I find the Google/Startup dichotomy here fascinating. We are on hackernews, a site focused on startups. Pivoting dramatically, including throwing away your entire customer base for a different population, is considered an essential part of running a startup. But if a big company has a product that is obviously stagnating at a small userbase then the community demands that it be supported in perpetuity.

There is a pair of Cole Haan shoes I really like. I bought several of the same exact style over the years. It was eventually phased out. I can't buy it anymore. Is Cole Haan narcissistic for not offering me the shoe I want?

Is it narcissism, or good business?

When Google tries to be disruptive in an emerging niche, it does it with a backing (brand & money) that could effectively snuff the smaller (and more willing) competition that it finds already operating in the arena. It enters as the 800lbs big G, smashing everything in its wake. Then sometime later, loses interest and goes home with its ball, leaving its users and the surviving smaller competition to figure out what's next.

Edit: If the service truly represents a dead end, why not sell it?

The practical reason is that it's statically compiled out of the monorepo and hosted on borg behind GFEs so there's really nothing to sell except the codebase and infrastructure of Google of which a snippet is the service in question, and the licensing that makes it possible is probably non-transferrable.

That's not a practical reason, if it was a small company they would sell it.

The real reason is that Google would prefer to kill the service than have it continue with another owner which would compete with other Google offerings. And compared to Google's overall value, they don't particularly need the sale price.

The other problem is that if it's a dead or dead-end service then who would buy it? Maybe VC is easier than I thought... Perhaps Google values services more than most. They certainly spend a lot when acquiring other companies. Who would pay $2B for Google Reader or Daydream?

I think the other thing that was unstated in my last comment is that a lot of Google products are not much more than a veneer over material design and a bigtable or spanner backend. What is there to sell aside from the concept, glue code, and design work? The data? Now there's something that would really get people up in arms.

If you want to argue that the data Google has is very valuable then I agree wholeheartedly. It's also not going to sell that data which would be suicide from a privacy perspective. Letting new products use existing data is also pretty valuable, but doesn't make the resulting product as useful to anyone else.

I guess also, a service that is ‘dead’ to google might be a huge userbase to another company.

Why not both?

It’s debatable whether many people outside HN actually hold a grudge; Google’s overall favorability ratings are crazily high. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Stadia had a rough launch because of Google’s reputation.

Shoes are a bad analogy because there is little switching cost; you just ties a different pair of laces and you’re done. If you had five years of playlists on G Music and now you have to move them to Spotify, that’s a major project. (Source: I did this, and it took me many hours).

Put differently, as a happy customer, you don’t want the company to pivot. It’s usually bad news for all of the existing happy customers. A successful pivot is great for the company, hopefully great for the new happy users, and very disruptive for the old customers. In the best cases the net utility is even positive.

(edit, made the odds clearer)

As I can see, their only edge is that they own a global content delivery network which in the best case might be able to give them a few years' head-start in terms of performance vs. other players that don't own IP infrastructure. (It's a recent development that cloud-hosted gaming is even viable from a latency perspective). But that doesn't seem like the core long-term problem; it might give you a first-mover advantage but I don't see that being enough to build a defensible moat in this space.

Yes. Absolutely.

First, shoes and music streaming are NOTHING alike.

Many products like shoes are so close to mass customization. Levis finally, mostly got smart about this.

Why can't I reorder the exact same glasses, shoes, jeans that fit?

It's mostly because of the broken feedback loops, missing backward flow of information. The designer, fashion buyer, PHB absolutely knows what you should want. Your opinion is moot.

Oh gosh it'd cost so much to build the infrastructure, complication, returns, we'd have to pay laborers a few pennies more blah blah blah.

Excuses.

I don't care.

Just make the shoes I want and I'll be a loyal customer forever.

PS- I asked LA Eyeworks to resume making the Big Bodhi (John Lennon, Steve Jobs) glasses for 20+ years. The pair I bought in the 90s were finally beyond repair. The lady I bought from said she could sell two dozen pairs overnight. I visited the original LA Eyeworks store twice, to make a personal appeal. Nope. Can't be done. Not possible. (The Big Bodhi are XL size, for my big pumpkin head.)

PPS- Speaking of Cole Haan... I had a pair that I absolutely loved. Bought them for working conventions. Standing on that concrete all day for 3-4 days. Sucks. Think of fashionable postman shoes. Gods, I loved those shoes. LOVED THEM. Best shoes I've ever owned. I tried so many times to replace them. I'm so mad at Cole Haan. I LOATHE them. Apparently they were bought by Nike or something and completely went to shit.

A mirror might help with your narcissist detection. There's a lot more involved in manufacturing than one person or even 20 people wanting it and that 3D printers exist doesn't change the equation so much. They've been around for a while. The short of it is a larger market is far more appealing than your brand of customer loyalty.

https://www.levi.com/US/en_US/blog/category/make-it-yours/

Mea culpa: Worked for fashion retailer on recommendation engine. Have some experience with the players.

Or would you like to dive into the logistics of customized manufacturing when applied to ~$200 items?

I'll save myself some time and just skip to The Correct Answer:

Made-to-order is the next growth opportunity. (Fast fashion has been played out.)

I'd watch someone like StitchFix or Trunk Club. They'll shorten the supply chain somehow (partnership, M&A, investment). Start offering made to order on select items. Strategically.

They'll need to do better measurements. Add MTailor features or equivalent.

Some are doing pop-ups, concierge. I'm now bearish on that approach. Mostly because of coronavirus. But I just can't think of any of the current players getting that kind of smart. I'll be delighted if someone proves me wrong.

I tuned out about 18mo ago. So haven't kept up. I'm told there's an MTailor like thing for sizing glasses.

I still don't have a clue how someone can do remote shoe sizing. Right now, everything's inferred from returns. But that's like diagnosing TBIs using phrenology.

I'm sure Amazon will continue to try any thing and everything. I haven't looked at their latest fashion effort. Mostly because whatever they do is a non-starter. Authenticity is table stakes for fashion, fast fashion, and therefore made to order. They'll certainly steal other people's lunch money, but are otherwise constitutionally incapable of anything new. Further, Amazon is entirely wholly hostile to authenticity. For them to pivot towards would invalidate their raison d'être. It could happen. I'm just betting against.

"...when applied to ~$200 items?"

You crack me up.

I feel like if startups ran their business like google runs their products, they'd fail pretty quickly. Am I off base here?

Google are big enough and generate enough profit that they can afford to have entire divisions of developers who are kept around in case they're needed one day. That doesn't make those people good developers though. Obviously there are some very capable people on those teams, but if they're genuinely talented why aren't they working on Search or Ads? That's what makes Google money, so that's why the best people end up, not on little side projects.

Essentially, the bigger you get the harder it is to go after "small" opportunities. But some of the biggest disruptions come from those "small" problems.

It's a fine way to look for niches to exploit for a startup.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

Facebook, Amazon, and Google are no longer the new underdogs and are old enough to be in the disenfranchisement trough. They will eventually stabilize like Apple and Microsoft.

Best shoes I’ve ever owned...

It's garbage. It's barely usable. I'm going to have to switch to Spotify.

Google always does this thing where it trashes a mature service and replaces it with something really new and immature that doesn't fit the use case of their previous customers in the hopes that they'll acquire new customers. But there's no sales pitch for Youtube Music. It doesn't do anything new. It's just, "the last one wasn't as successful as we'd like, so let's change things up a bit." And with an attitude like that, the next one won't be successful either. Which is why Google keeps doing this over and over.

They have corporate commitment problems. They never take a service and make it good, they just scrap it and start a new one in the hopes that they'll luck into a big hit. They've had like a dozen different instant-messaging apps in the past decade, and none of them ever caught on, because they keep scrapping them. I couldn't even tell you what the current iteration is. I used to use Google Allo a bit, which was their last one, but then they scrapped that and made this most recent one. I don't know why they do this.

Just import them into the music app on my laptop, sync my library, and boom those tracks are available everywhere, just like google music. I actually like it better, since it's an actual app and I don't need to upload the tracks through chrome – I don't use chrome, I use firefox, and I used to have to use chrome just to upload my music.

A healthy ecosystem should allow for innovations to take place from Apple, Google, and Mozilla and look at what sticks. As it stands now, Mozilla and Apple occasionally make new contributions to web standards but anything that chrome pushes effectively becomes one without any input from another company and that's kind of problematic.

So it's Chrome that doesn't implement a standard, and Safari that doesn't implement an ad-hoc competitor technology.

Why should they? It was a thing pushed and created by Google.

We might as well just have Chronium then it Google's whims become de facto/jure web standards implemented by all...

Google Chrome was compared to IE6 as being close to having 'the monopoly position as a browser'.

Indeed, Internet Explorer peaked at ~95% global browser market share in 2003-4 (when IE6 was the dominant version). Safari currently has <10% of the browser market share on desktop, <20% including mobile [1].

Sorry, Safari is nowhere close to being IE6 from this perspective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Btw, I’m a web dev myself.

Google Music was a solution for a generation where streaming subscriptions didn’t exist yet. That’s fine - it’s ok for products to die as the market changes and employees to move on to more relevant stuff.

At least for me it was a good music streaming service, had all I ever needed.

Now I switched to YT Music. Not sure how that's any different. It still plays most of the music I had bundled up in the playlists I created over the years and that's fine I guess. It seems a bit easier to find live sets from festivals with YT Music so that's a plus.

Killing streaming subscriptions alternatives because they're on the decline definitely pushes that decline, even if it could have plateaued at some point where the service could have stayed viable.

That's a wrong take out of OPs comment. They specifically mentioned that except for a niche subset of users most people don't store MP3s in their phones to listen to. There is nothing wrong for a service to adapt to their new customer base. Why should they staff niche projects because some small % of users (and declining) want to keep using it and provide better alternatives?

Because killing off products has given Google a reputation that stops tens of millions of people using any of the fancy new products that Googlers build and launch. In the long term all the effort Googlers put in to new products is a waste of time.

This should be qualified. Killing off products without an alternative has given that reputation. As long as they provide a viable alternative with effective migration it should not count as "killing off". But I hear you, its the perception that matters too.

I mean in all fairness, For the price gouging I see for storage on phones, I can buy an mp3 player (with a nice DAC), a huge SD card, and then load it on there. That's why I don't store music on my phone.

I used a standalone MP3 player for years in addition to my phone, because I couldn’t find a phone with a decent DAC, but now the existence of Bluetooth DACs means I have less to lug around.

Fair enough, but that still makes you a niche subset. For a vast amount of people in the world, streaming music suffices.

A couple years back storing music was the case in emerging markets too because cell phone internet was expensive and terrible. However, now with 3G+ and cheap plans the number of people who want to store music and listen to it is reducing. Nothing wrong with services adapting IMO.

You on the other hand are right to have your own preferences with storing and listening to music (maybe it is a curated list, old songs not available for streaming) - valid reasons. But then you should find alternatives.

You left out the "if you don't constitute a viable market" part (expressed by the parent as "nobody but aging millenials still does X), which makes all the difference, though.

Yes and no. I would argue that small projects are a misalignment of resources for FAANG companies. For example, niche music streaming services are better left to smaller startups who can easily solve those problems.

FAANGs should allocate their resources on big problems that others would not have the resources to tackle. Because if the FAANGs don't, no one else would be able to feasibly attack those problems.

The upside is the big problems get solved and there's smaller problems left on the table for startups to flourish on.

I completely agree that a FAANG company would choose to prioritize big problems over small, but the essence of tech these days is how casually they might solve a problem, kill off any startups that might have also been pursuing that problem, and then discard their solution some time later with no regard for the users of that solution or acknowledging the dead startups that didn't have the resources (or will) to compete.

Because a product they have shipped no longer serves the company's interests does not mean it no longer serves the user's interest. And yet these companies casually kill off these things without regard to the impact it has on those users. That lack of empathy, that focus on what is good for the company and company employee's who focus on what is good for them, is the narcissism here.

I was trying to talk in the more "general" sense than the specific sense. A company with empathy would never have shipped the music service in the first place if it didn't intend to support it as a product going forward and with an end of life strategy that accommodated the users who adopted it. To illustrate with an example:

Non-narcissistic company:

We have this thing which manages a music library, it isn't part of our core mission but it is likely useful to people.

Okay, put together a plan for sunsetting it if it turns out that it doesn't make sense to support it. Then when you launch it, make sure people know what will happen in the event we decide to end of life the product.

Launch product, ... time passes .. then sunset it. Activate the sunsetting plan.

Nobody is surprised, the plans were already in place and the users already knew what would happen if it came to this, they feel sad but they knew this was something that could happen.

Narcissistic company:

Hey we got this thing which works and is trendy, it manages a music library and it will poke our competitor in the eye because they think they have a monopoly on managing peoples music. Should we ship it?

Hell yeah! Let's hype the hell out of it and really make competitor look bad. They will waste so much time and effort trying to figure out how to respond!

Launch product ... time passes ...

Hey, that thing we launched still costs us money and the competitor has long since moved to a subscription service which we can't do and nobody in the company wants to work on this dog cuz its old and tired anyway.

Okay, take it behind the barn and shoot it. Turn off the servers and free them up for other things we can use to get good press!

But the users?

Oh people still use this crap? Tell you what refund them what they paid, hahahahahahahahahahahaha. That was so funny. Yeah, like we owe them anything. Just turn off the damn servers, there are like six really interesting things with lots of buzz words we could be showing off with those machines and storage.

That's a catch-22. You have to be pretty big to be able to license this stuff at all.

Wanna see your career die quickly? Move to a maintenance project.

If there’s a hiring manager at Google that wants someone to babysit products that shouldn’t die, but can’t attract career-oriented people to work on, ping me :)

The best way to keep going is to diversify, not only being a generalist, but also extending the soft skills, don't funnel too much in technology for technology's sake, and the career will be just fine, even with maintenance projects.

My org, which is more focused on maintenance than any other org at Google, has among the highest promotion rates. I personally lead a team whose primary job is related to code maintenance rather than product features. I've been promoted in the top 5% of promotion rates during my career.

It is true that there are maintenance teams that stagnate. It may be a different story for product managers or vps, but for engineers I've seen tremendous career success focused entirely on maintenance.

> work on something that a minority of people care about

then that can be a very viable business plan. In fact, pg probably has an essay about that. Maybe the "do things that don't scale" one?

that's just business and economics, isn't it? Like how an economy (GDP) always has to grow, regardless.