I did use Trips for travel once and liked it, but hesitated to get invested in it lest it dies one day (today). I approach most new Google products with the same trepidation. On the other hand, I like Google's start-uppy environment and desire to experiment with anything because it could lead to great products like Gmail.
My question is about that circular dependency of a Google product only lasting if it gets popular and a product not getting popular because we think it won't last. If launching is just for annual reviews, and you don't care about the result, I get that but am just curious if any Googlers think the Google Product Stigma needs fixing.
Answer as throwaway if needed.
Option one: every product Google makes it supports forever regardless of whether it succeeds or not, where "success" for Google is defined as "billions of users". (Ref all the people laughing at why G+ was still going despite not being popular. [Note: I've read the 'unpopular' thing was disputed; I don't know the actual numbers.]) In this world Google can never attempt a product unless they've verified ahead of time it will become a category-defining product (Chrome, Android, Gmail).
Option two: occasionally some products will test the waters and fail.
I think it's easy to say at the time of a product failure (or even at launch: see the people who scoffed at iPod and Dropbox) to say that it was destined to fail -- it's pretty much guaranteed to happen on HN because people love to shit on and watch other people shit on others' work, for some sad human nature reason -- but difficult to see which of those guaranteed-to-fail products will actually eventually succeed. So option one mostly means you never launch new products.
Big companies faced with this dilemma (the Ciscos or Microsofts or even Facebooks) deal with it by waiting for startups to succeed then buying the result (Whatsapp, Instagram, Github). Famously at Microsoft if you had a good idea the correct way to implement it was to leave, implement as new company, get reacquired. That may become the case at Google too.
Instead Google tries to do option two. I think you could argue about the rate of launch/fail in category two but it doesn't bother me too much. I recall a comment from the Netflix founder about how they had too many successful shows and how that is a problem, that they were playing it too safe.
I also use emacs as my editor because I know it's old enough that it's not gonna change out from under me. When I care about reliability in this way I choose accordingly. Nothing in life in permanent; I evaluate new Google products like I evaluate random startup products, which is to say they may randomly disappear in a year and I factor that in. For example Keep seems like a nice product and I sometimes use it for grocery lists but I'm not gonna put anything important in it (disclaimer: I have absolutely no insider facts about Keep, that is just my feeling about it based on the previous reasoning).
Past approaches were putting things under Google Labs or the Eternal Beta. But it needs to exist separately from the long term survivors like Sheets, GDrive, etc.
If success is going to be billions of users then yeah, probably do option 1, because nearly nothing is going to get there. Why not have a pipeline to spin these products off or have them survive with lower expectations?
But from the writeup, it doesn’t seem like this product was a failure.
Why? This how old Microsoft thought and it’s unbelievable that Google is taking their place while they have renewed to “new Microsoft”. I see tons of small stuff coming out of Microsoft these days that lives on despite tiny niche user base. When they do decide to kill product, they seem to be very sensitive, give plenty of time and figure out some migration path. The point is that a lot of dev ops can be automated in 2019. You can comfortably run small products without much overhead. Google seems to be either behind mastering this art or confused. I thought I would never see a day when I say Microsoft is doing better than Google.
Most of the time "fail" just means "fail to become a category-defining product," whereas any other software company would be happy to pull the kind of numbers Google does for its smaller projects. If Google wants to operate like a venture capital firm, investing in many products and seeing most fail to get huge, than that's fine, but they need to consider the negative impact it has on their brand and on all future product launches.
Keep is now a core gsuite app, so while it could also get canned or have a total makeover, it will probably stay, atleast for enterprises, like Google+ continues to.
I'm grouping here but engineers that work at Google are likely to be the type of person who is looking to continue to move up the career ladder. Seems like a good option would be to outsource some of these products but that doesn't seem like Googles M.O. either.
If that's true (and I only had his word on it), it may just be that they're currently "flushing the pipeline" of all the promotion-fueled products that got started before this change went in, or maybe the change hasn't permeated all the way through the company yet. So it's possible Google's frantic pace of launching doomed products will taper off in time.
So the sequence of events are:
- founding guy leaves
- new guy becoming in charge sees career going down drain
- makes case for shutdown/half assed merge with other products to get out as soon as possible
Ugh. And I’m still rather unwilling to hand over my email to a third party. Is there any nice way to organize trips anymore?
To see your trips and travel research, turn on these settings
Web & app activity Off
[1] Google Maps won't even let me store my home address without also opting-in; it worked fine without it for years.
Didn't you do that already by having a Gmail account?
If people loved Google Trips now is a great time to create your own Trips application and cash in on the people disappointed by Google.
I did keep up some docs around the project, though I'd probably do a full rewrite it's been three years: https://yingw787.github.io/traveltile_docs/
There are companies who specialize in organising travel, which could be aided by better software.
Personally, I would pay for a travel planning app, but the pricing structure would have to be right since I'm not going to pay for a subscription for something I use infrequently.
I think the key thing here is that travel is already very expensive, so there is money to be made here in improving the process, but skimming some ad/referral revenue off a large volume is the easiest way to do so.
I looked for a travel planning app when I went to Mexico City last year and was generally not impressed with the offerings, so I just ended up pinning everything I wanted to do in Google Maps.
TripIt Pro is the standard and costs $49 per year. It's not really for leisure travel but for business/productivity.
PS: happened with Picasa.
So... they've just reorganized most of the features to different websites, instead of keeping them locked in an app you have to download.
Doesn't seem that bad. I don't think this really counts as a noteworthy "dead" product, just a refactoring of features across properties.
I worked at Intuit for a bit, and with only a handful of products they were experiencing the same thing. I can only imagine trying to coordinate so many teams across such an enormous organization.
Abundance of ads (or rather partners' offerings) on Google Flight is a fair point, however it's a bit ironic to see this shaming coming from ArsTechnica that itself relies heavily on ad revenue.
It's a news site that has an paid option for an ad-free and tracking-free subscription. I'm not sure how it could be less ironic unless it came from a public news service that has a blanket ban on advertisements. (Do any of those exist?)
It's a trip organizer/sharing platform that aims to be the place for you to collect all the various bits of information & reservations & such for your trip. Currently web-only but mobile on the roadmap as well as offline/export functionality which was one of the nice features of Google Trips.
Feedback welcome. I know it's still a little rough around the edges. Hoping to have things buttoned up nicely in another week or two and then start advertising it more officially to everyday folks.
I do care somewhat about confirming accounts in general just because it cuts down on spam/abuse, and it ensures someone didn't fat-finger their email and then can't regain access when they forget their password in a month. Also, I have on the roadmap a feature for configurable reminders/notifications, and services like AWS SES track bounces. Too many invalid recipients and you run the risk of getting throttled or suspended.
Is it though? Amazon's Free tier is more than enough to run a small early/proof-of-concept startup. Even ignoring Docker etc, Elastic Beanstalk is literally set and forget platform. There's very little excuse for not running something fault tolerant and modern.
At least, that's how I've stood up the last three startups i've lead engineering at.
I don't get why they don't realize that by making people rely on all these experiments (see Inbox) and then shutting them down their brand suffers immensely.
I've migrated all my photo collection to Photos--although I back it up regularly--and I'm seriously considering going back to Apple Photos.
You just cannot trust Google to keep products working anymore.
I hope you either pay for storage or backup before you upload, or you may be disappointed to discover your photos are lower quality than they were when they were shot.
Although, I'm not sure my pictures would get downsized since their limits are pretty generous.
The worst is videos. My phone shoots them at 4K and they would get resized at 1080p.
It's pretty amazing for planning vacations because of that.
However this year I did for the first time get the other way around where I couldn't buy the price it said was available. I've also noticed Kayak now just as good or better, and flighthub is generally great too.
So for me it used to be the best, now is good, but nothing amazing.
For example, Barcelona: https://www.google.com/destination?q=barcelona+city&output=s...
Disclaimer: I work on a different travel-related product at Google.
For those using it heavily, one could hardly pick a more inconvenient date. Sometime in October or November, between the summer and holiday/new year travel surges would be more appropriate.
But, obviously less convenient for Google.
Google are becoming like their own version of Murphy's Law:
The app you rely on will be shut down at a random time, and at the most inconvenient possible time.
My end goal is to limit my exposure to Google to an as-needed basis, using only Youtube and Maps. For Google Maps, I'll likely start using Apple Maps more and Tesla's service when I get my Model 3, leaving Youtube as the only Google product I use with any frequency.
"Google it" has become a pejorative to eff something up.
Trips, you've been Googled.
But on the plus side... oh.