There’s a certain dark humor in the way that Google Talk/Reader kind of marks the apex of their reputation - they sacrificed so much trying to beat Facebook at its own game, and all they got for that devil’s bargain was G+.
Google+ and circles were a good idea and should have been given a team with a lot of free rein and left to grow organically.
Google+ died because it was forced on everyone that had a Google and a Youtube account by psychopathic managers to "grow the numbers". This included forcing a realname policy on non-G+ users that explicitly did not want their online persona connected to their identity. It became the least cool platform on the internet overnight.
The mistake they made was having it be closed invites for so long. Facebook butchered Facebook Chat, and my whole friend group was ready to jump ship. Except Google wouldn’t let us, and then Facebook had enough time to get Chat/Messages kind of good enough again, and by the time anyone could get on Google+ no one cared to.
There were also some really bad decisions: for example, G+ on iOS would send you a push notification every time some rando who had you in their Gmail contacts joined G+ or added you to a circle. There was no way to turn that off other than disabling notifications entirely or deleting the app for something like half a year. I chose the latter long before they implemented it.
Circles were potentially interesting but if memory serves the first implementation was clumsy and I found it limiting because it required you to know what your followers were interested in and, if memory serves, didn't have a way to de-dupe shares so you'd see the same blog post shared by 20 people as separate notifications. My impression of that time was mostly seeing things I wasn't interested in or had seen before.
>Google+ died because it was forced on everyone that had a Google and a Youtube account
Today I have two Youtube accounts despite every effort to not end up with a real name G+ account. And while all of my main activity is on my non-real name account - i.e. the one I actually want, I'm forced to use the other to connect to rewards (Overwatch League tokens to my Battle.net account for watching Overwatch League), because I'm not allowed to do that on my "branded" account. An account I never wanted to exist.
In practice, for Circles to actually be useful, they need to be scrupulously maintained.
If you send a message to a certain circle about a pool party, and it turns out that you forgot to add a friend to the circle they will be insulted.
Or if you send a message to a circle that included someone who the message was not intended for, once again, you’re in trouble.
Group chats tend to work much better because they are simpler and are only created when you have a specific need. They can last beyond that need if the people in it end up being a useful grouping for the long term, but this filtering happens organically.
I was an intern at Google right around the time where Google+ (long before it was known under that name) became a thing for Google engineers internally. I sat next to a team that was majorly impacted by that.
It's all subjective of course, but I could practically "feel" Google changing. Before I started my internship and still during it for the most time, Google was this incredible company that people, including me, were in awe about. All their products were so good. So technically refined, so methodical, you could really see that the people working on them were really smart, and really cared about it all.
And then it changed and became this "corporation", and nowadays it's sometimes seen as almost the opposite of what it was, working there being boring but stable. Part of that is probably just a normal consequence of the immense growth, but personally I can't shake the feeling that Google+ had a large part in it.
I was a fulltimer there around the same time, and I agree. I ended up quitting fairly soon after the G+ real names fiasco blew up, and it felt like a lot of internal "social capital" got burned on that, which was never really recovered.
I don't think the whole place went to hell at that moment, or anything, and your description is maybe a little more dramatic than I'd go with, as to the role of G+... but it definitely seemed like one of the big turning points.
Sorry, I did not mean to imply a dramatic and sudden change either. I just perceived this as a turning point, like you say (and with only my limited first hand experience there, of course).
Google major revenue stream is and will always be search/ads. Everything else is marginal, irrelevant and that’s why I think they don’t care much.
I still can’t explain how Google got beaten at their own game (cloud / computing at scale) by an e-commerce site : Amazon.
That says it all.
Having many friends who work at Google, I think they have the wrong system of incentives in place. Rightfully, people optimize and prioritize based on their path to promotion rather than building products that people love.
It’s much easier to get a promotion if you build something new vs keep iterating on existing products making it better.
>I still can’t explain how Google got beaten at their own game (cloud / computing at scale) by an e-commerce site : Amazon.
But it wasn’t Google’s game at all: cloud computing is a low margin business (relatively speaking). Amazon knows how to run low margins businesses, and Google doesn’t.
Google was so unimpressed with cloud, that they got serious about it only around 2012, when it became obvious that other clouds will outgrow Google as a whole. I think it was Google’s Internet Explorer moment.
I'm curious, have you benchmarked both of these and seen if there's no real world difference? I've had major performance differences between clouds on what is supposedly similar hardware. If AWS is faster in nothing then why they're so expensive would be a very good question indeed.
My initial guess would be AWS is relying on its advantage that users who are currently using AWS heavily are unlikely to switch clouds if they suddenly have to go from VM's to dedicated servers, and thus they can profit off such capture. e.g. 7x cost is probably fine when you consider what the cost might be to employ people for a cloud migration.
A lot of it also comes down to reliability, security (not just at the platform level but also the tools for you to build on), and most importantly integration with other services which you’d have to build and maintain on your own.
You don’t buy AWS because it’s cheaper than a dedicated server but because you can get that Linux server using the same management services (API, authentication, monitoring & logging, etc.) that you use to get serverless functions & containers, object storage, managed ML services, normal and reporting databases, development tools, etc.
That’s not saying that either one is wrong, just different - it’s like asking why someone used a hotel for a conference when you had a great tent site on your vacation to the mountains.
The question is how much money Amazon spends on development of those services. What part of price is hardware expenses, what part of price is software expenses.
There's definitely a healthy margin but don't underestimate how much time goes into making everything work smoothly. The major cloud providers do a lot of things like handling zero-downtime migration between failed physical hosts, monitoring for infrastructure issues, firmware testing/security/updates, etc. which is completely transparent to you until you realize that you haven't spent time in years on things like hardware or environmental failures (stuff like that SSD 40k hour bug which showed up here, recently, for example) or dealing with stuff like Spectre.
The big confound here is scale: AWS can amortize the cost of someone really digging into firmware security over millions of customers but a smaller provider can't. You might not notice that until you either need to get your environment certified or some kind of vulnerability / supply chain attack against a hardware vendor is revealed. That can mean that AWS is both making a hefty profit reselling those engineers' work to all of their customers but also that it's still cheaper to pay them than it is for you to do that work yourself.
It didn't so much fade as that it got switched off. Suddenly Google was just another evil US corporation when before you might have had the impression that they meant what they said. To be fair to your comment: there were some earlier signs but they could all explained away in one way or another, but that time the mask fell and they never managed to put it back on again.
Now they get a lot of business because they are the least bad option. Which still makes Google useful but I'd love for some actual competition. But with the network effects at play any viable competition can be stifled.
Same. One of the big things I don't think their management appreciated was how Reader's users skewed towards people who influenced others — journalists, libraries, the family “tech expert”, etc. — and how forcing them out of something which worked into something which simply wasn't ready to launch ensured that, unlike almost every previous Google launch, the coverage was predominantly negative. They'd had flops before (e.g. Buzz) but since nobody was forced to stop using something they liked to use the flop those didn't damage the brand anywhere near as much.
Yeah I do think that was seriously under calculated.
It seems like reader comes up on nearly every article about google screwing up something like this.
What I never understood though, why did they cancel it in the first place. I always figured that the crawler likely used RSS for discovery. I mean why wouldn't it? I constantly find that RSS has articles before I see them on the website.
So how much extra data were they really storing for supporting Reader? I mean they had to support the UI but it just seemed like an odd removal.
I’ve heard it brought up by C-level executives considering GCP. The business models are different but the idea that things will be cancelled has been well linked to the brand.
My understanding on Reader is that it was less the data than that it was older code and the internal dependencies were rotting.
Oh sure, it wasn't a social network, but it was, like the GP said, the apex of what Google once was: innovation in the field with completely new, potentially useless, but ultimately eyes-opening tech
It was pretty innovative, but it also showed such incredible hubris.
The famous post (now gone but referenced from [1]) about how they spend who-knows-how-long reimplementing scroll bars in the browser when the app was so janky it barely worked was the kind of thing that doomed it.
The HN discussion at the time is interesting too[2]
- A public and open protocol that could have replaced email with structured messages if it got popular, and
- A series of self-love technical exercises like the scrollbars and the live-typing which nobody cared for and killed adoption (worked in Chrome only, very few people care to share half-composed emails with their correspondents).
A textbook example of losing sight of the goal and giving devs too much rope to hang themselves with.
