They have a real problem finding developers that will want to work on it. You don't get promoted at Google for maintaining a product that isn't growing.
that is very worrying, but i also wonder how hard google tried. they don't have a very good track record for building and maintaining products outside of their main product space (ads and selling data).
That’s not a development fail. They need better product people maybe? Also, google has money to spend so the bar for a launch may have been much lower in the past.
Yeah, it's really weird to see this pattern repeat again and again. Google has a few flagship products that get proper attention, but everything else...I just don't understand how it even gets developed in the first place, if they don't have a small team to continue working on it post-release.
It's the typical Google development cycle. Build a great product, don't get enough users, engineers lose interest and boom the product is basically sunset. Years later it is either revived or cancelled outright.
I don't have much faith in Google being able to scale this into something truly game changing. They don't have the nimbleness and service culture that is required.
Google puts things on the chopping block due to small userbase or not enough user growth. A very large user base product but which has stagnated should be fine as long as users don't start leavign
The product side is all that matters here. If Google cannot productize it, then all they did was do other people's homework for them. And it increasingly looks like Google has zero plan for productizing it.
That didn't take very long now did it? I never even got around to checking it out.
Aren't they afraid that the next product they announce in this fashion will be met with some scepticism from potential early adopters, who might think 'I'll wait for a bit to see if it stays', which in turn will lead to a cycle where it gets harder and harder for google to release new stuff and get it adopted?
edit: would be nice if they open sourced the code.
If you don't pay for something you can't expect support or updates.
So could be that Google is simply moving that team onto more strategically useful projects. Personally I can't see why they kept supporting this as it isn't core business.
The problem of Google to me seems to be that they release something they think it's good enough and then just leave it there hoping that time will prove them right. Then one day they wake up and see there has not been any adoption, and kill it.
When Google releases something they are hardly all behind it, and seem to forget about it in a week.
Nothing time and money can't solve. And if there's one thing Google has, it's money.
The problem is that Google has the attention span of a hamster on crack. Instead of giving a new handset platform time to grow and mature, it'll jettison the whole project before it gets a chance to gain traction.
reply