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.