I understand why Google would shut down an expensive gambit like Stadia, but cheap good-will projects like RSS and Podcasts? Why not just keep them running for PR alone? How expensive could they possibly be to run?
I doubt it has anything to do with the direct cost of maintenance. Google has a tendency to introduce multiple products that serve similar markets, as the article cited with Podcasts and YouTube Music. They have to cut the cruft eventually. Given the numbers cited in the article (23% listen to podcasts through YouTube Music, 4% through Podcasts), YouTube Music made more sense from the business perspective. I would imagine that is especially true when you consider that they can promote more products through YouTube Music.
That said, I somehow doubt that many people are going to transition from Podcasts to YouTube Music. There are too many alternatives out there, alternatives that would likely reflect the interests of Podcasts users better. Heck, nearly three quarters of podcast consumers are already using those products.
> I doubt it has anything to do with the direct cost of maintenance. Google has a tendency to introduce multiple products that serve similar markets, as the article cited with Podcasts and YouTube Music.
Besides both using audio files, Podcasts and Music are totally different markets, with different use cases, etc. Are spreadsheets and games in similar markets, because they both use graphics on video screens?
Jamming them together because of some superficial similarity is a stupid simplification, even if many users already do things sub-optimally.
Google really needs to get some cheap offshore teams that can do maintenance on the products they'd otherwise kill. They'd stop burning so much goodwill that way.
> Are spreadsheets and games in similar markets, because they both use graphics on video screens?
Slightly more realistic examples would be "spreadsheets and databases" or "spreadsheets and word processors". Plenty of people use a spreadsheet when data is represented in a tabular format, even when it isn't the most appropriate tool. (Tangentially, I've also heard of 4x games referred to as spreadsheet games. Though that's more of a description of play style than presentation!)
Don't get me wrong. I agree that podcasts shouldn't be jammed in with music. At least for myself. Yet when Google's numbers are saying that about a quarter of people access podcasts through YouTube, there are clearly a lot of people who do not agree!
They made the same calculation with Google Play Music and "merged" it into Youtube Music. Not to worry, they migrated all my music over! Except most of the Youtube "Music" was people's personal uploads of dubious quality. I ended up moving to Spotify instead.
Each engineer gets paid something around 200k-500k all in depending on seniority. I doubt just 1 team worked on this product given the bureaucracy of big tech companies like google. So why shell out millions of dollars in salary per year when the product isn’t making money?
Even worse. What engineer goes to Google and wants to be stuck on a maintenance project? No advancement potential. At best usable to claim you were a googler.
Google is basically split into "build things that make users happy" teams and "build things that make Google money" teams, so I think that on an individual product level you may be correct, but in aggregate at the high level Google believes there is a ton of value in revenue-less products.
Now for Podcasts (or any given product) there's always going to be some calculus of "is it enough value to justify the cost", and clearly Google believes the answer here is no.
Really depends on "how many people". Also if its roughly the same group of people they're making angry over and over, and they don't see an impact to the bottom line, then I'd say the answer is "pretty small", at least relative to Google's size (at which its all about volume)
Maybe part of the problem is paying people 200-500K for this kind of job? Is it written in stone at all products require that kind of "skill" to function?
The problem is not that. The problem is that managers will insist that businesses are in danger if they face any competition.
Of course, the only thing that's really in danger is the careers (and egos) of those managers. Internal competition would be an extremely good source of information on the performance of the business those managers manage.
"I can't count that low" is less of a joke than it sounds. Google's approach to developing software and products is great for ensuring that everything they make can scale up, but is terrible for scaling down and minimizing the maintenance work required for a small service.
Mature products don't have enough scope for Google engineers to get good performance reviews.
Maybe you could spin up a lower tier of engineers who aren't on the same career track and exist only to maintain mature/deprecated products, but that could come with its own set of problems.
My understanding is that the codebase was partially shared with Google+, which was a corporate priority. But having to check changes against both reduced velocity so the easiest thing was to just kill Google Reader which didn't have much love in Google' C-suite.
