It's kind of the way of the world now, not just Google. I've accumulated a ton of stuff that just doesn't work anymore or works in a crippled local-only mode because the service doesn't exist anymore or drivers/software stopped getting updates. What's really sad is buying something, having a little bit of fun with it, then going back to it a year or two later and finding out it's a brick now. Or just buying something "new" and finding out it was born into the grave.
No :( Now what will I do when a website is down or broken or just randomly not working? Why does google kill every good feature? What a terrible company...
Not sure Google, whose favourite past time is shutting down every couple of years services millions use would be the best option particularly when absolute reliability is a requirement.
Ars Technica has a 'graveyard' mini site somewhere devoted to listing everything Google shuts down.
How coud all of googles websites be down this long tho. You would at least think google being the company they are would have some sort of like backup serevers or backup plan type stuff. Idk
For what is worth I just asked around in family barbecue if anyone knows a Google product that shutdown. No one knows.
Non tech savvy hardly know that Youtube belongs to Google even. Tech forums like this are a bubble and we must take care when generalizing our assumptions.
What happens if Google goes down for a while? Is it really that bad? Yes, Gmail and Drive may cause all kinds of chaos but I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine and YouTube.
There are a lot of big tech products where the megacorp has lost interest. Google has websites dedicated to listing their abandoned products or services.
people keep trotting out this old story of Google kills products but it hasn't happened in years. Yes they killed some niche products years ago - social network/chat and an rss reader.. but the important stuff with huge user bases is stable. gmail, chrome, calendar, maps, docs have never been shutdown and likely never will until the entire tech world changes drastically.
For real, go back to HN posts, just 5 years ago, a whole chunk of them are parked domains and 404s.
My 10 year old macbook, 5 year old iPhone, no support, no parts.
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