Incidentally, this is why I don't use any Google products other than search. It's never clear to me which ones are real products that are trying to win and make money, and which ones are just fun side projects that a multibillion dollar corporation is doing out of the goodness of their hearts, but could get shut down at any time.
Every project by Google I was willing to jump platforms for, they killed. So outside of email, maps, and search, sometimes voice, they have nothing left that is worth investing time into. It will disappear within a couple years or less.
Voice? Could easily fold and be sold to Sprint. I’m honestly surprised (and thankful) it’s been working for 15+ years. Completely out of Google character. I hope they forgot about it running on a server under someone’s desk in the basement just below a red stapler.
In all seriousness, though: if I were a user of Google Voice, I'd be seriously concerned that they would shut it down in a way that caused me to lose access to my phone number (even if only indirectly, as happened recently with their divesture of Google Domains or whatever their registrar was called)... you are much braver than I ;P.
Presumably because it's still providing value. It was originally about mass collecting voice data so they could train their speech-to-text capabilities with various dialects.
Dialects are always in flux and there are plenty of languages out there they haven't conquered, so ... I'd guess they're just leaving it running to detect new speech or languages or dialets or ... personal data gathering or... ?
Google Voice was also supposed to revolutionize how many parts of cell phone service were to be provided -- signing in to an account instead of SIM cards, multiple phone numbers on one device, visual voicemail, advanced calling features. Android was supposed to be the vehicle of delivery.
In fact, Google Voice on Android was supposed to make calls via data-only (no minutes usage) on a smartphone, but carriers would not allow Google to do that. Hence the strange random-number dialing which utilizes a 3 way call to make a 2 way call by default. Years later, they quietly allowed calls over data but by then GV was already on lifesupport.
The audio quality of Youtube videos is not representative of the audio quality of someone speaking into their phone.
The speech patterns also differ heavily, with Youtubers (usually) talking in a presentative manner and speaking very clearly.
I think the way people talk in private phone calls, as well as the call audio quality, are much more similar to that of someone speaking to an assistant.
I used it since a few years before Google bought GrandCentral in '07. A couple of years ago I moved to voip.ms as part of my de-googling and am happy with it. There are oodles of such providers.
I didn't look for a free option after leaving Google Voice. I'm happy to pay the low cost to be the customer instead of the product. Same with gmail to fastmail.
I've been burned by Google too many times, but I'm definitely thankful for them continuing to maintain Voice, and even actively improving it over the last few years. I've been using it as my primary phone number since the GrandCentral days, so it'd be a pretty big pain to have the rug pulled out from under me at this point.
It would also be pretty shortsighted from a business perspective, IMO. Voice could still be extended to compete with iMessage and WhatsApp, like they sort of tried to do back when they were going to merge it with Hangouts.
I think there is/are some executives at Google/Alphabet that utilize GV so much that they couldn't kill it if they wanted to. I used to have a voip device that worked with my GV number, and Google extended the life of the API used several years, I since stopped using that device and the service had still been working for it.
I do miss when GV and SMS were integrated with Hangouts though... was imo a much better experience than you get today with all the broken out apps.
The only reason that merger was even allowed to happen was because it was extremely clear that Sprint would not have been a going concern into the next year if it would stay independent.
And as a result, T-Mobile has gotten worse, because now they don't have to try as hard to compete with AT&T and Verizon.
I feel like Sprint failing may have been better for the market; I expect more Sprint customers would have switched to AT&T or Verizon than to T-Mobile, and T-Mobile would still have to fight for customers.
Instead, T-Mo has jacked up prices just like everyone else, reduced nice perks, and their "uncarrier" movement is but a memory.
Fiber is also still running, somehow. I don’t think they’re expanding much if at all but I’m shocked it hasn’t been sold off.
Frankly, I’m just as shocked they didn’t go full throttle with it either, because talk about a data selling gold mine with all that traffic
While I’m on that subject, it could have been a real opportunity for them to push fiber + YouTube TV as a package. Google isn’t good at making original content but at some point they have made a software + services play that makes such a package more palatable and user friendly, imagine subscribing to a YouTube channel and it becomes a channel as part of the TV app for instance. A lot of people watch channels like this as it is.
That’s absolutely amazing. Besides hosting at home, do you feel any difference vs say a 1gbps line? Surely most servers won’t saturate this when downloading or browsing?
I don't feel any difference over our previous 1G service, other than it never lags, even if multiple kids are streaming video and I have a backup running. The biggest difference is that it's half the price of the 1G service that ran over AT&T's fiber.
> fun side projects that a multibillion dollar corporation is doing out of the goodness of their hearts
Back then it felt like it was actually just possible that they just were that cool. Noughties Google was really something compared to the staid, implacable incumbents. 15GB (with a G!) of email storage that would grow forever! Google Earth! YouTube! Live long enough to see yourself become the villain indeed.
Google's leadership made their intentions clear with the purchase of the much reviled DoubleClick in 2007. They didn't become villains; it was always all about the money, just like everyone else.
I think at least at first it was genuinely not villainous. The highly technical founders, I think, did mean it with "Don't Be Evil". PageRank wasn't designed from the start to be a universal panopticon. After all, the global crash hadn't happened, rates weren't zero yet, no one had smartphones, social media wasn't a word, mobile meant J2EE and Symbian, and the now-familiar all-pervasive Silicon Valley financialisation MBA cancer was yet to come. That said, the realisation that "all the data" wasn't just about search index data and book scans did clearly hit for them (or, if that was the plan since 1998, surface) by the mid 00s.
DoubleClick was the year after Google Code. They had a good few years of being considered cool and, well, Not Evil. Google Earth was 2001, Gmail, Scholar and Books was 2004, Reader and Gtalk (RIP x 2) 2005, Patents in 2006 and dropping 1.65 billion plus (which sounds trivial now that everyone and their mum's are worth billions for whatever dog-walking app, but not then) on YouTube that year, even though it was only a year old. Mad times, you could barely sign up for a beta before another one landed. The search engine itself was of course revolutionary and peerless. And you could use it on your WAP phone until something called the "iPhone" happened.
For those of us who were young and, yes, naive, and who weren't paying attention in the first dot com crash in those newspapers adults read while we played (8 year olds in the 90s rarely using IRC to get the lowdown on Silicon Valley), it seemed like it was possibly a new age. "Going public" in 2004 wasn't yet another obvious "oh here we go again" moments, because they were among the first in the generation, with the pervious generation mostly fizzling before pervasive internet access (Amazon made it, but it was a slower burn).
Chrome and Android was 2008, and I remember first hearing around then the phrase "Google Mothership". Though I never stopped using Firefox (and Opera, I don't remember when I switched to Firefox), Chrome was undeniably a technical coup at the time. Being cool and shiny and actually good at being a browser, while kicking that evil Microsoft in the teeth helped too. It took time to burn though that goodwill. Even today, very many otherwise FOSSy people won't move from Chrome.
If done inside a conglomerate, it can be the best of both worlds. Access to Google tech and funding, but free from rigid corporate hierarchies, at least at the beginning.
You have to look at what teams at Google are using Flutter. Any dev tool Google officially releases tends to be funded by some product that actually likes/uses it.
There are a lot of teams using it, which is why it's still getting so much support. If you see Google apps moving away from it, then it's time to start looking for an alternative.
It's also why AngularDart still exists and is getting updated. There are large projects that use it, so they will keep supporting it.
The fact Pay and Ads both use, along with Youtube Create even, is a pretty good sign because if they have a non-trivial codebase of flutter/dart app(s) then killing it would impact all those teams who are doing important work. I've debated trying flutter/dart a few times and this makes me feel more willing to try it.
Ads is the reason Dart is still around, they saved the team after the project folded, after migrating from GWT to AngularDart, they weren't into doing yet another rewrite.
> Ads is the reason Dart is still around, they saved the team after the project folded,
Wasn't it Analytics which had Dart? But I do remember something about Ads saving it.
> they weren't into doing yet another rewrite.
It all depends on politics within the company. For example: youtube was hastily rewritten using alpha/beta versions of Polymer targeting Custom Elements v0. The moment they did that v0 was deprecated.
So within next 4 years they rewrote Youtube again with Polymer version targeting Custom Elements v1. The moment they did that, Polymer was deprecated and replaced with lit.
Even though they haven't rewritten Youtube, they've now spent time integrating Wiz, an internal Google framework (that also got merged with Angular).
The costs of rewrites don't matter at Google as much as promotions.
I assumed Flutter is open source; if they fix kill it off, is there a reason to not to expect the community to fork and maintain it? Presumably they'd have to rebrand it without Google giving permission for the name, but that alone doesn't seem like enough to stop it from existing in some form.
The base ROI of Flutter to Google isn't all that clear because it's relatively complex to maintain. Worse, it requires maintaining Dart, which appears to be a dead-end language in terms of adoption.
If Flutter and Dart were donated to the community, they would most likely slowly die because no one outside of Google gets enough benefit from them to justify maintaining an entire programming language.
It's worse. Flutter actually works against google's own interests. Webpages that render text in a canvas are not as easily indexable as webpages that emit html. It's funny too because the same is true for sites made with flutter. They aren't SEO friendly
You could suggest using AI to OCR the canvas but even that would be subpar because most sites that use HTML provide multiple screens worth of info but sites that render to a canvas render only what's visible. The rest of the data is internal. You'd not only need the AI to successfully OCR the text, you'd need it to interact with the page get it to render what's not currently displayed.
Accessibility interfaces are ideal for this situation, allowing an LLM to interact with a GUI strictly through text. Unfortunately, they're often an afterthought in implementations.
> is there a reason to not to expect the community to fork and maintain it?
I think you should ask the opposite question instead, and this goes for any project that is corporate "owned"/sponsored like Flutter: why should we expect the community to maintain it if the company abandons it?
Are there any non-Googlers with commit access to the project? Do non-Googlers comprise a decent percentage of contributions? If not, the bar goes up quite a bit for a fork, or for a "peaceful handoff" of the existing project.
Google Maps isn't going anywhere. I'd even argue that it's more important than search; it's far more difficult to switch to a competitor.
GMail isn't going anywhere either.
YouTube is a bit less clear: it doesn't really have any competitors, and is extremely popular and widespread, but it surely costs a fortune to keep running.
It'd be interesting to see the financials on these different business units to see which are the healthiest and which aren't.
How is it difficult to switch to a maps competitor? Really depends on how much you use it, but most of my use involved looking up a location, then getting directions to it. There's no cost to switching, expect perhaps setting up my commonly used addresses, which are basically in my contacts anyway. I'm sure that there are cases that are harder to switch, but I'd guess that they don't apply to the majority of people.
Gmail, on the other hand, like any email service, is much harder to switch. Until we get mandated email address portability, like was done with phone numbers some years back.
>How is it difficult to switch to a maps competitor?
>but most of my use involved looking up a location
Right, and that's where most of Google Maps' value is: it's really a business directory combined with a navigation system. I'm not going to look up an address for some place, I want to just search for "<business name> near me" and find all the nearby locations and pick one and go there. Even better, Google Maps has reviews built-in so you can see if people hate a certain place.
>but I'd guess that they don't apply to the majority of people.
If you think the majority of people keep business names and addresses in a contacts list, you're really out of touch.
Also, GMaps has features competing systems usually don't, depending on locality. Here in Tokyo, it's tied into the public transportation system so it'll tell you which train lines to ride, which platform to use, which car to ride in, which station exit to use, when a train is delayed, etc. It'll even tell you exactly how much each option costs, since different train lines have different costs. Then, inside many buildings, it'll show you level-by-level what business is on what floor.
> If you think the majority of people keep business names and addresses in a contacts list, you're really out of touch.
This is not at all what they were saying, and I'm not sure where you got that. What they're saying is that Google doesn't have a monopoly on business location data, so searching for a business on a competitor (especially a large one like Apple, but mostly even OSM) does just work.
I am aware of plenty public transports in European countries that you better print out those PDFs, from their website, assuming they have them in first place.
Those are all great features, but they are not features which lock you into the platform. If bing or Apple maps had the same utility I could switch to them at the drop of a hat.
It is the only map application that allow you to check public transport (bus/metro/tram) with changes other than (if it exists) a local app for the city.
As far as I know, there is no other map application that does that.
Exactly. Here in Tokyo, there is a local app that's tied into public transit just like GMaps, but all it does is tell you how to get from Station X to Station Y. If that's all you want to know, it works quite well. But most people want to know more than that: where is Business A, and what's the fastest/cheapest way to get there from my current location? Which station exit should I use? And oh yeah, how are the reviews on it? And can I see the menu, and place a reservation too?
> YouTube is a bit less clear: it doesn't really have any competitors, and is extremely popular and widespread, but it surely costs a fortune to keep running.
There was a brief moment when it looked like Twitch would kill YouTube; then, much like Instagram responding to SnapChat, they took the best parts of it and added them to itself. I'd be amazed if YouTube wasn't profitable now with the combination of more ads, more subscription/superchat options and the pandemic-era boom in streaming.
Business strategy is more than just launch product, make money. Companies operate in a dynamic space, and if you play any game (basketball, chess ..) you know that moving forward at all cost is not how you play the game. Sometimes you side-step, sometimes you take a step back, sometimes you sacrifice your piece.
If you expect you team to just go-go-go, you might something in the short term but you'll fail miserably in long-term.
That is totally fine, but Google is a case where they go into new business units and fairly often kill those units quite soon.
It's not like they're doing cereals and now they're doing other cereals, so you can fall back to their previous cereals. You always have to find a new supplier, or then just start buying bread.
Yeah, there are so many examples. It's one of the reasons I was unwilling to jump on board Google Stadia... I kept thinking "let's wait and see how it does". Particularly since you had to buy non-transferable game licenses.
And, of course, they shut it down. At this point, Google is going to have to be in a space for at least 5 years and clearly be highly successful before I would even think about using them.
And I worked at AWS Professional Services and sat in on sales calls all of time where one of our talking points was “a company couldn’t trust Google to not to abandon a service they were going to be dependent on”.
Was that partially FUD? Probably. But there were plenty of services sales could point to.
Eh, when it happened the world was ready. It felt like a different internet back then, and it was pretty great for a company to say that everyone was already on github anyways, so let's all go there (Microsoft followed almost the exact same timeline with Codeplex, and really who cares).
More Google style would be shortly after shutting down Google Code starting up a new code hosting project, migrating several times to always slightly incompatible frontends requiring developer changes, shutting down the project, and shortly afterwards starting up a new code hosting project...
I agree with a lot of the other options, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention one that isn't always obvious.
With all the Big Corp asterisks, Microsoft Business Basic can be a pretty great deal at 6 USD/month. Solid reliability, aliases, (too many) config options, 1TB of OneDrive storage, cloud MS apps, etc.
Apple hosts custom domains at no extra charge if you have iCloud+. I've used it for a couple years now to host my family's domain and a couple of hobby ones for myself.
I would probably still be on Apple mail and use its generated email aliases except it went through a stage of not dealing with various back bounce spam so I switched to fastmail and have had no issues.
If you need something cheap and are willing to deal with a tiny company, have a look at <https://purelymail.com>. I've been happy with them for two years, never had any problems with delivery, and they support infinite domains/aliases, and custom Sieve rules. But do not use it if you need 99.999999% SLAs or anything like that, because again -- it's a one-man show.
I've used Fast Mail, liked it a lot, but I think at the time the pricing wasn't the best.
I then used some other platform that was quite "old school" that is recommended here. The Mail Admin was very opinionated which lead to some mail being blocked. That wasn't cool.
I'm now with Migadu on the cheapest plan and it's been fine. Had a few outages here and there, but otherwise solid.
mentioning the sunset of a google products, in general, in any thread about some specific google product, is a kind of godwin's law.
because of ordering by vote, we can't see how quickly it happened in this case. in godwin's law the likelihood increases by length of discussion, implying a slow/linear kind of probability, but for google product sunset i would argue that the likelihood ramps up very aggressively from the start.
i hereby dub this `jiveturkey's law`.
like godwin's law, the subthread becomes a distraction. unlike godwin's law, the sunset distraction is always a legitimate point. it's just that it has become tired.
