For real though. Why the f*** does google do this?
My understanding is that you didn't see your career advance in Google if you maintained an existing product, only if you launched new ones. So, there is an internal bias in development teams to create new products while not keeping them around.
In some cases, this would encourage Google developers to relaunch products rather than improve existing products.
All those closings and new launches also helps with reducing that pesky user base, get burnt a few times by Google and Microsoft looks much better.
Google is not an endpoint if you wanna be a money-laden tech bro. To get real cash you gotta create a startup and grift some money out of VCs. To do that, it helps if you "innovated something totally new" at someplace with name recognition like Google.
Everything except search and ads are simply practice grifts before the real grift. You cannot rely on any Google product to last for any length of time, even properties Google purchases will lose reliability as they fall into disrepair and neglect, see Nest.
I used to love Google everything, I was on the wave beta. I was one of the first with a cr-48. It is sad for those of us that want to contribute to something big, cool, and impactful, watch for fuschia to implode next, I think it already started when they "had" to layoff "over hires."
One or two person teams don't put a man on the moon. It takes a lot of really smart people working on very small specific things together to make world changing stuff happen, the culture of Big Tech is not conducive to "real" work anymore. It's big grifts run by little grifters.
I met someone at a party who works at Google. She told me that too many decisions are made by engineers instead of like a higher up product person.
That's not contradicting what you said. Others have also said there's a lot more rewards for making something "new" rather than maintaining something.
It's a failure of Google management
Microsoft does too. Every time I log in to Azure (or Intune, or Defender, or Microsoft 365 or whatever they're all called these days) for work something has changed names. The documentation usually isn't updated to reflect the changes.
Microsoft has been trying to be more proactive about this: they changed all their documentation to say Entra ID instead of Azure Active Directory...before actually changing Azure AD to be called Entra ID...
They do, but I think Google is worse about it because it’s all random back and forth. Most of Microsoft’s recent changes have been renaming Office something or Azure something to Microsoft something. Often the product name itself hasn’t changed, or when it does it’s usually grouping a bunch of products with separate names under one product line with related functionality (Defender didn’t rename, but it also absorbed a lot, Purview and Entra were new absorbed a lot of other product names). Teams was Lync and then Skype for Businesses, but I actually think the simplifying and getting away from the Skype branding was a good move.
Microsoft also seems to have a more thought out process for new products in the first place and doesn’t have the reputation for abandoning things all the time.
What a time to be alive.
Seems like they've "over hired" in marketing.
As a Google Workspace user, I recommend going off the grid somewhere streetview can't find you...
Why does Google charge more to enterprise users and why do they bother to pay for that?
Enterprises usually need/want additional features, customizations or guarantees, like for example:
- integration of a Single Sign-On system
- on-premise hosting
- Service-Level Agreement for the availability of the service
A good place to leave this:
Enterprise can afford more than individuals and all businesses always find a way to make enterprise customers pay more.
For example when you buy a plane ticket, it's much cheaper if you have a weekend between your onward and outward trip. Because business travelers will travel during the week.
this is incredible common. in software offerings, an enterprise account per user can be twice or more the price of an “individual one”. eg. an individual intelliJ license is 200€ for the first year and 600€ for the enterprise one
