Google is the new IBM
Years of being one-upped on AI and cracking down on innovation turned the poster child for Silicon Valley cool into a dinosaur.
Google is the new IBM::Years of being one-upped on AI and cracking down on innovation turned the poster child for Silicon Valley cool into a dinosaur.
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I blame Sundar... Wayyy too many duplicated projects (e.g. Allo) and projects terminated too early (e.g., Stadia) under him.
Stadia's shutdown reallly pissed me off. The problem it had was the monitisation, not the actual thing it did. Stadia worked in places with crappy wifi, like the 2.4ghz only I had at my Mam's house, when GeForce Now, XBox Cloud and Amazon's Luna, all shit the bed. Really well optimised, it also worked at higher quality than everything else when you actually had a good connection.
If they'd actually built out the infrastructure properly, had all the features, like being able to play a game via youtube after watching a video on it, and the quasi split screen thing, it would've done a lot better. It also needed a bit of time, which Google seems hesitant to actually give any of it's projects.
The main reason stadia failed is because they have cancelled so many projects before stadia that people were taking bets on when stadia would close before it even started.
No one wanted to buy into a service that was going to shut down and they created a self fulfilling prophecy.
Essentially all new Google projects wikl forever be doomed to this fate.
It failed because they didn't give it enough time to succeed. Google had enough money to invest in Stadia at a loss for many years until it eventually succeeds, but instead they just confirmed their image of randomly cancelling products.
All true. The monetization wasn't even that bad, it was more so the marketing. Lots of people didn't know about Stadia or were against it because of the bad launch they had.
I think the service would've done far better had Google made some guarantees like "all your purchases will be refunded if we shutdown in the next 10 years" and then ran a new ad campaign for it.
I ended up getting a Stadia Premiere Edition (Controller and a Chromecast Ultra) for £20 down from £70 and tried it for essentially free (Stadia Pro 12 months free).
The got £20 refunded when they wound down - announced 3/4 of the way through my Stadia trial.
So all free and got a long cabled USB-C charger, a newer Chromecast than my old one, which ended up on the 2nd TV, and a controller I can repurpose.
Wild.
I got a Chromecast on sale for like $15 last year when I read that they could be rooted.
This was not he case. I have get to use it.
Stadia was neither open enough to excite nerds and build a tech community nor polished or straightforward enough to go straight to pure consumers (notpowersuserss).
That's my take at least
I read some days ago that google fosters a sort of innovation culture, that encourages their developers to create new stuff instead of putting effort into existing things. Which is also why so many of their products seem to be just rebrands of older ideas they had.
Google was like that before Sundar.
