Comment by frossie
16 years ago
You know what the complement of Kill Early/Often is? It's me never letting my shop use a new Google product ever again.
People invest time in adopting these technologies. Sure, with a little startup you take into account the fact that they might not be able to survive, but with Google you think hey, okay, let's use this thing. And you start developing your process around it. And then you get burned when it gets dropped with "Oh well we lost interest, okay we love you, bye bye!".
So today, my guys would have been better off sticking with their lousy wiki that having switched to Wave (despite the fact that they liked it and felt it increased their productivity - personally, I never warmed up to it).
Fool me once...
Yep, same here. I gave a friggen' talk about Wave at a TechCrunch event. I used it. I wrote an article about it. Inc.com wrote a "personal viewpoint" column where they presented me as a Wave supporter.
Google just lost all credibility with me as an early adopter. From now on, I'll wait 2 years before I start supporting a new Google product, since they apparently have no staying power.
Imagine how these guys feel:
http://completewaveguide.com/
Too bad they'll never let something last 2-years.
The risk of that happening was obvious to me and probably others as well. Heck, whenever you have a dependency on some external service there's a risk that service or provider could go away. Provide the service yourself, or scratch that itch another way, and you'll be immune to that risk. They didn't force you to use Wave, and in fact they were nice enough to let you use it for free, so I don't see what grounds you have to complain about it going away.
they were nice enough to let you use it for free
They didn't give me the option to pay for it to keep it though, did they.
It's not the case that google (or any other tech company out there) gains nothing by "letting people use things for free". They gain the possibility of creating/cornering a niche, they get a bunch of advocates that help them spread their brand (see swombat's comment), they get an army of unpaid beta-testers, they can sell market dominance to their advertisers, etc etc.
But, if they keep releasing and dropping products, they will lose those things. That is their call, and they are free to make it - I just wanted to point out one consequence.
The plus side for the HN populace is that people like me are more than happy to pay a specialist shop for the chance that it will stick around and develop its product. This is why my photos are on smugmug and not picassa, why my notes are in evernote and not google notebook (another release-and-drop product), why my to-do list is in toodledo and not google tasks, etc etc.
Frankly if Google went poof tomorrow, the only thing I would really cry over would be google reader. I am actually very sad it has come to this.