Rule of Google: if it works, kill it.
I know, I know, using Google apps isn’t the best, but this was a perfectly good Podcast app with all the features you might want.
Apparently they’re moving everything over to YouTube Music, where a lot of the features of Google Podcasts aren’t implemented yet.
I’ve moved over to an app from F-Droid.
I don’t really understand how they consistently manage to screw things up. And they always say that the features are coming, but they never do.
I’m still bitter over Inbox.
I used to be excited about new things from Google. Tried to get into every beta, downloaded the newest released apps etc. But not anymore.
I just read about tasks being removed from Google Keep. Then the feature removal from nest hubs. Do they have a unified strategy at all? Or is it just the whims of a manager’s daily musings that drive what development does?
It’s a company culture thing. You’re not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products. You are rewarded for starting new ones.
No kidding.
It is 2024, and here is your yearly reminder that you still can’t create a new folder/label in the official Gmail Android app despite the online documentation implying that you can.
Android users literally run their lives out of Google Calendar. Think you can share your calendar with a friend from your phone? Think again. It’s back to the 10 year old desktop interface for you!
Oh you’re not at home at your computer, well, try using the desktop version of Google Calandar on your phone’s browser. I dare you.
I’m still waiting for the day when we can create an event from a message in Gmail.
I live in Silicon Valley and this is a standard thing here. Companies measure your success as an employee based on “impact”. Launching a new thing that tens or hundreds of millions of people like and use is big impact. Deleting old code to reduce the overall complexity of the system is also seen as having a lot of impact - old code has potential security risks, privacy / data storage risks, may require legacy frameworks that aren’t supported any more, etc.
However, maintaining an existing system isn’t always seen as impactful, unless it’s a major system or needs some large bug fixes for issues that affect a significant number of users, or that affect paid customers.
Sometimes, apps are built by a small team (say 1-4 people) during a hackathon. Eventually, that team has to move on to other work, and nobody else wants to pick up maintenance of the system they built. This is usually the reason why smaller products die.
You also need to keep in mind that if you’re using a free service, you’re not the customer. The customer is whoever is paying for the service on your behalf - for example, advertisers, paid users, etc. Generally, time spent improving the app will be spent on improving the experience for paid users rather than free ones. New features in systems like Gmail, Google Drive, etc mostly get built because paid users ask for them. This also means that apps that don’t drive revenue (like Google Reader, etc) have very light staffing.
Former Googlers have always said that the big issue with sustaining products at Google is that it is highly competitive and Google rewards new products, not sustaining current products. So, most people want to continuously join/form teams for new products leaving little resources for current products. This has been the way since Google started becoming a large company – so decades now.
This makes sense as to why Google puts out applications that seemingly do the same thing as something else but ever so slightly different and why there are sometimes cool new products that die on the vine years later and if there was no slightly different thing available it just dies or if there is then there is a half-assed migration.
In the Reddit AMA the Google Home team answered a few questions and only the very few softball ones. One interesting comment they made though is that because of the Nest products and generally new products, they believe it is a challenge to support the older hardware, including integrating Google and Nest hardware, so basically you get features removed to make it all work. Of course, there was the promise and supposed internal roadmap that puts these features back eventually, but we’ve seen that kind of promise over and over from Google and it rarely happens. They are trying to replace Assistant with their Gemini AI which you can do now but it comes with even less features (but parity is coming – they promise!..one day!). Is that parity with current Assistant which seems to be supporting less and less and working worse?
Google is losing a lot of consumer trust in products I think and it’s going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.
I think deep down, everybody, including Google, realizes this all ends with them retaining their customer s solely through the blackmail they have accumulated over the years.
My god, the assistant, yes. After catching up with Siri it was actually useful. And now it seems all it does is plop whatever you say into a Google search. And since they killed that, too, well…
There’s still no better email client than inbox. It was so fucking good
Man, Inbox was so good. I still start typing “inbox” into the address bar to get to my emails.
I always felt Google is just a collection of startups each doing their own thing, and they live and die like startups, too. There’s barely any overall strategy, and whenever they actually try to do something strategic, the result sucks (e.g. G+)
I’m not ready to be reminded of the loss of inbox
I’m still pissed over the loss of inbox.
They have an agenda, which isn’t aligned with your agenda. They only care about profitability, so they kill any projects not supporting that goal. Some projects are created to gather specific data sets about users, and the project is shut down when the data is captured, regardless of how popular the project was. They are always doing something with an ulterior motive. Once you understand that then you won’t be mystified by their decisions anymore.
It’s not even profitability. It’s about what looks good on a resume.
New projects look good. Maintaining old projects doesn’t.
I’ve heard a theory that says all the apps and services they make only have the purpose of collecting data. Sort of like limited time experiments. Once they get all they need from one of them they kill it and move on.
Sometimes they pretend to roll a dead service into another product in order to drive customers to that product but it’s done only in name, by a completely unrelated team and with only a vaguely related feature subset.
It would certainly explain a lot.