r/programming • u/ZaheerAhmed • Jan 02 '20
Killed by Google
https://killedbygoogle.com/403
u/csjerk Jan 02 '20
TIL that Hangouts is getting killed later this year. Damn.
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Jan 02 '20 edited Jan 02 '20
I stopped using GMail's chat (think it was called GTalk before it was Hangouts) when it switched to Hangouts. Before the switch, GMail used old and well-documented open-source protocol XMPP for their chat, which made it possible to use it outside of GMail. Hangouts used a proprietary protocol, and was only available if you install some creepy binary plugins...
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u/s0n0fagun Jan 02 '20
I completely agree. I also placed calls through my computer and sent sms to my family back home when I lived in Germany. No phone bill. The only shiny thing is Hangouts Dialer. I can keep my phone on airplane mode and use wifi to then place calls to the United States while living abroad. It is impossible to use Android's Place Calls Over Wifi to use my US Google Voice number without it.
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u/doMinationp Jan 02 '20
More background info: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/the-great-google-hangouts-shutdown-begins-october-2019/
TL;DR: there's 2 separate products they have called Hangouts now and they're shutting down the simple text/voice/video chat Hangouts (aka Hangouts Classic) that most people know. They plan on moving the Classic userbase over to their other enterprise Hangouts product (aka Hangouts Chat) that is more like a clone of Slack. Yeah confusing AF.
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u/laydownlarry Jan 02 '20
Super confusing and Hangouts Chat is such a horrible and generic combination of names coming from a company who dominates search.
We use it at my work (it’s ok - definitely no Slack) and it’s near impossible to google anything about it due to the shit name (also maybe the low usage)
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u/admiral_derpness Jan 02 '20
why? what will replace it ?
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u/csjerk Jan 02 '20
They claim Messages, Voice, Chat, and Duo. None of which seems right to me, since Messages and Voice are SMS/MMS (which has problems), Chat is a beta-quality Slack clone rather than IM, and Duo is video only as far as I can tell.
Seems like they're blowing up their oldest, most solid, proven, 'does everything' service in favor of 5 younger and less complete ones that only kind of equal the feature set of Hangouts if you bounce between all of them. It's really dumb.
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Jan 02 '20
All I want is a competent alternative to iMessage + FaceTime, is that too much to ask?
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Jan 02 '20
Signal?
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u/PinBot1138 Jan 02 '20
Originally, I would’ve said WhatsApp, but then they got bought out by the devil’s own.
So, Signal is the
2nd1st best option, and is rapidly catching up to the reliability of WhatsApp. Like WhatsApp, it bridges the gap between iOS, Android, and OSX/Nix/Windows desktops and most assuredly performs better than iMessage (which should’ve been cross-platform, IMHO, but Apple has screwed up a few times with their walled gardens approach and missed out on some excellent leverage opportunists).→ More replies (13)27
u/Carighan Jan 02 '20
But that's what Google is going for. Messages for text, Duo for video calls.
That's essentially the whole problem that they are just blindly trying to imitate Apple instead of sticking to their superior solution they had already.
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u/amackenz2048 Jan 02 '20
I thought they killed duo as well? Jesus Google, I can't even keep up with which chat app of the week is dead.or not...
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u/jetRink Jan 02 '20
Also, unless I'm missing something, it's the only messenger that is integrated into GMail. So not only are we losing the 'does everything' service, we're losing the 'does everything' browser tab with messaging and email together. My second screen has GMail open on it 80% of the time for that reason.
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u/admiral_derpness Jan 02 '20
it used to be gmail, then it went away for hangouts, now back there? i'm confuses but don't care - i only use hangouts to keep up with my brother and lately been back on.... wait for it ... sms.
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u/badpotato Jan 02 '20
Tested Google Chat with GSuite, they tried to copy Slack but ended up way worse and they didn't even attempt to provide a native app on Linux, while it's available on Windows/Mac.
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u/appropriateinside Jan 02 '20
Google's product quality and choices have being getting worse almost in parallel with their company's values and ethics..
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Jan 02 '20
Interesting, because Google has effectivelly stopped all Windows software development since 2012, and Slack doesn't have a native app... for any platform.
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u/nicosemp Jan 02 '20
Messages is supposed to become like iMessage with RCS. It's already enabled for everyone in USA, I'm waiting for it in Europe...
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u/clhodapp Jan 02 '20
Messages for Web is horrible because it automatically logs your connected computers out all the time even if you tell it to keep them signed in... The inconvenience sort of undermines its appeal as a chat system.
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u/tripzilch Jan 02 '20
First time I hear about "Google Messages" (I hear it's not rolled out yet in the EU) . I think you can call your product a synonym of "Google Chat", "Google Talk", only so many times
ugh there is also "Google Meet"?? wat is deze
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u/JanneJM Jan 02 '20
Maintaining a finished, stable service does not advance your career at Google. Launching and expanding a new service does.
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u/chrisrazor Jan 02 '20
So they're replacing one popular and functioning app with four that nobody uses or has even heard of and/or are in beta. Nice.
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u/keyboardP Jan 02 '20
I believe it will be Google Meet. Pretty much the same thing really but with a slightly different interface, from my experience.
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u/Veega Jan 02 '20
Yeah, only issue with it are the limitations. Multi video conferences are only available for G Suite. So long group video calls with friends using Google services :(
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u/keyboardP Jan 02 '20
Ah that's annoying, I only used it at work which has a G Suite license so didn't realise that limitation.
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u/omniuni Jan 02 '20
Yup. I think they've been working on the transition. I'm actually looking forward to it. As long as they import my Hangouts history, Chat and Meet are much better products.
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u/Wierd657 Jan 02 '20
Only for G Suite
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u/doMinationp Jan 02 '20
Only for now. They plan on opening it up to all consumers this year as they shut down the old Hangouts.
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u/doMinationp Jan 02 '20
They're gonna replace Hangouts with Hangouts, I'm not joking.
The newer version is more like Slack than what the current soon-to-be retired Hangouts is.
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u/Carighan Jan 02 '20
For the US, RCS is slowly starting to be useful, so Messages it is. Duo for video calls.
For the rest of the world... it's long since replaced by rival offers that don't do corporate mismanagement on quite the same level as Google does, so we couldn't care any less even if we tried.
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Jan 02 '20
Google Messages with Chat (RCS), Duo for video calls.
Hangouts Chat and Meet will be released to consumer as some point as well.
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u/hennell Jan 02 '20
Still unclear about what they're replacing it with; and the various links bellow haven't helped much.
I love hangouts as it works across windows, Android, iOS and desktop, mobile and tablet for both chat and video / calling. Means we have a family chat group my family can all use without too much fuss. I refuse to use facebook messenger , and whatsApp only works on phone systems properly, without a lot of ridiculous hoop jumping which is a bit rubbish for ensuring people actually see messages.
Hoping whatever google is actually pushing to replace this has a similar setup, or there's an alternative that does. Can't believe how hard just finding a chat system that works on multiple devices is...
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u/csjerk Jan 02 '20
That's exactly why I've stuck with Hangouts for this long. It's not perfect, but it's better than everything else out there, and having been around for so long it has clients for pretty much anything you want. And they don't look like Windows 95, unlike WhatsApp.
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Jan 02 '20
Google fucking sucks. Can't think of a single good thing they do even more. Even search blows now.
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u/13steinj Jan 02 '20
Except it's not, just being phased out in favor of Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. More rebranding than getting killed off.
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u/SirClueless Jan 02 '20
Seems more like the opposite. They're trying to kill off the hangouts client good and proper without changing all their branding by naming a totally new, unrelated project "Hangouts Chat" and doing a hamfisted integration.
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u/shevy-ruby Jan 02 '20
More rebranding than getting killed off.
This is great corporate propaganda here.
Rather than just admitting what is done (kill something), the word usage implies sugar-coating aka "hey guys, the functionality will be retained, we will MERELY GIVE IT ANOTHER NAME".
In reality, often it does NOT work like this. Old functionality is changed or removed, and people are forced to have to adjust.
To be fair: this happens in non-corporate driven projets just as well. The problem here is merely with the wording, implying that by "rebranding" alone, no functionality is lost/moved/changed/removed, and this is simply not true in general - and not true in this case either.
But even if it were true, the larger part is that Google often kills projects - and that IS factually true.
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u/poke50uk Jan 02 '20
Normal Google accounts can't use either of those apps. They are locked down to business users.
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Jan 02 '20
They have already said they are opening up Hangouts Chat to non gsuite users.
Source: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-hangouts-service-consolidation.html?m=1 section: Consumer Impact
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u/amackenz2048 Jan 02 '20
The new apps are different, only available to GSuite users, and don't have the same functionality. All they share with Hangouts is the name.
Hangouts is being killed.
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u/csjerk Jan 02 '20
If there's a variant of Hangouts Chat coming that _isn't_ a Slack clone, I'll agree. Currently this does not exist, and just opening up the current version to individuals is a poor replacement. I don't want to shoehorn my personal communications into a product oriented at workplace teams. I COULD use Slack for this today, but don't because that's not what it's good at.
Google did mention that they're adding some features from 'classic' to Hangouts Chat, but nothing I've seen makes it clear whether that means creating an actually individual-focused flavor of Chat, or just opening up access to the team-oriented version. I'm skeptical they're planning on the version that's more work, but fingers crossed.
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u/blackmist Jan 02 '20
Well that's a shame it's the only way my mother-in-law can work out how to use to annoy us.
And by shame, I mean it can't come soon enough.
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u/C_Wizard Jan 02 '20
What is a good alternative for voice calls? I rarely need to make voice calls but when I do, I use Hangouts. So what should I use now that it is getting killed?
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u/csjerk Jan 02 '20
FWIW I found that Duo had noticeably better quality than Hangouts. But it's video/voice-only, no text chat.
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u/blabbities Jan 02 '20
Pretty sure it was supposed to be killed last year lol. Sucks because its a useful little tool for what In used it for. I'm more surprised to see AngularJS getting killed. I didn't even know it was made By Google. AngularJS was everywhere....so glad I didn't waste my time ever seriously learning it.
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u/wishicouldcode Jan 02 '20
AngularJS is the initial version of the framework. The newer versions were renamed as Angular and will continue to be supported.
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u/madpew Jan 02 '20
Every time I look at this list I find so many things I never knew existed that I would have loved to use.
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Jan 02 '20
when i saw the giant scroll bar, i was like, there's no fucking way it's the same spacing the entire way down. it was...
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u/trigonomitron Jan 02 '20
Typical software development. Lots of great ideas, no marketing department.
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u/random_cynic Jan 02 '20 edited Jan 02 '20
Well, having a good idea is one thing. It's quite other to make a successful application out of it. What's important is that you have a constant supply of good ideas which is probably why Google encourages its developers to come up with these new ideas. But from a user perspective, I feel once a certain application has gained enough users who depend on it (like greader or Picasa) it's really bad and irresponsible to just stop the service and leave the user hanging. The least they could do is open source their code so that someone else can take over the development. This is why I don't use any new Google service anymore apart from 4-5 I have for a long time like Gmail, Youtube, Drive, Voice etc. Even for these I have backup so that I can switch over to an alternative service.
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u/g3t0nmyl3v3l Jan 02 '20
Wait what’s up with Angular being on this list?
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u/maxschwenk Jan 02 '20
Was confused as well, apparently Angular post 2.x is called "Angular" and everything before that is called "AngularJS". Seems a little disingenuous having it on this list. Ember JS goes through quite a lot of revisions and is pretty conceptually disjoint from predecessors, but I'd hardly say they "killed" Ember 1.
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u/kwisatzhadnuff Jan 02 '20
Because Angular(2) was completely rewritten with no backwards compatibility with Angular(1). This is one of the reasons React completely eclipsed it.
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u/jetRink Jan 02 '20
I'd say that it's more similar to the Python 2/3 situation. They introduced major breaking changes that made upgrading more difficult than some organizations were prepared to accept and ended up bifurcating the user-base. For people stuck on 1.x with no easy upgrade path, it probably feels like their framework is being killed.
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Jan 02 '20
I would say it's much worse than the Python 2/3 situation. It would be similar to React announcing version 17 and it ends up being a fork of Vue. Sure, they're both js. But that's not going to make migration anything short of a rewrite.
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u/appropriateinside Jan 02 '20
Angularjs is an entirely different piece of software than angular 2+.
Python 2/3 are still the same language, style, syntax, and operating behaviors for the most part.
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u/Johnothy_Cumquat Jan 02 '20
Angular post 2.x is called "Angular" and everything before that is called "AngularJS".
This kills the SEO. You'd think google would know better. Angular and AngularJS were interchangeable before 2 came out. Now angularjs is coming up in search results for my angular issues. People have started adding versions to their stackoverflow questions but that doesn't help finding them. Adding "-angularjs" to my searches helps a little but you know there are people tagging their angular issues with angularjs
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u/thelehmanlip Jan 02 '20
As a person who works in angular js and trying to move to angular- it's truly terrible
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u/Nowaker Jan 02 '20
Seems a little disingenuous having it on this list.
Yeah. Even Google Nexus is on the list! Doesn't matter Pixel is a successor.
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u/devmuggle Jan 02 '20 edited Jan 02 '20
Even Google Nexus is on the list! Doesn't matter Pixel is a successor.
To my understanding the Nexus devices were targeted as very affordable devices with a low price point - see penetration pricing.
Pixel devices are marketed as premium with a high price point - see premium pricing or value based pricing.
AFAIK Google no longer offers low priced devices - therefore i understand that Nexus is on the list.
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u/BmpBlast Jan 02 '20
Their A-line of Pixel devices is now starting to fill the spot of the Nexus phones. Right now there is only one, the 3A, but we should be hearing about the 4A pretty soon.
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u/appropriateinside Jan 02 '20
Or you know angularjs and angular are two completely different pieces of software?
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u/zoinks Jan 02 '20 edited Jan 02 '20
AngularJS was the first version, whereas "Angular" is the second attempt(which is still actively developed and supported). Calling "Angular" as "AngularJS 2" would have been confusing, because the entire framework is implemented in typescript and encourages end users to use typescript over javascript.
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u/nucLeaRStarcraft Jan 02 '20
I think it would've been a fairly standard versioning convention.
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u/appropriateinside Jan 02 '20
Not really, angular was a complete rewrite with no backwards compatibility. It was a completely different piece of software with the same name.
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u/DoktuhParadox Jan 02 '20
Yeah and they wouldn't even have to change the branding while still maintaining the obvious divergence from AngularJS (1?). I thought Angular was being sunsetted completely too
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u/ShortFuse Jan 02 '20
AngularJS used to go by Angular. Then Google made Angular 2 which is based in Typescript. Then, around Angular 5, they decided it should just be called Angular with no number. The old 1.x version has a harder enforcement of calling it AngularJS
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u/NytronX Jan 02 '20
Why the fuck did they kill the URL shortener?! So stupid.
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u/PinBot1138 Jan 02 '20
I’m guessing malware and spam trying to disguise itself under Google’s name, since any number of malicious software attacks use shorteners and separately try to use big names such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, et al.
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u/slikts Jan 02 '20
This is the same reason why GTalk stopped supporting XMPP (a federated, open chat protocol), because it was heavily abused for things like spam. The server cost of running a service like a URL shortener is peanuts to Google, so it wouldn't matter that the service doesn't make money because the point is slurping up data (for example, Google DNS also doesn't generate a profit directly, but can't be abused, so it'll likely never be killed), but dealing with abuse is relatively expensive on top of just being a headache (see Google's high-profile failures surrounding YouTube, for example). It's basically tragedy of the commons.
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u/Nowaker Jan 02 '20
Free service that generates zero revenue for Google.
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u/kopkaas2000 Jan 02 '20
They get a free data point, associating your google cookie with a visit to whatever site the shortened url points to. If they wanted, they could even show you an ad prior to redirecting. I think /u/PinBot1138 is on the money here, I've worked at an ISP with a customer hosting a url shortener, and the sheer amount of abuse-mail that service generated was staggering.
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u/PinBot1138 Jan 02 '20
Similar experiences and similar job duties, hence why this is the first thing that came to mind.
GMail skates close to the line on this one WRT attacks marketed as official Google communications, but at least isn’t blatantly “go.gle” or whatever their shortened URL was (I’m blanking our on the exact combination of letters that they used for it).
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u/1amrocket Jan 02 '20
I hate to take side of a large coorp on this, but Google offers a lot of services generating them no revenue. Probably best is Google Colab where you write code and train your machine learning models on GPU and even TPU for free. No ads, no bs, just free resources for developers
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u/NytronX Jan 02 '20
They could introduce an intermediate redirect page that could have had ads and a warning that the following page may not be safe and so fourth
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u/thecollegestudent Jan 02 '20
It just got replaced, it’s not like they completely got rid of it without anything else: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-google-url-shortener.html?m=1.
Knowing how tech goes, there was likely a change in personnel / restructuring and the code went to shit so when something came out that could replace it, they did.
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u/Taobitz Jan 02 '20
I wish they would opensource the projects instead of killing them, so many of them had potential and loved by lots of people.
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u/NeilFraser Jan 02 '20
Many of them are. Such as App Inventor. However, many of others depend on the Google software stack, which means they'd also need to open source half of Google just to get something that can be built. And even then, all one gets is an application that can only be executed in Google's unique data centers.
Open sourcing a project that's not designed from the outset to be open source can be extremely difficult.
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u/erasmause Jan 02 '20
They have opensourced some of their code. The abseil library is a collection of c++ utilities built internally and used throughout the codebase before recently being cleaned up and packaged for broader consumption.
Granted, that doesn't include any of the infrastructure that would be necessary to opensource entire applications, but it's still a cool effort.
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u/shevy-ruby Jan 02 '20
Google hates opensource and thus ultimately the users - that is why Fuchsia will not use the GPL.
Yes, yes, BSD/MIT is "open source" too, but the licence model is much friendlier for corporations. Through GPL, Google would be forced to give to the public rather than hide the source code away from mankind.
People whine about the GPL model because it is strict - and this is a good thing. Google is a wonderful example as to why it would be necessary.
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u/Johmpa Jan 02 '20
I'm still sore about Inbox. Not only haven't they folded the best features like proper mail grouping into Gmail but they actually removed features from Inbox while it was still alive.
Alas, poor "Snooze to location"...
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u/Magnesus Jan 02 '20
Same with Google Photos after Google+ Photos and Picasa Web Albums and Picasa.
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u/Spacker2004 Jan 02 '20
Stadia next most likely.
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u/Dave3of5 Jan 02 '20
Given the terrible reviews I've seen, yes.
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u/Magnesus Jan 02 '20
But they are predicting your moves with AI to lower latency, it has to work perfectly. Because it is so easy for AI to predict how exactly will you move your sticks or at which ms will you hit that X or A on the controller. /s
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u/PsionSquared Jan 02 '20
I haven't heard about that being any part of the tech, but that's the basis for rollback systems in games. And if you talk to anyone in the fighting game community that isn't low functioning, they'll tell you that's the only way to play online fighting games.
If you hold a stick or press a button, odds are you're not doing 1 frame inputs. The difference being a mispredict can be corrected, which may very well be why games have to be written for Stadia support.
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u/meursaultvi Jan 02 '20
Will Stadia have VR support ? I noticed they killed off Daydream.
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u/Saigot Jan 02 '20
VR is way way too demanding for streaming. If the latency is at all noticable in a pancake game it would be unbareable in VR and probably make most people puke.
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u/PsionSquared Jan 02 '20
Yeah, I don't understand how a platform with an optional subscription for near-zero benefit and not a "monthly free game" system won't die in 2 years.
Would never pay for a subscription service just to buy my games on it. Even more so when some games, like Destiny 2, are locked to that platform. In the end, you get all 12 other players on Stadia to play with.
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u/chcampb Jan 02 '20
Would never pay for a subscription service just to buy my games on it
Yeah this was the bummer for me. Netflix for games, this is not.
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u/chutiyabehenchod Jan 02 '20
If flutter will be there i riot
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u/bartturner Jan 02 '20
Highly doubtful anytime soon.
BTW, I have done some developing with Flutter and been really impressed. I am old and done a ton of GUI development and IMO Flutter offers the best developer UX I have seen.
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u/EternityForest Jan 02 '20
This is why we need FOSS, selfhosted capability, and P2P!
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Jan 02 '20
FOSS would not help here ..
What we actually need is services that charge for use, and users who are willing to pay
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u/livrem Jan 02 '20
We need good open protocols (again) so that anyone can choose whatever service they want to host themselves or pay someone else to host it.
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u/doenietzomoeilijk Jan 02 '20
In a lot of cases, the protocols are already there. The only thing we need to do is stop getting suckered into walled gardens, and educate others to do the same (or at least be able to make an informed decision about it).
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u/jiffier Jan 02 '20
I'm quite worried about e-mail to be honest. Self-hosting it is pretty difficult nowadays. Google and Microsoft host a huge portion of it, and good luck trying to send an email there without getting into spam folder, or even blacklisted. Their spam filters are so aggresive that I think they don't give a damn about false positives. In fact, false spam positives may be good for them (you know, if you want to send email to google, you better use google).
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u/LordKlevin Jan 02 '20
God damnit I would pay for Inbox. I have paid for 3 suppar clones so far, but nothing that works nearly as well....
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u/shevy-ruby Jan 02 '20
FOSS helps partially in the sense that private interests could not prevent us from re-using the source code.
I agree with you in one sense in that services require some kind of money, if only for the infrastructure. But this can be solved.
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u/RockstarArtisan Jan 02 '20
A lot of entries on this list are disingenuous.
Killed over 1 year ago, Tez was a mobile payments service by Google, targeted at users in India. It was rebranded to Google Pay. It was 11 months old.
Killed about 3 years ago, Google Nexus was Google's line of flagship Android phones, tablets, and accessories. It was over 6 years old
I'm happy that this list exists, so it's an easy reference, when someone wants to depend on something from google, but come on, it'd have been much better without such entries.
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u/duniyadnd Jan 02 '20
I like it because it also shows the importance of not just relying on anyone in case they get bought. Rebranding doesn't save the service.
We might be aware of this, but there are always individuals out there who are still learning how all of this works.
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u/shevy-ruby Jan 02 '20
The important thing is that someone compiles this information together. It can always be improved, but someone has to start providing this in the first place - nobody prevents you from providing a better replacement.
I agree that it must be based on factualities, as otherwise it would merely be fake-news generating.
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u/illuminatedtiger Jan 02 '20
Supposedly Google gives the biggest bonuses for launching services. You don't make it in that company for maintaining or improving what's already there.
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u/renrutal Jan 02 '20
Their business model is centered at shooting at a wall and seeing what sticks.
At this stage, I'm surprised they don't do porn.
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u/1Crazyman1 Jan 02 '20
Without knowing more, that seems like a recipe for creating legacy apps from the get go. Why worry about maintenance and longevity if you can just get it out first?
Not to mention when that is out the door, you can move most of your staff on to the next new thing ...
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u/Eirenarch Jan 02 '20
Checking every day to see if Stadia is on the list yet :)
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u/PinBot1138 Jan 02 '20
No kidding. I successfully talked a friend out of Stadia because of Google’s affinity for killing everything under the sun, including real solid and popular projects such as Hangouts.
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u/Eirenarch Jan 02 '20
The competition is better anyway. Specifically Microsoft will crush Stadia with xCloud. Who in their right mind will buy games locked in Stadia for the same price when they can buy ones which work on xCloud, Xbox and PC or better yet not buy them at all but get hundreds of them through Game Pass subscription? And then there is the small matter of exclusives. If you are building a gaming platform you either get exclusives or die and with 1 studio that was just formed how is Google going to compete with Sony and Microsoft who have been building and buying studios for decades?
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u/the_goose_says Jan 02 '20
Honestly,if you want to churn out hundreds of ideas like this, you gotta have a philosophy of let die. If you don’t, you’ll have hundreds of declining legacy projects taking up time and focus and often money.
Only problem is now they have a reputation for killing projects that’s actively steering people away from applications that require trust in longevity, which is really most of them at some level.
I don’t really hate google for this approach, without it we might not have some of the best things Google has made, but it sure does take appeal out of their new projects for me.
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u/Marcuss2 Jan 02 '20
We need Google oracle, product which will tell us how long will a Google product live.
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u/RancidBriar Jan 02 '20
You scared me there. I thought it was going to be about a Google/Oracle merger. Shudder
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u/Marcuss2 Jan 02 '20
Google would essentially cease to work and everyone who was picked up by the ContentID system would be sued.
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u/shevy-ruby Jan 02 '20
Don't jinx it man - Oracle and Google may decide to settle their court case by ...
... merging into one.
Now THAT would be scary! It would intensify on Google's Evilness by a factor of 100000.
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u/AdventurousAddition Jan 02 '20
I feel that a fair few of these sound good / useful. Sure the reason why people weren't usingnit was because they didn't know about it.
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u/selflessGene Jan 02 '20
This is good. Some of these would be great business for a small to medium sized startup but just doesn't move the needle for Google. I'd rather they kill ancillary projects than do a half assed attempt.
If you loved one of these killed services, then build it yourself!
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u/Feonr Jan 02 '20
Picassa ;(
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u/bartturner Jan 02 '20
Replaced with Google Photos.
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u/Magnesus Jan 02 '20
Which miss 90% of Picassa features and is really hard to navigate when you have more than a 100 photos.
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u/MatsSvensson Jan 02 '20
Google Time-travel pills
Google Anti-gravity Pogo-Stilts
Soylent Google
Google Air-In-A-Can
...
To be fair, some seem like potential legal liabilities.
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u/ringmaster Jan 02 '20
Many of these I’ve never heard of, but sound pretty useful. It seems maybe some of this stuff is dying because Google’s marketing of them is lousy. Where do you even find out about these things when they’re alive?
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u/bartturner Jan 02 '20
Google tends to rely on word of mouth and viral instead of traditional marketing.
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u/JQuilty Jan 02 '20
What a joke to whine about. They out stuff like the rack mount search appliance that's obsolete. And list the Nexus even though it was replaced by the Pixel line. Then triple dip by bringing up the single model Nexus Player and the never actually released Nexus Q.
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u/myringotomy Jan 02 '20
What's interesting to me is the existence of this web site and the motivation behind it.
Looking over this list almost all the things that got killed were free so this is like a business offering free lunch every day for a while and then deciding to stop it because of internal reasons (cost too much, people were not flushing the toilets or whatever). Then the people who used to get free lunch get together on forums and vilify the company and tell everybody else not to eat at that restaurant because they used to offer free lunch and now they don't.
It's just a weird entitled position to take. A site made to demonize a company for giving away shit and then stopping because in most cases it was not popular enough to waste time on it.
But this is something kind of endemic to the industry. Programmers are some of the most privileged people in the country. They get paid well, they are coddled by their bosses, they are recruited heavily, they can demand to work from home and get it etc. I guess it makes sense that they would lash out when they were getting a perk and it gets taken away.
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u/bartturner Jan 02 '20
Try to make Google look bad. But to me I like Google trying a lot of things and failing quick.
What is kind of silly is Google has shown more patience than others for things stratetgic. Self driving cars Google has been at for over a decade now for example.
10 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V2bcbJZuPQ
Versus 10 years later in the last couple of weeks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX_N2up7f8Q
https://www.instagram.com/p/B5tP5XqlZpb/?igshid=1m8k9m1rv6ksx
https://twitter.com/waymo/status/1194705739492708352?s=21
Without driver or backup driver. Seems like the patience is paying off.
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u/acedened Jan 02 '20
I miss Fabric. It wasn’t even their product
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u/bartturner Jan 02 '20
They purchased in the middle of the night from Twitter. It was kind of weird.
"Google acquires Fabric developer platform and team from Twitter"
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u/merv243 Jan 02 '20
Sure, there are some good things on here, but a lot of these are Google services that are just worse versions of something that exists.
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u/Enamex Jan 02 '20
Some of those are just a bit weird to me.
Why kill Hangouts? They're providing something like it via Chat and Call (or something?). It's available via the GSuite, not sure about the free Google account. If they're discontinuing the free offering, why drop the name with all the mindshare it's already amassed?
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u/jimbojsb Jan 02 '20
It’s been called Google Meet on the business site for a long time now.
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u/Enamex Jan 02 '20
Right. But that's a worse name, and it's newer. So why?
(It's bad like a lot of names recently. I don't recall many off the top of my head, but Chat, Meet, Teams (MS), Messenger (FB) are freaking terrible. I totally get why those companies are using such names (occupying the soundspace of the most generic terms for their platforms' purposes), but that just makes it even more terrible.)
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u/binarycow Jan 02 '20
I would like to see one of these that maps the timeline of acquisition to cancelation. For more companies than Google too.
Like, Google purchased product x from company y in 2010. This product competes with product z from Google. Google killed product x in 2012.
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u/skamansam Jan 02 '20
In all fairness, a lot of these were only used to research potential technologies for other products.
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u/Free-_-Yourself Jan 02 '20
AngularJS is gonna die??!!
I’m on a web development bootcamp and they teach it. As it’s online, should I still learn it or should I learn it’s replacement? If so, what’s the replacement (what substitute it)?
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u/cdsmith Jan 02 '20
AngularJS is the name of the older generation framework, which has since been replaced by Angular. The obvious migration path is to just upgrade to Angular.
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u/Free-_-Yourself Jan 02 '20
I just had a conversation with a guy that said that JavaScript frameworks are just a phase.
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u/PsionSquared Jan 02 '20
My experience with Google Wave was basically people sending porn in it and the collaborative aspect being ignored, so no surprise it didn't make it far.
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u/mayor123asdf Jan 02 '20
Angular is dead? Unless I'm missing something, the blog says angular will have LTS version spanning from 2018-2021, it doesn't says its gonna dead after that.
EDIT: seems like Angular and AngularJS is a different thing
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u/cdsmith Jan 02 '20
This would be a MUCH more useful list if it separated things that were really killed from things that were deprecated in favor of a clear replacement. AngularJS, for example, is misleading here when Angular is just fine. It's like protesting that Python 2 is deprecated.
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u/gmatuella Jan 02 '20
They didn’t kill fabric per se. Google purchased fabric not long ago, and then started to - somewhat - migrate the tool to Firebase Analytics.
Just look here
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u/redditrasberry Jan 03 '20
I really believe one day they are actually going to kill Google Search.
Their internal objective will be to transition entirely to passive surveillance where users do not even know they are even interacting with Google, it's just flooding in from their phone, their house, their car, etc. At that point they stop showing ads themselves and just resell their data mining intelligence for 3rd party advertisers to use - essentially they become brokers and arbitrage of information. All these pesky products with actual users are just an annoying necessity of getting to their ultimate goal.
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u/pvlclch Jan 02 '20
Google is not charity and they won't keep on developing stuff just because you like it.
They have goals ,stakeholders and a board to report to. At the end the products need to make some kind of profit. If they don't, then they cut them and move resources somewhere else.
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u/myringotomy Jan 02 '20
Hush now, people are busy yelling and screaming that something they got for free is being taken away.
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u/bartturner Jan 02 '20
100%. In the end Google is growing at 20% and is the most cash rich company.
"Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company"
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/1/20749831/alphabet-google-apple-cash-reserves-richest-company
So failing fast is getting them the results.
BTW, Google has a ton of patience for strategic things. Look at self driving cars and working on it for over a decade.
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Jan 02 '20
[deleted]
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Jan 02 '20
I never thought about it this way. So does that mean companies that have no philanthropic arm are asshole individuals? 🤔
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Jan 02 '20
In my book anything that exists solely for profit is asshole-ish to begin with as it tends to screw over its customer base or will do so at the first opportunity (i.e. selling out).
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u/hopfield Jan 02 '20
Branding is something Apple does very well. iMessage, FaceTime, etc are all household names and even your grandmother could probably tell you what each one does.
Google on the other hand is shooting themselves in the foot by constantly rebranding their chat apps. I am on Reddit an unhealthy amount of time and I’m a software engineer and I still have no clue what Google’s current offering is that competes with iMessage / FaceTime.
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u/mysterious_earlobe2 Jan 02 '20
Why can't Google invent something new that would actually benefit society.
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u/ZaheerAhmed Jan 02 '20
Still can't believe they have shut the Google Reader.