I think Google should focus on continuous product development. They always create a product and then leave it alone without touching it again. Usually the product is good originally, but it degrades because nobody updates it.
I wonder if building new products is preferably over always building new features. Some products are done from a user perspective, but keep getting tinkered with because it's growth or death and eventually the beloved product is unrecognizable. Maybe the ideal scenario is to put those products into maintenance mode instead and move investment to new products. Google's problem is that they are so extreme on only investing in new products and don't make incremental improvements.
Is bizarre that this and how it's tight to the way they do promotions has even evident to people outside Google for years and nothing changes.
And it's precisely their lack of commitment that's put Google in this position. Everyone knows that unless a product is a smash hit at Google, they will almost always kill it in a year or two. But the reason Google isn't making smash hit products anymore is no one wants to try it knowing Google will probably kill it, it's a death spiral for any new products they release.
Except that they over-reward "design a completely new project in market X" where they already have a product, and under-reward fixing the existing product in a backward-compatible way. That means customers can't count on Google supporting anything long-term.
A Google product looks ground-breakingly great when it comes out, but then gets more-or-less abandoned with few subsequent releases, and slowly disintegrates?
The problem with Google is that you don't know if any product/service they launch will still be supported in a few years' time, or if the product/engineering team will lose interest and move on to build the next shiny thing.
Eh - Google is going to cancel this project in a few months as it withers on the vine. Google is good at making little innovative products, but not good at maintaining them.
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.
Why does Google continue to try to produce new products? We all know they will never become reality, or if they do, they'll stop existing soon after they're open to the public. They're now just a regretware company.
I don't think it's the problem with lack of innovation. Google has innovated in a lot of areas - Transformers (the foundation for ChatGPT), Stadia, Project Starline, and some the public may not have heard of yet.
The problem lies with translating that innovation to long term product vision, and reimagining how these innovations could be made into a product.
I suspect that they announce it to fast too, too soon - before it's proven. Stadia and LaMDA is an example of this. They actually showcased LaMDA last year or the year before that in I/O. The other is that they give up on innovations too soon because they can't think of ways to monetize them.
I really admire Google, but they have become notorious for their “fast fail” mentality and product sun setting.
No matter how good this may be I don’t trust google to not close this down or make major modifications that could cause issues in 1,3,5+ years from now.
So it’s a reluctant “no thanks” from me, as I really wish they would plan their product portfolio more long term than history so far demonstrates.
I'd suggest a 4th reason: Google has so much money and so many high-traffic properties that it can keep a poorly designed or unpolished product going for years, more than long enough for the original people who designed and built it to move on/up inside the company. Google will just push the product on the front page of some existing property to bump traffic, or get creators/developers to use it in hopes of boosting their existing search rankings, or give away the product for free. Every company would try to do these things but Google has a big advantage.
This allows Google to be lazy about product-market fit and avoid asking the hard questions like "is this thing really better than the alternative" and "what's the ROI for people who adopt this".
I worked on what I'd consider a failed product, and there was no explicit acknowledgement of that fact ever, we just waited 3 years and quietly turned it off. A more drawn-out version of the same thing happened with Google Plus. There was never anything like a "product postmortem".
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