What a surprise. Entrepreneurial, hypercapitalist tech bros are only fixated on planting their [flag] in the next bit of virgin soil, not on nurturing, maintaining, or taking any responsibility for the products of their fecundity.
They’re like fuckboys, but with software systems.
Has anyone actually looked at the list? Many of the items still live on in different forms or are discontinued hardware that probably wasn’t turning a profit.
I don’t want to defend Google here, but this ‘graveyard’ is just overly dramatic.
For example: Google Nexus
‘The Google Nexus series was discontinued and replaced by the Pixel Brand.’ - RIP
Damn, Google Goggles was impressive, although I rarely used it, and just for kicks. I remember taking a photo of friends and having GG automatically recognize part of a picture on a wall that was sideways and half hidden.
I think you’re letting them off the hook way too easily, though. This just seems to be what big tech companies do: generate digital litter. (Yeah, I wrote that. I’m still pretty crabby about losing some useful stuff, and now that Google owns Lytro, I feel justifiably nervous about its future.)
Maybe, yes. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Google Reader. But what ‘useful stuff’ have you lost, that wasn’t replaced by something similar? Tech is a fast changing business. To expect one of the biggest companies to slow down, because humans don’t like change, seems… absurd.
Google Plus was an interesting place if you liked art, tabletop, science, and didn’t mind not being immediately muted by an FB-like algorithm.
It was (often rightly) the butt of many jokes, but by any reasonable metric, it successfully competed against other social media sites.
They still told me it was ending and that was that.
Hardly. Think: what good is it if it’s just going to be rendered useless in a matter of a few years? And who is it for if not humans?
Why launch anything then? Like, say, a game streaming service? When should we start a death clock for that? (That it should be when not if is pretty much a given.)
If your brand is change over stability, there should come no surprise when folk come to regard your company as one being run by flakes, and not necessarily a good place to put money or time.
But it’s not rendered useless in most cases. Something similar exists somewhere else and Google doesn’t want to compete/put in money (Reader) or the same functionality is moved to a different Google product (Inbox).
I see Google experimenting a lot (feels like more in the past), buying successful projects, and closing/trimming excess. If you want to be mad at that last part, be mad at capitalism or shareholders or something. If you are mad at experimenting and failing… don’t.
I don’t think G+ was the only place on the internet for those communities.
Google says you’re wrong:
Since that’s what I see when I go to my old page there, I gotta go with that.
I see Google as the next Alta Vista.
So what? Even a Google Product Manager should be able to grasp why people might find something useful, and might not like it when a service suddenly stops being that. It’s a waste, and a critical failure on Google’s part.
So, congrats to Google on their “experiment” and, I guess, engineered failure and all, but now I don’t recommend anything they offer. I can’t.
Why bother?
Pixel isn’t a rebrand of Nexus.
The selling point for Nexus phones were that they were relatively affordable yet came with stock android and regular updates. Also, that you had a choice when it came to hardware features and price but could expect the exact same software experience, save for better performance obviously for phones with better specs.
Pixel phones are a way of competing with iPhones even more closely. They’re status symbols, they range from expensive to even more expensive, all have a unified look to them, and Google has become the hardware manufacturer.
The Android One project is probably closer to what Nexus was, IMO.
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