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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 03 2019, @06:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the too-big-to-care dept.

Google's constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

We are 91 days into the year, and so far, Google is racking up an unprecedented body count. If we just take the official shutdown dates that have already occurred in 2019, a Google-branded product, feature, or service has died, on average, about every nine days.

Some of these product shutdowns have transition plans, and some of them (like Google+) represent Google completely abandoning a user base. The specifics aren't crucial, though. What matters is that every single one of these actions has a negative consequence for Google's brand, and the near-constant stream of shutdown announcements makes Google seem more unstable and untrustworthy than it has ever been. Yes, there was the one time Google killed Google Wave nine years ago or when it took Google Reader away six years ago, but things were never this bad.

For a while there has been a subset of people concerned about Google's privacy and antitrust issues, but now Google is eroding trust that its existing customers have in the company. That's a huge problem. Google has significantly harmed its brand over the last few months, and I'm not even sure the company realizes it.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 03 2019, @06:31PM (12 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday April 03 2019, @06:31PM (#824189)

    They don't care. They don't have to care. They're Google.

    That's what happens in businesses who feel like they have no real competitors (and make no mistake, we're not all suddenly going to use Bing or DuckDuckGo just because Google is bad).

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Wednesday April 03 2019, @07:06PM (1 child)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Wednesday April 03 2019, @07:06PM (#824200) Journal

    That's what happens in businesses who feel like they have no real competitors

    It's not just that. They have diversified enough to reduce Google's effect on the stock, or they should. They're not just Google, it's Alphabet [google.com], and things are still looking up over the last five years...

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
    • (Score: 5, Informative) by EvilSS on Wednesday April 03 2019, @08:08PM

      by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 03 2019, @08:08PM (#824217)
      Eh, not really. Not yet anyway. In FY18, Google represented 99.6% of Alphabet's revenue. Of that, 70.7% of revenue was directly from Google properties (mainly ads and other paid placement on search, maps, gmail, youtube, etc), 14.7% from adsense on non-Google sites, and 14.6% from digital purchases (play store), cloud, and hardware. Alphabet's "Other Bets" (so non-Google) revenue was just 0.4% of their overall revenue. The majority of that was from Fiber, R&D services, and licensing.
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday April 03 2019, @07:35PM (2 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 03 2019, @07:35PM (#824210) Journal

    I absolutely use duckduckgo, albiet with the understanding that google is always a !g away.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by deimtee on Thursday April 04 2019, @12:54AM (1 child)

      by deimtee (3272) on Thursday April 04 2019, @12:54AM (#824309) Journal

      I use DDG because even without the G tracking, it is now on average a better search engine.
      It's not better than Google was back when their pagerank search was new and amazing, but Google's results are now so full of ads and irrelevant crap that I can find stuff faster on DDG.

      --
      If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 04 2019, @03:45AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 04 2019, @03:45AM (#824355)

        I much prefer StartPage.com over DDG. But it seems DDG has become more well-known. Perhaps because of Android?

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday April 03 2019, @08:27PM (6 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 03 2019, @08:27PM (#824224) Journal

    I agree that They Don't Care.

    But that, IMO, is NOT the reason they abandon old products. Not caring merely allows them to abandon old products.

    The reason, IMO, is a cultural problem. It's fun to create new things. It's boring to maintain existing things. Year after year. Issue ticket after issue ticket.

    It's more fun to be a startup creating new things. Google needs to stop acting like a startup. But, since, as you say, They Don't Care (tm), they don't have to stop acting like a startup.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 03 2019, @09:42PM (5 children)

      by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday April 03 2019, @09:42PM (#824247)

      The reason, IMO, is a cultural problem. It's fun to create new things. It's boring to maintain existing things. Year after year. Issue ticket after issue ticket.

      Having been one of the poor saps stuck at a desk maintaining existing things: Yes, there's a certain amount of truth to that, but if the existing thing is making a big pile of money then a company will tend to put the time and effort into maintaining it. Even ones that are close-enough to startup mode that the same management is partially in place.

      My guess is that this is a beancounter-driven decision, not a technically-driven decision. All these products and services feel a lot like throwing everything they can think of out onto the marketplace in an effort to figure out what makes them money. If it's not making them money, it has no value to Google, so nobody in the executive suite cares about keeping it.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday April 03 2019, @09:57PM (4 children)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 03 2019, @09:57PM (#824254) Journal

        Your third paragraph is an interesting theory.

        What the bean counters may not realize is that this strategy tragedy may cost them far more money than they think they might gain. If things are too unstable, people will find greener pastures on the web. This creates opportunity for others that WILL provide stable platforms.

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 03 2019, @10:12PM (3 children)

          by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday April 03 2019, @10:12PM (#824259)

          What the bean counters may not realize is that this strategy tragedy may cost them far more money than they think they might gain.

          Yeah, but that's way in the future and can't be attributed to the specific bean-counter who made that decision. Cutting this stuff, on the other hand, cuts unnecessary expenses and thus earnings per share right now. What, you thought the people running most businesses in the US even think about the long-term consequences to their firm? Their worst-case scenario is going from being a VP of Uselessness at Google to being a VP of Uselessness at Amazon or Microsoft or IBM or Apple.

          --
          The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
          • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday April 04 2019, @12:59AM (2 children)

            by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Thursday April 04 2019, @12:59AM (#824310)

            In my experience beancounters know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

            I have learned from bitter experience that if the company is run by someone with a finance or accounting background I don't want to work there.

            Google won't be any difference if the beancounters are running the show.

            • (Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday April 04 2019, @04:02PM

              by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 04 2019, @04:02PM (#824540) Journal

              > In my experience beancounters know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

              The opposite is a Lisp programmer, who knows the value of everything and the cost of nothing.

              --
              People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
            • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 04 2019, @04:03PM

              by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 04 2019, @04:03PM (#824542) Journal

              I have learned from bitter experience that if the company is run by someone with a finance or accounting background I don't want to work there.

              Google won't be any difference if the beancounters are running the show.

              I heard back in the late 1980s or early 1990s that:

              When a company makes more than $50 million, the beancounters run the company.

              When a company makes more than $500 million, lawyers run the company.

              --
              People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.