When I rejoined Google (working in the hardware division), my managers tried to get me to work on stadia and I refused (this was shortly before it launched). I looked at it, said "this won't be successful, and google will eventually get rid of it". My managers simply couldn't understand that. They said "the leadership thinks this will be successful and we should build it" and then I realized they were sheeple.
Highly paid sheeple whose paycheck and continued employment is probably correlated with their ability to oversee a technically successful execution of the designs of higher-ups. That sounds like the line that I would use if I had to build something so that I could get paid, even though I might agree with you personally.
When you looked at it, what was it that tipped you off to its eventual failure? Was it a flaw in the technical design or something? How did you know it would eventually fail? (Looking to learn how to spot things like that, here!)
My google failure sensors were honed on reader and google plus. In fact I just rejoined a company I worked at before Google and they had adopted Currents- Google's workspace version of Google Plus. Folks tried to get me to use it and all I could say was: I will never use Google Plus again. We are shutting down our Currents because... nobody ever uses it.
There's several factors at play. First, Google simply does not have any ability to compete in the consumer gaming space because they don't understand it. Second, to make the project work required an enormous expenditure across hardware, software, deployment, and game studios. If the product wasn't absurdly successful, it would be a failure simply because its profit margins would be low. Third, there's no real way to make money doing machine learning on gamer behavior (the way this works in mobile, where many games including ads) so the profit margin would be low. Fourth, I saw a number of preeminent engineers who worked on the project leave shortly after it was launched, or some time later (when it first started becoming obvious the project wasn't a hit). Fifth, leadership pitched this as something that only Google could do, that Google's unique hardware and physical presence in POPs meant they would have significant advantages was obviously wrong (multiple companies always had the technical acumen and production infrastructure to make this happen).
What really blows me away is how close Google Cloud is becoming to something that Google would have to cancel because they can't get the profit margins to compare to ads.
> What really blows me away is how close Google Cloud is becoming to something that Google would have to cancel because they can't get the profit margins to compare to ads.
I imagine GC is one of the big three cloud platforms (with AWS, Azure) so I am absolutely intrigued by your suggestion. How bad is it going, really? They've made a lot of investment in Firebase also. I could probably see them shake things up drastically, but shutting down sounds like suicide.
As a GCP customer, I must say, it is not on the same level as AWS and Azure. Every single product offered by GCP is severely lacking when compared to the top competition. It is very clear to me that GCP is not a priority for Google.
It's interesting that both Apple and Google still aren't very good at gaming. Maybe this is a big reason why Nintendo Switch is still the king despite smartphone is ubiquitous?
Ah, ok. Haven't seen this before. Interestingly the peeps at Google probably liked it as the comic's address is found in txt records of dns.google (via cli: `dig +short txt dns.google` or `host -t txt dns.google`).
There are a significant number of large orgs on G Suite enterprise now. And Gmail is a key part of the offering for many. So they won't be shutting down Gmail altogether anytime soon. Although sunsetting free Gmail accounts in the future wouldn't be out of the question.
> It only became apparent it would fail after it launched. The technology is great and not the reason it was doomed so you didn't call anything.
The technology isn't why it failed, Google is. Google was Google before it launched, and after it launched. So anyone familiar with Google could have predicted this failure before the actual launch.
As I remember comments at the time, it was the most common prediction. When Stadia launched, Google was at the peak of irritation for service shutdowns, and it was considered a string of failures, not a running joke.
