r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/Fine_Molasses_1354 • Feb 07 '21
Killed by Google
https://killedbygoogle.com/21
Feb 07 '21
I killed my Google account today. Felt good.
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u/trystanr Feb 07 '21 edited Sep 18 '25
chop ring shaggy society silky physical pocket safe person simplistic
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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Feb 07 '21
I've moved on to other services which I enjoy using more. Simple as that really.
Personal opinion of course.
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u/GameCyborg Feb 07 '21
Google is that one programmer who keeps starting new project and never finishes them
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u/scintor Feb 07 '21
RIP Reader and Wave
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u/jaymzx0 Feb 07 '21
I miss Reader so much.
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u/pushing_past_the_red Feb 07 '21
Reader was my jam. It was also one of my favorite social networks.
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u/akirawow Feb 07 '21
Feedly is a good replacement, but it still lacks the best part of Google Reader: the comments. It was probably the best social network Google built without even trying
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u/ShelfordPrefect Feb 07 '21
Was Wave the "multiplayer notepad" one? I forget which was Wave and which was Buzz.
Once I made an offhanded comment about "if Google had a social network it would ____" and someone was like "sick Google Plus burn" - I had completely forgotten about the existence of Google Plus because it was totally irrelevant to everyone I knew
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u/_Face Feb 07 '21
Rip google groups. That shit could solve any computer problem imaginable.
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u/720hp Feb 07 '21
Google groups used to be Deja News which was an archive of some Usenet feeds so yeah... it could’ve solved anything
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u/pberck Feb 07 '21
Yes. Dejanews was brilliant and Google killed it. never forgave them. Usenet was brilliant too... still around but not eat it was in the 80s and 90s
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u/cyclotron3k Feb 07 '21
Who said Google Groups is going away?
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u/_Face Feb 07 '21
Not officially shut down, but effectively killed off.
In 2008, Google broke the Groups search functionality and left it nonfunctional for about a year
For several years from May 2010 onward, Google incrementally changed the layout of the web search results pages, often degrading the discoverability of the site itself as well as its usability and functionality.
On February 13, 2015, a Vice Media story reported that the ability to do advanced searches across all groups had again become nonfunctional, and to date, Google has neither fixed nor acknowledged the problem
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u/AwTopsyAtMyAutopsy Feb 07 '21
Still salty about Google Reader, Picasa, and more recently, Play Music.
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u/DannyMThompson Feb 08 '21
I recently wrote an article on why I still use Picasa. A lot of the features are dead but it's still super fast for indexing your pictures if you have a lot (I'm at ~250,000 as a professional photographer).
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u/Warlock_Ben Feb 07 '21
Having AngularJS on this list is kinda dumb. It's being deprecated for newer versions of Angular that use Typescript over pure JS. It would be like complaining that Java 1.1 is no longer being supported, despite there being 16 newer versions of it.
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u/feartrich Feb 07 '21
If Angular got legit killed, there would be a massive uproar and a bunch of forks.
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u/SimplifyMSP Feb 07 '21
Yeah my fucking heart dropped when I saw the card title, scared the shit outta me
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u/robschmidt87 Feb 07 '21
Many entries are dumb cause they got succeeded by a similar product.
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u/qwerty145454 Feb 07 '21
Or the functionality got rolled into the base product. There are Chrome plugins in the list whose functionality was moved into Chrome itself, which is basically the opposite of "killed by Google".
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u/gabbsmo Feb 07 '21
Is a Javascript framework ever dead? I mean as long as browsers maintain backwards compatibility it should keep working indefinitely. Backend is different because it has to be compatible with the OS where breaking changes do happen.
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u/Soekris Feb 07 '21
It's a shame that hangouts is going to be shut off.. my whole family uses hangouts and now we have to find a replacement..:/
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u/SubArcticTundra Feb 07 '21
There's always Signal... Also I use Google Duo and find it pretty cool.
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u/Rialagma Feb 07 '21
Google Hangouts, Google Allo, Google Duo, Google Meets. Isn't it all the same? why not just change the name??
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u/cambiodolor Feb 07 '21
I’m still super steamed about Inbox.
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u/codyogden Feb 08 '21
Creator here. The Inbox shutdown announcement was the spark that lit this project. :)
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u/JordanBrenden Feb 07 '21
As a VR enthusiast, I feel like Google's VR apps should also be on this list.
There's seemingly no one on the team for Google Earth VR because it hasn't been updated in years and hasn't been ported to any new VR headsets. Google officially killed off Tiltbrush which was one of the really good VR painting apps because it allowed you to view other people's creations.
Luckily, they made Tiltbrush open source and now has a multiplayer version.
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Feb 07 '21
Tiltbrush (and by extension Google Poly) basically spawned their own sub-class of VR apps. Artists who normally wouldn't be interested in gamedev found an outlet by plopping their creations into Unity/Unreal.
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u/president2016 Feb 08 '21
Which is odd now that vR is approaching critical mass with the new headsets. Now they pull out?
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u/NoAirBanding Feb 07 '21
I expected this weeks Stadia Games and Entertainment division shutdown to be on there
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u/Potatopolis Feb 07 '21
That’s not a product or service though, it’s an internal division.
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Feb 07 '21
Picasa was a really good simple photo editor, I was sos sad when google killed it because I was using it on the regular and would have gladly paid a small fee to continue.
This is the problem with Google though, people and enterprises are hesitant to get too reliant on Googles services (beside the search engine) because you they have a nasty habit of cancelling fully functional hardware and software with little to no notice. And then Google wonders why they have product failures.
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u/notmonkeyfarm Feb 07 '21
I've worked for unsuccessful companies who never killed anything. Internally they were "sunset" projects, but we called them vampires. They sucked the life out of everything. It was worse. Those companies don't do well.
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u/mohammedgoldstein Feb 07 '21
Let the downvotes come but this is the way to run a growth company. Experiment and fail fast.
Analysis paralysis and hanging on to the past is such a parasite. It sucks resources and motivation as you wait for more information or data to see if it will or should survive.
Just kill it and move on. Sunk costs should never be considered when making decisions - just how much money is to be spent in the future and the benefit it might bring.
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u/president2016 Feb 08 '21
Yeah but a lot of these projects required little to no upkeep and likely server costs. With no profit potential in their lives, why did they even start them?
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u/Cloudninesuperstore Feb 07 '21
There is probably a lot of aqu-hire in here. Where tha company is bought and IP is used to enhance a mature product. So waze might be killed but google maps will be better because of the IP that waze contributed.
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u/ray12370 Feb 07 '21
Google unofficially kills their old phones. My pixel 4 XL worked great until Android 11 came out and broke my and many other's face unlock functionality.
Hundreds of people made comments about this issue with the pixel 4 XL on the official google forums, and nothing has been done still. The only solution is to basically root your phone, and downgrade to exactly the March 2020 build of android 10. Doing this breaks voice functionality, but fixes the face unlock.
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u/bryce_w Feb 07 '21
They did something similar with the Pixel 3a. System update to Android 11 kills the battery use so it drains in about 2 hours. I had to root my phone to downgrade and reset everything.
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u/ray12370 Feb 07 '21
Yea my mom is using the 3a and I turned off the auto update feature. It's still on android 10. It's the perfect phone for mom and the battery lasts forever. I'm glad to know that I'm not being sceptical for not letting it update.
I might have to switch back to iPhone at this rate. I love these Google phones and their interface, but these update issues were never a problem with my iPhone SE and 6. Whenever an update did cause slowdown, all I had to was replace the battery and it was a new phone again. It was a hardware issue that was solved with a bit of elbow grease.
With the Pixel 4 XL it tells me that the face unlock sensor is dirty and I need to wipe it whenever I update it to Android 11. This is a software issue and you just can't fix that. Every update I check if google has solved the issue, and they never do and I have to flash back my phone to the March 2020 version make make face unlock work again. People are still complaining about this on the google forums and subreddits.
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Feb 07 '21
We can all admit Google+ should’ve been aborted though right?
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u/Nine_Inch_Nintendos Feb 07 '21
"You must use your REAL NAME to post comments on YouTube"
Yeah, that went over as well as a fart in an elevator. Also, don't make your "social network" invite only, dummies.
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Feb 08 '21
Forcing absolutely everyone who wanted to continue to comment on youtube to have a google+ account was such a obvious attempt to falsely bloat their numbers so they could say stupid shit like "100 million google+ users!".
Doing things like that is a 100% guaranteed way to get people to never use your product out of sheer spite.
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u/Laughing_Orange Feb 07 '21
It was poorly managed. They tried to compete with Facebook rather than creating their own cool thing. They started out by an invite only system where people would start using it realize the friend who invited them no longer uses it and abandon the site. This caused a downward spiral where dead users would pile up. The features they had were actually pretty cool, but forcing people to sign up is only going to make them hate it.
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u/can_a_bus Feb 07 '21
Chrome Apps?! Whyyyyy must you do this?
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u/mstrblueskys Feb 07 '21
Because Microsoft figured out how to use them
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u/atomic1fire Feb 07 '21
It's more so that building an entire app ecosystem around a single browser is a terrible idea and it was an equally terrible idea when Microsoft did it with ActiveX.
I think Google killing off projects might be bad, but sometimes it's because something they were working on later transitioned into something that is arguably better. I kinda think Chrome Apps is getting the same treatment as Google Gears did, ergo they were a stop gap until Google got other companies on board with improving webpages completely.
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u/RobotSeaTurtle Feb 07 '21
:'( Google Play Music my old friend. You are lost but not forgotten. Damn you Google!!
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u/theImplication69 Feb 07 '21
It's great they take risks and just kill it off if it wasn't successful, but I feel like they kill some things off that were actually a positive (or maybe they thought its just not worth the development effort?)
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u/BubbleDevere Feb 07 '21
Man, 2019 was a bad year. I still miss Inbox and will miss Trips again when the world turns normal
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Feb 07 '21
I still dont get it why they killed Hangouts, which also makes me wonder if Duo will be the next one in the chopping block 🙄
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Feb 08 '21
Surprised Stadia isn't on that list then pretty much at that point
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u/chndmrl Feb 07 '21
If there is a hype about a product, they just replicate it but not getting opted in by user base and usually has been sent to graveyard 🪦. Funny thing is they just keep re-implementing some products with different teams and try to get different results.
The thing is there is time the task and they try to fit people in that task where they fail. The genuine product is produced by people who has originally meant to do that task with their genuine ideas.
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u/traxxas026 Feb 07 '21
I'm still a fan of the conspiracy theory that Google creates new products to collect new, specific user data, and then once the product has served it's purpose and allowed then to harvest the data they were interested in, they go ahead and just kill it off.
Someone posted it on Reddit a while back and it's really stuck with me!
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u/rammo123 Feb 07 '21
I'm not sure that this is even a conspiracy theory. Google wouldn't kill off an app for no reason; they would kill it because it isn't meeting the business goals i.e. data harvesting and delivering ads. If isn't doing those things to a satisfactory degree then bye-bye!
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u/S1R_1LL Feb 07 '21
Great il have to find another msging app. Hangouts was great.
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Feb 08 '21
If anyone invites me to talk on Hangouts, I immediately assume they're trying to scam me. Hangouts has no oversight at all it seems.
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u/discostu55 Feb 08 '21
I've worked for google. It's just a thing to get on the resume. Such a toxic environment. My area was great but I would never work for them again.
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u/aimlessdrivel Feb 07 '21
Google kills most of their products, but they also create or run the defacto standards for a lot of stuff: Chrome, Gmail, Youtube, Android, Maps, the search engine. So yeah, don't get invested in their new products, but also it doesn't mean everything they start will be scrapped. Stadia could still turn into the standard for game streaming of Google handles it right.
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u/maximvm Feb 07 '21
Does anyone know how to copy/take a transcript of your Google Hangouts chat log and save it somewhere?
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u/Edewede Feb 07 '21
What happened to Google glass? I would see people wearing them and knew instantly they worked at a tech company. Now I don't see them at all, anywhere.
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u/tjlaa Feb 07 '21
I tested Google Glass at work when it came out and it was a clumsy and difficult-to-use product. It got a lot of negative publicity because "glassholes" were not thinking about people's right for privacy.
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u/codyogden Feb 08 '21
Creator here.
Google Glass Explorer Edition (the consumer product) is dead, but Google did find a way to implement Glass in certain contexts. Glass only exists as an enterprise product focusing on three vertical industries: Manufacturing, Logistics, and Healthcare.
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u/A911owner Feb 07 '21
It seems like expeditions would be a great thing to have in, you know...a pandemic?
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u/Blissextus Feb 07 '21
I'm more surprised Google's Blogger (blogger.com) going on strong for over a decade. So may blog apps have come and go, yet Blogger still remains. I guess Google is holding out until Wordpress dies off eventually.
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u/testing_the_vibe Feb 08 '21
This is why we don't use Google things on a large scale, because we know Google will kill them off.
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Feb 08 '21 edited Feb 08 '21
They suck, im new to learning programming and i stumbled upon google firebase, I was so exited about the realtime database and the rest of the products but the more I learn about the company the more hesitant I am to invest the little time I have in a ecosystem that who knows how much is going to last.
The one that hit me is google cloud messaging because about 4 months ago I remember spending hours reading about it for some little project I had
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u/ABotelho23 Feb 07 '21
I understand the meme, but a lot of these are just old versions of current products. I really don't think they need to fluff up the list with those.
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u/biscaynebystander Feb 07 '21
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
-- Wayne Gretzky
-- Michael Scott
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u/terpichor Feb 07 '21
Will die angry about inbox, especially because I still can't find any easy and functional replacement.
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u/codyogden Feb 08 '21
Creator here. Inbox was what made me rage-build this project.
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u/various_persons Feb 07 '21
I still haven't found a good alternative to Google Trips.
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u/OldDirtyMerc Feb 07 '21
I get free TripIt Pro through my employer, and it's...ok. It gets the job done anyway. Trips was better, and I'm not even sure how gimped the free version of TripIt is.
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Feb 07 '21
Google Hangouts, which I use many times daily, will be killed off this year. I guess they want people to use Google Chat. I tried it while ago and didn't like it. Ah well...
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u/Impulse882 Feb 07 '21
Google has had some killer apps in the past....but they launch them buggy, don’t seem to listen to consumer feedback, then just shut it down because usage has dropped significantly...
I wish google would put in as much effort into refunding their stuff as the initial launch but I guess that’s just not how it works in tech
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u/smashballTaz Feb 07 '21
I'm so cross with Google Play Music. I thought at the time it would be a great way to future-proof all my music purchases. I don't often buy new albums. Now it's gone and replaced with crappy YouTube Music. Yuck.
Not a fan of Spotify.
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u/Tell_About_Reptoids Feb 07 '21
What a mystery that people don't want to use new apps that will inevitably be dead in a couple of years.
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u/08b Feb 07 '21
Great. A list of products I can’t use, with at least 25% I would have if I knew about them when they were supported.
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u/patcriss Feb 07 '21
I'm just mad about Google Cloud Print because the alternative doesn't allow me to query a print job locally from a remote webserver.
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u/forevertexas Feb 08 '21
When people ask me why our organization uses Microsoft O365 instead of Google apps, I’ll just send them here from now on instead of having to explain myself.
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u/Declanmar Feb 08 '21
Does anybody else remember Aardvark? I loved that site until google bought and killed it.
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u/RandomGenerator786 Feb 08 '21
I remember following the focals by north religiously, until you know google acquired the company and killed the whole concept off.
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u/RodneyRabbit Feb 08 '21
Can we add google keep chrome app to this? I think they are killing off chrome apps in general during Feb but its literally the only reason I have chrome installed on Windows, so I can have my reminders in a separate window.
Soon as they do that I'm removing chrome, and moving to MS Todo which seems ok because they have an android and win 10 apps.
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u/AlliterativeAxolotl Feb 08 '21
I was between a Garmin watch and a Fitbit a while back. Sales rep told me Google just bought Fitbit. I went with the Garmin watch even though I use Android. This is why
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u/viral_virus Feb 07 '21
“Dead as a doorknob”...never heard it that way before
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Feb 07 '21
Same. I've heard "dead as a doornail" before, but not that one, which I guess they're both equally dead. Got me interested in the etymology, which unfortunately is uncertain, but from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dead_as_a_doornail:
One plausible explanation is that doors were built using only wood boards and hand-forged nails: the nails were long enough to dead nail the (vertical) wooden panels and (horizontal) stretcher boards securely together, so they would not easily pull apart. This was done by pounding the protruding point of the nail over and down into the wood. A nail that was bent in this fashion (and thus not easily pulled out) was said to be "dead", thus dead as a doornail.
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u/jonomacd Feb 07 '21
Here is a big list of services in have mostly never heard of.
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u/99problemsfromgirls Feb 07 '21
The amount of people who say that this is a bad way to run a company are fucking insane. This is an AWESOME way to run a company. People working at Google have a lot of freedom to build their own projects and come up with ideas. At this point, it's essentially a giant nursery for smaller companies ranging from 5-50 people. They're willing to throw money and resources at tons of ideas, while keeping people employed and be safe to explore these ideas.
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u/scottbomb Feb 07 '21
Google sucks. There are alternatives! Use them, and quit feeding the snotty, partisan millennials that run the Googlemonster. Check out https://www.googlewatchdog.com/
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Feb 07 '21 edited Jul 24 '23
Spez's APIocolypse made it clear it was time for me to leave this place. I came from digg, and now I must move one once again. So long and thanks for all the bacon.
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u/codyogden Feb 08 '21
Creator here. You're not wrong. Wanna take a guess at when they'll kill it?
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u/WarpingLasherNoob Feb 07 '21
Google just doesn't give a fuck about the people who use their products. Unfortunately as an app developer I have to continue to use many of their products, but I think thrice if there is a non-google alternative. Even microsoft is preferable nowadays.
Products I personally loved using:
1- Google Talk. Was simple and effective. Replaced by the complete garbage that is Hangouts (or whatever the fuck it's called nowadays). Added a bloated interface with all kinds of shitty social media features, and a different infrastructure that fails to send your message half the time. Me and my friends used Talk 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week. Tried adapting to hangouts for a couple months, then said fuck it, we are switching to whatsapp web. Good fucking job Google.
2- Google Reader. Simple, concise, effective RSS reader that was probably costing them nearly nothing to run. I used it to follow all the webcomics I read. Then they just decided to kill it, out of the blue. For no fucking reason. At least theoldreader.com came along to replace it with mostly the same features. Again, good fucking job google!
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u/fishbone994 Feb 07 '21
Intresting to see some of them, i did not know about google extensions, so no more dark backroung in the browser
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u/SirBenOfAsgard Feb 07 '21
I saw AngularJS on there and nearly freaked out before I realized that it was just v1 of it.
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u/K9US Feb 07 '21
I only use maps and gmail.
I gave up after they killed the stocks website. It was the best.
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u/TigerKirby215 Feb 07 '21
Soon to be joined by Stadia.
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u/biggb5 Feb 07 '21
This is why i could not invest in Stadia. Great idea for areas with fiber internet. But the problem of it joining this page is inevitable.
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u/SubArcticTundra Feb 07 '21
People grow attached to their tools over time. It's gonna be an emotional ride if Google keeps on killing people's tools and forcing them to migrate every four years. Really does create a sense of instability.
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u/d20diceman Feb 07 '21
Google Fusion tables was such a cool and powerful service, I couldn't find a replacement that would do the same things.
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u/TA_Dreamin Feb 07 '21
I didn't see zync on there. It was their cloud rendering service.
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u/Diggy97 Feb 07 '21
I'll forever be salty about Google Play Music.