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.