For them to change, they'd have to either: 1) Support everything into eternity, which given their propensity to release new things frequently would grow to be impossibly expensive, or 2) Be more disciplined in what they release, so that it can be supported in perpetuity. I don't see either happening, so we end up where we are now. They have to keep innovating or they'll stagnate and die.
Someone has to invest the time and money to keep services running, even if only limping along. Google likes to experiment and test the waters. It's part of why they've been so successful. I hope they keep killing off their underperforming/underused services so they can keep on pushing other things forward.
However, closing down stagnant projects is very different from locking down access to previously open APIs (Google Maps). Since we're discussing the closure of Google Code, I won't get distracted with that controversial topic.
In the end, they are a for-profit business. Not a charity.
That's where GitHub is now. If GitHub closed in the same way, that would be... unfortunate.
That seems to be where Google Code was trying to go. For whatever reason, it never quite made it.
But if you're part of the scenery - and Google Code was, for a while - and not just a shack hardly anyone visits, a burden of responsibility goes with that.
Whereas an early start-up with 100 users selling a product with not much lock-in can pivot without too much side effect. The users know they are dealing with a start-up and may expect it.
'Eternity' overstates it. Plenty of vendors support projects long after they are obsolete. IBM supported OS/2, released 1992 and a marketplace flop, until the end of 2006.
That means that if I need something to be around for awhile, I'll count on IBM and not Google. Google has the perogative to make that choice, of course, and long-term support generally is associated more with the business market than with consumers. Party that's because it costs more for businesses to change, partly IMO because consumers are poorly educated customers.
EDIT: It's a little odd to see this very normal comment modded down to -1 (now -3!). Another perfectly fine comment was modded down to 0. I don't care about the points at all, but it supports my instinct that some on HN are trying to protect Google. Employees? Fans?
That's because users paid for it.
Google gave the world high-quality, free open source code hosting for eight years. I don't see how that's anything but a net positive.
I'll give you three guesses as to how much those companies still running OS/2 were paying for support in 2006.
When IBM buys a company/product, they will merrily throw everything out and declare that v.next is the next version of whatever product you are using. Then the legacy product goes in life support.
OS/2 lived on because it was widely deployed in banking for ATMs and POS, and it generated a lot of complimentary revenue. So when a company like Target had 100,000 cash registers, IBM got to sell services around deployment and maintenance, and management software like Tivoli to manage the devices.
code.google.com was around for 7 years. What more do you want?
It was launched at OSCON in 2006.
The large companies are made of small clueless people just like every other company on the face of the Earth.
(a) For things (eg. Reader, Google Wallet for Digital Goods) that could be viable businesses in their own right with some modifications, spin them off as small companies.
(b) Open source the project they no longer have interest in. (as was done for Google Wave, which arguably wasn't necessary because the level of interest in Wave at that point was quite low)
In this case (and perhaps they already have this), I would suggest that they allow anyone to discover all the projects on Google Code and export them such that they could be imported into other code hosting sites, allowing everyone else to build a Google Code alternative.
This is pretty ridiculous. It is a free service, sustained only by how long corporate wants to foot the bill. This is why it's so important to keep in mind how sustainable your dependencies are longer term (if having to move away from them would be such a big deal).
Not only that, but Google Code lost the mindshare battle and hasn't been getting much development attention for some time now. It has fallen way behind, is now sub-par, and there has been a mass exodus of projects away from it. It had a nice year or two, but it's time to put it down.
It's simple: Stop wasting developer manpower, money, and time on something that no longer offers much utility. Close shop, figure out how those resources could be better spent doing things that are useful.
See my couple of wasted Google Glass devices that will never see an Android update again. Do you think I'll ever buy a Google Android product after they wasted $3k of mine? Do you think I'll buy any more of their tech device blunders like cars or thermostats or other devices? Likely not. It's well established they'll just drop them soon after release anyway.
They are getting the same reputation for software services. There are lots of startups that would have been happy with Reader's usage numbers besides, so they aren't even making decisions everyone would agree are good kills.
With my Android apps, any time someone sends me a bug report or a complaint, I refund them immediately and thank them for the feedback. Does this make me the most money? Hell no. But I have a lot of friendly users who email me constantly with improvements and who aren't mad I'm ripping them off or screwing them over. That's worth a lot too. Google is saving money to screw over users with this Google Code decision and it's definitely not one I agree with.
Again, these are two very niche projects. Reader was a niche within a niche. Glass was an experiment that a tiny subset of the population ever even touched first-hand. It never even reached a "1.0".
As early adopters and as technologists, it's easy for us to get upset when our favorite pet project gets killed. But in the end, Reader failed to get any kind of traction beyond its niche. Glass ran into a buzzsaw of negative perception, legislation, and media twisting, in addition to technical challenges. The lessons learned from Glass will be applied to present and future efforts.
Glass is clearly very much alive.
Glass is still very much alive.
It sucks for our niche, but ultimately Google Reader was a product that didn't have any appeal beyond said tiny niche. The original goal was to make RSS more accessible beyond technologists, but it failed to reach any kind of mass appeal. Some of this was more to do with RSS/Atom feeds having some ergonomic issues that weren't solved before the social media frenzy took hold.
Failure is when results don't meet expectations, which is what happened to Reader. I don't fault them for closing it, despite it being inconvenient for me to switch. What does a for-profit company have to gain by dumping time and resources into a failure whose window of opportunity has passed? Some goodwill from a tiny, miniscule subset of their userbase?
Apologies for the rantiness of the post below, it isn't meant aggressively, just more frustration at no apparent direction seen within the Googlesphere.
The removal of features that people use with no warning and non-implementation of features immediately after release is really really annoying. It makes their stated goals ("index everything") meaningless/temporary/untrustworthy, and dissuades me from buying services from them. Freeloaders use their products a lot (I do!) but I would think twice about ever ever ever paying for software from them, or for a service because you have no idea when it'll shut shop. Even products they still produce appear to be completely disjointed (see the Play Books app on Android and the complete disparity found with their web interface...)
Here's a list of annoyances in products they've released to much fanfare, then apparently just not bothered developing anymore:
1. Google+, yes all of it. And I use it! (where is it going now that Gundotra has left?)
2. Maps: My Maps now isn't integrated into the Android app (they spun it off??), Latitude is gone, Google Local is gone but apparently still there (you can read reviews but hidden and secret GUI controls are now the order of the day for working out how to do anything in Google Maps)
3. Google Drive desktop client: will it ever tell me how far it has got in uploading a massive file? The web client does, the desktop one doesn't. Surely that's an OBVIOUS feature in a filesync utility. Don't ask about their promised Linux version. Couldn't they write it in Go or something?
4. Google Hangouts Android client: the forced update from Talk with the removal of features (is someone actually online? a presence feature seen since MSN Messenger that somehow escapes Google's notice)
5. Google Chrome OS: why is it even here? There was much talk of being stiff competition to Windows and OSX but it's like an Etch-A-Sketch toy operating system. I think TinyCore Linux does more?
I'll stop now because it's coming up to lunch time and I'll get indigestion.
I am a big fan of Android, but their incessant removal of features within their core apps and then rereleases of similar-but-ever-so-slightly-different apps ever year at I/O is getting wearisome.
You just listed a bunch of projects that failed to get traction or lost mindshare battles. I expect an innovator to move on from failures, which is what all of your examples are. Reader: Failure, Google Code: Failure, G+: Failure, Wave: Failure. The reasons for each failure differ, but said reasons are irrelevant to this discussion. The fact is that Google attempted something, maybe enjoyed a little bit of success, but the results didn't meet their expectations. Rather than continue running these things with skeleton crews (to what effect?), they've done the right thing and closed them down.
The only exception is Glass, which was an experiment that already is impacting other current and future products. It never had a guaranteed future. It never reached consumer "1.0".
That's great if you are an investor or employee, but if you are a user it kind of sucks.
Google just needs to be up front about it (and maybe they are): We make no commitment to supporting this application or maintaining it as is. We might make radical changes, we might shut it down. If we do shut it down, we'll warn you at least 9 months ahead of time.
I'm not going to invest much in those applications, but others might.
Google code is mostly irrelevant to this calculus, because it was not ever meant to make money for anyone, but i think you are a little harsh here.
Don't get me wrong, as a user, I would love to have the stuff i want to use supported forever. But it's unrealistic.
Google is suffering the reputational damage it deserves - not because it is now behaving any differently from other corporations but because it has betrayed the promise that it would.
Nobody launches a new product and guarantees "If this doesn't work out, we'll keep it around indefinitely on life support". You don't start a new effort expecting failure. If it doesn't end up working out, it'll be closed down. Google's failures are just a lot more public than whatever side business many of us may take a stab at.
This isn't unique to Google. Failures need to be learned from and culled. We as a small business/startup oriented crowd should understand that more than most. I've had to kill off more projects than I'd like to admit because I didn't want to spend the time/money on what I perceived to be failures.
Not that failure is bad. Like Google, I've learned a ton from my unsuccessful projects.
Consumer and 'free' software is the exception, and it's a recent exception with rapid release schedules. It's just shifting the costs from the vendor (maintaining old products) to the consumer (changing/upgrading).
It's important to note that in many cases, the vendor pays for what is otherwise a free service (Reader, Wave, G+). In the case of some services, they may gather some data from which they can profit from, but that doesn't always pay the bills.
So yes, the customer may have to switch services or upgrade, but unlike enterprise software, they aren't paying four to six figures to use said services.