Google has the focus of a 12 year adhd kid who just ate a whole birthday cake, unless when it comes to data collection. Google doesn't produce quality products anymore. They found their niche and pretend to do other things to try continuing that "do no evil" lie of a mission statement they used to have.

Here's the lesson, you can't trust google with anything. You base your personal or business infrastructure on Google you can expect one of two things:complete privacy invasion or they're going to destroy whatever you're using because they never took it seriously in the first place.

A decade ago I was an intern at Google. One of my mentors said something that has stuck with me: "Google found a hose that money pours out of and it's name is online advertising. All we do now is desperately try to find another hose."

Google's strategy for a long time was: Hire every clever person you can; give them some creative freedom; see if any of them come up with a trillion dollar idea.

Only now they've 'grown up'. 20% time is dead. There is no second hose. They've mostly given up on the idea of a clever person finding a new money-hose. They just focus on the one they have now.

Isn't that how they've always operated? Gmail was launched in 2004 and that sure wasn't a money-hose. But it did serve as yet another platform to support their money-hose since they could scan your emails and serve you ads.

It's really only a recent change to actually monetise Gmail beyond ads. They sell it as part of G Suite and as part of Google One. Not sure if Google One brings in the dough but surely G Suite makes enough to justify its existence.

Ads make up 80% of their revenue. That's not diversified. That's an ad company that dabbles in other things. If Shell or BP's revenue was 80% oil and 20% solar, wouldn't you still call them oil companies that dabble in solar?

I'd like to see one for operating income, though, because I know AWS has a higher operating income than Amazon's Retail arm, even though Retail has a much higher revenue.

My statement is that yes, there is a second hose.

I've never said they're not primarily an ad company.

What's the threshold for something being a "hose"? A $36B business is a pretty big business!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...

I made a very specific claim and I'm not sure what everyone's problem is. Google has found other sources of revenue and is actively trying to grow those sources. There are other hoses. I have never claimed it's not an ad company or that ads have somehow gone away. Because that would be dumb and factually wrong.

https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20201030_alphabet_10Q.pd...

Q3 2019, ads were 84% of revenue Q3 2020, ads were 81% of revenue

It's not a massive change, but it's changing and ads are at the lowest percentage of overall revenue they've ever been.

"More diversified than it's ever been" can be factually true here, but for the purposes of this discussion was highly inaccurate.

> They've mostly given up on the idea of a clever person finding a new money-hose. They just focus on the one they have now.

The financial numbers suggest they have not given up and have succeeded incrementally towards other sources since. How else do you correct the above statement?

Growing from $1B to $10B is really difficult, unless you have virtually no competition.

I think they are quite shortsighted. The idea of running Google as a conglomerate, turning it into Alphabet, was good. But somehow, they have not been able to get rid of those layers of middle management that kill innovation. I've heard that Calico and other ventures are really political, and lot's of people that moved there hoping to do great work are quite frustrated.

Which is a shame, because they do have know how and technology to achieve great things. Just out of the protein folding results of this week you could spin off dozens of highly successful startups.

I bought a Chromebook in 2014. It still works, but support was discontinued earlier this year. That sounds okay to me. I wonder if Poly was popular? I've never heard about it 'til today.

A lot of businesses would be more successful if they learned how to do this across their own products and features. Instead engineers drown in KTLO, adding to cognitive load not only for employees but customers too.

Ironically at this point, I'd place more trust on an open-source project because at the very least, if the maintainer abandons it, I could fork it and potentially self-host.

Either Google has a real problem finding developers capable of maintaining things, or their decisions to keep things running are based purely on cash with no regard for either users or their own reputation as a company that can keep services running.

> They have a real problem finding developers that will want to work on it.

At most companies, you don't get to choose projects you want to work on. You get assigned a project whether you like it or not. Almost every other company functions like this, Google's insistence on being different is shooting them in the foot.

> You don't get promoted at Google for maintaining a product that isn't growing.

Maybe Google should be selecting for people who aren't interested in chasing promotions. There are plenty of 'workman' developers in the world who are okay with spending the rest of their careers maintaining legacy systems. This probably ties into good ol' Silicon Valley age discrimination: they spend so much time chasing young hotshots with chips on their shoulders, while most of the workman developers are in their 50s.

If Google really wanted to solve this problem they could by making the promotion criteria different. Their actions say they don't really see it as a problem, though.

The fact that they won't just freeze uploads and leave it up is just stupid.

People always bring up "What about maintenance costs in terms of dev time!", but at the core this is literally static assets. No fancy API, no crazy isomorphic app or something needing fat servers.

Just 3D modeling files.

Literally they could generate a static page for each asset that uses the preview image instead of the 3d viewer, stick it in their cloud storage solution, and have it exist, untouched, in perpetuity.

The cost wouldn't even register on a microscopic scale for a place like Google

The reason google kills everything is because they do everything via monorepo. So if they don't have enough devs to literally -keep a service up to date with the currently evolving stack- they have to kill the project. This is why things get killed so easily.

Makes sense to me from a "why canyt you just leave it on" standpoint. But it still makes me very leeery of trusting any project of theirs long term (besides search/gmail).

If something that relies on say, one of their log services, and that log service is getting end-of-lifed then all the dependent services that aren't really critical will also get shutdown. It's a forcing mechanism to keep the amount of cruft down. If that service that relies on the old service is that important they'll put the resources on the project long enough to port it to the new service.

When considering whether to learn/migrate to a Google service, everyone should consider this ratio at which Google values your time vs. that of their engineers.

It doesn't need to stay up to date with an evolving stack

Static files in Google's equivalent of an S3 bucket with public downloads enabled, that's it.

By design these types of blob storage services "just work" as a consumer indefinitely (otherwise there wouldn't be much of a point to them)

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I get the whole "who does it get billed to, who's going to take a day to write this script that makes the preview page" deal, but like, this is literally the one time where just a little bit of initiative can win some brownie points with minimal investment, can't they do it?

Also, you cannot remove it. You can uninstall the icon, but the underlying code is so deeply integrated into the OS that people can still call you and you will get a Duo video call even after uninstalling it.

Quite a menace.

Is it possible to remove/deactivate it via adb or other tools?

I haven't tried, I don't mess with my phone too much because I don't want to trip the Knox fuse.

I'm surprised an Android 10 phone does not have Duo pre-installed. Does it have the standard Play store and associated google apps?

Duo has 1 billion+ installs in play store, which basically means they pre-installed it on every phone.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

I could understand putting in less effort, or more effort, but failing the way they did was mind boggling and just seems like lack of a strategy on the management level.

More work, yes. But certainly much better than what they are doing now.

How would they do that? Who would pay the server costs?

Edit: Out of curiosity, is there anyone reading this comment that would be willing to pay for the infrastructure costs to keep Poly alive?

The user would run the server, or another company, or a group of enthousiasts. It doesn't need to be expensive, especially if the user doesn't require many other users on the system.

Did any of your companies ever do that? How did it go?

A commenter here shared an example of a similar product shut down by Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_3D

Disclaimer: Googler, but in no way connect to the Poly team.

Edit: Added Remix 3D example.

Like with Covid, like with SLAs, it's not enough to think of ratios of success or failure. You have to also look at frequency and duration.

A flaky test might fail a build 1 time in 200, but as your team gets bigger, build frequency rises, your tests grow, and eventually you're getting failed builds frequently enough that people start to see them as a regular occurrence, and that negatively affects their opinions about the whole experience. I've seen people bash the system when failures happen weekly, I've seen others 'turn' after a couple of statistical clusters and then fall to confirmation bias long afterward.

Google has so many irons in the fire that I think we've reached that same threshold for a lot of people. Shutting down the worst 1% of your projects a year sounds like a completely reasonable business plan. Until you have 1000 projects, and now you're shutting one down every five weeks on average. People will talk.

And if there's no transparency in that process, how do I know that my favorite tool isn't next, or on the list for next year? Odds are low, but not zero.

I wonder if they are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: google launches a product, people avoid it assuming it’ll get killed off, google says the user metrics don’t justify the investment, and they kill it.

If you ask someone who doesn't read HN if they've ever been frustrated with Google shutting down a product, my guess is 95%+ of people wouldn't be able to remember a single product that was shut down that they used.

One solution for Google might be to brand the products without the "Google" name prefix, until Google is absolutely sure it will be around for a decade+.

That is true, but it ignores the fact that at least 50% of Google's product offerings are aimed at the sort of people who read HN.

This has happened with Picassa, with Google+ (which had great integrations with other G services, and features I liked - such as one that let you group people into, say separately addressable units such as friends, family, colleagues, associates etc) and also the original Google chat (still around, but functionally degraded and headed for the chop, I fear).

I've loved some of these because of their features/usability. To me Google+ having few users and not having content pushed in my face was a bonus. Text chatting happily while in a Gmail tab (usually open when I'm working) but with minimal distraction and not having to context-switch - suits me. And now a lovely library of free 3D assets is for the chop.

Once upon a time I earned a little kudos for having my finger on the pulse and spotting decent emerging tech/trends. I was laughed at by many when, in 1994, I switched from a senior role in print news to one in the nascent online space - but many people took an interest because of my recommendation or at my urging.

I am no seer, I am rarely an evangelist, but I hate it that many people I know have invested time/effort in Google stuff on my recommendation. I feel as though I have let them down.

Hosting some files to serve as a counterpoint would not be totally unjustifiable from a marketing perspective.

They ended Music, and bait and switch their photo policy.

Traumatic events for me. I've left both services, won't get another pixel, and attempted to switch to Firefox.

When those first adopters are deciding whether or not use the new product, part of that equation is what happens if this doesn't catch on? Should I trust them to jump on board now, wait, or go with someone else?

For instance if someone was choosing betwen two similar and new products from Microsoft and Google one factor weighing in Microsoft's favor is they will care about support, and an exit plan even if the product doesn't take off.

It was a little frustrating in some places since a lot of it was oriented around their VR drawing tool (Tilt Brush) which my system didn't support.

And if I and everyone else thinks this way, as Google is conditioning them to, then no one will ever adopt Google's non heavily promoted products, which will make their failure a self fulfilling prophecy.