I think Google has such a strong consumer following now that it isn't as interested in keeping the developers happy. We were early adopters so got a good amount of attention at the start but that certainly seems to have waned with Google's popularity.
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.
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
That’s true, but I’ve noticed a significant drop in interest for any new Google products. It may not affect their bottom line, but the hype that led to waiting lists for Google Wave or rapid trial adoption of G+ is over.
I concur, but for a different reason: I think Google want this to be a "premium" product, in the same way the iPad has maintained its status in the tablet world.
Google are starting to recognise that merely having lots of users isn't necessarily as interesting or profitable as having slightly fewer that are of a higher value.
I feel like Google used to be really big on the "release early, release often" mantra. At some point they turned more into Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. You can look in the windows and see them doing cool shit, but it never seems to make it to the general public.
Of course, most egregiously, they invented transformers like 6 years ago, and they've had LaMDA for over a year, and only let people see small glimpses of it. Also, Waymo has been around for almost 15 years, and seems to have some really neat tech, but people can't actually use it. Calico has apparently made some massive breakthroughs with ISRIB treatments, and bought up all the patents so they have exclusive access to it, but seem to be keeping everything to themselves.
I feel like Google Code could have easily dominated over GitHub, but then they just let Microsoft have it.
Google does so much cool stuff, and I'm grateful for the services that they offer, many of which I pay for. It just sucks that they've gotten so stingy lately about what they release. I hope that changes soon.
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.
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.
One of my favorite examples is looking at the Google Trends page for Google Allo [0]. Lots of initial interest at release, but since it didn't add anything to what people already was using, including Google hangouts, interest soon faded away. Google's practice of release early, release often, doesn't really work when entering a market with strong established products. Good luck getting people to try convincing their friends to switch to a different chat app they already tried and didn't like.
Google is known for attracting top engineers, but their product managers seems to be some of the worst in the industry. Where would they be without their ad cash cow? It's been years since I got exited about anything they released. I think I noticed it getting worse right around when Eric Schmidt got replaced as CEO.
At some point Google needs to realize that releasing products then killing them like this makes people worry about using them for other projects. Simply going on number of users / revenue per user doesn't seem to be a a great long term strategy.
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?
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