Google has already pulled six products in 2023

The dedicated Streetview app was finally killed because streetview is already integrated in regular google maps. To me, that seems like a good reason to discontinue the dedicated app.<p>I don&#x27;t get the reasoning behind this article. Half of this list is side projects which didn&#x27;t work out, which is understandable to a certain degree. The article feels like blogspam riding on the hypetrain of people disliking when google discontinues products like Stadia.

Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN.<p>It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes.<p>Anyone wanna bet on if&#x2F;when Bard gets axed?

Why does Google get grilled so badly for pulling products? Don’t other companies do the exact same thing, and isn’t it their full right to abandon projects when it no longer makes sense?

Ouch, not a good look when people lose almost complete faith in your hardware products. Every one I know of has been shut down at this point. Why would I buy a Google Hardware ever? Especially considering how they treated the Onhub...<p>Stadia Onhub Glass

Beyond the serious dependability questions Google raises, I feel bad for the millions of units of OnHub, Nest, Stadia, and other hardware that are still perfectly functional, but rendered obsolete because of what amounts to high level, corporate financial decisions.<p>Any company engaging in mass market IoT sales should be compelled, for the sake of consumer confidence and protection, of an &quot;exit plan&quot; to allow fully localized control of these devices -- independent of an upstream server or system.

Google is where projects go to die. Several friends who have joined via M&amp;A have shared they had little expectations of seeing their babies continue in any way, shape of form after purchase by Google.<p>While I don&#x27;t know this founder, his excellent writeup summarizes my understanding of the culture w&#x2F;r&#x2F;t innovation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@pravse&#x2F;the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cfd61a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@pravse&#x2F;the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cf...</a>

I have never even heard of Google Jacquard, was it maybe advertised more in the US than in Europe?<p>It seems like an interesting concept, since hands-free control of your phone via speech is often too awkward to use in public imho.<p>Maybe it&#x27;ll come back when the hardware is able to shrink even more, making it less conspicuous.

Honestly still missing Stadia so much.<p>Not a heavy gamer, but Stadia was awesome for game nights with friends and also the play while someone watches along feature was great.<p>I&#x27;d always wanted to play Red Dead redemption 2 (which was on Stadia) but my PC can run it, so I bought it for my birthday, 110 gb download, had to install the epic launcher, then the rockstar launcher, then it complained about not being able to verify the files, then it locked me out of my account due to some linking issue between the two, then it just kept refusing to start saying it was already running and then many, many hours later, I was able to sit down and play it for an hour and a half which is all i wanted, which wasn&#x27;t really worth it in the end.<p>Why is the user experience and entry into gaming so rough&#x2F;awful?

The list is a bit dishonest.<p>Google Code Jam was not a product, and it was an event that was a net loss in terms of revenue, which is hard to justify maintaining when you are cutting thousands of jobs.<p>Google Street View is part of Google Maps, the post even says so.<p>Google OnHub is a one time hardware product. Nobody is blaming Nintendo for killing the Gameboy Color when it stopped producing it.<p>I don&#x27;t see how any of the 6 things mentioned here have been unjustifiably &quot;killed&quot;.

This list doesn&#x27;t include dropcam, though I guess its a bit different in scope. Last week I received a notice that my dropcams will just be bricked in April 2024- they will just stop working because they are &quot;too hard to support.&quot;<p>I have neither asked for, nor received, a single feature from what I bought, I just want it to continue working. With prior products, they were &quot;free&quot; so it was kind of acceptable that they were discontinued, but now I have a real tangible thing, that Google has just decided to shut off and that&#x27;s that.<p>I will never buy something without open standards again. My expectation is that at some point in the life of these cameras they would support RTSP but they never did, and I now see more than ever that that was a feature, not a bug. I will never make that mistake again.

I know that &quot;never used these!&quot; is a common trope with these sunsets, but Google also shuts down products that have big impacts to users. The shutdown of Universal Analytics and, to a less extent, Optimize, is having a pretty big impact to most website.

Check out some of the recent highlights from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com</a><p>- <i>All</i> Google Code Competitions, which had gone on for 19 years<p>- Jacquard, there IOT clothing attempt, around for 9 years<p>- Stadia, shorter but their cloud gaming attempt around for 3 years<p>Google killing Jacquard and Stadia seems run of the mill but the first one! When I was in college I remember people talking about google code jam and I wasn&#x27;t even into coding then. That seems like a big retreat and I must have missed HN discussing it because, just wow.

At this point, what is the reason to use Google Cloud or any other critical service, if you have a clear track of record with higher probability that it will be shutdown sooner or later?

Is Fuchsia on this list too, even unofficially so?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com</a>

I love these Google shutdown posts: whenever a headline like this comes up I wonder how many of those former Google products I&#x27;ve actually heard of.

Just curious to hear from other engineers, do those constant product shutdowns impact the way you evaluate Google technologies when considering developing new products? I don&#x27;t expect Go, Android, Tensorflow to disappear or lose their Google backing any time soon, but I&#x27;ve personally felt uncomfortable using Angular, Flutter (and Dart), and services on GCP to build anything serious.

When hear about hardware products turning into bricks after the manufacturer pulled the plug on cloud services, I wonder how long it will still be legal.<p>Legislation should be put in place so that features not requiring a connection shall work offline.<p>In north America, there is a lot of political pressure for some environmental issues but nothing about planned obsolescence.

They also killed all offline music support for Fitbit <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5google.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;01&#x2F;17&#x2F;fitbit-pandora-deezer-support&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5google.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;01&#x2F;17&#x2F;fitbit-pandora-deezer-supp...</a>

I wish I could still use Site Block, the predecessor of the Chrome extension Personal Blocklist. It was convenient because it could sync the sites I blocked with my Google account, so I could block them on my smartphone too.

I was going to comment on another post, about the validity of CS style leetcode puzzles in interviews, and that Goole seems to have been at the forefront of this trend: Not only do they not necessarily predict competence at solving real-world problems, they possibly select for people who treat complex real-world problems as a CS exercise, and just look at the result for Google - numerous projects that try to solve the wrong problem, others that solve it in a way that doesn&#x27;t align with the audience, etc. The algorithms are probably efficient though.

It&#x27;s because Google actively celebrates and encourages failure - if the evidence is there, they will kill it and actively reward this behaviour. At Google, this is how you get promoted and bonused.

I wonder if the death of CodeJam hints the end of LC-style interviews.

Stadia for sure is the notable one. When first announced it was met with skepticism after which Google insisted that they&#x27;d be in it for the long term.<p>Well, guess not. It just cements an already shaky reputation. Don&#x27;t depend on anything Google personally or in business if you have a choice. They still don&#x27;t care though, they seem immune to market forces and things like &quot;customers&quot;.

None of those &quot;products&quot; (really just features. What is the point of a Streets View &quot;app&quot;?) made any sense to begin with.<p>Goes to show that Google has been a free-for-all for too long. Who allowed these things to be built (waste of resources) and launched (bad for brand and marketing as they won&#x27;t be able to succeed anyway) is beyond me. What&#x27;s going on at Google nowadays?!

hey, random googler(s) maintaining google scholar: thank you! it&#x27;s awesome.

Fine, let them destroy their brand altight; but &quot;landfilling&quot; perfectly good hardware for no other reason other than &quot;we can&#x27;t be bothered&quot; should be made illegal and severely punished. This is the mindset that brought us to blow 420 ppm, and it needs to stop.<p>Apple abandoned AirPort access points 5 years ago in 2018, and still got security updates a year later. Dammit!

Whom do I have to contact to get acquired for 100M by Google and then shutdown with a full stock vesting after 6 months?

Missing Grasshopper, Google&#x27;s gamified interactive Javascript teaching project. It&#x27;s pretty cool.

Tax people: is this all a response to 174 and capitalizing R&amp;D &#x2F; Software expenses you think?

Google code jam is not a product. I doubt most people had heard of the other products..except stadia

and this is why I wont use Google products. You can&#x27;t trust them not to pull the plug.

Stadia was so predictable, obvious and was just too easy [0] and had no chance in surviving.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27039202" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27039202</a>

GCP on the chopping block if it doesn&#x27;t start making gains on Azure by EOY?

What you call a &quot;shutdown spree&quot; I call a &quot;focus fest&quot;.

These decisions look rational. Not capricious. Stuff that isn&#x27;t reaching a sustainable audience at Google scale, and that can&#x27;t be spun-off, like Niantic, for example, should get cut.

Google must perform periodic ritual sacrifice of some of its own. It is the natural order of things. Failure to do so would anger the internet gods.

Fire Sundar.<p>The guy just rides on the wave of money that search brings in. Otherwise it&#x27;s just failed project after failed project. Google has this stupid process where they spin up a new idea, cripple the launch, cripple support, cripple maintenance, and then kill the project for lack of success a year later leaving the few suckers who held out with faith in them high and dry.<p>For me personally, Allo was the final straw. I did the footwork of getting people to switch to it, had some mild success, and then google pulled the rug making me look like an idiot.

The Google Graveyard [1] grows.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve heard of half of those. Never used any (street view is included in maps, so I never used a dedicated app).

A few hours ago I was searching for an application to display 3d data.<p>I came across a Goole project.<p>I didn&#x27;t even look at it twice.

How about the opposite? What products did Google create in the last few years that had staying power?

Stadia is probably the saddest one. Great technology that was never really given a chance.

Is this more than usual?

Damn this thread really brought out all the google shills

How safe is Firebase?

This is why I can’t bring myself to buy any google product since there’s a good chance it won’t be supported in a couple of years.

HN has 2 perma-front page topics:<p>Google shutting down something noone has ever heard of<p>Is it just me or has Google search gotten worse?