The editorializing in this article was excessive. I do believe the author successfully identified one of the main engineers of Google Search's fall from grace (which despite what Google says is...
The editorializing in this article was excessive. I do believe the author successfully identified one of the main engineers of Google Search's fall from grace (which despite what Google says is clear to anyone with eyes), but the myopic focus on Raghavan, and the lionizing of Gomes, make the piece read as more of a personal vendetta than an investigatory exposé in my opinion.
I'm surprised by the lack of blame directed at Raghavan's superiors, namely Pichai but really leadership as a whole. The strategy of promoting growth at all costs was not adopted through a one-man campaign on the part of Raghavan. The entire executive structure endorsed it, even if there may have been holdouts like Gomes. People like Raghavan who monkey-bar from failure to failure while still somehow climbing the corporate ladder are dime-a-dozen, and I don't need to read what amounts to a derisive profile of him to know that there was someone just like him at Google trying to trade positive user experience for ad dollars. The same thing is happening at every major website.
What this article does make me wish for is an actual case study of how Google's executive culture was converted from "Don't Be Evil" to the growth-at-all-costs mandate that was apparently already fully in force by the time this article raises the curtain in 2019. Was it turnover of the early No-Evil engineers? Was it the rush to compete with the emerging social media goliaths? Is this just the inevitable arc of all publicly-traded companies in the post-Jack Welch world? I mean, I remember 10+ years ago being excited every time Google launched a new project. Now they've killed so many unique projects it's practically a joke to imply any Google project other than Search has any longevity. Though based on the last few years it seems they're doing their best to kill Search, too.
Google has discontinued lots of products, but I still think this meme is a bit exaggerated. Many products get killed pretty soon after launch because they were disappointments by Google's rather...
Google has discontinued lots of products, but I still think this meme is a bit exaggerated. Many products get killed pretty soon after launch because they were disappointments by Google's rather high standards. When I go through the list of "Killed by Google" products (and it's a long list), they're mostly things I never used, and you probably haven't either. Some I never even heard of. FitStar Yoga?
Google Reader and Google+ are products I did use. Google+ was obviously a flop, but I liked it. Google Reader is sort of like a cult classic TV show that didn't find a large enough audience.
Some products on that list have obvious successors. Apparently, AngularJS is dead, but Angular is its successor? (I'm not familiar with the differences.)
There are also many products that are obviously successful and seem pretty unlikely to disappear. Some that I don't believe will ever be killed include Gmail (they tried hard to improve on it with Inbox and failed) and the office suite (Docs, Calendar, Sheets, Slides, etc.). They are very popular with paying business customers, plus Google uses them internally. What is Google going to do, switch to Microsoft?
YouTube is obviously successful and isn't going away. Google Photos seems likely to stick around. (They did kill its predecessor, Picasa.)
If someone made a similar website for Microsoft or Apple, how many products could they list?
Killing Google Reader to me will always be "the day the music died". It makes perfect sense from a pure myopic business perspective: AMP was on the way in and you could sell ads a lot easier on...
Killing Google Reader to me will always be "the day the music died".
It makes perfect sense from a pure myopic business perspective: AMP was on the way in and you could sell ads a lot easier on AMP than you could on RSS. So Google Reader obviously had to die. It was just such a drastic break from the way the company has treated its users in the past. It didn't matter that if you looked 10-15 years into the future it was easy to see how Reader could have sustained a place with a lot of market leverage for them. There was a distinct possibility that in 2 years they could make more short-term money if AMP was adopted as quickly as they hoped. But of course AMP was selling "a better online reading experience"... Which Reader already delivered in a way that was better for users . So Reader went down in a cornfield.
In a way, it sort of is similar to "cult classic show that gets cancelled" as you put it: Firefly got pulled because some executive at Fox was bothered by how much people liked it (in lieu of his pet project iirc). But that was to be expected from Fox (or TV/media). That was really the first time Google behaved that way.
As far as the ad hominem against Raghavan: Yes, it's a bit off-putting, but these executives pay themselves millions on the pretense that they take more responsibility for the success and failures of their organizations. Hard to boo-hoo too much when someone actually calls their number on that for once. It's a lot less indecent than these guys paying themselves the equivalent of 20-30 other people under them who actually do the work. :shrug
I think the key difference with Google is how haphazard they are with their new products. It's like they are just throwing random stuff at the wall to see what sticks, with little thought as to...
I think the key difference with Google is how haphazard they are with their new products. It's like they are just throwing random stuff at the wall to see what sticks, with little thought as to how any of it fits into their existing product portfolio.
For example, Google has launched no fewer than five instant messaging platforms, with most of them co-existing until recently. How many messaging platforms has Apple launched in the last 15 years?
They're also bad at offering a worthwhile migration path when they do shut something down. They shut down Google Play Music and told people to switch to YouTube Music, but the latter is still lacking major features that people liked about the former. It's also forcibly bundled with YouTube Premium.
I don't think you're wrong at all. There have been some unfortunate discontinuations of good products, you already mentioned Picasa, though most of them are either bad or didn't get the reach they...
I don't think you're wrong at all. There have been some unfortunate discontinuations of good products, you already mentioned Picasa, though most of them are either bad or didn't get the reach they needed.
I'm almost more likely to put it on Google's marketing than anything else.
Any list you'll make for Microsoft or Apple is probably a lot shorter but I get the sense they kill things in their cribs and never let some experiments see the light of day. An internal list would be likely longer. Google just throws out product after product in the hopes something sticks.
I don't know enough about Microsoft's history to comment on them, but I feel like you are selling Apple very short here. I found a website that claims to be a general "killed by" list for google,...
I don't know enough about Microsoft's history to comment on them, but I feel like you are selling Apple very short here. I found a website that claims to be a general "killed by" list for google, apple, and microsoft: https://killedby.tech/apple/
I have some peeves with the selections (you don't get to count sunsetting support for old model phones for example), so here is my editorialized list:
Magsafe duo charger
Photo Stream (Long since replaced by iCloud photo library, so this doesn't really count imo)
Airport wifi router
Airport Time Capsule (computer backup and wifi router)
iPod nano
iPod Shuffle
Aperture
iPhoto (pretty much replaced by photos app, so also doesn't really count imo)
iPod Classic
iPod socks (does this really count?)
iWeb (a wysiwyg website builder)
iDVD (I believe these features are now built into finder, so doesn't really count)
MobileMe (pretty much replaced by iCloud)
Xserve
Newton (pretty much the iPad before its time) (I will also include eMate and MessagePad in this)
Not included in the website:
MacOS support for third party vendors
Classic MacOS
iPod Games
MacOS as a server was killed. Apple's wifi routers were killed. The iPod, and iPod games were killed. Aperture was killed. Besides that, this track record seems pretty good to me. I don't have numbers, but I get the impression that apple only discontinues products when they are declining in the market. As far as I am aware, none of these were popular things when they were discontinued. (One exception is MacOS third part support, but that was when apple was hemorrhaging money and Steve Jobs had to change Apple's business model, so that was probably for the best.)
My impression has always been this: Google will kill projects on a whim. If they release a new product, I highly recommend being very wary about using it. Microsoft will somehow keep projects stringing along forever. If they release something, you can be confident that it will still be around, and be just as shitty, nearly forever. Also there will be 4 different things with the same name. Apple will release something later than everyone else and pretend like they invented it, but it will likely be better than the competition, and has a good chance of getting meaningful updates in the future. Also if the Apple product includes a cloud component, wait for other people to find the issues before you adopt it.
I'm not really a fan of these lists as they often misrepresent the history of the product. Has Apple really "killed" the iPhone 4S, or did they just release a new hardware revision? Did Google...
I found a website that claims to be a general "killed by" list for google, apple, and microsoft
I'm not really a fan of these lists as they often misrepresent the history of the product. Has Apple really "killed" the iPhone 4S, or did they just release a new hardware revision? Did Google kill AngularJS, or did they just release a new version (Angular) with a migration path?
It would make sense to include entire product line, like when Apple discontinued the iPod Touch. A lot of it though just feels like they're trying to bulk up the list.
Conversely, they also seem to be missing a lot. The first two discontinued Apple services I searched, Ping and iAd, are both missing. Microsoft recently killed Windows Mixed Reality and the Windows Subsystem for Android, and those are missing. The list allows future-discontinuations, so I'd have expected them to be included. There's no Microsoft DreamScene either.
Then it seems like there's a lot of dupes. Google Jamboard is on here twice, as is DropCam. They list both MSN Messenger and Windows Live Message, despite the latter being the direct successor. Legacy G Suite accounts were never actually killed, yet are still included.
Really the majority of these entries are either non-notable or misleading. It feels like these lists are often posted as a numbers game, but there's maybe 10-20 notable examples in total.
I have to admit I had to look those up. For what it’s worth, Claris is still around developing FileMaker. The latest version is from 2023. I have no idea if it’s even remotely close to the same...
I have to admit I had to look those up.
For what it’s worth, Claris is still around developing FileMaker. The latest version is from 2023. I have no idea if it’s even remotely close to the same software. I never used older versions of FileMaker, and the current version looks like it’s aimed at business to business licensing which isn’t cheap.
I've been Google Fi user since the beginning. It's not the cheapest, but the flexibility and cheap international but is great. I'm sure they'll kill it sooner rather than later.
I've been Google Fi user since the beginning. It's not the cheapest, but the flexibility and cheap international but is great. I'm sure they'll kill it sooner rather than later.
Actually, if you're mentioning Angular, their tech-tech is actually really successful / at least well-known (Golang, Kubernetes, Transformers / LLMs / whatever that stuff is). So the issue is...
Actually, if you're mentioning Angular, their tech-tech is actually really successful / at least well-known (Golang, Kubernetes, Transformers / LLMs / whatever that stuff is). So the issue is probably that they used their prominence in Search to try and be more user-facing, rather than sticking to engineering issues and letting Search be an advertisement of their quality. They probably still would have made shitty, ad-ridden search, but I also think an image based on engineering (versus being like, the face of the internet that everyone and their grandparents sees) might have changed the overall outcome.
Their cloud infrastructure is also very good. We have been using it at my workplace for six years and have only had one major outage in that period. When their load balancers was down and broke...
Their cloud infrastructure is also very good. We have been using it at my workplace for six years and have only had one major outage in that period. When their load balancers was down and broke half the internet for a few hours. Everything practically runs at 100% uptime. And every kind of deprecation is handled with years of warning and usually you can still use it afterwards, just not create new instances. A very different experience than using their end consumer products.
The editorializing in this article was excessive. I do believe the author successfully identified one of the main engineers of Google Search's fall from grace (which despite what Google says is clear to anyone with eyes), but the myopic focus on Raghavan, and the lionizing of Gomes, make the piece read as more of a personal vendetta than an investigatory exposé in my opinion.
I'm surprised by the lack of blame directed at Raghavan's superiors, namely Pichai but really leadership as a whole. The strategy of promoting growth at all costs was not adopted through a one-man campaign on the part of Raghavan. The entire executive structure endorsed it, even if there may have been holdouts like Gomes. People like Raghavan who monkey-bar from failure to failure while still somehow climbing the corporate ladder are dime-a-dozen, and I don't need to read what amounts to a derisive profile of him to know that there was someone just like him at Google trying to trade positive user experience for ad dollars. The same thing is happening at every major website.
What this article does make me wish for is an actual case study of how Google's executive culture was converted from "Don't Be Evil" to the growth-at-all-costs mandate that was apparently already fully in force by the time this article raises the curtain in 2019. Was it turnover of the early No-Evil engineers? Was it the rush to compete with the emerging social media goliaths? Is this just the inevitable arc of all publicly-traded companies in the post-Jack Welch world? I mean, I remember 10+ years ago being excited every time Google launched a new project. Now they've killed so many unique projects it's practically a joke to imply any Google project other than Search has any longevity. Though based on the last few years it seems they're doing their best to kill Search, too.
Google has discontinued lots of products, but I still think this meme is a bit exaggerated. Many products get killed pretty soon after launch because they were disappointments by Google's rather high standards. When I go through the list of "Killed by Google" products (and it's a long list), they're mostly things I never used, and you probably haven't either. Some I never even heard of. FitStar Yoga?
Google Reader and Google+ are products I did use. Google+ was obviously a flop, but I liked it. Google Reader is sort of like a cult classic TV show that didn't find a large enough audience.
Some products on that list have obvious successors. Apparently, AngularJS is dead, but Angular is its successor? (I'm not familiar with the differences.)
There are also many products that are obviously successful and seem pretty unlikely to disappear. Some that I don't believe will ever be killed include Gmail (they tried hard to improve on it with Inbox and failed) and the office suite (Docs, Calendar, Sheets, Slides, etc.). They are very popular with paying business customers, plus Google uses them internally. What is Google going to do, switch to Microsoft?
YouTube is obviously successful and isn't going away. Google Photos seems likely to stick around. (They did kill its predecessor, Picasa.)
If someone made a similar website for Microsoft or Apple, how many products could they list?
Killing Google Reader to me will always be "the day the music died".
It makes perfect sense from a pure myopic business perspective: AMP was on the way in and you could sell ads a lot easier on AMP than you could on RSS. So Google Reader obviously had to die. It was just such a drastic break from the way the company has treated its users in the past. It didn't matter that if you looked 10-15 years into the future it was easy to see how Reader could have sustained a place with a lot of market leverage for them. There was a distinct possibility that in 2 years they could make more short-term money if AMP was adopted as quickly as they hoped. But of course AMP was selling "a better online reading experience"... Which Reader already delivered in a way that was better for users . So Reader went down in a cornfield.
In a way, it sort of is similar to "cult classic show that gets cancelled" as you put it: Firefly got pulled because some executive at Fox was bothered by how much people liked it (in lieu of his pet project iirc). But that was to be expected from Fox (or TV/media). That was really the first time Google behaved that way.
As far as the ad hominem against Raghavan: Yes, it's a bit off-putting, but these executives pay themselves millions on the pretense that they take more responsibility for the success and failures of their organizations. Hard to boo-hoo too much when someone actually calls their number on that for once. It's a lot less indecent than these guys paying themselves the equivalent of 20-30 other people under them who actually do the work. :shrug
I think the key difference with Google is how haphazard they are with their new products. It's like they are just throwing random stuff at the wall to see what sticks, with little thought as to how any of it fits into their existing product portfolio.
For example, Google has launched no fewer than five instant messaging platforms, with most of them co-existing until recently. How many messaging platforms has Apple launched in the last 15 years?
They're also bad at offering a worthwhile migration path when they do shut something down. They shut down Google Play Music and told people to switch to YouTube Music, but the latter is still lacking major features that people liked about the former. It's also forcibly bundled with YouTube Premium.
I don't think you're wrong at all. There have been some unfortunate discontinuations of good products, you already mentioned Picasa, though most of them are either bad or didn't get the reach they needed.
I'm almost more likely to put it on Google's marketing than anything else.
Any list you'll make for Microsoft or Apple is probably a lot shorter but I get the sense they kill things in their cribs and never let some experiments see the light of day. An internal list would be likely longer. Google just throws out product after product in the hopes something sticks.
I don't know enough about Microsoft's history to comment on them, but I feel like you are selling Apple very short here. I found a website that claims to be a general "killed by" list for google, apple, and microsoft: https://killedby.tech/apple/
I have some peeves with the selections (you don't get to count sunsetting support for old model phones for example), so here is my editorialized list:
Not included in the website:
MacOS as a server was killed. Apple's wifi routers were killed. The iPod, and iPod games were killed. Aperture was killed. Besides that, this track record seems pretty good to me. I don't have numbers, but I get the impression that apple only discontinues products when they are declining in the market. As far as I am aware, none of these were popular things when they were discontinued. (One exception is MacOS third part support, but that was when apple was hemorrhaging money and Steve Jobs had to change Apple's business model, so that was probably for the best.)
My impression has always been this: Google will kill projects on a whim. If they release a new product, I highly recommend being very wary about using it. Microsoft will somehow keep projects stringing along forever. If they release something, you can be confident that it will still be around, and be just as shitty, nearly forever. Also there will be 4 different things with the same name. Apple will release something later than everyone else and pretend like they invented it, but it will likely be better than the competition, and has a good chance of getting meaningful updates in the future. Also if the Apple product includes a cloud component, wait for other people to find the issues before you adopt it.
I'm not really a fan of these lists as they often misrepresent the history of the product. Has Apple really "killed" the iPhone 4S, or did they just release a new hardware revision? Did Google kill AngularJS, or did they just release a new version (Angular) with a migration path?
It would make sense to include entire product line, like when Apple discontinued the iPod Touch. A lot of it though just feels like they're trying to bulk up the list.
Conversely, they also seem to be missing a lot. The first two discontinued Apple services I searched, Ping and iAd, are both missing. Microsoft recently killed Windows Mixed Reality and the Windows Subsystem for Android, and those are missing. The list allows future-discontinuations, so I'd have expected them to be included. There's no Microsoft DreamScene either.
Then it seems like there's a lot of dupes. Google Jamboard is on here twice, as is DropCam. They list both MSN Messenger and Windows Live Message, despite the latter being the direct successor. Legacy G Suite accounts were never actually killed, yet are still included.
Really the majority of these entries are either non-notable or misleading. It feels like these lists are often posted as a numbers game, but there's maybe 10-20 notable examples in total.
Hypercard and Filemaker Pro are two I remember, but I guess that's going pretty far back.
I have to admit I had to look those up.
For what it’s worth, Claris is still around developing FileMaker. The latest version is from 2023. I have no idea if it’s even remotely close to the same software. I never used older versions of FileMaker, and the current version looks like it’s aimed at business to business licensing which isn’t cheap.
Huh. Yeah, I just assumed it was gone, but I guess not.
I wonder if anyone remembers dBase?
I've been Google Fi user since the beginning. It's not the cheapest, but the flexibility and cheap international but is great. I'm sure they'll kill it sooner rather than later.
Actually, if you're mentioning Angular, their tech-tech is actually really successful / at least well-known (Golang, Kubernetes, Transformers / LLMs / whatever that stuff is). So the issue is probably that they used their prominence in Search to try and be more user-facing, rather than sticking to engineering issues and letting Search be an advertisement of their quality. They probably still would have made shitty, ad-ridden search, but I also think an image based on engineering (versus being like, the face of the internet that everyone and their grandparents sees) might have changed the overall outcome.
Their cloud infrastructure is also very good. We have been using it at my workplace for six years and have only had one major outage in that period. When their load balancers was down and broke half the internet for a few hours. Everything practically runs at 100% uptime. And every kind of deprecation is handled with years of warning and usually you can still use it afterwards, just not create new instances. A very different experience than using their end consumer products.
I'm not OP, but the writer of that article has an interesting podcast called Better Offline.