Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success. They made their billions on low hanging fruit, by throwing a lot of resources at problems with very high demand for a solution that weren't yet tackled well (e.g. query the internet, keep in touch with friends). So it's no wonder that in this day in age they are incapable of understanding product market fit, innovating, or competing in a market with competent players and a lower barrier to entry.

I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products.

When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it makes it much easier to do; you can also see this in case of Google Maps. You can just push your products inside the ecosystem, and be almost guaranteed success.

Stadia drifted away from that ecosystem (as does Google Cloud for that matter), and as such is much more difficult to pull off. Combine that with Google’s reputation for killing things, and the writing was on the wall from the start.

It was totally low hanging fruit. Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder. Finding useful sites and filtering out spam are much more difficult now than when Google started. The signal to noise ratio on the internet has plummeted.

And that is just the difficulty of building an application. Actually gaining marketshare in search is a whole other problem to solve and also very difficult. Even if you manage to build a superior search engine you’ll have an uphill battle convincing people to use it.

This is what it means to have all the low hanging fruit cleaned out. Google built their application at a time when most people weren’t even on the internet and spam was barely getting started as a social problem. Sure, what they had was remarkable and innovative, but only because everything else at the time was so bad. But now? Different story.

You can actually read Page & Brin’s original paper online [1] and implement it yourself. It’s not very difficult. In fact, it was an assignment question in my 3rd year numerical methods class. Unfortunately if you just point the basic algorithm at a crawl (which you can download for free here [2]) you’re going to get useless results. The spammers are optimized to fool this algorithm (Pagerank) so you need to find a way to filter out the spam. And that is a very very deep rabbit hole!

[1] https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

[2] https://commoncrawl.org/

This is what everyone thought in 1999. Search engines were a solved problem in a crowded market where there could be little room for new contender And whatever limitations we had in search were just inherent in how it all worked and we just had to deal with it.

We must have lived in different 1999's

But that's not where others failed. Instead, it's coming up with the idea, realizing that it's a truly good idea, that was the important thing. (Remember, Yahoo and other(s) didn't want to buy Google and the algorithm, when they had the chance.)

Maybe if you replace "totally low hanging fruit", with "It was undiscovered winner-takes-it-all markets" I'd agree.

In hindsight, everything is obvious. But initially, discovering that opportunity — looking at how many people (how few, just 2) did, it wasn't easy.

I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make. I think what's being proposed is that the more undiscovered markets get discovered, the fewer undiscovered markets are left, and the more difficult they are to discover. Pagerank was a good idea that worked.

And back at the time, before Google Search, many many related markets didn't, couldn't, yet exist. And, back then, I'd think PageRank could count as one of the few and difficult thing to discover.

I think "low hanging fruit" makes it sound too easy :- )

Then you missed the point. It doesn't matter whether PageRank was something trivial any grad student could come up with or if it was on the level of Einstein's General Relativity in difficulty. The point is that it was one basic idea.

Today if you want to dethrone Google you need to overcome the enormous amount of engineering that has gone into Google Search and Maps. You can't do that by just "discovering" something as a grad student. It's going to take thousands (or millions) of engineering hours to achieve.

That is what it means for the low-hanging fruit to be gone. It's like the difference between discovering electricity, as we all know took quite a while but was achieved by a small number of scientists and inventors over a period of a couple centuries, and trying to compete against the modern-day electrical distribution network on your own, which is essentially impossible without some kind of Star Trek alien galactic empire level technology.

The big guys at that time were blinded by their own success, Google wanted users to do their search and leave the site which was completely opposite to what the Yahoo's of that day wanted to do, they wanted users to hang out on their portal.

I’ve often heard the saying how “everything easy has already been invented” and that it’s so much harder today to invent new things.

I think it’s a fallacy. Things were just as hard in the past.

I owned an ISP in 1998 and there were plenty of search engines at the time. Google invented something unique and innovative and they were rewarded tremendously for it. There were literally hundreds of other companies trying to do the same thing but Google was better. If it was low hanging fruit then Hotbot or any of the other major players could’ve done it.

In 1998 there were plenty of search engines and their use was distributed more evenly. The internet was still fairly new and most people weren't online yet. It certainly wasn't an integral part of most people's life. Google came along and improved on the existing search engines and in doing so wiped out a lot of that competition, becoming what they are today.

A new search engine now has to compete with global network effects, orders of magnitudes more data, Android, and a complex web of interconnected functionality.

Even only looking at the advantage that Google Maps brings to the table totally blows past any barriers present in 1998. Sure, you could build a much better search engine but who's going to use it when it can't give them directions?

Then consider that if you look like you'll end up making some headway, you're likely to just get bought and killed off/integrated.

Are you a pessimist in life? You’re focusing on only the negative aspects of starting a search engine today.

24 years after Google was formed we have orders of magnitude cheaper processing, orders of magnitude better AI, the ability to start small with cloud computing and work your way up from there. We have 24 years of search engine research to a large extent publicly available.

I really think all this “things would’ve been so much easier back then” are simply excuses as to why someone can’t do something today.

They do exist, have you heard of any of them?

My intention wasn't to dismiss the possibility of popular new search engines. Only to highlight that the environment is substantially more complex/challenging than in 1997.

I actually think that their entrepreneur spirit and business attitude made them successful. Other guys thought of their search engines as of technical experiments and hobbies, they weren't serious about it. In another words Google cared more for innovating their search engine, making money and then reinvesting it back in R&D and staying ahead of everybody. The same story was with Microsoft and Digital Research; Bill Gates simply cared more business wise and was more fanatical in making money than Gary Kildall.

I'm not a programmer but I can write down on a piece of paper an algorithm which is more efficient than Google's in filtering out "spam" websites. I'm from southeast Europe and for my local market there are numerous ecommerce phishing websites that are popping up on a first page of search results. Some even ranked first. I reported them to Google but 6 months after nothing changed.

Stadia was a rich technical problem with an application area that’s accessible to Googlers. Even if Googlers don’t video game, real life is a game to them. But Stadia failed because it lacked the artistic passion behind Nintendo and the best gaming studios.

If Google set themselves up like McKinsey—- i.e. turn their engineering workforce into a contracting service—- then Google might be able to contribute to a real product. But Googlers just don’t care about people. They care about puzzles and systematicity.

PageRank actually originates from Economics[0] where Input–output model tells you that you need to care about balancing inputs and outputs in order to have an efficient economy. Speaking of internet search engines and ranking websites inputs would be links(backlinks) and outputs would be ranked web documents.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model

This may be part of the problem. Google was founded by algorithm nerds, and that's now part of the DNA of the company. Apple (Tesla/Starlink/etc) was founded upon vision - what could the future look like? How do I make that happen today? - and then, somehow, to pare that back to something that's economically viable in a reasonable time frame.

That said, taking existing problems and trying to better apply algorithms to make a better product is still a thing in AI space though - and even here plenty of start ups are taking the lead.

Within high technical complexity space, they differ in significant ways with Apple or Tesla – they don't have organizational mechanisms to do deep vertically integrated problem solutioning. Even when they have academically much superior AI tech, their ability to productize those capabilities is slow and less effective due to how cross-organization collaboration works.

On the business side, they don't have a business team really. There's no MBAs scheming new pricing or bundling models nor are there people wanting to chase/beat market competitors. So, whenever they do SKU based pricing or subscription based pricing, they tend to get it less right than, say, Microsoft.

Edit: One thing to add... Google's history of 'solving highly technical problems' has really been more around scaling infrastructure, with their notable successful products being Google search, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube - with Android being an exception that rule if you'd call that a 'product'. Maps and Google assistance have some technical aspects, but nothing really out of the grasp of a modern startup. Technical ability for SaaS companies isn't really the moat it used to be.

Not any more. These days their DNA is ads.

> The fact that Tesla has failed to output a new car or really innovate much lately

They literally turned into a battery company with their own batteries, their own chemistry and their own end to end manufacturing process. They are making state of the art batteries when only 5 years ago this company had never even made single high volume car.

You can like or dislike FSD but it is innovative.

In terms of manufacturing, things like Gigapress is now getting copied all over the car industry.

Innovation is not just new products.

And in capital intensive business, scale itself requires innovation.

And they are doing this while having 30% growth every year with exploding profits at the same time. After 10 years when people were screaming about how EV wouldn't ever be profitable.

> spacex appears to be stuck in a morass of engine troubles for their latest big rockets

What? SpaceX is currently reaching an incredibly high operational cadence. That requires innovation.

SpaceX is launching Starlink sats with laser communication and deploying it large scale. They are producing incredibly advanced antenna technology as consumer electronics.

The Raptor engine is the most advanced rocket engine in human history and they are on their second major iteration building them as fast as very few rocket engine in history have ever been produced. They are regularly doing full duration test of these engines. Currently its not really the engines that is holding them back.

Claiming that being a little bit late on building the by far the most advanced rocket system in human history is taking his eye of the ball is pretty absurd.

Tesla were early adopters by making use of them, but not innovators.

There are two versions of the Gigapress history going around. In one version the idea came to the Idra CEO in a dream, while in the other version Elon gave multiple die casting manufacturers a call and got a hard no from everyone, expect for Idra who gave him a ‘maybe’.

Whichever it it is not that important in my view. What is undisputed is that Tesla put their money where their mouth is and took a real money bet on this new unproven technology early on. That is as much innovation as actually coming up with the machine and idea yourself.

Edit: to add to my point about innovation, from what I understand, no car company has ever used die casted parts in structural components due to concerns about internal stresses resulting from the die cast process. Normally this requires expensive post treatments but Tesla developed a custom alloy that makes this post treatment unnecessary. I am a bit light on details; someone with a metallurgy or structural engineering background pls chime in.

Structural die-casting has been a trend in the automotive industry, having started before the Gigapress. One article on this, from 2018, is https://www.spotlightmetal.com/opportunities-for-die-casting... and in that you see an analysis of the economic benefits, even though it's an article for public consumption.

The article itself, back in 2018, mentions cars already using structural die-casting and basically forecasts structural die-casting becoming a more typical manufacturing method.

Also its a part of company from China operating in Italy.

These machines are also continuously improved in prosecution at Tesla and that knowlage is flowing back to the company. The machines deployed in Texas are already an improvement over those in California. There is a lot around the core machine that needs to be improved as well.

My understanding is that they saw the usefulness of these machines quite early and were developing them in this direction and that they had already produced 4000 tonne presses of this general type. Now it's at 6000 and 8000 tonnes.

Customers are needed to make use of good ideas-- you can't take them otherwise, but the innovation is the work the Italians did.

Machines that like still wouldn't exist today had Tesla not done the necessary investment.

There is the machine and then the application of the machine to an actual production process.

It's like Germany and its heavy presses, during WWII. Lack of manpower, or in this case, something else that is wrong, leads to an player going for the most complete realization of that is easier and has major advantages.

All other car companies?

> If the other manufacturers have that down, then their need for very large components of this kind is lower.

This is not how this works. Tesla also 'has it down' with the Model 3 manufacturing line.

Its still lower CAPX and lower OPEX to use gigapress.

This is a large part why even the former CEO of VW said they were behind in some ways.

Yes, but at the time when they went after these presses as the thing for the future, they didn't quite have it down.

>Its still lower CAPX and lower OPEX to use gigapress.

Now, probably, yes.

That’s Panasonic, not Tesla. You are confused by the Tesla marketing here. Tesla makes plenty of interesting things but that’s not part of it.

Yes, Tesla is buying batteries from Panasonic. They are also buying batteries from LQ and CATL. Nobody questions that.

In addition to that Tesla has its totally own production process and chemistries. These are not shared with LG, CATL or Panasonic. Its own fully owned battery factory and research facility in California. They are currently building a battery plan in Austin and in Berlin, these are fully owned and operated Tesla plants.

These plants have their own manufacturing processes developed in-house. They even built the machines them selves. A lot of this is done in Germany in a former well known German supplier that Tesla bought outright like 5 years ago. They also bought a company in Canada that makes the battery filling machines and pumps in Canada.

If you still think we are in 2014 and Tesla is just being supplied by Panasonic, you have not been paying attention.

Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.

The first phone with a capacitive touch screen was the LG Prada. Of course, resistive touch screen phones existed for a long, long time before that.

Sony Ericsson Liveview, MOTOACTV, the Pebble watch, even the Samsung Galaxy Gear predates the Apple Watch.

As always, downvotes are welcome but where I am wrong?

But you’re just seeing the screen 1 dimensionally yes capacitive screens existed but when I say the “iPhone screen” is why it was a success I mean the technology (capacitive) + the interaction design (momentum scroll and pinch to zoom) + heavy optimization (jerky scrolling was unacceptable, every interaction had to move exactly with the finger, even browser redrawing was decoupled from the scroll to enable this).

All these parts together in unison and to a high level of polish is what made that product magical and a success.

On the other hand the LG Prada devs and designers just had jerky scrolling and no one on the team said “this isn’t good enough”

If you ask me, Apple's main innovation with the iPhone was making the UI usable with just a finger instead of a stylus.

The reason Apple’s success at product development is so hard is that it involves orchestrating many, many different technologies together to create a powerful set of capabilities accessed through a consistent seamless user experience. That’s not a simple thing to even describe or discuss, let alone understand. It’s why they take years to develop products, and are almost never first in a new category, such as smart watches as you say.

That said, the LG Prada beat the iPhone to market by a month but the iPhone was in development for longer. What’s really interesting is the LG Prada II included a physical keyboard showing they where backing away from the design rather than doubling down.

Opera Mini was well optimized for cellphones of the time and bandwidth limited cellphone plans, but Apple’s deal with AT&T to allow unlimited bandwidth flipped a lot of those design decisions on their head. IMO what really separated the iPhone’s browser was a larger screen + better UI + better rendering + unlimited bandwidth meant it could just be used to casually browse the web.

Opera Turbo was always disabled on my phone, never needed it. But I never used GPRS, only EDGE and later.

The iPhone was released June 29, 2007 but announced in January. “On 7 November 2007, Opera Mini 4 was released. According to Johan Schön, technical lead of Opera Mini development, the entire code was rewritten.[28] Opera Mini 4 includes the ability to view web pages similarly to a desktop based browser by introducing Overview and Zoom functions, and a landscape view setting. In Overview mode, the user can scroll a zoomed-out version of certain web pages.[29] Using a built-in pointer, the user can zoom into a portion of the page to provide a clearer view”

Hmm, perhaps I had a beta version of that. I definitely had it before the iPhone came out. Or it might have been a different browser? Not sure.

Mobile hardware wasn't capable of delivering such smoothness. Apple's innovation was to prioritize UI rendering over everything else. When you're zooming, rendering stops and browser only deals with zooming. Regardless of current CPU capabilities and load, scrolling and zooming is always smooth. And turns out people care about those way more than parallel rendering.

That's some underappreciated outside of the box thinking.

You call it innovative, I call it draconian anti-consumer walled garden that needs to be eliminated

And that’s because it was a terrible phone.

I’m confused by your comment. Android pioneered a good 80% of the modern smartphone UX. Apple makes nice phones but they are pretty much always late mover.

Their Pixel line hasn't dominated the market by any means, but has also done well enough that they can at least claim to some extent that they don't "need" the other manufacturers. Of course they do, but they can use "whatever, we'll just make $COOL_THING a Pixel exclusive and leave you behind" a threat with teeth. They actually do sometimes make features Pixel exclusive (sometimes just for a limited time), and that seems to be working out ok for them.

Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning, but I'd wager these days they've also clawed back most of that control. If Apple tells their customers, "we wanted to give you this cool new feature, but Verizon wouldn't let us", that will not go well for Verizon.

So I do agree that there's some compromise, and Google (and Apple) don't get to do literally anything they want, they are in a much better position to control their ecosystems and dictate terms than they were back when they started.

What concessions would those have been? The way I recall it, Apple in the early iPhone years would always favor retaining control over the phone experience over carrier reach, so they were available on very few carriers initially (especially compared to Android), but would not make concessions to them. Eventually, iPhones became a must-have item for carriers, so they all signed on under Apple's terms — and nowadays, unlocked phones are mostly the norm anyway.

Making sure the other guy loses isn’t great motivation to do anything. Especially once the “other guy” has lost. Google isn’t especially excited by OS, because their bread and butter is all in the cloud they just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake. It’s always looked at through the lens of how it will help advertisers and since the zeitgeist for the last few years has been about privacy as it relates to personal devices, they can’t really “innovate” much without hurting their core business.

I worked in Google consumer hardware and yes this is how it is. Quite a few motivated and talented people, for sure, but organizationally it just ended up being "copy Apple and/or Amazon's roadmap."

There are whole product areas at Google whose entire existence boils down to "everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"

And the rest of it: "Ok, we killed Microsoft here, now what?" "Eh... whatever."

I think the problem is simply that it's too disorganized with that many people. I used to work on Google Fiber, and something that our customers complained about was that they couldn't upload files to Google Drive at 1Gbps. That wasn't our fault, we were happy to route data at that speed, and we had the peering capacity with Google to support it. (Different ASNs!) The reality was, we identified performance problems with Google Drive, and they simply didn't care. They had other stuff to worry about; only one city in the US had 1Gbps Internet at the time, but they still didn't have 100% of the docs/file sharing market (hi Dropbox), so they were like "it's not a priority" and worked on something that would actually make them money instead. I get it, but it never felt good. That's what's sad about companies with such a large scope; supporting your own company's initiative is rarely the right business.

The reason I like small companies is because if there was jrockway Fiber and jrockway Drive, obviously they would work perfectly together. I would simply not sleep a few nights to make it happen. But at big companies, that's not a thing, and it really confuses people that imagine the brand name means something. (I have similar complaints about calling shitty Android tablets "Chromebooks", when they didn't run Chrome OS. The Chrome OS team was a level above Android in terms of technical excellence, so it just felt bad to have some bug-ridden third-party tablet ruin the brand name like that. But, money. I'm sure people bought them, hated them, and still use Chrome instead of Firefox. But it always makes me a little sad.)

IMO from the outside the problem with Google seems to be a lack of saying ‘no’ to people - they start so many different offerings without enough/any cohesion, bring stuff to market quite fast, then seemingly strip resources away as soon as they have gone live if the product isn’t instantly an overnight success.

I don't use iCloud with Keynote myself, but those sort of sync issues always happen in multiuser apps that also allow offline editing (e.g. I get the same conflicts in O365 with Powerpoint because they are inevitable if you are allowing offline editing).

This is the issue. If it’s not #1, or maybe #2, in the market then google is certainly going to drop it after a while.

There were 10 search engines when Google launched, and a megalith called Yahoo dominating the Internet.

Emphasis added. It took putting the right money and the right minds towards doing it well. There aren't a lot of SaaS ideas that scale to close to 100% of world population that don't yet have an incumbent. Tiktok was lucky that Twitter dumped Vine. Zoom was lucky that Skype, Hangouts, Facetime dropped the ball by trying to keep their users in walled gardens, and not really solving the teleconference problem well.

So they are big because they were there early. But being there early didn't guarantee you'd get big.

Search technology wasn't new or innovative, the innovation was when Google bolted on AdWords.

Call me shallow, but I liked the simple, distraction free landing page and the "feeling lucky" button.

Altavista was certainly better than what came before, but you had to get your query just right in order to find what you wanted. And if you couldn't find the right words for the query, you were sunk. With Google, you could get ok-ish results with a sub-standard query, and the ok-ish results would often help you figure out a better query.

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

This is accurate. What makes a company good a defending market leadership makes them terrible at innovation - and you see this with both Google and Meta as they churn though building 100 million dollar products only to discontinue them because they aren't worth billions yet.

r/ps5: 2.6m

r/steamdeck: 230k

r/stadia: 119k

What jumps out from that thread you linked is the casualness of the gamers. So not only did Google find a tiny market, but that market wasn't terribly motivated.

Stadia relied on casuals who happen to have a stable fiber optic cable internet connection.

Xbox game pass doesn't work for me but I understand it's value proposition will work others - I pay a smaller fee and in return I get cloud or local, for a large variety of games. Geforce now you still had to buy games, but you got to keep them regardless of gfn, and you still had local or cloud options. Different systems but both understandable. I never understood stadia value - it seemed worst of all worlds and full of restrictions.

Google wants googlers and high school students to not use Windows for any reason, and only use chromebooks.

Stadia was a way for people with a chromebook to play Windows games.

However, the lack of subscriptions, separate purchase model, lack of discoverability (no search bar for years! from the Search company!) and porting model make it clear Stadia was very much not targeted at casuals.

This is coming from someone who now has no free time for video games, and only plays indie roguelikes because AAA games are too much of a time commitment to ever finish.

By sales, the highest-selling games are [1] Minecraft (now AAA), Grand Theft Auto V (AAA), EA Tetris, PUBG (before becoming freemium), Mario games, Pokémon, Terraria, and Red Dead Redemption 2.

So by sales, the vast majority of top-selling games are AAA. For what it's worth, I think similarly to you about preferring indie games to AAA games due to lack of time. But for most gamers and people in general, I don't think people even calculate the 40-60 hours per week. Most players probably just spend a lot of free time and weekend days gaming, and then the hours add up.

You do have a point that a large number of players play free-to-play games (e.g. League of Legends and many phone games), but there's a fair argument that AAA games are also targeted at "casual players," by evidence of their wide popularity in terms of massive sales numbers.

[1] https://gamertweak.com/most-played-popular-games/

AAA game industry agrees with you, releasing mega titles like Halo w/o a story to finish, just online "service game" that will always be there for you (until they shut the service off).

And in my mind, those are enthusiast games, because only enthusiasts are spending $500 on a graphics card.

1) pick a high risk / high reward opportunity

2) invest heavily in the fundamental tech behind it and see if it works out

3) when it doesn’t work out, shut it down, take the tech you built and use it for something.

So for example, let’s look at dart.

There was never any way it was going to work, really… but, at the time, maaaaybe, it could have worked. …and google would have owned the web stack entirely.

…but, they’ve put it to work in flutter now and that’s going ok.

The point I’m making is that if you look at this from the perspective of investment in fundamental technology (Ie. Steaming video say) what’s better?

A) develop it with no specific use case

B) work really hard on a very difficult use case that might end up failing

If you can afford it, the latter is maybe not the worst way of doing it.

You end up with battle tested technology and no users to bother you for the made-in-a-rush service you made to go with it.

You could easily argue that more successfully outcomes could come from less risky investments… but do you want 50 kind of bleh services in your portfolio?

I don’t think google does. They want a few unicorns.

You don’t get unicorns by playing it safe.

So… I’m not saying it’s the right strategy, or even a good one, but from that perspective you can see why you’d try.

Bet: we’ll see something fancy using the streaming tech roll out eventually, probably linked to a more successful existing product, it will be unremarkable and well liked by most people.

Every time Google shuts down a product, they hurt their reputation. They’re pissing in the pool that future Google products need to survive. At this point I don’t know if Google can make successful new products because nobody trusts their follow through.

I only use the products that are very unlikely to go away quickly. Search, Gmail and Android. I'd like to get off Gmail for other reasons, but it's a pain. And I mostly use DuckDuckGo for search these days.

I used to think that, but I was actually surprised how easy it was to get off GMail. I gave Fastmail my credit card number, clicked a few buttons in their UI to get my mail transferred over, moved my MX records, and I was done. I ended up migrating contacts, too, but that was just a couple more clicks in Fastmail's UI, as they have an OAuth flow that interacts directly with Google's APIs.

I still haven't migrated my calendar, and a few other email-adjacent things, but it's fine; it can all operate this way until I'm ready.

Edit: right after posting, realized you might be using an @gmail.com address, so yeah, migrating off GMail in that case is much harder than if you have a custom domain.

Beyond that, especially given that I assume (hope?) such sites are rare, a simple workaround would be to have a GMail account just for such signups, and set it up to forward to your main mail account hosted elsewhere. I think that's a pretty small price to pay if you really do want to get off GMail.

In my case, I still have my GSuite (or Google Workspaces or whatever they hell they're calling it now) account (really the only difference is now my MX records point somewhere else), so if I did have any sites left where I hadn't switched from Google auth to email/password auth, it would still work.

It’s a product I’ve shied away from because Google.

Angular (and angularjs before it) are typical Google engineering. (Too much rxjs solutioning in search of a problem to solve. Compare it to svelte using an observable interface to get 80% of the benefit with the rest of the absolute insanity that junior devs bounce off and make angular a dreaded framework compared to react, vue, svelte)

Google is an anti-brand at this point.

they should use TS. or kotlin or Swift ... or just Java.

look at React. the simplest piece of shit and it's eating the world because people got into the cult of React. similarly with Go.

...

streaming tech: they'll just fold it into YouTube somehow.

unicorns: did they ever launch any since Gmail?

Maps

Docs

Go

/shrug

I dunno, I think it’s fair to say they’ve had a few winners.

Got any winners that they started themselves instead of acquiring?

Credit where it's due though: A lot of companies destroy their acquisitions, which hasn't happened in these cases.

Go doesn't make them money directly. Similarly k8s is great, but doesn't make them money. (At best it's the classic commoditize your complement strategy. Though I have no idea where Go comes from. Well, I guess if you hire enough language developers you're bound to eventually get a new language, even if it's a bit meh, so they at least matched React in that.)

No one devs on a 8 year old budget laptop or a slow internet connection. Some devs forget that those even exist.

Fast internet isn't a given either. It's slow in some areas, and slower in most hotels. I've had sub-10mbps, 1500ms ping internet quite often, especially while travelling.

That's without counting cultural assumptions SV companies make, especially when their staff is lacking in cultural diversity.

It sounds like a financially smart thing to do but it cuts your legs out because nobody is doing research anymore, and you select for people with half a billion potential and an eagerness to lie.

Microsoft did something similar with the Xbox (people forget that it was basically done because they were afraid that consoles would become general purpose computers and destroy the Windows monopoly) but they also actually made a business with it and made it profitable in its own right.

It's not always going to work out, but I do think Google's actions helped stifle competition in that market. Google could have successfully stopped another company from blowing up in that market and becoming a real competitor to worry about in other markets down the line.

Admittedly this approach has worked once, and extremely successfully: Android. But Google tend to believe that being from Google will make a product more attractive when the exact opposite is true. (For many reasons, including the simple lack of trust that Google will still be in a market in five years time.)

I'm surprised at how many people are discounting what Stadia offered. My reasons for not investing in it are pretty much just data caps and lack of trust in Google.

Also, I've owned every Playstation since PS2, and I've never played an online multiplayer game on one (with the exception of Journey, which does so silently), nor do I give the slightest damn about achievements.

If I could just play the game and not worry about the hardware, I’d be tempted as long as the service was reliable. Had Stadia become a real business, I’d have jumped on in 5 years or something.

They probably spent millions on getting the whole Ubisoft and EA catalogues on Stadia. There was also Red Dead Redemption 2 quite early on, Football Manager 2020, Destiny 2, some Doom, Hitman, Cyberpunk. Not to mention hundreds of indie games. Saying Google didn't invest enough is showing lack of knowledge about the platform.

Thet didn't need an exclusive, that money would have been better spent on convincing more studios to port, marketing. And reassuring potential users with a promise for a refund.

But you own the console for life, whereas a game on Stadia is known to disappear at any moment (because we know google will drop it).

I still didn't see any value in Stadia though. The cloud-only full-price approach was the main issue (GeForce Now had them beat there), but also their investment in hardware has been pitiful, so you're effectively playing at low graphics settings. Rather than addressing that, they chased the 4K buzzword. The kind of gamers who insist on 4K aren't the kind who want to use cloud gaming services. GeForce Now understood this, Stadia didn't.

Incidentally Google were sued for supposedly misleading promotion of their 4K support: https://www.pcgamer.com/stadias-4k-gaming-claims-come-back-t...

First they had an almost year-long waiting list. Now you have to pay a hefty commissioning fee.

For me that makes no sense as a cloud setup. The benefit of cloud is paying when you need it (like when I travel and didn't bring my PC) and not when I don't need it.

Stadia did offer that but because you had to pay for the games it also wasn't worthwhile.

I use plutosphere now for VR when I'm traveling and that's great and not too expensive. Still a bit buggy and slow to boot the machines though.

And, there hasn’t been a waitlist for some time now. At least in California. I was up and running within 30 minutes of starting my subscription, and can cancel any time.

And, regardless of the exact implementation, the Shadow approach is infinitely more desirable to me than the complete lock in, and limited selection, of Stadia.

And yes I know you use your own games.. But it's not suited for casual use for me. I use plutosphere instead. That's only intended for VR but that's all I use anyway :) Plutosphere is also a "PC in the cloud" but you pay $2 per hour and a $10 monthly fee if you want persistent storage. No sign-up fees though. But its pricing is pretty ideal for holidays, whereas Shadow PC is now completely unviable for that with the activation fee.

With the associated UX of manually logging in, handling disk space, waiting for installations and updates, etc. etc. etc.

> manually logging in

You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.

You do have to boot with a different device, first for VR with their Quest app (implementation detail of the Beta) or Virtual Desktop (required).

You have to login to each and every store (Steam, Epic, Ubi, etc.) you want to play games with.

> there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores

As of now. Some games' ToS already state you can't play them remotely, and technically Shadow would be in violation of that. It's enough for EA or whatever to threaten to sue them and they might implement restrictions.

I agree that the flexibility and continued ownership of the games is a massive bonus.

Once, as you also need to do when booting up your a console for the first time.

It's probably possible to turn some of these people into regular gamers with a service like Stadia. But a lot of them won't buy many games, and those that do might bite the bullet and go out and buy a console, so probably not the best audience for a product?

There are effectively 3 consoles and it takes about a minute to set it up.

They don't strike me as common reasons to choose Stadia.

Which happens once and requires no intervention from the user.

The rest of the time it's as simple as take DVD out of box and put in drive.

If you meant "setup" as in literally just playing a game you've already setup, then sure, that can be fairly quick, but still not as quick as Stadia was.

If we gave some gamer the funds to run the gaming equivalent of archive.org I might have more trust in the service. Earning money and archiving cultural goods for future generations are not easily compatible goals.

They are - Google is still the most trusted brand in any studies you can find (and if you find one where it's not, it's probably #2)

It is going down rather than climbing right now, but that's also not that uncommon - Apple/etc is also seeing the same thing.

Now, among tech, and maybe even gamers, i would bet this is less true, and that is highly problematic to the degree it needs to sell to tech/people who listen to tech.

But the latter also often consistently overestimates how much influence it has (IE tech people often believe that the whisper effect they have makes a difference, and that is only true in certain cases over a long period of time).

In most cases, social influencers in completely unrelated fields can generate more tech product sales than happy/angry tech people :)

Put another way - the simplistic notion that Stadia, or anything from Google, failed simply due to lack of tech trust is silly. While it's a fun headline that plays to their audience, things are rarely that simple

We are talking about trust for Google to launch a new product or service. It's not worth to users nor businesses to direct any money or effort into anything new Google makes because it's not for long.

Google simply can't be trusted to do that. Partial list of products estalishing this trend: Meebo, Buzz, Orkut, Google+, Notebook, SideWiki, Google Schemer, Google Spaces, Google Checkout, Google Directory, Google Sync, Google Hangouts, iGoogle, Google Knol, Google Lively, Google Moderator, .... Complete list is over 200 items long.

Rather then assert your feelings as truth, please show any meaningful data that says the general public doesn't trust Google to launch products. It should not be hard to find if you're right.

As an aside, I was responsible for Google moderator for the majority of its life. It was never launched except as a "use this if you like it" type thing (we considered it but chose not to make a formal product offering).

The launch blog post (which only appeared on the app engine blog) makes this super clear: "Several of our colleagues and visitors to Google have asked if we could make it available externally for any kind of talk, presentation and/or event. Conveniently, Google App Engine launched in April and made it easy for us to do this! As a result, we're pleased to release this tool, now called Google Moderator, on Google App Engine."

We were asked by some folks to let them use it, and it was easy enough, do we did it. We kept it around for folks for 7 years. Just about everyone using it had moved on.

The turndown notice was a generic one I approved because we got asked to have some random public facing answer in case anyone cared. IE so that Michael Arrington didn't just make stuff up out of thin air to support whatever his narrative of the week was. We were spending our time helping the small number of users, so I didn't care about the accuracy of the notice. It is correct that we didn't productize it due to usage and other reasons. It still remains used internally.

I know that data doesn't fit your narrative either, so I suspect you'll discard it or argue rather than change your view.

This is actually why your view doesn't match the data - you are focused on conforming the data to your view instead of your view to the data. Citing moderator in the same list as actual products shows that.

That’s where the market is moving towards however. A lot of the game you "purchased" on the other platforms refuse to work if you can’t connect to their weird anti-piracy scheme.

I agree with the article. Stadia was an interesting offer. The revolving free games coming with the pro subscription was a good deal and the idea of being able to keep playing games at their rendering best without having to fuss and constantly upgrade a PC - by far the worst platform to game for occasional players like me - sounded great.

Stadia issue was for most it wasn’t offering what it claimed to offer. Games didn’t look that good on the free tier for exemple and as pointed no one trusts Google so I didn’t want to invest more than the strict minimum. Apparently I have played Cyberpunk for free so that’s nice.

  > That’s where the market is moving towards however. 

It's a lot harder to build a walled garden from scratch as a late-comer, and even harder when you're building it in a swamp where people are less confident about moving in.

I bought RDR2 for stadia in 2020 and played it everywhere - my phone, laptop, desktop. I played through the whole game and never once had any technical issues. That ability is what gives cloud gaming a real value beyond PC gaming or console gaming. You tell someone without a high spec gaming PC and no PS5 that they can play a new AAA game without buying anything new, then I think lots of people will love that. The article mentions you can't use your own controller, which is flat wrong. I used a Microsoft Xbox controller for both computer and android when I played. For someone who only plays games for 10-20 hours a month or so, it's great to not have to worry about buying new equipment.

However, after the introductory free month of the service I gave it up. Only a few games, and the ones I liked were so short and simple that I was done with them after a week or so. GeForce now has the right idea here - the cloud gaming IS the service and it connects to your existing games on steam and origin.

sigh As a gamer and actual Stadia user this is not a complete or fair depiction. Like almost every other cloud/gaming service including Xbox etc. Stadia had a "Pro" subscription model which have you access to dozens (hundreds?) of games.

Furthermore "you could only play them through this limited service" is exactly the same model as every other gaming service!

In theory, yes. In practise, if Steam shuts down tomorrow, I still have all my games on my hard disk and cracking Steam's DRM is pretty easy, and quite possibly completely legal in the circumstance.

I guess it's not trivial to get such "floating" windows licenses and prevent people from mining with a mouse jiggler?

Though I did subscribe to the 3080 tier for a month when my gaming machine was out of comission.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-death-of-google-stad...

The idea of Stadia made a lot of sense to me when I first heard of it. I guess the implementation wasn't very good though.

Of course, the average consumer has also never heard of Stadia. I've barely heard of it and I was at the Google Cloud event where they either launched it or gave it a lot of air time.

It was a shitty platform to develop for, end of story. I’m the games industry, there are 100 more failures that look like that.

Specifically Vulkan is bad, and Linux is worse.

The solution is obvious and done by the extant and thriving streaming services.

Latency isn't an issue for movies or TV. Streaming will never work for games in the same way playing a game locally does.

Like any other console.

I wrote this on another article comment but I don't think it's just about Google not understanding gamers, but gaming in general.

- People who play games are fickle and distrustful (and rightfully so, cause gaming in general has a sordid history of screwing the player-base repeatedly). Google didn't understand this and seem to have understood it as "built it and they will come", ignoring the handful of failed consoles that claimed to revolutionize gaming

- People who play games are fiercely fanatic towards specific games/platforms (that the console wars still continue is very strange to me; preference sure, but the outright militant approach towards different platforms is just silly). Google didn't understand this and thought it would be enough to just put platform out there and everyone would switch over

- Developers understand the resource allocation for making a game pretty well, and they constantly are missing deadlines and/or releasing half-baked games. Google didn't understand this and just released a platform that was costly to port to and might as well have been another console

- The games that were the showcase of Stadia were not games you want to just pick up and play on the go, they're something you sit down and put a few hours into. Google didn't understand this and apparently just thought "well, AAA game X is popular, let's get that on our platform"

- Google already _has_ a platform for gaming called Android, and they didn't seem to understand what makes it work and what doesn't, or how to use that as a base for their idea, and instead tried to make a whole new platform

- Stadia was a new gaming platform no matter how you slice it, but Google seemed to have the idea that Stadia was just something everyone would love and convert to immediately no matter how complex it was to put games on it. Developers even as late as 2022 still had trouble porting games to Stadia and if it's hard to port, naturally they're not going to develop something specifically for it

The list can go on, but really Google just didn't understand what they were trying to do. The tech was pretty neat, but they didn't understand that what they were offering simply wasn't the way people wanted to play games or develop games for.

Combine this with the fact that _everyone_ (devs and players alike) knew that it had a limited window to be successful before Google shut it down due to lack of $$$, and not having a strong showing from day 1 was not even a nail in the coffin, it was shoveling dirt atop the platform the moment it arrived.

Google was never poised to disrupt gaming in my opinion -- what they were poised to do was to provide the datacenter and audience for developers to create their own vision of what Stadia should have been, but Google tried to make a video game platform, and instead made another entry in the "Failed Video Game console/platforms" lists that will be content for Youtube in the future.

Well people who just care which console has MOAR FPS deserve what they get.

But as long as console exclusives still exist, there is an argument for a platform preference.

I'm sick that you can't buy ("license") something on one platform and then immediately use it on another.

I understand that the platform costs and taxes are meant to recoup development and upkeep (to a certain extent), but it still pisses me off as a consumer.

If I buy ("license") a game or movie on Google, I should be able to watch it on Netflix or play it on Steam.

The whole walled garden "app store" system sucks.

And yet those programs do not magically work on Windows or Linux because that's not how computers work. Developers have to specifically target and build their programs for the devices they wish to support.

And many apps (in particular SaaS ones) allow you to buy one license and use their program on whatever device they support. App Store doesn't stop you.

If I can get it to run, licensing shouldn't be another road block

It's never been as reliable as Apple platforms are way more of a moving target, so it's never got as feature complete and dependable as wine

* - I am taking developers at their word on this. I haven't sold anything on the Mac App Store.

I don't really see the value in transferring my Steam games to GOG for example. So I don't really see what the criticism is here.

Game store and some multiplayer integration is not that limiting. It's preferrable to every single game building their own awful mini-stores/platforms (like EAs and Ubisofts. Even Battle.net's can be annoying and naggy).

Never heard of that before. Googled it, and it appears to be an american only thing. Any suggestions for the rest of the world?

My knowledge about this is limited to a couple board game programs I used to use on a Mac and now run on Linux.

It’s not gog type freedom from drm but it seems to be cross platform. Well of course not on iOS….

Except on Steam. Never buy your games on the app store. Get them on Steam and you get all platforms* (at least most of the time).

* PC platforms of course. Hell will freeze over before you also get the console version.

I was also wondering if the licence could be some form of asymmetric key which could be used to "unlock" the game, but that might be a solution looking for a problem.

I don't think this would ever work in reality, because it limits the ability of the delivery service to double dip.

It's a bit weird because other games haven't had those issues. It's common for racing games to get delisted because of expired licenses, but if you purchased it that licensed content is yours to download forever. Every 2 years or so a Forza game has to get pulled and goes on sale for $1 for the final week.

Edit: Doing some further digging it looks like it's because they kept selling Alan Wake after the music rights expired, so they had to push an update or delist the game. That's pretty crappy.

https://www.pcgamer.com/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas-steam-u...

Just because it’s on the disc doesn’t mean the binary has to load it.

As for mandatory patches: you would at least have the option to play single-player offline without updating.