, Kubernetes, probably some more.
They've succesfully launched more products than any other corp out there. Even though nothing rivals their search revenue.
Although of lately they've been getting a bad rep with killing projects. Startups we often push to move fast and break things, but from Google we seem to expect more.
Regarding Stadia they handled it nicely, got a full refund after using it for almost a year (except for the subscription which is fair)