Obviously if you make thousands and thousands of products, then a couple will eventually have to be dropped. Can you even name me 5 big products they've ended which had a huge impact.
First cut from just checking Wikipedia. Number of google services: 117. Number of discontinued google services: 43.
So what's that.. about 40%?
Still a lot, though.
This is by far the most pervasive comment on HN regarding Google ("Oh, they launched something, don't use it because they will retire it soon. Look what happened to Reader!"). Its also completely misleading when applied to Google Cloud Platform which has been around for almost 9 years now without deprecating any service.
Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud Platform
If moving the goalposts is allowed then fair enough, it can be any number you choose.
>This is by far the most pervasive comment on HN regarding Google ("Oh, they launched something, don't use it because they will retire it soon. Look what happened to Reader!").
Yes, hello, reality calling - Google has a PR problem, as a direct result of canceling services. This PR problem is bleeding into their commercial offerings precisely because of their reliance and cultivation of grassroots, technology-minded consumer mind share. "Man, I killed all those bees but for some reason now my honey production has dropped right off. Could there be a connection???"
Someone did not properly cost this into the decision to terminate those services, and it's now biting the organization. It should be.
It's not always an easy decision, but my point is that there's a balance to be hit here. There are definitely time where discontinuing products is the right choice and the time is much better spent working on something else. I'd argue that a company which NEVER discontinues anything no matter how old and unused it is is a company that won't go far.
Even if you don’t, I hope Google understands it, and then learns from it. Wanna take a guess at why Microsft kept FoxPro around for so long? One of the reasons was if MS axed it, they’d lose those developers, many forever. Not until they had a good transition story that utilized MS products could they dare discontinue it. And to this day some will still say MS bought Fox Software for the tech and killed FoxPro...despite it being kept around for over ten years.
Point being, MS did the right thing by FoxPro in my eyes, and it is still used as an example of MS discontinuing products. Google has most definitely not done right by some products, so perhaps that will help you understand why people keep bringing it up.
Still they axed Silverlight only a few years after they launched it. Lots and lots of enterprisey stuff was built with it and then all that stuff was suddenly unsupported.
Because it feels like half of their products DO get discontinued.
And because it doesn't matter if it's half or not. As if 20% would be a better number?
One would be foolish to fully trust any company that shut down 1-2 products they were using.
But it would take a special kind of stupid to trust new products by Google who has shut down over a dozen of their products, including widely promoted ones, from Glass and Wave to Video, Reader and so on.
- Analog Efex Pro
- Color Efex Pro
- Silver Efex Pro
- Viveza
- HDR Efex Pro
- Sharpener Pro
- Dfine
Right now this product is losing substantial amounts of money, we're talking on the order of tens of millions USD per year. If the net present cost of support exceeds the net present value of the product revenue stream Google has every right to cull it. It's their prerogative as a business.
My prerogative as a business consumer (when I am in that position) makes me wary of being reliant on the whims of a multi-billion dollar company whose primary revenues are generated from ads for my analytics needs.
It's quite possible Google Data Studio is going to be the next big thing for the company, it's just as possible it doesn't get the desired traction and ends up culled from their offerings.
1. Apple (Aperture, "Smart" features from OSX absent from iOS, APIs that force almost complete re-writes, generally culling of PC/corporate friendly products such as Server etc).
2. Facebook, seems like they experiment a lot (which is good) but too often fail to label things as beta. And they change 'features' way too often for my taste (I seldom use their services so far, at least on a personal level).
3. Google (Google Read for news strikes me as the biggest loss personally, my news were never the same afterwards as I never considered putting in so much time carefully selecting RSS feeds etc. if they could go away just like that; eventually I don't even read most news anymore). They have a less-than-stellar record on mobile apps, but then again that's a moving sector where it's hard to be consistent over "LTS" kind of periods.
4. Microsoft, but at this point I have to commend how much long-term support they put into most of their products, sometimes it's even too much to have to put up with legacy features that hinder modern paradigms (particularly on Windows 10, ofc).
5. Amazon, simply because I've yet to encounter a case of product/service being put out of service.
I wonder who agrees/disagrees around here.
