This week’s dead Google products: Google Podcasts, basic Gmail, and more!

I mean, I get the logic but re:valid business strategy, that is increasinly clearly not the case. At least as long as alienating and giving people a hard nudge to De-Google is indicative of failure, maybe I'm out of line here. All I know is I'm not hearing a certain generecized verb these days so much as the antithetical of said verb. Although I get the argument to the contrary, something something echo chamber...

Their unreliabillity is legendary and at meme-level. They are like a hotel that closes up shop and moves the set overnight while you're sleeping so you wake up naked in the middle of the street. I'm surprised they even have real office buildings/campuses and not just movie sets on stilts.

But meanwhile lose all credibility. If you don't want to commit to a specific piece of hardware, don't sell it. A $5000 whiteboard with a $600 yearly subscription AND that requires paid Google workspace subscriptions for each user (100 employees=$12000 each year) will NEVER be ultra popular. They already knew from the beginning that they wouldn't be possibly move millions of units of this and they would just cash in from the subscriptions.

All files generated on this devices are proprietary and saved on their servers. As of now, it's not possible to get them and open on a computer. When they pull the plug, they're all gone.

For example, when Twitter died and they sold all the forniture at the auction, they had more than an hundred devices like this. https://bid.hgpauction.com/past-auctions/herita10216?term=Jamboard

Maybe the new management kept some of the boards, but here they spent half million in hardware + 60k yearly for the software licenses + another hundreds of thousands for the required Google workspace accounts for the users. And for what? For e-waste that ends with no drop-in replacement. Now corps need to quickly find an alternative and they need to pay extra to convert the generated files to the new platform.

Behaving like this will definitely hurt future sales, as Google will be labeled as the supplier that suddenly disappears without a drop-in replacement.

There are a lot of other companies that discontinue and render the purchased hardware a brick within a short timeframe, for example Cisco, but at least they have an upgrade path and not "we exit the market, good luck".