I’m convinced the Google treadmill of products that are created, shut down, and recreated is due to a promotion oriented culture. They must be getting rewarded for launches, not for building useful products or successful businesses.
Not shocking. Their VPN app sucked ass. A) it randomly disconnected several times a day, and B) it had no "kill switch" option which would block all traffic when the VPN went down. So my connection was frequently unprotected throughout the day.
I think it's 50/50 whether or not I believe the reasoning.<p>One one hand: killing a product for not being multi billion user multi billion dollar overnight success is incredibly on brand.<p>On the other hand: I 100% believe that they just found government pushback too burdensome to comply with. That would match what I saw when I worked there.
This impacts me quite a bit as I use this often.
I pay for Google One for the extra storage and VPN. Now the VPN is going away but my costs will stay the same.<p>That's absurd to me.
I somewhat anticipated the discontinuation of Google VPN because Google didn't address the issue of DNS hijacking, particularly on their Windows client. Ironically, this unresolved issue is why I stopped using their service.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/google/vpn-libraries/issues/36">https://github.com/google/vpn-libraries/issues/36</a>
> Google is now “discontinuing the VPN feature as [they] found people simply weren’t using it.”<p>[...]<p>> Meanwhile, there are no changes to the free Pixel VPN introduced with the Pixel 7 series in 2022.<p>Ah yes, nobody is using it, so Google is saving cost by... discontinuing it for paying services customers, but continuing to provide it to hardware customers (that actually don't pay per month for it). Makes total sense.
I don’t know if it’s just bad management or they want to stay out any possible antitrust case. Because with their weight Google could easily make this a multi million “small” business.<p>Either way, it’s good they leave some for the next guy to earn. ( not because the goodness of their heart I’m sure )
I wonder what their marketing is thinking about this. Google One is effectively just Google Drive storage with some feature add-ons. Until now, that VPN was their only 'additional' thing in the package. Without the VPN it's just a few enhancements to existing products that aren't compelling enough.
The service didn't even work if you signed up for google one from most of the world and then they discontinue it coz of low usage?
Pretty funny stuff
Everything Google does has privacy invasion baked into it.<p>So it's really kinda insulting for them to offer a product where the central purpose is to provide *privacy*.<p>Apparently, the public is not quite as dumb as they thought.