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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

358 points ofalkaed | 1 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
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bxparks ◴[11 Oct 25 23:45 UTC] No.45553791[source]▶
A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4.

Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos.

Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now.

Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google.

Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.

Google Finance: Tracked my stocks and funds there. Then they killed it. Won't trust them with my data again.

Google NFC Wallet: They killed it. Then Apple launched the same thing, and took over.

Google Chromecast Audio: It did one thing, which is all I needed. Sold mine as soon as they announced they were killing it.

Google Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not know that until I started writing this..

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brandonb927 ◴[12 Oct 25 00:50 UTC] No.45554121[source]▶
Google Reader: I will forever be salty about how Google killed something that likely required very little maintenance in the long run. It could have stayed exactly the same for a decade and I wouldn't have cared because I use an RSS reader exactly the same way I do that I did back in 2015.
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nine_k ◴[12 Oct 25 05:01 UTC] No.45555378[source]▶
Yes. That was the single worst business decision in Google history, as somebody correctly noted. It burned an enormous amount of goodwill for no gain whatsoever.

Killing Google Reader affected a relatively small number of users, but these users disporportionately happened to be founders, CTOs, VPs of engineering, social media luminaries, and people who eventually became founders, CTOs, etc. They had been painfully taught to not trust Google, and, since that time, they didn't. And still don't.

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perardi ◴[12 Oct 25 05:26 UTC] No.45555498[source]▶
Just think of the data mining they could have had there.

They had a core set of ultra-connected users who touched key aspects of the entire tech industry. The knowledge graph you could have built out of what those people read and shared…

They could have just kept the entire service running with, what, 2 software engineers? Such a waste.

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1. nine_k ◴[12 Oct 25 06:24 UTC] No.45555771[source]▶
This would require the decision-maker to think and act at the scale and in interests of the entire company. Not at the scale of a promo packet for next perf: "saved several millions in operation costs by shutting down a low-impact, unprofitable service."