Growing Fallout Surrounding Google Stadia Shutdown, Revisiting the Alphabet Structure, YouTube Testing 4K as Premium Feature (Daily Update)
Hello everyone. Yesterday's update regarding Google pulling the plug on Stadia led me to pursue a few additional points when it came to Google and Alphabet. Let's jump right in.
Growing Fallout Surrounding Google Stadia Shutdown
Over at TechCrunch, here’s Devin Coldewey:
“There’s a lot of chatter right now about the ‘surprise’ shutdown of Stadia, Google’s game-streaming service. While it’s true that rivals like Geforce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming presented entrenched competition and that Google knows next to nothing about gaming, the main trouble — as with most of its products these days — is that no one trusted them to keep it alive longer than a year or two.
It really is that simple: No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for that at this point, people are wary of investing in even its more popular products…
And here’s where it was really doomed. Because while people will happily drop a couple bucks here and there for a Google service, no one is going to pay hundreds for something they have a sneaking feeling is going to be completely worthless in short order.
Google’s legacy of killing products is infamous. Its twists and turns on priorities, branding, standards and everything else have made it clear to everyone that they cannot be trusted with anything beyond their core services, and they even like to screw those up now and then.”
Coldewey concluded by saying Google has permanently destroyed the trust of stakeholders (developers / game studios / media / creators / consumers etc.) that would be needed to get new products off the ground.
Coldewey raised a number of good points. He was not alone in sharing such feelings either. Various tech publications ran similar opinion pieces regarding Google trust issues. While there is nothing wrong with killing or ending a bad product or business, if a company becomes a habitual product killer, customer trust will suffer. A very good argument can be made that Amazon is suffering from a similar dynamic especially when it comes to devices. In both cases, we have companies conducting too much R&D out in public.
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