I mean seriously, every time google voice moves to a new platform it loses several features. It's one of the reasons why I avoid Google whenever possible. I went with Office 365 Enterprise over the Google solution for my business, and I use Linux as my primary desktop.

Do you know how badly you have to mess up for a Linux user to look at your offerings and say "Well, I trust Microsoft more"?

These days the same announcements just fill me with dread and I expect the the software/service to be shutdown or gimped to the point of worthlessness within a year.

Reminder that "Core G-Suite" is an official designation, not something I just made up. Right now, their Core G-Suite products are: Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites, Calendars, Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Plus, Keep, Vault, and Jamboard.

If a team was already using the feature they got to keep it for an extra year or so, but otherwise you had to upgrade at double the price to have the feature.

That being said, it is now implemented in an easier to use way.

Don't recall details, but I believe there were a few other minor functionality losses of that type. I had already moved to the higher tier for unlimited storage and data retention tools.

There's a feeling of a stronger and stronger push to get per user revenue up and up with the new Enterprise level functionality coming at "contact us" pricing.

The last "interaction" I had was convincing/reminding someone to make sure the G Suite account/service they were signing up for was indeed HIPAA compliant, and that they had the signed business agreement with Google to put same in force.

Don't know what the pricing for that was/is. It was more a "don't let your partners and manager do this unless you are sure of it and have this in place", in the context of casual conversation.

Anyone else got such an agreement? If the legalese doesn't preclude saying, how's it priced?

But I don’t think they’ve ever dropped products entirely. Although hangouts has been titled a bunch of different things.

Wow, I could not have stated it better myself. AWS is also like Microsoft in that they start high and commit to only dropping price. They also seem to do a pretty good job at customer service which Google has a reputation for lacking (although that is Amazon's bread and butter).

Unlike many other companies' free/beta offers, Google has made no excessive push to free/beta users out of their accounts. Of course, they do keep trying to upsell you, e.g. in the administrator management console or whatever they're calling it.

All the same, yeah, relying on a "free" account for a business is probably not a good idea.

And, you get no tech support beyond reading their help pages.

I mean, point being I don't trust them not to mess up my workflow. Even if I trusted them to not screw with the core g-suite products, I trust Microsoft more than Google at this point.

If you had told me that I would trust Microsoft more than Google 5 years ago I would have literally thought you were insane.

There's also the fact that they needn't deprecate something to remove or degrade features from it, or alter the workflow significantly enough to make it into a product that's no longer worth using.

At Microsoft there was a running joke, “No one got promoted for a refactor”. Piling on more features was the way up.

Especially given https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241

Replace Google with Nintendo.

And before you get angry at me (and I would maybe say justifiably because I grew up with Nintendo as well), I recommend you sit through a few episodes of Zero Punctuation! covering any of the following titles: Mario, Legend of Zelda, Metroid or Smash Brothers and tell me if you detect a theme that that curmudgeon Croshaw is trying to get across.

(Spoiler alert: Outside of their hardware division, Nintendo seems depressingly want for original ideas and IPs as far as gaming franchises go, which is probably a good thing to see Nintendo getting into the 'maker'verse with the switch cardboard stuff)

Even Mario and the Legend of Zelda, which have many many games, try to present something unique and innovative every game.

I don't like to be frontal but I get a feeling that you don't have any idea of what you are talking about.

The same with Zelda. Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword were both attempts to recapture the Ocarina of Time lightning in a bottle. Breath of the Wild really shook things up for the franchise and brought it into the modern era.

And I'm NOT the only person who thinks this way. Nintendo has said so themselves. Five years ago[1]. And we're still got a new device with the same familiar platform drop titles: Mario, Mario Kart and Zelda.

[1]https://www.nbcnews.com/technology/nintendo-admits-it-needs-...

At least Naughty Dog, the creators of Crash Bandicoot got out of their comfort zone and explored multiple different IP, despite Crash ostensibly being to the PS1 what Mario was to the N64, and Sonic the Hedgehog was to the Sega Dreamcast.

So the truth comes out. But the thread is about Google employees redoing the same thing to get promotions with no long-term strategy, which leads to a lot of product churn. What does Nintendo actually have to do with this? If you have grievances with Nintendo, I don't think this is the thread to do it unless you in fact have something productive to add to the conversation.

the easiest way to get a big, shiny product is to just re-launch the same projects over, and over, and over

As someone commented about Hangouts, and me comparing it to other instances where we see similar behavior in the video game space.

It was meant to merely be an analogy and we got off the rails a bit, this was never intended to be some kind of long-winded jab at Nintendo for its own sake.

Had to laugh at the irony here. Arms is newer. You probably forgot about it (ironically) because lots of new IP is forgettable and that's why companies with strong IP and characters use them in more than one product.

But the reason it works is because when Nintendo releases a new Mario or Zelda game, they also change the way it is played, introducing new challenges, dungeons, puzzles, and mechanics throughout the game, and they tend to do this part really really well even if the cast of characters is largely the same from game to game.

Sometimes that isn't the case, the NSMB series really could just disappear and nobody would care at this point, but that doesn't mean Nintendo can't introduce original ideas.

Yahtzee, for his part, cares mainly about two things. Is the story good and is the game fun? The story doesn't always have to be groundbreaking for him to be having fun, but it is a lot more fun for him if it is a good story because oftentimes, that's all he really wants and a lot of the things that make games fun for other people, don't necessarily do it for him. Saving the Princess over and over again also just doesn't do it for him, and I can respect that, but when the writing is really good, he can even enjoy that part of a Mario game. Just check out his Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door review.