Gotta say, most annoying thing to me was discontinuing support for the Nexus 6p after only 2 years. Made me switch to iPhone for ever.
Any solution that allows you to write stuff on the Interwebs can be misused for spam. The solution that every company is expected to come up with, of course, is a good anti-spam mechanism.
Youtube annotations were a solution offered for free. It probably didn't make any sense for Google to implement a good (and expensive) anti-spam mechanism for it. But let's call it for what it is -- a cost-cutting measure made at the expense of users, most of whom are non-paying. There's no point in bringing up technical matters, there aren't any.
Disclaimer: I work at Google, but don't have insider knowledge on this.
It seems like Google really can't handle long term support of anything that isn't wildly successful (200+ million users), and even for those things that hit said benchmark, long term support is bumpy, inconsistent and unpredictable.
for example, "secure google search" was "killed" but all this means is that instead of having to type "secure.google.com" to use encryption, google made HTTPS the default...
there are lots of legitimate examples so such exaggerations seem unneccessary
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7631341?hl=en
and does not have anything more to do with "anonymous" searching
It clearly says that it provided provided users with anonymous search, which gives the impression of something like DuckDuckGo or Startpage. But that's not what's happening, and I think that's worse than your original complaint.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100524223335/http://www.google...
> Note that SSL search does not reduce the data that Google receives and logs when you search, or change the listing of these terms in your Web History
Searches performed at encrypted.google.com (not just google.com with SSL) were not available in any user-facing capacity in one's Google account. It did not store the search queries in user-facing history, and did not use those terms for future search suggestions.
I'd bet a week's paycheck that Google's list would be the shorter one.
GE may have stopped making a radio your parents bought in 1948, but it's perfectly possible it still works. How many perfectly functional devices have GE bricked simply because they were bored of supporting them? MS Windows drivers support just about every ancient crusty device MS ever made - apparently forever.
It's the web obsession with having every trivial action go through an online server - for data gathering - that breaks the consumer's implied contract with hardware devices: That they should simply work until physically beyond economic repair.
Most of those simple web API actions could function just as well on the LAN, so the device could function indefinitely - you'd just lose remote access when the Google API server shuttered. The 99% case of controlling lights or thermostat whilst in the home would still work, just no longer remotely from a hotel 1,000 miles away.
But it's curious that you only hear cries of outrage when Google kills products, not when other companies do it.
Why do you think that is?
------
Media Center
Kinect
Zune
PlaysForSure DRM
Microsoft Money
Windows Home Server
Microsoft Kin Phone
Microsoft Mobile, previously known as Nokia
Windows 10 Mobile
The Band
TechNet
Hotmail
Live Messenger
Live Mesh
Groove Music Pass
Groove Music for iOS
Groove Music for Android
Encarta
Windows Small Business Server
Flight Simulator
Microsoft Works
Microsoft FrontPage
Windows Embedded Automotive, formerly Microsoft Auto, formerly Windows CE for Automotive, formerly Windows Automotive, formerly Windows Mobile for Automotive
If you already bought them, Microsoft Money, Encarta, Flight Sim, SBS, Works etc etc should all keep working. If you still have the CD you can probably install just fine, and keep on using them (if it's still meaningful). I'm sure plenty do just that, and perhaps some will for decades. Just no more new versions are coming. Sure MSN Messenger and other online offerings have been hard stopped.
For most of your list, no one hit what's effectively a remote kill switch, and stopped them working for everyone at the same moment. That's what killing an API does for an internet service, or hardware device dependent on that service. On such and such date $thing will cease working. Google does that all the time, hardware and software. So much that they got themselves a reputation for it.
Didn't wear out, die of old age, become obsolete, but they reached out and killed. It's qualitatively different.
All those would still work btw. You just wouldn't get updates / newer versions of them.
But if you're talking about services that rely on online servers it seems different. And these are services that no longer work once the plug is pulled.
For MS the list I can pull from memory is far shorter. In fact, i only remember Zune. I bet i missed several, but more than Google?
When Google pulls the plug on Nest, they burn an entire ecosystem, and piss off the people they should be working with on IoT. It's really stupid strategy.
Let's instead just evaluate Google's behaviour as it is.
The difference is probably visibility.
Microsoft have for the longest time been hiding in the cushy enterprise segment where customers pay you halt development and kill products.
Closed-off products. Perhaps not even a resonable API. Definitely not public facing.
I’m kidding about enterprise software, but it’s kind of true.
This point was about “enterprise” software in general and the fact that many a project has been abandoned and put down in this space without much fanfare.
Also, many big companies tend to pay a lot of money for software the never actually use, hence “cushy”.
They’re competitive on prices too (although it’s tough when many of your direct competitors are free). Compare MS Office with something like Maya or AutoCAD, say.
First of all I’m talking developer exposure.
Many angry devs have sat in their cubicle swearing at MS & others product teams for changes made or products dropped. These products doesn’t necessarily have the visibility of google services.
What I’m further trying to say is that it’s a culture thing.
Times are changing and with it the business model of selling standardized crap to clueless, ignorant customers.
How quick this change comes for a company is dependent mostly on the inertia of it’s customer base i guess.
Businesses are starting realize that you need to take back control of data and process to increase opportunities for innovation as well as speedy delivery.
This culture has in ways been pioneered by for example google and others selling/providing services rather than software suites.
They have constant change as an inherent property of their organization and this leaks.
This is ofc just my take on it.
(Digression regarding prices: maya and cad are business drivers. You need to compare them to SAP or possibly the bizdev stuff from MS == not cheap)
I’m coming at it mostly as a client-side developer, comparing to platforms like macOS, iOS and Android (and the web!) where things are constantly in flux, with new APIs added and old ones deprecated.
Compared to those, Windows and .NET are extremely stable; they add new APIs, sure, but old ones tend to stick around and keep working for a long time (some would argue too long).
That’s not to say I like Microsoft platforms and APIs; they tend to be badly-designed, buggy and fragmented. But in my experience at least, old MS APIs keep on working whereas old Google APIs get deprecated and shut down. It’s a very different developer experience, with different upsides and downsides.
I’ve spent far too much time in the “enterprise” spectrum of this business and arguably this is were MS for example have made the bulk of it’s fortune.
The flux you mention could for many be a “good thing” assuming you can keep pace?
Edit: I want to add that this is a really easy problem to solve. Support or create an open standard for the communication between the device and the server. Allow the device to be reconfigured to communicate with other servers. Then you can shut down your service and owners can keep on going. Better yet, make it so that our device can communicate on the LAN without needing a server at all. These problems exist not because they’re some inevitable fact of life, but because these companies see more value in not fixing them.
If you as a user or third party provider integrated with this API and rely on it for functionality, you have no alternative nor recourse.
> As a Works with Nest developer and partner, you will not be able to access or control Nest devices once the Works with Nest APIs are turned off on August 31, 2019. Moving forward, our team will focus on making Works with Google Assistant the most helpful and intelligent ecosystem for the home, enabling all of the products in your users’ homes to work together. We encourage all smart home developers to visit the Actions on Google Smart Home developer site to learn how to integrate your devices or services with the Google Assistant.
Beyond this, apps can be updated to remove or decrease support for older devices, and here our focus on trying to insist on auto-updated apps to fix security problems, or on apps that are designed to receive server-side updates, causes significant problems.
At some point, for example, I'm going to have to stop using the Philips Hue app, because I have an older Hue bridge. Support for the older bridge was at some point removed from the main app (and accompanied by an advertisement for the newer bridge), and moved to a legacy one, which seems to have a significantly slower response time. Now the legacy app has popups noting that web services will no longer support older hubs, and other services will be degraded... along with advertisements for the newer hubs. I expect at some point the app will simply be intentionally broken, entirely.
Fortunately, in this case, I can just use other apps, and other systems entirely, if need be, and at least the older hardware supports entirely local APIs (unless Philips decides to push a firmware update to break them?). I'm certainly not going to replace hardware that works with new hardware that provides no benefits, and throw away the old hardware; this would make no sense.
We call it the tech industry but 90% of it is actually politics. Big money influences things the most but everyone basically looks out for their own interest, right down to programmers shilling their favourite language/framework. Thats what makes this a difficult problem.
Google, though, is unusual that most of their users are not Google customers. They are the product. So Google's relationship to most individuals is statistical, not personal. If they care about me as an individual, I have never seen the slightest sign of it.
I also think that a lot of things at Google get started and killed not on the business merits, but due to shifting internal politics. Most of my Google friends have left, so I don't have recent examples, but from what I hear Google Plus is a fine example of something launched because a powerful executive got excited. As the political winds shifted, though, it got neglected, and then eventually killed.
Another interesting example for me is Google Reader. I liked the product, but was never clear to me why they built it. They ignored it for a long time and then shot it in the head. Giving it away crushed the market for commercial RSS readers. Once they stopped, that market came back, proving that Google could have had a successful commercial product if they had bothered to run it like a real business.
So no, I don't think we expect them to continue all things indefinitely. But I would love to see a more clear logic for what they will continue to support, because from my perspective it's erratic. I would be very unlikely to build a company that depended on Google; despite having used them for 20 years, I still don't think I can predict their business strategy. In contrast, I've been using Amazon for a similar period, and I have a pretty good idea of what they'll do. I'm not worried they'll EOL the AWS services I use, for example.
Let's ban Google from working on life-saving medical devices, because they will just get bored and stop supporting the software.
So what? That's between the car buyers and Google. Why should they be disallowed?
US Federal Trade Commission, https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements... (1983)
> The basic question is whether the act or practice is likely to affect the consumer's conduct or decision with regard to a product or service. If so, the practice is material ... because consumers are likely to have chosen differently but for the deception ... the Commission will find deception if there is a representation, omission or practice that is likely to mislead the consumer acting reasonably in the circumstances, to the consumer's detriment.
I don't know if anyone at TJ Maxx even understands that these are not items they can sell, as they don't work anymore. I think they think they're just fancy watches.
They will get a fraction returned. So, they still profit.
Big companies like that need fines big enough to risk closing them down for doing stuff like this. No reason for them to care otherwise.
They either know, or have purposefully arranged things so the people who know enough aren't burdened with knowing everything. Neither is acceptable.
They could be idiots who don't know what they're doing, but then they wouldn't still be in business.
I returned cheap electronics to a UK store recently, it was very clear the entire batch didn't work, indeed it was probably why they were on offer. People will say "oh it was only a couple of quid, won't bother taking it back". Still on sale. I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't reshelved the non-working ones I returned.
Safety-critical() physical infrastructure is different than internet services. Applying laws for one to the other makes no sense.
() remember when all the Nests’ batteries died at the same time one winter?
Consider it an incentive to avoid dependencies on external services.
Perhaps there's a legislative solution. Although in the UK the Consumer Rights Act has no time-limit, so in theory of your thermostat stops working because the company decided to pull the plug then you can get refunded, at least.
I'd like to see something like a requirement to publish interoperability details, or code that runs on a major OS that operates as a server, to facilitate long term user-led support, too.
The requirement to publish interoperabilty-details/code/etc. is something I see as far more burdensome, perhaps in some cases to the point of being impractical, which is sad because I actually value these properties quite highly. I don't own any products that rely on the API of a specific company to continue functioning, and as an individual consumer I reward companies that do release such details (albeit in a statistically insignificant way). The simple, obvious reason that this is burdensome is because the release of code helps competitors, and requiring a company to help competitors makes it more likely that they will decide to invest in some less-regulated industry instead. There's a logical reason that most software companies aren't open-sourcing their products, unfortunately. Also, and I disagree with this yet don't want to force my opinions of the world on other peoples' infosec decisions, some people argue that closed source software is more secure than open source software due to security through obscurity. More rarely, I can imagine edge-case IoT devices that rely on highly specific infrastructure where interoperability just isn't reasonable, and the question of which layer interoperability should be provided on is non-obvious. Imagine if SpaceX launched a swarm of satellites measuring some data about the Martian atmosphere and released a product that could tell you the measurements when asked. Do they need to provide the details of the API between the product and the Earth-based relay? Do they need to provide the details of the connection between the Earth-based relay and the Martian satellite swarm? Do they need to provide the details of the internals of the satellites themselves? What if they're the only company anywhere near being able to supply this service, and the technology will almost certainly be obsolete by the time another company manages to launch a Martian satellite swarm? I feel like this probably isn't the best example, but there might be better examples I'm too dumb to think of at the moment, and not at least considering those known-unknown potential scenarios might be harmful to society as a whole (but I think I've articulated this last point worse than the rest of my comment, and I'm not entirely convinced of it myself).
[0]Edit: on further thought, this hampering effect should only really exist if there is a minimum time from date-of-sale that the minimum EOL must extend to; if I can meet the requirements while selling a product that is only guaranteed to work until yesterday then it shouldn't have any real effect other than consumer awareness, but it also kind of takes the teeth out of the proposal.
There are also some products in there that were killed in a fashion that seemed capricious and difficult-to-explain in terms of popularity, usage and continued cost to Google - notably Reader and Code Search.
To that end, I'm not sure I see the value in framing this specifically as a Google thing. Google is maybe the most visible because of how many products it has, and how popular many of them are. But really, this sort of thing is a problem that's inherent to any IoT devices that rely on proprietary cloud services, in whole or in part.
These services typically include some language in the EULA to the effect of, "We can disable parts of this device from our end, for any reason, at any time." And agreeing to those is almost certainly precondition for using the device.
Which absolutely sucks. But it's the legal and consumer protection environment we live in right now. Pretending it isn't is -- hang the downvotes, I'm gonna double down on this -- pollyannaish. Until things change, your only real recourse as a consumer is to refuse to buy products that are sold under those sorts of terms. Which, unfortunately, does mean steering clear of IoT devices that rely on proprietary cloud services.
I'm a big user of Play music but can see the signs a mile off that it's being pushed into closing because of YouTube music, a service is straight up worse so I'll have to look around for alternatives.
Not because it's not a valid criticism but because people seem to think they are the only person ever to make that damn joke.
Anything less than that means you're relying on a temporary situation whose end you don't control and can't predict.
Is that backed up by anyone else?
Then they came for Google+, and I did not speak out—Because almost all the people I want life updates from are on Facebook.
Then they came for Google Reader, and I did not speak out—Because I never actually heard of Reader until years after it was eliminated. Maybe Reader was actually first?
Then they came for Works with Nest, and I smugly said, "I told you so"—Because I always thought it was a bad idea to expose my thermostat to the internet.
Finally, they game for GMail—and I couldn't contact anyone who might speak out for me.
I use InboxZero through Beeminder, and could see Beeminder being locked out.
Then its impossible for the functionality to evaporate.
Ask the xmpp/jabber folks about hangouts.
I can see them keeping it around for enterprise for a bit longer, though.
Also, unless you're using IMAP to sync the entire mailbox, you'd still lose. If your mail program only stores e.g. last 30 days of mail locally, and lets everything else live on the mailserver, then you'd only have 30 days worth of e-mails left.
The first is out of character for google and the second is totally within your control.
All your mail is for most people merely GB at most per user.
Doesn’t mean they can’t get rid of it.
Furthermore if you have an up to date sync on the day imap support ends then you have all your email and need face only changing over to a new address or if you already use a custom domain logging on and changing the email provider.
One can dream. :-)
Looking back, I guess it served as a kind of instagram/facebook feed, but for the internet that I wanted to see (which would differ from time to time, sometimes i want webcomics, sometimes I want ffffound <- this is largly something social media has yet to pick up on, the ebb and flow of what our attention wants). But no social media has captured my attention like Reader did...
I use Feedly now too but I still miss my Reader band.
“Well, sure, they shut down that API I don’t use — big deal; all things come to an end eventually! But, they’d NEVER do that to this API I rely on — that would be so horrible, Google just would not do it!”
I hope we all can acknowledge that this argument is on perpetually eroding ground, at the very least.