News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud. Parent comment

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by Lammy on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @12:15AM (#21822031)
The issue for me isn't Reader itself but what it says about the disconnect between Google management and us, the users of Google products. That seems to have happened around the time Google went from _having_ a "user base" to being effectively ubiquitous. I can't speak for others, but Google of the 2000s "got" the hacker/nerd mindset in a way that was the closest thing to empathy I've ever felt from a corporation. That sounds naive to write down here in almost-2020, but that was how it felt at the time. When Reader died, so did that feeling, and now all of us are running around unsure if the Google products we personally care about are the ones Google management care about. Leaks like this one do not inspire confidence in that.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by manigandham on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:11AM (#21822590)
Free consumer products are not the same as paid enterprise services. The markets are entirely different, and ascribing the fate of Google Reader as a sign of anything on the B2B front doesn't make sense.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by dwaite on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:40AM (#21822720)
> Free consumer products are not the same as paid enterprise services.

They may have different revenue models, but there is little difference when it comes down to management killing services which aren't profitable.

If there is a difference, it is that Reader could be maintained at little cost, while GCE (when it gets the axe) could potentially be costing google hundreds of millions per year to keep running.

There have been plenty of other cases where google has burned bridges with the technical crowd which they should have embraced as champions for selling services. Killing off XMPP support was another prime one for me, and absolutely affected paid enterprise customers as well.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by erik_seaberg on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @03:46AM (#21823017)
Reader could only be maintained at little cost if its dependencies were stable. But stable infra doesn't get you promoted, so every service needs to be staffed indefinitely (to keep it on the upgrade treadmill) or killed gracefully before prod explodes.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by hvis on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @05:56AM (#21823699)
These same arguments can be applied to GCEx 100x more. So the point stands.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by Lammy on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @03:15AM (#21822872)
To be fair, the switch to mobile-first did more to kill XMPP than Google did. It's a lot better now a decade later with all the XEPs, but now there's nobody there to talk to so it's too late.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by scarface74 on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @08:53AM (#21824764)
Just a cursory look at killedbygoogle.com will show you a list of products that fall in the category of not free and used by business (Hired by Google) and/or were products that developers integrated with their own software that was killed.

As a developer or a company, why should I trust Google as a platform?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by DougN7 on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @11:41AM (#21826632)
It's not just Reader and all the other services. It's really crappy customer service too. Reddit's got a good thread going about someone that paid up on GSUITE that got their account locked. You have to hope a tweet goes viral to get help.

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ecacki/gsuite_sus...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by stoops on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:47AM (#21822750)
This is not an economic problem. It is a trust problem.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by ageofwant on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @05:19AM (#21823523)
That's irrelevant. Its about trust, commitment and sticking it out. Google's penchant of throwing shit against a wall to see what sticks seems to prevent them from applying themselves to increase the stickiness of their shit.

You simply cannot trust Google to do right by me, the user. That's it.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by DaharMaster79 on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @10:11AM (#21825607)
See, the thing is though, that they kill stuff that DOES stick as well. There's plenty of stuff in the Google Graveyard that was still widely used, with large user base, and they kill it anyway. There's no consistent logic to their killing of products. Sometimes they simply don't want to update it, sometimes it's purely internal politics (G+), sometimes there's just no reason we can find.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by wayneftw on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @08:31PM (#21831283)
What people believe about them matters, not whatever internal rationalizations may or may not have occurred.

Aside from their bad reputation for killing products, they also have a bad reputation for providing next to zero human support services for their products - even if you do pay for them.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by Already__Taken on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @06:42AM (#21823915)
And yet, the gsuite accounts I pay for can't use Google Home properly.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by dmix on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @06:49AM (#21823949)
AWS has launched a hundred small products which anyone can signup for on the spot, it’s not that different than consumer product releases. And it’s also not the opaque enterprise sales process of Oracle and IBM where things move at a way slower pace.

It’s somewhere in between and if Google started launching a bunch of new DB and other infrastructure products I’d be worried about adopting them individually - not worried that the entire data centres and business divisions getting shut down. Because Google will probably move on to another product without thought of the last one.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by Lammy on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:20AM (#21822636)
Feelings often don't make sense, but you can't 'logic' feelings away that easily. Or I can't, anyway.
[ Parent | on HN ]