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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.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 03 2019, @06:37PM (4 children)
Google has a culture which allows engineers with short attention spans to wander from project to project. Sometimes Google kills a product for business reasons, sometimes because nobody feels like maintaining it anymore. They've run their little project, time to move on to a new one. This mentality is not very conducive to business.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday April 03 2019, @07:12PM
It's the ultimate Millennial Company. Keep trying new exciting stuff, change often, polish rarely, only bother to maintain critical stuff.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday April 03 2019, @07:28PM
The article elaborates on how there are projects that just arise within the company and end up competing with each other (and not on a quality basis).
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 03 2019, @08:22PM
I have mentioned a Cultural problem over on Ars Technica.
I think Google might have a culture where people are rewarded for Creating Shiny New Products!
But what about the boring, thankless, job of maintaining and improving existing products? You know, the kind of work most of us paid professionals do.
I got to start a new green field project ten years ago. (eg, from scratch, I get to pick the tech stack, etc) And that is fun. But rare compared to daily ongoing maintenance, improvements and new features.
Google would do well to improve existing projects instead of creating overlapping new projects which then create a reason to abandon things that work perfectly well.
I don't think it is about the top being so consumed with greed that it causes this. I think it is just a cultural problem within the company. It's time to stop acting like a startup. Yes I know a lot of young hipsters will probably cry.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 04 2019, @02:19AM
But they've got their eye on the ball when it comes to search and ads. Why should they get tied down with other commitments, especially when they produce zero revenue? Their G-suites seem pretty solid.