Had no idea Google had a VPN. I don’t know why anyone would use it. As if their other data gathering methods weren’t enough. Imagine funneling all of your internet traffic through them.
For the same reason Apple operates Private Relay. Google also cares a tonne about state censorship blocking access to its web services.
A refresher: Google runs world's largest public DNS resolver, builds a browser used by 3b+, and an OS by 2b+. If they need to harvest data, they most certainly don't need a VPN (and may be that's why they killed it).
Apple doesn’t operate Private Relay, and in fact that’s kind of the point: nodes are operated by three separate entities (Cloudflare, Fastly and Akamai IIRC). And the protocol is designed such that no entity can link your identity to your traffic. It’s actually quite cool and worth reading more about if you aren’t familiar with it.
I don’t think that’s the answer. I don’t know about Google One but iCloud Private Relay doesn’t work in China straight up. You get a message saying it’s not allowed in the territory.
To be honest I don't think anyone will really care too much about Google killing a VPN product there's probably companies out there better suited to offer this as a service. I think the one that still bothers me and I think was a big mistake considering there cloud computing platform was Google Domains. Wasn't that profitable product and perfectly suited to be fully integrated into GCP?
Edit: As someone else has stated it's good that they try things and try different products and I think it's good that they shutdown products that they are not good at running
Doesn't Google live and breath domains? They index the internet and have Google Cloud Platform so surely Domains should be part of Google's core businesses?
I pay for Google One and the VPN was a bad joke from day one even on Android. It was absolutely unreliable, the connection was unavailable or cut randomly. The DNS used were random choice between those of Google and the ISP. This service was unusable even on the wifi in my flat.
It was a disaster when travelling, it was very hard to get it to work with hotel wifi or if there was a captive portal. There are different country lists for "You have access to the VPN service" and "You have access to the VPN service when travelling".
The service does not work in China. The service simply does not work in the majority of cases where it might be needed.
Google has made no effort to improve this service in several years, for their paying customers, on their mobile OS.
I'm not convinced the other offerings are actually secure.
For example[1]:
> However, if he controls the responsible DHCP server, he can simply command end devices to send their data past the VPN. To do this, it sends the DHCP option 121 with a corresponding route –, for example, to redirect all DNS queries. The VPN's own encryption is omitted, but the VPN connection is maintained so that the user is unaware of the attack.
> Leviathan Security has reproduced the problem with Windows, Linux, iOS and MacOS – but the attack does not work with Android because Android ignores the DHCP option 121.
this was fixed some 8-10 years ago when most apps trying to make money shifted to subscription services. You can't pirate an APK if it's just a thin client.
There's definitely free/OS ways to run a VPN, but it definitely a clunky process with limited locations available.
Switch to subscriptions was caused by many different factors, like non-existent way to sell upgrades to new versions through app stores or forced BS activities by appstores with crazy deadlines. And yes, more regular, even though lower, cashflow too.
Yes - I didn't mean all Android users would have it. I mean making it available means they basically have an iCloud competitor they can release on all Play-enabled phones, which millions of people would likely pay for.
That already exists, it's called Google One. It's installed on a billion devices and it's pretty comparable to iCloud: more storage, email, and a bunch of other things most people don't care about, all included in one subscription. If anything, this is a story about how there's one less feature most people don't care about.
Of course, Apple only offers like a couple of subscriptions while Google has dozens of them, only some of which are united into that one subscription to rule them all.
Google purposely choosing to very specifically screw over its users like that should be enough for a lot of people (once they know) to avoid buying a Pixel. :)
"Google has assured us that it will not keep phones sent in for repair and that it is changing the wording of its ToS agreement to reflect this better."
A billion-dollar company cannot solve VPN on Windows? Please... The number and diversity of VPN offerings on Windows (including OSS ones) is a clear indication that that's not the issue.
Of course they can solve it if they wanted to. But those people were probably migrated to a more profitable team or laid off. We're in "number go up" mode now, not "market capure" mode.
i believe initially the vpn had something to do with google fi either integrated or a feature or something. so the vpn could be a leftover after they decided to go a different route, just a guess
They are ruthless and actually that's probably a good thing. At the scale they operate it's more obvious and affects many more users but if a product is not working e.g not reaching Google scale, then you gotta kill it. Maintaining it just to save face isn't the answer. Doesn't stop it being really annoying when largely everything is deprecated on Google Cloud or they kill your favourite niche product but I'm still a big google search and gmail user.
If they want to be ruthless, they should also highlight this bold and center at product launch in any Terms & Conditions.
This product will be deprecated and shutdown in the future if it doesn't consistently bring in $X billion within $Y quarters and within $Z operating cost. Kindly use at your own risk.
Avoiding sunk cost fallacy? I.e. if their metrics show that a certain service is a net loss for them, they kill it? At least I hope that's their reasoning and data.
Yeah, very good. They created a situation when you simply cannot trust them on any product they have. A calendar, do you use it today? What if they’ll kill it tomorrow?
Hopefully many other important things by Google don't bite the dust. I extensively use Keep, Scholar, and Finance. I don't see if any of them make money for Google which is what seems like the only metric they care about anyway.
i disagree. im sure they have an idea about how much they will lose on constantly trying stuff out.
i always glad companies, people are willing to try, test, risk, create, things because thats how progression and innovation works. the more the merrier, the crazier the better.
ill never criticize people/companies/ceos that are willing to try/create new things but it seems like people are the opposite and are very quick to do so. but i get it.
I'm glad companies create such useful tools. I'm just saying the prospect of continuation seems to be contingent on whether it's profitable (at least in the long run). Hopefully, Google doesn't take that approach with some of its products is all I'm saying.
Google is not a single person. Some manager or engineer at google thought, "how can I add the launch of a new product to my CV", cobbled this up, and someone in the hierarchy gave a green light. Six years later, someone else probably thought "this costs too much and doesn't improve the ad-money printing machine" so decided to shut it down.
Or more charitably, someone thought "I wonder if users would like this feature", so shipped it to see, and then saw they didn't use it, so removed it to reduce complexity and move on to more important things.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but in my experience few are thinking just about their CV or promotions, and most product changes are driven (at least publicly, within the company) by a desire to improve offerings for users.
This is Google. You need a major feature to get noticed and promoted. This feature was almost certainly shipped to ensure a pay rise/promotion for both the manager who delivered it and the manager who approved it. This was likely different in Google's early history. Unfortunately, this is how FAANGs and other large companies operate. You can only get promoted if you deliver something that convinces other managers in the company you deserve that promotion.
Product Managers are only as great as the last new shiny product feature they deliver. This is a systematic problem for companies. Product Teams rarely prioritise fixing technical debt that is actually resulting in significant operational overhead. They prefer to focus on yet another shiny feature, as it is much easier to market.
"We need to spend some time fixing technical debt for the last product feature we rushed to market, as it generates too many support tickets."
“improve offerings for users” without basing it on anything other than “let’s see if they like it” is CV development. It gives you an excuse to build something new rather than squeeze out a tiny performance gain in the money machine.
Pretty sure a product at this scale that required several XFN teams to execute on was not dreamt up by a couple people wanting a promotion.
This was a product that was meant to drive some KPI metric of some large organization, and it was launched with the full intention to drive it for years. Then when it wasn't meeting some target, instead of steering the ship in the right direction, the directors or VPs who funded the effort likely got bored and moved on to the next KPI.
I'm sure a lot of folks at the bottom worked very hard on it and were proud of it and definitely deserved the praise on their performance reviews. However, once it lost its director or VP support, there would have been no way to keep it running.
The Google One VPN was a silly product all along, given that one of the advantages of using a VPN is to protect yourself from Google's tracking (assumes one doesn't use Chrome)
Daily reminder that Google is an ad tech company. Everything they do is financed by ads. If the service is not relevant to ads it is going to be shut down eventually.
As a business owner thank God. That was an annoying stressful platform I disabled ages ago. Even when enabled it led to little to no leads, but created stress in response time which affected your placement and was featured prominently on the listing.
With this track record, I'm still in awe that there are any serious companies that use GCP. Unless you have a good migration strategy / contingency plan, you're letting your companies' bottom line being held hostage by a fickle and unfocused dog chasing every garbage truck that comes into his field of vision...
google selling their entire domain stuff to squarespace and the elimination of data transfer when you migrate from GCP to another provider doesn't shine a bright light on them imo.
This take is completely ridiculous, Google is absolutely not to be trusted in many of this fickle experiments it does and it will hurt them, but putting GCP, a paid system with a track record that powers so many important businesses is just bending the metaphor to a point where it makes no sense.
That said, that's what they get for doing this kind of thing I guess.
So, at this point I think the site owner can go the extra mile and create a bot that keeps track of HN or reddit topics for related headlines and post the running count along with a summary of popular products that Google axed and may be some trivia too.
Most of the spaghetti against the wall MVP from meta fails to gain any traction, and if it does it becomes a feature in a main app. Post year of efficiency it might happen again, but every successful Meta app outside of FB was an acquisition of an existing viable product. (Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, Occulus) I was really hoping Portal was going to catch on, I really liked it and found it to be a great home VC platform.
> I was really hoping Portal was going to catch on, I really liked it and found it to be a great home VC platform.
I worked on Portal and it came down to:
1. Cambridge Analytica. It is difficult to persuade people - and the media - you can be trusted to put a camera in their homes while you’re fighting a massive privacy scandal.
2. A leadership coup resulted in the project moving under Reality Labs, which never really wanted to be in the smart device business in the first place.
There were a bunch of other issues, but these two basically doomed the project from the start, which is a shame as it was well received by those who actually bought it.
> acquisition of an existing viable product. (Messenger,
Messenger is native at Facebook. It's born on Facebook.com as a floating non-permanent window that only works when the other person is online. Wikipedia seems to confirm this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_(software)#History
I agree on the Portal, it's perfect to call my grandma. I dread the day it will stop working because the alternative is an iPad that is worse in nearly every way (as a tabletop VC device for grandma)
Messenger is a product born of an app called Beluga, https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/facebook-messen.... It wasn't an app where they took the userbase, but the app was bought and the team tasked to build Messenger. (Source, I worked at FB from 2009-2016)
Threads was a bolt on feature on top of Instagram. It may eventually have the umbilical cut, but I think the only reason it has any traction is because Musk is insane. Had Musk not lit 44 Billion dollars on fire, Threads wouldn't be a thing. So yeah, a black swan in play.
IDK, I think of market forces as being rational actors, but yeah I guess Threads may be their first "hit" of an internal product since Facebook itself.
On one hand, I appreciate that they try all sorts of things and seem to have almost no hesitation with launching some things which are quirky or of niche usefulness.
On the other hand, the only things that have ever survived are Docs, GCP, and tenuously, Voice. I don't mind them launching and shutting down a lot of products, but it's really stunning just how few things actually make it.
> it's really stunning just how few things actually make it
which echoes my experience in the music industry, and what I've seen of VCs in tech, and small businesses in my town.
very, very, few things are successful, and even fewer of those are successful at the kind of scale that Google needs to ensure that they don't become a sprawling mess of millions of employees. they need very high margin high value products at high scale, supported by the fewest possible engineers (even if that number is still thousands or tens of thousands of engineers)... and the truth is, for that business model, very few things are possible, and that the understanding of what those things are is going to be the result of trial and error.
I'm almost completely de-Googled now, so these announcements affect me less and less as time passes, but I do understand why they do this, and it does make business sense
Right, a great number of companies would absolutely fly on the userbase of most of the apps on killedbygoogle. Some of these had hundreds of millions of users when google turned off the lights.
What's odd about One is it seems such a small thing for them to do given all the things they already do. They already have a global network, so VPN makes sense. They already have a lot of cloud storage, and know how to run cloudy things. They already have the phones to put it on.
This is fair, I shouldn't have omitted them. They do level the ratio of launches to shutdowns a bit. They slipped my mind because I personally never use of think of them, but they're definitely there.
I don't really see the difference. Youtube without Google's backing would have certainly died, wheras Google buying and mismanaging it may still have killed it. But it didn't.
There can be legal distinctions with LLC's and whatnot, but for the most part these are all google products.
For me, it's not so much the shutdown as it is the extremely short notice of the shutdown. At a BigCo I worked at, this would have missed the regular project funding cycle for 2024 and so would have to be done as an unplanned emergency project. Senior execs don't like emergencies ... and remember who caused them. Shutdowns should be given 2+ years notice!
I used to think the “killed by Google” meme was exaggerated, but this doesn’t look good. Why go through all the trouble of developing and promoting a VPN service as part of Google One, to eventually shut it down? If Apple is able to do it as part of iCloud, then why not Google? It’s like Google is launching new products without any strategic thinking, to eventually realize the product is not a good fit for them, after having wasted their own resources, and more importantly the time and attention of their customers. Google is slowly but surely destroying their brand. Which is kind of sad.
I have Google One VPN which comes with the storage, I don't use it. If I were going to use a VPN I'd probably use a different provider even though I have the free access of one.
I think it's because of trust - I'm nervous about the fact it's linked to my Google account. Using a separate provider with a virtual credit card and an Apple email relay would be my choice.
Personally I feel like Google kills are more brutal and abrupt.
For example MS killed Movie Maker, but you can still use it if you have it installed. Google killed service - and there nothing you can do with it.
