Indeed, Google's launch validates a market, creates enthusiasm, and once they shut it down you can be there to catch the users.

This is the VC cycle in a nutshell: venture capital does some PoC, business/tech R&D, and when it fails (usually does!) the lessons are still available to others.

It's no different even if the (defunct) startup has a patent: IP law doesn't really matter when the IP doesn't have any money behind it.

> It's no different even if the (defunct) startup has a patent

Not true - VC's are scared of giving money to anything that directly infringes a patent. If the company ever does wildly well, you can be sure whoever bought that patent for cents will be trying to collect millions...

I don't think VC's care about patents, they care about risk. A patent without any money behind it isn't a risk. A company that isn't making money to steal also isn't at risk. But if you have money, and the patent holder has money, then let the legal fireworks begin, and as a happy side-effect, the patent attorneys get to pay for their kids' college, and maybe an investment property or two.

> IP law doesn't really matter when the IP doesn't have any money behind it.

But that IP could end up owned by a patent troll that does have the money to enforce it in court, or at least threaten to do so.

Vine lives in a glass jar on the mantlepiece.

What a curious comment - care to elaborate? (I'm thinking a USB drive with Vine's source code is actually on your mantelpiece?)

It has to do with milkshakes.

Here’s a video for context:

https://youtu.be/GX-9wXFQRgA

Sounds like I better get started on my Stadia clone ;)

You'll also be competing with Amazon (Luna), Nvidia (Geforce Now), Microsoft (Xbox Game Pass), and Sony (Playstation Now). Plus other small players that are much farther along, like Shadow.

If you think about it, though none of these except Shadow are "small players naively competing with big business", it still kind of demonstrates the point. Google starts something that is ostensibly a good idea, demonstrates that there is some market, but flops the execution. I don't know what'll happen to Stadia, I'm hesitant to dismiss it just because "lol Google made another thing, surely they'll kill it in a year", but just skimming the news it does seem it'll go the way of Allo and Hangouts and Reader (And G+ ironically)...

"netflix for games" is an incredible value proposition if you have the capital to act on it.

So Apple Arcade?

I think you need console/pc games to make it work.

And microsoft are waaay ahead of you ;)

Why? More people have phones now than PCs or consoles, and Apple Arcade also includes iPads, Macs and Apple TV.

I think that is a reasonable take, it my more accurately say to both founders and investors that time / money invested in doing something Google is already doing is not a "bad bet"[1]

[1] Caveat search engines? Who knows when that house of cards will finally collapse.

[1] only "knuckleheads" would take that one on ;) Come join the new club in town https://knuckleheads.club/ - your immense knowledge and experience can help the cause a lot.

That might be true, but the risk is always that Google can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26581736.

Google Keep is next. It is neat and simple, though I haven't been using it lately.

I use Keep, but there are already millions of apps that does what Keep is doing. I don't think there will be a huge vacuum.

I actually really like Microsoft ToDo. Your setup can be as simple as you want or as complex as you need it to be!

Case in point, ‘To Do’ is derived from Wunderlist that has been around since 2011.

But Keep is much more than ToDo, it is more like a less capable OneNote (or, put differently, it is very much like the newer version of OneNote).

I really hope they don't kill it. Although, I never really recovered from the Red Wedding of Reader. However, I recently convinced myself to use Google Keep; it has a neat implementation of grabbing text from an image and works fairly well.

I realise that I will be training the algorithms, and appending data to the already vast collection. It is a trade-off I am willing to accept. I have generally been using it to grab text from labels for ingredients and other products to create my own notes.

I have a sync script that fetches all my google Keep notes and saves as markdown.

I was using it to sync into Roam for a while, but now I have it syncing into my markdown folder.

My current note taker is iA Writer. On the go markdown authoring, syncs with dropbox.

Thanks for the tip on iA Writer ─ like the aesthetics, and features. I will definitely give it a shot.

Yes, the aesthetics are great and quite functional too! They have released the fonts for free as well. I use that my VSCode for markdown:

` "[markdown]": { // use the beautiful duospace font when available "editor.fontFamily": "iA Writer Duospace, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe WPC', 'Segoe UI', system-ui, 'Ubuntu', 'Droid Sans', sans-serif, monospace", `

I should mention that I use it on mobile and share article links to it if it's something I want for research. Then on desktop I read and take notes on that same page. It turns reading into a more active process of knowledge acquisition/retention/application.

I think it's Google Podcasts, barely any efforts on features for the app, seems like they just made it because there needed to be a podcast app, Keep, while not given much attention by Google, is still easily accessible within Gmail.