It's entirely possible that those of us who pay attention to this are a vanishing minority compared to the cultural momentum of Google as the default search provider and a dominant provider of email/office SaaS.
But even if dissatisfaction is growing, the institional momentum is just so huge that it's very likely Google simply doesn't have the capacity to sense any brand damage even if it were actually occurring at any significant scale. You'd need to have people whose role included a duty to pay attention to this with systems for measuring it reporting to people who take them seriously. Google's never needed those people. It came into the world with a halo of value, primarily knowing the challenges of demand and growth rather than attrition. Much of its management and professional staff are probably largely drawn from the ranks of those who have known more success than challenge, and they are rewarded in such a way that they not only have little incentive to behave differently they may actually have an atrophied sense of the possibility that different might be important, even if they were aware of cultural momentum shifts and were willing/able to persuade others at Google to change how things are done in an enormously successful place.
Like Bill Gates said, success is a terrible teacher. Why would enough people at Google think Google has crucial lessons to learn?
I see this as a variant of the tragedy of the commons: in this case it is the reputation and market share of Google Search.
Each individual at Google is incentivised to feed their own cow… err… career at the expense of the commons: Google’s reputation.
Inevitably this will destroy Google, but this will take many years of accumulated damage to build up to a catastrophic point.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually
and then suddenly.”Having been burnt too many times with Google products[1] I try not use their offerings on the cloud many decision makers are here who will worry about similar issues.
If Google wants to be serious about Cloud then they need to be serious about long term support.
Microsoft in the win 3 /9x days till even win 7 was exceptionally consistent about ABI support even adding specific behaviors to support a single binary to make sure upgrades just worked. That kind of culture was a key factor that made developers want to develop on their platforms
—-
[1] just this week having to start work on upcoming firebase dynamic link deprecation.
While google had given a long lead time and announced the sunsetting years ahead , I still don’t have to worry about similar issues on AWS nearly as often.
I think of all the google.products, that's pretty good.
Inbox still hurts though, but not as much as google music
It caused them to make wild mistakes that jeopardized the long term viability of the company like milking their core product well after it had served its time in the market and neglecting, shutting down, or even warehousing everything else (sound familiar?).
It took some really forceful misunderstanding of their marketspace by clueless executives to finally bring Atari down and have it sold off for parts. And that's where Google's fate diverges from the historic lesson, Google won't die because its stuff its sales channels full of more hardware than they can sell (tying up every dollar in the company). Google will die because it's core product, ad placement, is become less valuable, causing the company to optimize trying to capture that main source of revenue -- which is realized in a total lack of strategy to build literally any other business.
For example, if AI/VR/neural implants/something else* completely shake up the computing landscape (and traditional search engines start to fall into irrelevancy), will people trust Google to be the provider for these things? Or will they look at their history of quickly killing products, and choose a competitor who might be in it for the long haul?
* Given some of these fields are already dominated by Google's competitors/other FAANG level companies, that already be a bad sign.
Their finance bros don't care about anything they can't measure. Mission accomplished as far as they're concerned.
It was a fairly hidden piece of functionality that a tiny proportion of people ever used -- of course, a higher proportion of HN users, but still.
Their brand is unchanged.
I used to buy in heavily to the Google ecosystem and trust it as a pretty solid go to option for anything they offered, now I'd be really hesitant to use it for anything critical. I have even been wondering if my longstanding gmail email address will someday be a liability.
Those two examples were probably smaller services but had their effects on different populations. When you add up all the things that have been ended by Google it can really contribute to their overall brand image. Some things can trickle down from more technical users to less technical. I think chrome was first adopted by a highly tech literate population before breaking into the mainstream, and if that population starts to mistrust Google it could hurt them in the long run.
I think there has been a pretty major shift in Google culture and product strategy and I'm not a fan of it.
What was the last new Google anything you added to your daily life? Instead of adding Google Quickshare to share files from my PC to Android I use Microsoft's Phone Link. That is the first time in my life I've picked a Microsoft product over a Google one. It also just works better and doesn't require I have bluetooth enabled on both devices.
Gemini. Maybe you prefer ChatGPT, but either way the product category is a huge improvement to daily life for a lot of people. And transformers were invented at Google.
And Waymo is on its way to being huge. Might eventually make Google more money than everything it's done before.
As far as I can tell, innovation seems alive and well at Google. But a lot of their product categories are simply "mature" by now -- you're not going to see some wild transformation of YouTube, or Docs and Drive, or Android. Same as you're not seeing some wild reinvention of Apple Music, or iCloud, or iOS.
I am never getting into a Google powered vehicle. They aren't 2000s genius Google, they are 2024 'We're getting rid of Google Cache' Google that prioritizes a buck over good tech. I'm not trusting that mindset with my life.
And you still won't get into a Waymo when extensive statistics prove they're far safer than a human driver?
But all those features were what drew users, power users especially. And users each had their own featured reasons to love Firefox.
Now look at them. Most used browser to nothing.
There are other reasons too, but what Firefox did was remove what was special about them.
Feel free to criticize Mozilla all you like, but this is a prime example of myopic tech-bubble thinking that is being decried elsewhere in this thread. Firefox market share declined first because Google used their market position to advertise Chrome for free on what was then the most valuable web real estate in the world (the Google home page), then because they paid software installers to use dark patterns to automatically install Chrome and set it as the default browser without the user's consent, and then because they optimized all of Google's popular properties to work best in Chrome and only begrudgingly in other browsers, and then because they shipped it as the default browser on the OS that Google controls. There's not a single thing that Mozilla could have done to stop Chrome, short of making their own phone OS where they could ship Firefox as the default, which they did in fact attempt.
So yes, Google was going to win the fight Mozilla picked, but Mozilla picked a losing strategy.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/chrom...
Yes, indeed. This may or may not have been wrong of Google, however this is also called "competition". And what did Mozilla do?
It flinched.
Many users loved Firefox, and disliked that Chrome had barely any ability to customize anything when released. It was literally years before you could change even the most basic things about the interface. When released, almost nothing could be configured about it, and it was a far cry from Firefox's ability to give the user what they wanted.
Firefox's response to Chrome's minor speed improvements? Was to literally begin a campaign to become the enemy. Firefox devs worked diligently to make Firefox a second rate clone of Chrome. They removed features, configuration, the ability to modify the interface, and more.
Mozilla could have so easily kept all that configurability, its strong point, its unique factor, but instead panicked. And in doing so it rendered itself incapable of competing on any footing.
Put another way, yes Google had vast resources. Yet this is precisely why you never compete on the same footing as them. You instead compete on what they do not have.
And that was the ability to theme Firefox, to configure it as you wanted, to turn off features you did not want, and more. Chrome had none of this initially. And Google is literally famous for, and incapable of listening to users. They're not built for it. Mozilla was.
And they threw all those strengths away, the only way they could compete with Chrome.
So yes, there were things they could have done. And yes, endless people told them that in bug reports, in emails to them, and more. If anyone's thinking here is myopic (great personal attack, btw), it was Mozilla's.
I love Firefox (fork) it is my only browser but you can see the long term trend and I do wonder if it will even be a thing in a decades time. Unless there is a sudden shift towards it, is will eventually be relegated to the last of the most devoted geeks as we watch it wither away at the hands of the tech giants running the net.
A big thing was when they cut the Servo team that was when I knew they had sort of given up on trying to push forward but merely follow.
It is probably inevitable, I mean if even Microsoft couldnt fight off Googles browser dominance, what hope does Mozilla have long term.
The new Google TV is more like a smart TV without the TV. It has apps you install. It's much more complex and not the same thing at all. I was disappointed.
But then again every company discontinues products. I don't see that as a breach of trust. It's making up a promise they never made and criticizing them for it.
The silver lining is that I have been finding some better alternatives to both Chromecast and YouTube. I have some Amazon Firesticks with Kodi installed that are pointed at my media-filled NAS, including videos I fetched previously with yt-dlp
I am also considering moving everything over to something like Intel PC sticks and possibly running Kodi off of those eventually. Then I can have all of the smart features I need without any ads or without any of the devices obsoleting themselves beyond my control
I've got a couple nest protects that need to be put into a shallow grave.
They've kinda mucked up the rest of the nest ecosystem.
A pox on google.
(But in that case, I don’t see why you bought one in the first place.)
It was a gift for a relative: a "Chromecast with Google TV." I didn't know what it really was when I bought it. Taking "Chromecast" out of the name makes sense.
The original concept was great, but I guess it doesn't sell anymore?
I bought an OG Chromecast over a decade ago. It was a one-trick pony: Push "cast" button on pocket computer, and whatever I was doing there would show up on the BFT.
Which is great, you know, for a person who lives alone and never has visitors: One can select an item from the slick interface provided by the service they subscribe to on their amazing personal computing device and it appears magically on the big screen. The control buttons are there on the pocket computer, too. It Just Works.
However, it is an awful experience for someone who wishes to watch a film together with others: My personal pocket computer is not really set up to be shared with others (and the live screencast function of Chromecast, while functional, has really high latency for interactive tasks).
And if someone else wants to pick something to watch using their own personal pocket computer, then they can of course do so -- but theirs is also not meant to be a shared experience, and they won't be able to use the services that I pay to use in my home.
So fine. A film is selected, however that is done, and it is playing. But it's time to pause it so someone can use the bathroom. Do I use my phone for my Chromecast for the movie my friend picked on their phone? I already had to hide the buttons from showing up in the notification area of everyone's pocket computer on the LAN, since my roommate kept being a dick and stopping my shit.
Or do I have my friend fumble around with this potentially-unfamiliar interface on their own (locked) pocket computer to pause it? What if they stepped away? Do I find the Home app on my own pocket computer, open it, find the devices page, find the appropriate Chromecast device, and then finally fucking pause it? (Fuck you. I just want to go take a fucking piss.)
Back then, it was a much better experience in my household to use a PS3 for streaming: It had a regular remote control that -- as a design intent -- anyone could pick up and operate. Browsing possible selections was done on the BFT that was visible to all interested parties. My roommate didn't get a notification on their phone that encouraged them fuck with me from a different area of the house. It was a much better experience for those who didn't live a life of absolute solitude.
Today, it's still that way -- except nowadays I have [what is sometimes referred to as] a GCWGTV. It can behave like an OG Chromecast (what UI???), or it can behave like a human-centric streaming device with its own GUI and dedicated physical remote control that anyone can pick up and use, browsing Netflix or Plex or whatever in a manner very similar to what we were doing on a PS3 back in the day.
This works fine.
Honestly that sounds far more like your roommate being an ass than some failure of the technology. If you had to tape over the IR sensor because your roommate kept blasting the IR power off signal for your TV, would you also blame the IR sensor?
Either way, my TV remotes which support CEC that have play/pause buttons on them can play/pause content on my OG chromecast.
(And CEC is a curse for those with AV systems of even moderate complexity.)
I'd still say its 99% having a shitty roommate. I don't know why you'd excuse their shit behavior on having a button to do it.
> And CEC is a curse for those with AV systems of even moderate complexity.
Eh. I've had a few dozen AV setups of "moderate" complexity (multiple game consoles/streaming boxes, AV receiver, BD player, TV) and never really had bad experiences. Often things just work when I've turned them on. And honestly most of the time with things running my OG Chromecasts its the only actual device on the setup (a stand-alone TV mounted someplace like in the garage or kitchen or patio).
No?
Then we're done here.
Nobody's locked-down personal pocket computer needs to be involved at all for this most mundane task.
Simplicity.
The only thing is that if you set up with all HomePods you can have your TV audio go to them too in stereo. Very cool. And Google doesn’t have that feature.
Can my neighbor not stop by and watch some TV with me and have the ability to pause it?
I might as well publish the SSID and passphrase on a billboard, or just go full Bruce Schneier and leave it open for all.
(Or.... You know, a real remote! With real buttons!)
The original argument was in favor of the OG Chromecast's method, wherein: There is no dedicated remote laying around that anyone can pick up and unambiguously make work.
It is good to have options.
(And modern Google-produced streaming devices, whether they are good or bad, do provide options.)
And for ages afterwards they would use it as a reference device for google TV and testing for play store certification - just as they were pushing 64-bit only as a valid app path. So many things were only missing from the google tv play store for years afterwards because they just wouldn't function on those things.
> And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
Will you have no trouble buying a Roku or Amazon Fire Stick though?
Those are also paper weights once the company decides to stop supporting them - and I'm not aware of any consumer electronics that allows you to install your own software on it.
Seems like a strange swipe at Google, even though your complaints apply to all of these devices regardless of brand.
For what it's worth - Google's latest phones, Pixel 9, boast 7 years of updates and support.
All consumer electronics are designed to be disposable. GP's point was a grievance with consumer electronics at large, not Google's. What other consumer electronics allow you to replace the OS with your own, or receive infinite updates forever? Zero.
Chromecast lasted for a decade, and is "dead" only in name. None of GP's statement is on-point for a typical "Google kills things all the time" complaint.
If we're going to throw shade at Google, make sure it's about legitimate things.
My older Roku 2 is effectively unusable as most apps are just outrageously sluggish and videos often crash loading.
They were sold as cable box replacements, running the YouTube TV app, rather than their ability to "cast" a phone screen to a TV.
Afaik Google TV is to Android TV what Pixel OS is to Android. Both the "Chromecast with Google TV" and the new "Google TV Streamer" are technically running "full Android TV".
Also they were sold mainly as a Roku/Fire stick competitor. Maybe they marketed it alongside YouTube TV but also there's a dedicated Netflix button on the remote.
for how to do it, see:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara%E1%B9%87asati
make sure to read it fully, including all the links, recursively.
and
https://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?t=17516&start=20
https://damsara.org/interesting-new-findings/solitary-night-...
just kidding.
but really, do you seriously think that people in companies do things for any reason rather than their own benefit? do you? nope. nyet. nahi. nada. coz everyone is that way.
So yes, takedowns here are fine.
> I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
You can install LineageOS on it today.
If you want to complain about Google TV, the strategy is to bring up the first product to use that name. No one remembers it, and completely unrelated to current Google TV. Probably why Google chosen than name - even they forgot they had a product with that name already.
Unfortunately my TV is built on the Google TV OS, which probably means all smart features will be unusable in six months.
yes, of course. there will be outcry on eng-misc@ about it now it is in the news, and when it was first suggested that Search do this, someone will have found the plan and circulated it and it will be widely understood that this will be terrible for the brand of Google Search.
and then some exec will have written some nonsense email explaining how it was important as a cost saving measure and to secure "IP" for "pivot to AI" and that'll be the end of it.
it's extremely weird that HN posters assume Google employees aren't aware of things happening in the world, or don't predict the very obvious consequences of VP decisions.
I received an email from Google today with the subject line "Meet the new Google TV Streamer (4K)"
The sender was Google Chromecast. Apparently it's some sort of streaming hardware they are selling for £99.
I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
No thanks, Google. You've blotched your copybook too many times.