News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them. Parent comment

Re:Average product lifespan of Google products before it kil... by visarga on Saturday November 23, 2019 @02:33AM (#21612938)
> but couldn't this be read with the opposite conclusion as well - that the average time that Google keeps marginal products alive is 4 years

Averages are misleading when the distribution is bi-or-multimodal.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Average product lifespan of Google products before it kil... by cookie_monsta on Saturday November 23, 2019 @03:33AM (#21613101)
So are you saying that it couldn't be read like that?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Average product lifespan of Google products before it kil... by KMnO4 on Saturday November 23, 2019 @09:18AM (#21614209)
Think about how many Google products have lasted much longer than four year: Search, Maps, Gmail, Drive, AdWords, etc. This skews the average.

What would be more helpful is a median, or percentiles (eg 75% of Google products only last X years, 25% last Y months). I imagine that would be much more representative of Google’s fail-fast experimentations.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Average product lifespan of Google products before it kil... by cookie_monsta on Monday November 25, 2019 @10:02AM (#21628650)
FTA: The average lifespan of a discontinued Google product is 4 years and 1 month.

"Living" products aren't skewing anything

[ Parent | on HN ]